Artists Space

Artists Fund

A campaign to raise 2.5 million dollars to significantly support future artistic production.

On the milestone of Artists Space's 50th anniversary in 2023, we embarked on a visionary initiative that reflects our deepest core values. We launched the Artists Fund, a campaign to raise 2.5 million dollars to increase and sustain our support of artists, underscoring our unyielding commitment to helping early-career and under-recognized artists realize their most ambitious projects and exhibitions.

To join us in this radical approach to holistically supporting the artists of the future, please contact Deputy Director Kelly Taxter at kelly@artistsspace.org.

*Please note that the Artists Fund is only open to receive donations and not available for applications.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, A Message In Nestle Water Bottles from Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint, MI, 2017/2023, set of three archival pigment prints on Canson Platine Fibre Rag, 16 x 24 inches (40.6 x 61 cm)

LaToya Ruby Frazier has produced a significant artwork, A Message In Nestle Water Bottles from Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint, MI, (2017/2023) in support of this initiative. Echoing the core of her practice, Frazier's collaboration on the Artists Fund will help to resource emerging and speculative artmaking of the future, ensuring Artists Space remains a vital site for artists' risk-taking, expansiveness, and invention.

The “Water is Life” mural in Frazier’s photographs was a water bottle display created by Flint, Michigan residents Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan, who are also part of a local artist collective called the Sister Tour. In 2015, Frazier spent five months getting to know Cobb, Hasan and their families, and documenting the effects of the Flint Water Crisis in what became the series Flint is Family (2016-2017). The series was published in Elle magazine and later shown in Frazier’s solo debut at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in 2018.

Frazier's artistic practice is defined by activism. Her transformative documentary-based work—across photography, sculpture, text, moving image, and performance—does more than just picture the realities of working people in urgent need of visibility, it actively intervenes, changing them for the better. For each of her projects, Frazier intimately engages with communities through dialogue and portraiture as well as advocacy and connection-building, to bring about solidarity and paths of resistance in the face of indignities. This unparalleled approach to art's actual potential to change lives extends to her role as an Artists Space board member, where she is leading the charge to raise the Artists Fund, a 2.5 million dollar initiative to support artistic production for early-career and underrecognized artists.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, A Message In Nestle Water Bottles from Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint, MI, 2017/2023, set of three archival pigment prints on Canson Platine Fibre Rag, 16 x 24 inches (40.6 x 61 cm)

50 Years of Artists Space and Beyond

Since first opening our doors in 1973, Artists Space has defined itself through collaborations with artists: at pivotal moments, we offer space, time, and fiscal resources to propel and advance their developing practices. Artists Space has long been known as a place for and constituted by artists; over the last fifty years, so many have acknowledged our central role in their careers. We are committed to continuing this important work at the highest level of excellence—regardless of always changing and unpredictable social, cultural, and economic conditions.

In recognition of our lasting and meaningful relationships with generations of artists, they will join us to establish the Artists Fund. Their transformative leadership is the ultimate call for individual supporters to not only meet but multiply their generosity. The Fund will be built over the next two years and will comprise numerous events and points of entry. This spring, it kicks off with Artists for Artists Space, a benefit exhibition whose artist-donors will be acknowledged as founding partners in the Fund. They will be bolstered by artists who will make significant cash contributions. This cohort will be joined by major individual donors to reach the Fund’s goal.

Artists Space holds the frontline of experimental practice. We fervently support and inspire the radical, ever-changing work of early-career artists across all mediums while also keeping step with the evolving tenets of contemporary practice by foregrounding issues of labor and equity. Artists Space has always supported the unknown, the speculative, the hermetic, the untested, and the evolving concerns of its time. Presenting the vanguard is not an easily sustainable path; thus, we rely on very small levels of support to only partially fund individual exhibitions of predominantly emerging and under-known artists. The Artists Fund provides an avenue for ensuring holistic support of our exhibition program and live performances regardless of an artist’s individual status. Support from the Artists Fund will be allocated annually to projects that require its resources.

From the beginning, Artists Space has remained an indispensable site for exhibitions, performances, public programs, and critical conversations while maintaining our founding commitment to complexity, collaboration, support for radical art forms and visibility for all communities. As Artists Space looks ahead to another fifty years as a beacon of New York cultural life, we would be grateful if you would join us in carving the path forward.

For further information on our Artists Fund, please contact Kelly Taxter: kelly@artistsspace.org