Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL) offers quality visual and performing arts programs and provides accessible education programs to encourage participation in the arts. Born of a community-driven effort to situate arts and culture at the center of the revitalizing Jamaica neighborhood, JCAL inspires youth to pursue an interest in the arts, showcases emerging artists and performers, and has delivered multidisciplinary, multicultural programs to more than three generations in Queens—where 2.4 million African-American, Caribbean-American, Indo-Asian, African, Latinx, Caucasian, Native American, and Indigenous artists and audiences live, work and learn.

Founded in 1972 and currently led by Executive Director Leonard Jacobs and Artistic Director Courtney Ffrench, JCAL is the only multidisciplinary arts center—and only member of New York City’s historic public-private partnership, the Cultural Institutions Group—in Southeast Queens. Within their 45,000-square-foot headquarters in the landmark Queens Register of Title and Deeds Building, JCAL offers an array of art galleries and studios, rehearsal spaces for music and dance, a 94-seat studio theater, plus classrooms and offices. Two blocks away—in another landmark structure, a former First Dutch Reformed Church—is JCAL’s state-of-the-art, 400-seat Jamaica Performing Arts Center (JPAC).

Jerome Foundation supports Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning’s ARTWorks program. ARTWorks—the Artist Residency and Training Seminar Series—is a six-month annual Fellowship focused on career sustainability for six early career, underrepresented visual artists in New York City. Through engagement with the program’s distinctive, wide-ranging Seminar Series, as well as cash stipends, an invitation to participate in a monthlong exhibition in JCAL’s Miller and Community galleries, and free use of JCAL’s studios, Fellows receive the practical knowledge to navigate the aesthetic and socioeconomic complexities and substructures of the New York art world. Through fiscal and technical support, Fellows hone their creative visions and professional practices, expand their career networks, and, at the culmination of the program, utilize JCAL’s well-recognized platform to ensure broad audience access to their work. ARTWorks operates in a three-year cycle with Jamaica Flux, JCAL’s triennial of site-specific artwork. Sherwin Banfield, a Queens-based mixed media artist and previous curator of Jamaica FLUX, serves as the Project Manager for ARTWorks.