The Ford and Andrew W. Mellon foundations have committed a total of $5 million over five years to launch an initiative designed to increase the visibility of and support for Latinx artists, ARTnews reports.

Administered by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Latinx Arts Fellowship program will award $50,000 each to a multigenerational cohort of fifteen Latinx visual artists annually. The remainder of the funds will be used to support USLAF. Ford Foundation program officer Rocío Aranda-Alvarado told ARTnews that, while designing the initiative, the foundations found that only about 2 percent of overall philanthropic giving goes to Latinx-focused organizations. According to Hispanics in Philanthropy and Candid's Latinx Funders data sets, funding for Latinx organizations in arts and culture has been declining since 2013, from a high of $40.2 million that year to $13.2 million in 2019.

Selected by curators at three mainstream art museums and three contemporary art museums founded by Latinx people — from among some two hundred artists nominated by experts in contemporary Latinx art — the inaugural 2021 fellows include five emerging, five mid-career, and five established artists. They include Elia Alba, a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, whose practice highlights the social and political complexity of race, representation, identity, and the collective community; rafa esparza, a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, whose work investigates and exposes ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments; Carlos Martiel, a performance artist working in New York City and Havana, Cuba, whose work critiques the racist or xenophobic practices used to marginalize or oppress certain groups of immigrants and non-white minorities; and Delilah Montoya, a Chicana photographer and printmaker based in Dallas, whose work explores questions about identity, power, land, borders, gender, community, and family.

"Giving each of the fellows $50,000 to do their work for a year will support them first and foremost, but with the power of the Mellon and the Ford foundations, this will bring visibility to this kind of initiative and we hope encourage museums to get on board," said USLAF director Adriana Zavala, an art historian at Tufts University. "We wanted to create a deliberate and intentional jury process so that the full diversity of the very complicated Latinx community could be represented from gender, gender identity, ethno-racial, class, geographic, and disability. This is how you build a sustained legacy by supporting artists at all phases of their career."

(Photo credit: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)