Now Art Grants

Seeking Funding!
If you find yourself entranced by these projects, please consider a donation of $20 to $100. Every $500 means a new artist gets funded. If you're feeling excited about the program, why not donate $500? Your donation will launch a new Now Art project! Contribute here or click below.
Pick an artist to donate to directly by visiting our peer tp peer network.

Artists and Funders:
Put your Profile on the the Now Art Grants Network to begin receiving or giving funds and creating social change.

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About Now Art

Now Art holds that the primary role and responsibility of art is to mirror the dilemmas of society to its citizens, offering a catalyst for change and development; evolves as society evolves; values the artist's use of a wide range of media; integrates contemporary and emerging technologies; prizes the power of individuals to effect change, discarding divisions between personal and political; honors and engages the work of its predecessors, recognizing that art builds upon art.  

Now Art Grants is a peer to peer funding program that combines the small donations of many individuals and make these available to artists whose work creates art that catalyzes social change. These artists often work with no pay and slim budgets because the activist nature of their work is often dismissed as "not fine art" or because art remains devalued as a viable career choice by society. You can donate any amount you choose to the grant pool. This money is combined and granted to artists who show their commitment to social change through their work. The art created by Now Art Grants will have a component that is delivered directly to those who have donated the grant funds as a direct return of your investment.

Artists creating work that engages dialogue about current social issues will receive grant funds (minimum $500), three months mentorship and the exposure to a mailing list of over 3000 people.

Join the Now Art Grants Network

Frequently Asked Questions

contact us at:
donations@nowartgrants.com

Can I donate directoy to the program?
What will happen to the money I donate?
Yes! Your donation will be collected with the donations of others. When the donation pool reaches $500, this money will be granted to one of the artists who have applied.

How can I stay in touch with artists that my donation is going towards supporting? When and how will I "see" the completed project?
Now Art grants are designed to support participatory art that is delivered to a wide audience. As such, the funders will receive an element of the work, delivered directly to them as a part of the project. This serves to involve a wide range of people in the dissemination of the work, expands the artists reach and renders obsolete the walls of traditional art galleries.

What kinds of social issues are funded?
Anything that you can imagine that can improve the way we live as a community.

How are the artists chosen?
Grant recipients will be chosen based on their passion, practicality, and ability to bring the project to fruition. Artists of all communities, disciplines and locations are eligible.

To be chosen to receive a Now Art Grant the artist/art must:
· Take place outside of a gallery or limited-access space.
· Engage a wide audience in a dialogue about a current social issue.
· Have a component that delivers an aspect of the art directly to those who have funded it.
· Show ability to fully accomplish the proposed project over six months.

To apply:
Send an email with your idea, a link to digital versions of your work and a bit about yourself to applications@nowartgrants.com. Slides will not be accepted. This application process is simple so as to not draw focus away from your primary work of creating art.

Why does the project have to take place outside of a gallery?
Now Art is work that provides wide access to the work. Galleries, by their physical nature are limited in their ability to reach audiences in a "now art' kind of way. Now Art should not be limited to a specific location but be delivered to people in a way that they can easily access it.

Other Funding Resources:
Art Deadlines List subscribe
The Fund for Women Artists funding sources
NutureArt
Creative Capital
A Room of Her Own grants for women artists and writers
Loreal Art & Science Foundation
USA United States Artists

Currently Funded

Eric Gottesman
Salam 2.0
"Starting in 1999, I began making photographs and videos with Salamawit Alemu, a young Ethiopian woman who was eight years old when I first met her. Her life story was one of constant change and it touched me deeply. I taught her to use a camera and asked her to make photographs about her life. I wanted to learn to see from her perspective. We have taught each other a lot over the last eight years, as we continue to make images together.

"I have tried to bridge the distance between me as an artist and Salam as my subject. Now, I would like to try to bring another perspective into this process: yours. damali and I have started a conversation about what might happen if we invited you, the Now Art network, into the process of creating images and text to try to impact someone else.  Download electronic version of a book that I have designed. It will contain the work that Salam and I have produced together. I will invite you to read it and then to respond to our work with your own work, to send images and text that interprets Salam's experience through your perspectives. I will then edit those perspectives into a book, along with the work that Salam and I have produced to create something that is (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts. In the past, according to traditional Ethiopian culture, one could ask a priest to make a parchment scroll with text and images to ward away illness or to heal existing ailments. In the present, young Ethiopians like Salam have Facebook accounts and blogs. This participatory book will be an experiment in a long and evolving history in Ethiopian culture of using text and image to connect the imagemaker, the subject and the audience."

The resulting work- created by you and Eric and Salam will be sold as a fundraiser for Salam herself to help her change her current circumstances and create the life she deserves.

More on Eric at http://ericgottesman.net

Laura Parker
Meet a Stranger + podcast produced by April Baer
Laura's "Meet a Stranger" Blog is a wonderful collection of people that Laura gets to know and delivers their stories right to your computer screen through her blog and direct emails of the "stranger bios." Laura has a gift for plain-language story telling and describing people as they describe themselves. Her project exemplifies the essence of Now Art, engaging real people with each other and with our world through art.

April Baer lends her journalistic and producing skills to bring Laura's project into a new medium- audio. April and Laura will team up to create a limited series of Meet a Stranger podcasts so that you can read, see and now hear the strangers that Laura brings you!

Angela Mobley
Truth Cards
Anglea will collect a variety of greeting cards made by artists. She will then utilize the members of this list and the general community to "shopdrop" (the opposite of shoplifting) the cards into stores where any citizen can purchase them. 

In the ritual of utilizing a generic sentiment to give grandma on her birthday or a co-worker for her new baby, we use the greeting card—a mix of predetermined and mass produced image and text. What is it about the non-specific wording surrounded by pastel flowers on a piece of paper that continues to take us back to the store to look for another? Why do we chose this paper medium to state life’s undercurrents, the things gone unsaid?

How would it feel to come across a difficult truth presented in the format of a greeting card?

"Truth Cards" make present the fact that stating the hurtful and intolerable is just as important as declaring the happy and celebratory events in one’s life. Angela's art is most interested in works that can shift one’s daily experience by encasing something challenging in an everyday, known object-- in this case the greeting card.

Angela has been buying cards from stores, scanning them in, retaining the image and font and shifting the wording only slightly. The cards are then returned to the original site and placed among the originals. Using social spaces where cards are sold, allows anyone looking at greeting cards the access to these “truth cards." For example, cards to a “Special Sister” and “Terrific Father” are slightly altered to a “Competitive Sister” or a “Terrible Father.” The inside text is shifted minimally, just enough to change the card's meaning.

More about Angela Mobley at angelamobley.com.

The Liba Nelson Vital Voice Award

This award is presented yearly to a person whose voice, spirit and persistence reflects a critical direction on the progress of social change. Named in memory of a wonderful youth mentor and music teacher, The Liba Nelson Vital Voice Award is a way to continue the work of catalyzing a path of social change led by strong young voices.

Liba Nelson was a music teacher, mother and a muse. She believed that the voices of young people were vital in creating a healthy and thriving community. She taught many people to sing and to live out loud.

The 2007-8 academic year recipient is
Brittany Brock of Vancouver, Washington.

Brittany made herself known to me when she sent me a debate text of hers titled "A White Girl's Speech on Privilege." This original oratory turned out to be a biting, straight-talking, insightful piece of wisdom on race relations from a white perspective. Brittany really breaks through the same old boring rhetoric of white privilege when she says "Racism, to whites, can be described as individual acts of meanness. A white person’s cultural perspective stops them from seeing race as a social system, wrongful stereotypes or institutional discrimination." Brittany's answer to this problem? "let’s make white folks uncomfortable. We can continue to put pressure on the white community by mentioning whiteness even if it may make us uncomfortable... in order to change what the normative boundaries of society are...we must push against them." This was so well put that I immediately sent her writings to Tim Wise so that he could mentor her to cultivate her potent voice.

Brittany, along with Grant Buckles, Kimmy Kunkle and Lauren Marino now head up WORK: Whites Overcoming Racism through Knowledge, a network of white people, and people of color allies committed to bursting through the tired and played out laziness of anti-racist politics and dig into the dirt and get things accomplished.
You can join WORK here: http://worknow.ning.com/

Thank you, Brittany for your work, and for your voice.
Keep it alive, thriving and loud! We all look forward to hearing more from you!

"Always desperate to sing" ~ Liba Nelson