About a decade ago, I was at a fundraising event when the director of a Brooklyn residency encouraged me to apply for a Van Lier studio fellowship. I had just recommitted to my practice and was hungry for momentum. I went home, pulled together the application, and hit submit with the kind of optimism that sustains artists between yeses.
The rejection landed quickly: I was ineligible because I was too old. Not by years or months, but literally seven days too old.
The email didn’t measure my resolve or my potential. It measured my birth date. A stopwatch dressed up as equity.
That absurd moment revealed something larger. It wasn’t just a lost residency; it was a reminder of how time itself disciplines artists, deciding who counts as “emerging,” who gets resources, and who gets written out.
In her 2010 book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, cultural theorist Elizabeth Freeman uses the term “chrononormativity” to describe the way dominant culture organizes life into linear stages — education, work, family, retirement — and keeps us “on time.” In the arts, chrononormativity takes the form of the conveyor belt we’re all told to ride: emerging by 30, mid-career by 40, late-career by 60. If you fall behind, step off, or return later, the system doesn’t know what to do with you.
Freeman’s concept makes sense in the context of artists’ lives, which are often lived queerly in relation to time — not always in terms of sexuality or gender, but in the refusal of normative clocks. We start late, shift mediums, pause for caregiving or parenting, recommit after detours. Our timelines are asynchronous, cyclical, out of sync. The late scholar José Esteban Muñoz called this queer temporality: resisting the straight line.
And yet, our institutions insist on enforcing chrononormativity. They set age caps, define categories vaguely, and reward those who stay closest to the script. My experience with the Van Lier studio residency is a case in point.
Created through the estate of Edward and Sally Van Lier, the Van Lier fellowships were funneled into the New York Community Trust with a clear donor mandate: to support young professional artists from historically underrepresented populations in New York City. Since their establishment, “early-career” has been defined as aged 18 to 30. Administering organizations — Movement Research, Abrons Arts Center, Rattlestick Theater, the Asian American Arts Alliance — all enforce that cap. The rigidity isn’t arbitrary. It reflects donor intent. And because the Trust is bound to honor that intent, the rules are unlikely to change unless new, parallel funds are created.
Philanthropy frozen in amber.
On paper, the program is designed to correct inequities by providing artists of color and other marginalized communities with early-career resources they’ve historically been denied. In practice, it means that at the moment I recommitted to making art, I was already past my expiration date.
The Van Lier rules don’t exist in isolation. They intersect with a broader tightening of the pipeline that defines who even gets to be “on time.” The recent Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in higher education has already led to drops in enrollment of Black students at some colleges and universities. For the art world, this matters because elite undergraduate and MFA programs remain the most common entry points into residencies, fellowships, and institutional networks. If fewer Black students are admitted to those programs, fewer will even have the chance to align with the timelines that Van Lier demands.
This compounds the logic of respectability politics. Black artists are told that legitimacy comes from entering the system in the “correct” way, through degrees, residencies, and fellowships earned on schedule. But systemic barriers mean that many can’t access those routes in time, or at all. The age cap then becomes one more filter, weeding out those who didn’t conform to the prescribed path while rewarding those who could.
Together, these forces shrink the space of possibility. What looks like an inclusive gesture — fellowships for BIPOC artists — becomes a funnel that only a narrow, already advantaged group can pass through. Everyone else is marked as “too late,” even when their work and lives reflect the realities of systemic exclusion rather than personal failure.
The cutoff is devastating because 30 is not a universal marker. It is relative.
A 30-year-old who went straight from BFA to MFA to residencies looks very different from a 30-year-old who deferred art school, supported a family, or entered the field later. One is fluent in institutional language and already visible in the pipeline. The other is still piecing together the foundations of a practice. But both are measured against the same absolute rule.
Chrononormativity collapses these differences into a single clock. It decides that “emergence” must happen early, regardless of the detours or delays that shape so many artists’ lives.
The effects are especially gendered. The late 20s and early 30s are often framed as the prime window for having children, a framing bound up with discourse around a “birth rate crisis,” at the same moment that Van Lier’s opportunities declare artists too old to be emerging. Caregiving, which women often carry out, compresses the already narrow eligibility window. What looks like “falling behind” on paper is actually labor the art world does not value: birthing, caregiving, sustaining others.
Other fields have begun to recognize this. Many research grants pause eligibility clocks for parental leave or caregiving. The arts lag behind, with few fellowships acknowledging these nonlinear timelines. In a field that celebrates freedom, artists are still punished for being out of sync.
Part of what sustains this exclusion is the language itself. Emerging, mid-career, late-career: the art world tosses these categories around as if they were neutral descriptors. In reality, they’re elastic, inconsistently applied, and deeply entangled with chrononormative assumptions that conflate age with career stage. “Emerging” often collapses into “young,” while “late-career” is usually shorthand for age or legacy.
These terms create the illusion of fairness while allowing institutions to decide who fits, case by case. They reinforce the fiction of a linear arc — beginning, middle, end — when in reality most artistic lives are nonlinear, interrupted, or cyclical.
Van Lier makes its criteria explicit, if unforgiving. But many other programs use the same terms without definition. If funders insist on these categories, they should be required to spell them out and allow artists to self-identify with an explanation. Otherwise, the terms become gatekeeping tools rather than invitations.
Looking at how different programs handle age reveals just how much of this is a design choice.
Van Lier represents the most rigid model: capped at 30, identity-targeted, and bound to donor intent. Its design creates a small, visible cohort of “success stories,” but only for those who can meet its unforgiving timeline.
The Burke Prize, created by the Museum of Arts and Design in 2018, takes a middle-ground approach: open to artists aged 21 to 45 working in craft. That 15-year extension beyond Van Lier acknowledges the reality of extended schooling, financial burdens, and nonlinear careers. The prize also focuses on craft, a field historically associated with women and queer artists, long marginalized in the hierarchy of fine art. Craft careers often unfold later, shaped by domestic labor or community practices rather than the BFA-to-MFA conveyor belt. By extending eligibility to 45, the prize tacitly acknowledges that emergence in these mediums follows different timelines, granting structural empathy to practices that have always existed outside the straightest path.
Then there are programs like MacDowell, which have no formal age cap. The residency is competitive, requiring a portfolio and references, but the evaluation is based on the quality of the work rather than the artist’s birth date. At MacDowell, the only clock that matters is the one in the studio. This model reminds us that age limits are not inevitable. They are choices, and some institutions choose differently.
Taken together, these three models show the spectrum: frozen donor rules, expanded empathy, and age-open alternatives. What they also show is that chrononormativity isn’t natural law. It’s a cultural imposition that can be resisted.
Not every program enforces the stopwatch. A growing number of residencies and grants explicitly acknowledge the nonlinear realities of artistic life. Stoneleaf in the Hudson Valley and the Wassaic Project in Upstate New York both run family residencies, building caregiving into the structure, and Artists & Mothers in New York offers nine-month childcare grants to support artist mothers. Even Anonymous Was a Woman’s signature grant, while not limited to mothers, directs resources to women over 40 — a rare acknowledgement that emergence and impact don’t stop at midlife.
These programs aren’t perfect, but they prove that age caps and rigid timelines are not inevitable. With intention, structures can be redesigned to reflect the nonlinear, care-shaped, and sometimes delayed paths that artists actually live.
This brings me back to the broader problem of how equity is structured in the arts. Programs with narrow age requirements create highly visible proof points: a handful of BIPOC artists supported early in their careers. Institutions point to them as evidence of progress. But the inequities that delay or block access for many others remain untouched. Those who start late, reenter after detours, or fall outside the linear script are written out. Representation without redistribution is just optics.
True redistribution would mean designing programs that acknowledge nonlinear lives. It would mean career-stage definitions tied to practice rather than age, eligibility clocks that pause for caregiving, and parallel funds that support reentrants. It would mean treating artists not as workers on a conveyor belt but as people living complex, asynchronous lives.
That design reveals something larger — that time itself is a barrier in the art world, and that the clocks we live by are not neutral. They are built to privilege those who stay “on time” and to exclude those who don’t.
But artists have always modeled other ways of living in time. We change mediums, circle back, recommit. We emerge at 25, at 40, at 70. We resist straight lines. If the art world is serious about equity (as it often claims to be), it has to learn from that. It has to stop equating emergence with youth and start building structures that reflect the multiplicity of artistic timelines.
Chrononormativity tells us there is only one clock, one schedule, one way to emerge. Artists know better. The clock doesn’t tick the same way for everyone. Until our institutions admit that, we’ll keep mistaking the optics of equity for the real thing.
Editor’s Note, September 18, 2025, 10:17am EDT: This article previously misidentified the specific Anonymous Was a Woman grant directing resources to women over age 40. The text has been updated with the correct information.
