The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced grants totaling $3.8 million in support of fifty arts organizations in the United States and Canada.

Recipients of the spring 2021 grant cycle include sixteen first-time grantees, several of which are small organizations working collaboratively with artists to incubate ambitious projects, such as Los Angeles Nomadic Division, which was awarded $50,000 to partner with community-based SON.Incubator on a new project space in South Central Los Angeles programmed by artist and curator Justen Leroy; Mountain Time Arts in Bozeman, Montana, which will receive $100,000 to work with members of local BIPOC, LGBTQIA, disabled, and agricultural communities to develop projects that raise awareness about the environment and restore Indigenous histories; and the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought in New Orleans, which was awarded $60,000 to harness the collective forces of small arts institutions to realize ambitious presentations they would not have the capacity to support on their own.

Nineteen museums, university art galleries, and other organizations presenting large-scale exhibitions will also receive support, including many with projects addressing the country's history of slavery and the current day reckoning with its legacy, such as the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, which was awarded $100,000 in support of its exhibit A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture, and the Mississippi Museum of Art, which will receive $100,000 in support of its project to commission fourteen artists to create work around the Great Migration. In acknowledgement of the pressures faced by arts organizations and the critical role they play in galvanizing communities, the foundation will continue to allow up to 50 percent of each grant to be used for administrative expenses.

"The spring 2021 grantees are taking this extended moment of disruption to business-as-usual to revisit and revise their approaches to supporting artists and communities," said Andy Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs. "This is a time for deliberate movement toward more equitable structures inside and outside the art world. The foundation is committed to supporting organizations that amplify the voices of artists and position them at the center of critical conversations shaping our future."

(Photo credit: Mountain Time Arts)