Posing with “Oriental Lilies” II 2025, Jamie Ho - Fellowship International Award. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Freshness and Fellowship in Pittsburgh

Silver Eye Center for Photography is a home for contemporary photography in Pittsburgh. Their annual Fellowship, now in its twenty-sixth year, boosts artists’ trajectory through technical and curatorial support as well as exposure to new audiences. Executive Director, Leo Hsu, spoke with us about this program and what makes it transformative for artists and viewers.

Please share a bit of the history of Silver Eye and this fellowship program.

Silver Eye began in the late 70s as two different groups or projects. One was the Blatent Image photographers’ collective, which was headquartered in Oakland, and the other was the Silver Eye Workshops, a project where artists in Pittsburgh would invite photographers from other parts of the country to lead workshops and share their work.

Since around the year 2000, there has been a fellowship program with a juried open call that has evolved over the years. Today, I work closely with Helen Trompeteler, our Deputy Director and Director of Programs on Fellowship. It's been a shared vision, and we're building on top of a long legacy. The idea is that it recognizes multiple artists, and that there is an international and a Keystone (Pennsylvania) aspect.

Our mission is to promote contemporary photography as a fine art, and we do that by supporting emerging/mid-career underrepresented and underseen artists. This program is a way that we recognize artists who are doing meaningful original work, support them in continuing their work, and share that work with the public.

How does the Fellowship benefit the artists who are recognized?

We provide honoraria - or in the case of the fellowship program, a cash award - and material support in all of our exhibitions. We print the exhibition as much as possible in our digital lab, and we give those prints to the artist at the end of the show. By producing the work here, we try to take that entire cost off of the artist whenever we can. There are situations in which the artist is creating unique objects, or creating work that can't be produced in our lab. In those cases, we will ship the work and cover that cost.

That's significant because there are circumstances in which an artist will receive an opportunity to show, they'll receive an honorarium, and they may have to use that honorarium to actually produce the show. We want to at least be able to remove that obstacle.

Offering curatorial support is also a priority for us. This exhibition opportunity is not just a chance to show their work but also to advance their practice; to move along in whatever their trajectory is.

Fellowship exhibitions at Silver Eye always have a sense of newness and excitement. What do you think accounts for that feeling?

By showing work that artists may still be thinking through, the exhibitions gain an energy, a kind of freshness. The work doesn't feel static. I hope that people coming in, when they see the work, they'll sense the ongoing nature of it. It represents that a living artist, perhaps somebody in their community, is engaging with the world around us or their own experiences.

In the exhibition, we often show artists who are not well-known, and in some cases, maybe even showing for the first time. Fellowship 26 artists have not shown together before, and they're probably not going to show together again in this same way. It creates an opportunity for richness out of the unexpected.

Meet Fellowship 26 artists at Silver Eye during the Opening Reception!
Thursday, May 21, 2026 from 6:00-8:00pm
The exhibition runs May 21 - August 8, 2026

Congratulations to our Spring 2026 Grantees!

This Spring Cycle blossomed with new grantees and perennial partners. Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your projects and plans with us.

A full list of grantees is available on our website.

We celebrate our community and its perseverance and joy in uplifting underrepresented voices in the arts and education ecosystems.

Partner Events

REVOLUTIONARY CARE

Rituals of Repair (2025), Alisha B. Wormsley – Photo Courtesy of the Artist

May 29 – September 5, 2026

SHARIF BEY: HOMECOMING

Crown Series installation view, (from left) Crown Series: Iris, 2024,
Crown Series: Sadie, 2024, Crown Series: Opal, 2024;
Photo: Kohler Co., courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

COMING SOON

June 26 – October 12, 2026

Please visit our website for more partner events.

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