In case you haven't seen it yet, I've compiled a fairly sizeable list of focused instances. More would be cool, but there's a fair number to check out already.
Aw thank you for the shout out! I run lemmyloves.art as well as literature.cafe
I contemplated making an art focused instance on pixelfed over lemmy but the software just generally isn't there yet imo. Maybe someday I might give it a shot provided if I get donations to help sustain my current instances on lemmy. I like pixelfed and it's rapid development though, it's extremely promising.
Looks smooth and I can see a lot of good things about this, but I also hope it doesn't slowly shift Pixelfed away from being an image sharing site. I really don't want my feed over there cluttered up with other things than photography and occasional traditional art - polls and text posts is just not what I'm there for.
Still, I'm sure they've thought about that, and there's some great potential for art groups. :)