The People’s Gallery
CALEB Chattanooga
Our August 2026 grant is headed to CALEB, and it’s going straight into artists’ pockets. They’re using their $1,500 award to pay local artists for The People’s Gallery, a community art exhibition and design competition that adds new chapters to Chattanooga’s People’s History.
CALEB (Chattanoogans in Action for Love, Equality, and Benevolence) is a grassroots organization working on public education, affordable housing, economic mobility through labor organizing, and criminal justice. Their People’s History Tour, built with local historian Michael Gilliland, explores Chattanooga’s history of white supremacy, Black resistance, and labor organizing. Now they’re inviting artists to help tell the rest of the story.
Here’s how it works: local artists answer an open call, dig into the research with Gilliland, and compete to create the next official installment of the People’s History Project. An open exhibition, themed “Our City. Our Resistance. Our History.”, will showcase even more local work, and the whole thing wraps with a free public exhibition and fundraiser.
Our $1,500 investment goes straight to the people doing the work: artist stipends and awards, plus the curator and photographer who present and document the project. CALEB’s thinking is simple. If you ask artists to preserve a city’s history, you pay them.
Chattanooga’s more awesome when the people who tell our stories get paid to tell them.
