Announcing the 2025-2026 Enduring Culture Community Partners Cohort

The Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) is pleased to announce the seven grantees selected to join the 2025–2026 Enduring Culture Community Partner Program. These community-based organizations are advancing cultural preservation efforts across New York City, safeguarding the traditions, spaces, and stories that define their neighborhoods.

This program is part of the MAS Enduring Culture Initiative, a multi-year effort that aims to expand New York City’s approach to preservation; to protect and celebrate the cultural heritage and places that make our neighborhoods and communities unique.

Selected through a competitive application process, this year’s seven grantees will receive financial support, mentorship, and technical assistance to advance grassroots work that protects underrecognized or at-risk cultural practices and places. Each partner will lead community-driven projects that strengthen local engagement, document cultural memory, and advocate for more equitable preservation systems citywide.

“MAS is honored to support and learn from this year’s Community Partners,” said Keri Butler, President of the Municipal Art Society. “These organizations represent the creativity, commitment, and cultural knowledge rooted in our city’s neighborhoods. Together, we’re working to ensure that the future of preservation reflects the full diversity of New York’s communities.”

The 2025–2026 Enduring Culture Initiative Community Partners

Friends of Abolitionist Place Inc. (Downtown Brooklyn)
Enhancing walking tours of Brooklyn’s abolitionist history with new digital tools that visualize the past, and developing virtual spaces for schools, senior centers, and online audiences to explore and engage with this history.

JaiBa LLC (Lower East Side, Manhattan)
Reclaiming overlooked public spaces through a vibrant series of sound-and-food-based cultural programs including stoop dinners and youth-led sensory mapping to celebrate the many layers of the Lower East Side’s cultural memory.

Kiki Arts Collaborative (Bronx / Upper Manhattan)
Preserving and celebrating the history of the Black trans and queer Kiki ballroom community through oral histories, archival storytelling, and a choreopoem performance, culminating in a public exhibition and community events.

Mobile Print Power (Corona, Queens / Citywide)
Hosting citywide printmaking workshops in public spaces, this project invites communities to share stories of place and identity through collective artmaking, zines, and silkscreen prints, building a living archive of cultural memory in the process.

MOMENT NYC (Crown Heights, Brooklyn)
Reviving the legacy of the historic Muse/New Muse arts center through a retrospective that includes performances, panel discussions, and archival exhibits to highlight its role in nurturing free artistic and civic expression.

Queer Nightlife Community Center (East New York, Brooklyn)
Building an infrastructure for preserving queer nightlife through mentorship, vinyl archiving, storytelling, and policy advocacy that uplifts nightlife as both cultural expression and community lifeline.

We Stay-Nos Quedamos Inc. (Melrose Commons, Bronx)
Engaging local residents in bilingual storytelling and mapping efforts to trace the legacy of the Melrose Urban Renewal Plan and train “Legacy Stewards” to lead community dialogues on memory, culture, and future planning.