Artadia Expands Grant Program in Six Cities – ARTnews.com

Grants from the New York–based nonprofit Artadia can aide artists in the early stages of their careers and offer an official stamp of approval that helps launch emerging talents to fame. Thanks to a new expansion, the organization will start offering more funding than ever before next year.

Starting in 2020, Artadia will grow its grant-making programs, which offer funds to artists based in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Houston. Whereas the organization has awarded two artists $10,000 grants annually in each city in past years, now each locale will have three awardees, allowing the organization to nearly double its support for artists. Artadia announced the news today at an event in Miami.

“Funds are fantastic, but it’s really about validation—being told that your work matters,” Carolyn Ramo, Artadia’s executive director, told ARTnews. “Our goal is to celebrate these artists in the cities they live and work and also create a national conversation around their practice.”

Applications for the next award cycle will open in Los Angeles in January, in New York in March, in Chicago in May, in San Francisco in July, in Atlanta in September, and in Houston in October. Additionally, the Artadia Fellowship, which supports immigrant and refugee artists in Houston, will be offered for the second year in a row.

Recent awardees have included some of today’s most closely watched young artists, among them Carmen Argote, Danielle Deadwyler, Brendan Fernandes, and Hadi Fallahpisheh.

“This is a way for us to be really responsive to artists’ needs, and they’re asking for more grants,” Ramo said.

Artist Cosmo Whyte, who is showing work with Anat Ebgi at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair this week, said that, since being awarded an Artadia grant in Atlanta in 2016, he has been exhibiting his work at international venues, like C-Gallery in Milan and La Philharmonie de Paris in France. In an interview with ARTnews, he described the trajectory since then as a “snowball effect where all these other grants and opportunities started coming my way.”

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Whyte is presenting a selection of drawings focused on the practice of participating in Caribbean carnival as part of an exploration of “what it means in our current political climate for immigrant communities to come out and perform carnival in public spaces. What does it mean for the immigrant to declare themselves present and occupy public space?”

His sculpture The Enigma of Arrival in 4 Sections, Section 3: Carry On (2017) will also be on view at the fair. That work, which comprises reupholstered airline seats, plastic, and broken ceramic plates on shipping pallets, looks a bit like a “family heirloom,” according to the artist. 

“The work references the silent trauma of migration that doesn’t get talked about in the public discourse: this very personal trauma of uprooting and recalibrating one’s life when you permanently move from one location to the next,” Whyte said.