[NEohioPAL]Foundations have grants available for artists

[Johnny Wu]

For those starving artists like myself :)
I found this article 
http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=155800010

New Organization Will Fund Individual Artists 


Four foundations have put up a total of $20 million to create a new
charity to support working artists, starting with a grant program that
will be one of the most generous in existence, the New York Times
reports.

In addition to $15 million contributed by the Ford Foundation, the
Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmuson foundations have pledged a total
of $5 million to create and seed the initial operations of United States
Artists (USA), which eventually hopes to become a conduit between
artists and individual donors and use gifts from individuals to build a
permanent endowment to support and expand its grant program. "I believe
there are individuals who would like to give to artists directly but
worry they lack a system to help identify talent," said Ford Foundation
president and CEO Susan V. Berresford. "This creates a mechanism through
which people can do that."

Through the organization's grant program, individual artists in a wide
variety of disciplines and at various stages in their career will
receive unrestricted awards of $50,000, with the first fifty awards to
be announced in December. At the moment, panels of artists, critics,
scholars, and other experts are reviewing the applications of three
hundred artists nominated anonymously. None of the nominees is a
household name, according to the group's executive director, Katharine
DeShaw. "We want these awards to demonstrate the diversity of American
art and the artists who create it," DeShaw told the Times.

The organization's creation was spurred in part by a 2003 Urban
Institute study, Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support
Structure for U.S. Artists, which documented the plight of artists since
the mid-1990s, when the federal government de-funded many of the grants
that the National Endowment for the Arts had made to individual artists.
State and local funding and foundation support for individual artists
had also declined, trends that have only started to reverse in the past
year or so.

News of the organization and its grant program was cheered by arts
groups and leaders. "The individual artist has been at the back of the
line in terms of support in American funding over the last decade," said
Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, "so any new system designed to get support directly into
the working hands of working artists is important."

Strom, Stephanie. "New Charity to Start Plan for $50,000 Artists'
Grants." New York Times 9/05/06. 



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