In Central Florida, 588,450 people are food insecure. That’s one in seven of our neighbors, and one in six children, according to Feeding America’s 2025 Map the Meal Gap data compiled by Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. The gap adds up to roughly 111 million missing meals across the region every year.
Orlando is doing something unusual about it. The city is using public art.
The Bloomberg Grant
In fall 2023, Bloomberg Philanthropies selected Orlando as one of eight U.S. cities to receive a Public Art Challenge grant of up to $1 million. The program funds temporary public art projects that address an urgent civic issue. Orlando’s submission, “Art Pollination: Building Food Justice through Creativity,” named hunger as the issue and named public art as part of the response.
The other seven 2024 cohort winners chose climate change, homelessness, racial justice, civic memory, and gun violence. Orlando chose food.
The Artist and the Exhibitions
The project is led by St. Louis-based artist Juan William Chávez, whose work consistently turns urban space into community gathering ground. His Orlando exhibition, “Juan William Chávez: Art Pollination,” ran October 10, 2025 through January 25, 2026 at the Mennello Museum of American Art in Loch Haven Park. Chávez worked in drawings, embroidery, and artifacts from Peru, building a visual argument that healthy food access is collective work rather than individual luck.
A companion exhibition, “Art Pollination: Building Food Justice through Creativity,” ran November 20 through December 14, 2025 at CityArts in the Downtown Arts District, with twenty Central Florida artists contributing. A third installation at the Terrace Gallery inside City Hall extended the run into January 2026.
What Makes This Different
Public art that exists in isolation is decoration. Art Pollination was built with operational partners from day one. The project’s nonprofit collaborators included Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, 4Roots, Hebni Nutrition Consultants, Ideas for Us-Fleet Farming, Black Bee Honey, and the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences for Orange County. Each one already does food work. The art gave them a louder voice in front of audiences they would not otherwise reach.
That model, artist plus museum plus food bank plus extension agency, is what civic infrastructure actually looks like when it works. Awareness without operators is a hashtag. Operators without awareness is a budget request that never gets funded. Putting them in the same room produces a project that does both jobs.
Why This Matters for Arts Funding
I sit on the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the question I get asked most often is whether arts spending is a luxury when other line items are tight. Art Pollination is the answer in evidence form. Bloomberg invested $1 million. Orlando used it to amplify the work of food banks and farmers already in the field. The exhibitions drew audiences who came for art and left with a clearer understanding of who in Central Florida is hungry, why, and what is being done about it.
That is not luxury. That is leverage.
The deeper lesson sits beneath the grant amount. When public art is tied to a measurable civic problem and to organizations already working on that problem, the case for arts funding stops being abstract. It becomes a line that connects a creative investment to a community outcome. That line is what every grant application, every legislative testimony, and every donor conversation needs.
The Data That Anchors the Work
The numbers Art Pollination is responding to are not abstract either. From Second Harvest’s 2025 Map the Meal Gap data:
- 588,450 food-insecure residents across the seven-county Central Florida region
- 153,460 of them children, one in six kids
- 26% food-insecurity rate among Black residents, 18% among Hispanic residents, 11% among white residents
- 35.6% of food-insecure individuals do not qualify for SNAP because their income sits just above the threshold
- $22.37 per week is the average shortfall per food-insecure person
Those gaps are what the partner organizations spend their days closing. The art makes sure the gaps are visible.
What to Watch Next
The Public Art Challenge grant funds the project for two years. The harder question is what Orlando builds afterward. Lasting impact will depend on whether the partnerships forged during Art Pollination outlive the exhibition runs and whether the city continues to fund the kind of art-meets-civic-problem programming that this grant proved out.
I will be watching, and so should anyone who cares about how arts dollars translate into community results.
Sources: Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge (publicartchallenge.bloomberg.org); City of Orlando, Art Pollination (orlando.gov); Mennello Museum of American Art (mennellomuseum.org); Feeding America and Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, Map the Meal Gap 2025 (feedhopenow.org).