The Protest Cup Fellowship at NCECA 2026
”The Protest Cup” is designed as an exhibition to express feelings about many issues, including gender, queer, and racial equity, free speech, environmental degradation, healthcare, education, genocide, war, poverty, migration, food systems. We love the irony of the cup as a subversive form. When we selected the cup as a focus, we were thinking about its comfort, domesticity, safety, and functional ubiquity. The purpose of the exhibition is to reinterpret the cup into a subversive object by means of decoration, form, and/or how the object functions. Works of 40+ artists will be featured in POW!'s 2026 exhibition at NCECA in Detroit, March 25-28, 2026.
We aim to center artists and empower creativity. In addition to thinking about the cups as protest objects, our exhibition is itself an anti-capitalist protest. We are using a model of compensation rooted in equity and inclusivity–one that values both the makers and those seeking to engage with and own pottery. We are looking at this exhibition as an experimental version of our biannual Cup Fellowship.
Our Open Call Application is now CLOSED.
Prunck Cups by Adero Willard
Pots On Wheels — POW! — is a mobile clay education and exhibition space, opening new doors of creative experience to communities and organizations.
OUTREACH
The POW! truck allows established and emerging ceramic artists to share their knowledge and perspectives with audiences of all ages and backgrounds outside the conventional educational or studio settings.
ENGAGEMENT
By encouraging participants to actively participate in the creation of hand-made objects, POW! cultivates each individual'sability to make something useful and beautiful with their hands, and their understanding of how that can impact the experiences of others.
AWARENESS
The gallery space within in the POW! truck serves as a showcase for the diverse and dynamic range of functional handmade ceramics currently being created by artists from around the country (and sometimes even by program participants!).
Hands-on creativity
Most POW! event participants have never had the chance to make something with clay. For others, it rekindles a joy they may not have had the opportunity to pursue in decades. You would be surprised by what you are capable of!
Connecting people & ideas
Our Make-A-Cup, Take-A-Cup exchange has given a first-hand introduction to creating an original clay object to thousands of participants! Folks can decorate (and sometimes even hand-make) a cup that will be part of a future POW! event, while taking home a cup that someone else decorated at a previous one.