Support for Individual Artists

GIA members have been working together to promote and improve funding for individual artists for over 20 years. The Support for Individual Artists Committee has been one of the most active groups of funders within GIA. Over the years, the committee has been an incubator for such projects as a scan of scholarly research on artist support, a visual timeline outlining the history of artist support funding, major publications, and programs, and the development of a national taxonomy for reporting data on support for individual artists. The committee continues to advise, inspire, and inform GIA’s thought leadership and programming in support for individual artists.

Click here to listen to the latest podcast, and see below for resources.

December 3, 2014 by SuJ'n

The Alliance of Artists Communities announces applications are open for its 2015 Creative Access residency awards. This program, supported by the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, provides visual artists and writers living with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) month-long, funded studio residencies. Caitlin Strokosch, Executive Director of the Alliance of Artists Communities, shares:

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December 2, 2014 by Sustainable Arts Foundation

The Sustainable Arts Foundation supports artists and writers with children by offering unrestricted cash awards to parent artists whose work is of the highest caliber. We're delighted to announce the winners of our 2014 Fall Awards. Once again, in this round demand was high: we received over 1,000 applications. To ensure that all applications received broad consideration, we enlisted previous awardees to serve as jurors.

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November 18, 2014 by cstrokosch

The Alliance of Artists Communities, in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, is pleased to announce the inaugural awardees for “Artists as Change Agents: Beyond Bellagio”. The two exceptional artists are Tiziana Panizza from Santiago, Chile, for her project Solitary Land; and Samir Parker from Thane, India, for his project Re-Flexing the City. Each artist will receive a $20,000 award, made possible through a grant to the Alliance of Artists Communities from The Rockefeller Foundation.

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November 8, 2014 by Tommer

Those of you who attended the 2013 Support for Individual artists Preconference will remember Conflict Kitchen, the Pitsburgh Artist-run take out restaurant thet provided our lunch. They are currently closed after a death threat from an unknown individual who interpreted their Palestinian lunch wrapper as anti-Israel.

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November 7, 2014 by SuJ'n

When composer and Director of the Center for Performing Arts Medicine at the Houston Methodist Hospital Jefferson Todd Frazier tells people that he works for a center for arts and medicine, he says he receives some odd looks. Arts and medicine are two things that most people would rarely combine, and yet the Center for Performing Arts Medicine, or CPAM, has been doing just that successfully for 25 years. It was founded by a doctor known for treating opera performers, Dr. C. Richard Stasney, after he received a phone call from a performer in need of specialized care.

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September 25, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin
The struggle to ensure that art work is recognized as real work and compensated accordingly is an essential one, and it continues through the efforts of art collectives and organizations, the actions of artists, and countless individual decisions to accept or reject engrossing but unpaid jobs.

— Elyse Mallouk, “On Laboring for Love”
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September 23, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

For several years, Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) members have noted the lack of sector-wide information about support for individual artists. Many funders feel that direct support for artists is a crucial part of the arts funding ecology and one that is underresourced. In the past, however, it has been difficult to assess the extent to which artists are being supported by institutional funders — in fact, it has even been difficult to have a field-wide conversation about the different ways in which artists receive support.

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August 6, 2014 by Tommer

The American Music Project is a nonprofit foundation that hopes to put a brighter spotlight on the American repertory, old and new, and to commission new works. “The goal of the foundation,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement, “is to facilitate more performances of our great musical legacy, as well as to raise awareness and, ultimately, help increase the amount of American music that is performed regularly in our concert halls and opera houses.”

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January 29, 2014 by Abigail

The Joyce Awards recognize artists of color who collaborate with nonprofit institutions by awarding them $50,000 to commission thought-provoking works of art, which aim to strengthen cross-cultural understanding by bringing diverse audiences together. The 2014 Joyce Award winners are Camille A. Brown, Jessie Montgomery, Lynn Nottage, and Tracey Scott Wilson. Read more about the winners and the award program here.

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February 26, 2014 by Abigail

Since 1998, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation has supported contemporary art exhibitions through its biennial Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. This opportunity provides funding for thematic exhibitions that are fresh and experimental in nature, and for which other funding is not yet forthcoming. The award provides assistance at the beginning stage of the exhibition’s development and offers the curator the support needed to realize the concept.

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