[altroots] United States Artists grants

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/arts/design/05unit.html? 
ex=1158120000&en=3254a37c7fc29f5d&ei=5070&emc=eta1


ARTS / ART & DESIGN   | September 5, 2006
New Charity to Start Plan for $50,000 Artistsâ?? Grants
By STEPHANIE STROM
A new charity, United States Artists, will announce an ambitious plan  
to provide support to working artists, starting with a grant program  
that will be one of the most generous in existence.



New Charity to Start Plan for $50,000 Artistsâ?? Grants

By STEPHANIE STROM
Published: September 5, 2006
A new charity, United States Artists, will announce today an  
ambitious plan to provide support to working artists, starting with a  
grant program that will be one of the most generous in existence.

Susan V. Berresford, president of the Ford Foundation.


Fifty artists working in a wide variety of disciplines and at various  
career stages will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The  
first recipients will be announced on Dec. 4.

â??The individual artist has been at the back of the line in terms of  
support in American funding over the last decade, so any new system  
designed to get support directly into the hand of working artists is  
important,â?? said Philip Bither, performing arts curator at the  
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Panels of artists, critics, scholars and others in the arts are  
reviewing the applications of 300 artists who were nominated by 150  
anonymous arts leaders around the country.

United States Artists declined to reveal any of the applicantsâ??  
names but said they range from an American Indian weaver who earns  
her living demonstrating her craft on the cruise ships that ply the  
Alaska coast to a Chinese-American photographer working in  
Minneapolis to a mariachi bandleader from Los Angeles.

â??No one is a household name,â?? said Katharine DeShaw, the groupâ??s  
executive director. â??We want these awards to demonstrate the  
diversity of American art and the artists who create it.â??

Four foundations â?? Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential and the Alaska- 
based Rasmusonâ?? have put up a total of $20 million to create the  
organization and seed its initial operations, but the goal is for it  
to become a conduit between artists and individual donors.

â??I believe there are individuals who would like to give to artists  
directly but worry they lack a system to help identify talent,â?? said  
Susan V. Berresford, president and chief executive of the Ford  
Foundation, which put $15 million into the project. â??This creates a  
mechanism through which people can do that.â??

This new charity plans to use gifts from individuals to build a  
permanent endowment to support and expand the grant program, but  
that, Ms. Berresford and others said, will be its biggest challenge.

United States Artists has attracted support from prominent national  
arts patrons like Agnes Gund and Eli and Edythe Broad.The hope is  
that these and other donors will eventually contribute $1 million  
each to endow a fellowship, much the same way that donors underwrite  
faculty chairs at universities, Ms. DeShaw said. â??This could do for  
artists what the MacArthur Awards do for those recipients,â?? Mr.  
Broad said in a telephone interview, referring to the coveted  
â??geniusâ?? grants that the MacArthur Foundation makes annually.  
Those grants total $500,000, paid out in $100,000 installments over  
five years.

This new charity was spurred in part by a 2003 Urban Institute  
study, â??Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure  
for U.S. Artists,â?? that documented the plight of artists since the  
mid-1990â??s, when the federal government abolished many of the grants  
that the National Endowment to the Arts had made to individual  
artists amid controversies over works involving nudity, sexuality and  
other provocative themes.

State and local financing of the arts had also declined, as had  
foundation support, trends that have started to reverse only in the  
last year or so.

In any case, most public money goes to arts institutions, not to  
artists directly. â??The chance for an artist to get money through an  
individual grant is something extremely rare,â?? said Barbara Kruger,  
an artist working in New York, Los Angeles and, increasingly, abroad.

There is no precise measure of how many grant programs directly  
support artists. The New York Foundation for the Arts, which itself  
makes such grants, maintains a database of about 2,900 such programs.  
The Urban Institute study found that more than $91 million was  
available to artists, but that two-thirds of cash grants that could  
be quantified were of less than $5,000. Only 21 percent of grants  
were of $10,000 or more.

Ms. Gund said the grants from the new charity come at a critical  
time, when basic costs of living like health costs and rent are  
rising and public support continues to ebb. â??Itâ??s a myth that most  
artists make money,â?? she said. â??Most of them donâ??t even get a  
chance to show, and even if they do, they donâ??t make enough with  
sales to meet their needs and still have to work teaching or waiting  
tables or at another kind of job.â??

For Roxane Butterfly, a tap-dancer, the $33,000 she got from the  
Guggenheim Foundation this year allowed her to continue her work  
after an injury sidelined her. â??It literally saved my artistic  
career,â?? she said in a telephone interview from her native France.  
â??If you donâ??t dance, you just donâ??t eat.â??

John Waters, the iconoclastic filmmaker, is one of the United States  
Artists nominators. â??I nominated people who have been doing work for  
a long period with great critical success but are still struggling  
financially,â?? he said in an interview from Provincetown, Mass.  
â??Theyâ??re very representative of most of the artists in this  
country.â??

Mr. Waters said he had never applied for a grant. His films were made  
with loans from his father and friends or, later, through investment  
partnerships. â??I still donâ??t think if I was making â??Pink  
Flamingosâ?? today I would ever get a grant,â?? he said, â??no matter  
how liberal the organization.â??
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