The New Wind Fellowship for Emerging Art Historians and Curators is a critical three-year mentorship and training program designed to address a significant vacuum in Mongolia’s art ecosystem. Since the transition to democracy, the former system for preparing art historians and curators has significantly broken down, and the country currently lacks formal or informal education pathways in curatorship.
The Fellowship responds to this gap by offering the country’s first long-term mentorship and training program. It supports a core group of five early-career cultural workers through hands-on experience, in-depth guidance, and international engagement. The program aims to build the future backbone of Mongolia’s curatorial and research infrastructure, providing fellows with stipends and training to prepare them for a successful professional life.
Crucially, this initiative is built for the long term: the project plans to have at least three groups of emerging curators and researchers, aiming to train a total of 15 art curators and art historians within the next ten years.
In May 2025, we issued apublic call for applicants interested in participating in this programme. Applicants are asked to write and submit a short analysis of an artwork of their choice. Since then, we have had two rounds of interviews, and the final interview took place on October 17, 2025. After careful consideration to ensure we are investing our time and resources in the right candidates, we have decided to implement a 12-week trial period. The trial period will run from 2025.11.20–2026.02.08.
During this period, finalists will be required to attend online seminars and complete assigned tasks. We will be focusing on exhibitions during the trial period, where finalists learn to analyse exhibitions (of all types), write reviews and critical texts and have group seminars where we discuss the texts as well as exploringexhibition histories, art spaces and exhibition making. The trial period educational content will be organised as an online course for the next cycle of emerging curators and art historians.
Our first cycle (2005–2008) finalists are:
HOW CAN YOU SUPPORT THE NEXT GEN FELLOWSHIP?
You are welcome to support us in the following ways (and any other way you could think of, let us know)
- Your expertise – If you are an expert in the field of visual arts, with degrees and significant professional experience as an artist, artist-researcher, artist-curator, writer, critic, or educator, contact us to join our international pool of experts who will teach our fellows.
- Your organisation – If you are an organisation (such as an arts university, museum, gallery, or art space) that offers education in curating, art history, or the visual arts in general, we would like to initiate a discussion about a potential collaboration and long-term exchange.
- Your monetary support – If you and your organisation support long-term research projects like ours, we are happy to discuss. Avoiding discussions about money and funding is common in our field. However, we all know that to produce high-quality outcomes, a project requires funding until it reaches a stage where the funding is consistent. On a fundamental level, fellows need time to think, reflect and write. They will not be able to achieve their goals if they are working multiple jobs to survive and only have time for sleep. At a minimum, we aim to secure at least one day or 8 hours a week, allowing fellows to spend time reading, thinking, and writing, and offer a corresponding stipend to compensate for that day.
Contact us for more discussion on new.wind.mongolia@gmail.com, or if you are already convinced, here is the link to our project donation.
THANK YOU!!!
New Wind: Art of Mongolia, Rewritten for the World 