OPPORTUNITIES FOR ARTISTS AND ARTS ORGANIZATIONS
Welcome to the Arts Center of the Capital Region.
We operate with a simple principle: art belongs to everyone.
From our mission to our values to our programs, we view the Arts Center as a creative and responsive organization with deep roots in the community, exciting collaborations and an expansive vision of how the arts can flourish in our region by helping to foster a supportive, inclusive and livable community.
We were founded in 1962 as the Rensselaer County Council on the Arts in Troy, NY, and it has been since these early days that we have partnered with the New York State Council on the Arts to manage the SCR program for Rensselaer, Albany and Schenectady Counties.
Our goal is to create a robust creative community that intersects, informs, and inspires the public while fostering growth in our artists and transforming our community’s cultural understanding and expression.
We achieve this goal through four core programmatic areas:
· arts in the public realm, in which we develop public art and exhibitions with and for the public
· community projects in which we foster neighborhood engagement
· arts education, in which we offer hundreds of classes a year for all ages and abilities, including community college and public-school programs, and
· artists’ services, in which we provide grants, funding and training services for artists, who are the foundation of our work.
Statewide Community Regrants Final Report
All recipients of 2026 Statewide Community Regrants (SCR) funding are required to submit a final report documenting the completion and impact of their funded project.
The final report provides The Arts Center of the Capital Region with information about how grant funds were used, who participated in or benefited from the project, and how the project supported the goals described in the original application.
Final reports are an important part of the Statewide Community Regrants program and help document the impact of public arts funding throughout Albany, Rensselaer, and Schenectady Counties.
Final Report Deadline: January 31, 2027
Grantees should retain project records, receipts, documentation, and supporting materials throughout the grant period to assist with completion of the final report.
BraVa! Call for Submissions 2026
The Arts Center of the Capital Region is partnering with YWCA of the Greater Capital
Region for their 11th Annual “BraVa!,” a fundraiser seeking to provide new bras at no
cost to those who need them and who live at YWCA-GCR, in the Greater
Capital Region or in the world at large.
The event will feature writers from around the region and beyond who will read jury-
selected poems and essays or perform songs and monologues on the topic of the
brassieres in their lives. The pieces will touch on the subject from many viewpoints and
range from poignant to hilarious.
The idea for the event developed out of a conversation between author, editor and
teacher Marion Roach Smith, who taught memoir writing for many years at The Arts
Center, and the former Director of Development and Marketing at the YWCA-GCR.
During a discussion on the holiday needs for the residents, Marion learned that bras are
always in desperately short supply for the residents at the YWCA of the Greater Capital
Region. “This struck a powerful chord with me, and we decided right there to do
something about it.”
A brand-new bra with tags is part of the $35 admission price for the night. In the ten
years in which the event has taken place, more than 5,000 bras have been collected, all
of which have been made available to those in need. To date, we have sent bras as far
away as Ukraine while still supplying any local person in need. This year, the event will
take place
on the evening of Thursday, November 5th, 2026, from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM at The Arts
Center of the Capital Region, 265 River Street, Troy, NY.
Please submit pieces of no more than 750 words in length on the topic of the role of
bras in our lives.
Submission is open to all.
The pieces can be essays, monologues, poems or songs.
Please: No sexualized pieces should be submitted. Also, please note that every year we
get far too many stories about training bras and first bra stories.
Songs should be no longer than 3.5 minutes in duration.
With your submission, please include:
Title of the work
Short bio
Contact email
Whether or not you are willing to read/perform your piece.
A jury will select from the pool. Deadline to submit is October 1, 2026. You will be
contacted by October 18, 2026 about your submission. The event has grown to the
extent that we can no longer supply readers for those who cannot attend.
Write well!