Grants

Ongoing

NYFA Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grants, administered by New York Foundation for the Arts
Since 2020, support for visual and media artists as well as choreographers with one-time grants of up to $5,000 for medical emergencies. New York Foundation for the Arts will continue to administer the Rauschenberg Emergency Grants serving artists’ medical needs. This program is in the tradition of Rauschenberg’s own Change, Inc., a non-profit foundation he established in 1970 to assist his peers across all disciplines in need of emergency aid.

2023

Beach Sessions
This organization presents new and free choreographic commissions on the public beach in the Rockaways, helping to expand the visibility of contemporary dance and providing crucial support for some of the most extraordinary movement artists in the region during a time that seems particularly punishing for performers.

Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Education Center
Historias is an arts festival based on research that recovers and elevates histories of the collaborating communities that exist across all the boroughs. This initiative, involving a selection of the 45 organizations that now compose the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York, will serve primarily low-income people and involve oral histories, archival research, think tanks with scholars and artists, and artists’ commissions to secure the different histories while also making them more accessible through talks, performances, exhibitions, and a website.

Rauschenberg Dancer Emergency Grant, administered by New York Foundation for the Arts
This update to the current RDEG will expand eligible expenses to include basic healthcare/dental care, dance gear/shoes, and rehearsal/studio space rental in addition to rental housing, utilities, food, transportation, and class/physical therapy/etc.

Together and Free
Continued support for this organization will secure bi-lingual case management staff to help parents reunite with their children, once separated from them at the border and now trapped in the US foster care system. 

Artists Council
The Artists Council, an anonymous group of working artists who assist in shaping the Foundation's philanthropy program by overseeing a portion of the Foundation's grant giving, has been funded in part by the Annenberg Foundation since 2020, and has awarded grants to the following organizations.

Black and Pink 
New support for this Omaha branch of a national prison abolitionist organization will help to liberate LGBTQIA2S+ people and people living with HIV/AIDS.

Blank Forms 
Continued support for this organization will sustain opportunities for experimental performers as well as new projects undertaken by Blank Forms Editions, launched in Spring 2017.  

Brown Bag Lady
This organization, founded in 2014, is committed to feeding and providing other essentials to the unhoused in Los Angeles.

Chinatown Tenants Union
This new support will help to provide a space for residents to develop a unified community voice on issues relating to gentrification and development.

Human Resources LA 
This organization supports an artist-driven space focused on performances, convenings and exhibitions.

LA Black Workers Center
This organization seeks to fix the broken opportunity ladder for Black workers in Los Angeles where only 2 in 5 Black workers have quality jobs.  The Center works to reduce unemployment through action and unionization.

Participant
Renewed support for this artist-centric gallery on the Lower Eastside will help it maintain its experimental exhibitions, many of which focus on performance and its global history.

Pinko 
This journal is committed to the creation of a new language and new concepts with which to grasp capitalist sexual and gender relations in order to allow the collective self-determination of gender become a “revolutionary achievement of the highest order.”

Public Assistants
Renewed support will allow this mutual aid network, design lab and resistance hub, founded in 2020, to continue to serve BIPOC creatives and doers who have previously felt underserved.

ReClaiming Our Homes 
New support will help pay for the legal fees needed to fight eviction from homes leased from Caltrans that purchased the buildings decades ago to clear the way for a freeway that never was built. Each family has a court case over the next year to determine whether it can remain in its homes.

El Sereno Community Land Trust
New support for this land trust, that also partners with Reclaiming Our Homes, will allow it to hire a community activist to elevate visibility for ways to develop local housing for the unsheltered. The trust has three main objectives: to support land defenders, economic justice, and housing justice.

Rolling Grocer 
This grocery store in Hudson, New York serves a wide range of community members including those living in poverty through a strategy of tiered pricing.

Transformative Arts 
This Los Angeles-based organization, founded in 2006 by two foreign-born American citizens, serves vulnerable populations, especially women and children, that could benefit from a direct engagement with the arts in order to hone and extend civic participation.

Wide Rainbow 
Renewed support for this contemporary art after school program allows it to work in under-resourced neighborhoods with limited or no access to the arts or arts education in New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit.

Black and Indigenous Land Rights and Agriculture 
The Black and Indigenous Land Rights and Agriculture Advisory Committee is a multi-year program that will assist those organizations involved in redressing the related losses of Black and Indigenous people’s land and capacity for wealth generation due to the long-term bias embedded in governmental and statutory systems. The following organizations have been awarded grants for 2023.

Dishgamu Humboldt Wiyot
Dishgamu Humboldt is a non-profit land conservancy operated wholly by the Wiyot Tribe under Tribal law in California. It oversees landback initiatives and is reorienting land conservancies to incorporate Indigenous worldviews. They received Tuluwat Island, both a sacred site and the location of a mass murder in 1860, that had been owned by the City of Eureka; It is understood to be the first municipality in U.S. history to voluntarily return land to a Tribe without restrictions on how it can be used.  

Owens Valley Indian Water Commission 
Owens Valley is also known as Payahǖǖnadǖ, “the place of the flowing water”. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) owns upwards of 95% of private land in Owens Valley, including that previously owned by the Bishop Paiute Indian Reservation. LADWP drained Owens Lake in the 1920s and has been systematically draining the aquifers ever since. Owens Valley Indian Water Commission is a non-profit that represents issues of the Bishop Paiute, Lone Pine Paiute, and Big Pine Paiute of the valley. Many of these issues relate to water, environmental and cultural resource monitoring and mitigation, and advocacy. 

Shelterwood
Shelterwood is a 900-acre Indigenous, Black, and Queer-led community forest and a collective of land protectors and cultural changemakers. Shelterwood is based on unceded Southern Pomo and Kashia territory, above what is now called the Russian River in Northern California. Through land stewardship, active forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction, community and cultural organizing, and the development of a future community retreat center, Shelterwood seeks to heal interconnected ecosystems. Local tribes are involved in sharing knowledge about Indigenous practices such as controlled burns.

2022

Foundation Initiatives

Black and Indigenous Land Rights and Agriculture Initiative
A new 3-year philanthropic activity, the Black and Indigenous Land Rights and Agriculture Initiative seeks to begin to redress the losses of Black and Indigenous people’s land and capacity for wealth generation due to long-term bias imbedded in governmental and statutory systems while providing risk capital to seed future activities and coalitions that could provide financial and spiritual relief. It will be shaped and led by a committee of experts from related fields. 

Grantees

Abrons Art Center*
Continued support to early and mid-career artists for cross-disciplinary performances, exhibitions, and residency programs.

A.rt R.esource T.ransfer (A.R.T.)*
Renewed support for A.R.T. press which publishes artist-to-artist conversations and artists' books that then are circulated through the Distribution to Underserved Communities Library Program (D.U.C.), to public schools, libraries, prisons, and alternative education centers natiowide, free of charge.

Artists Space*
Renewed support for artists' work in all forms, uniting visual, media, and performing arts together under one roof.

Beach Sessions Dance Series*
Renewed support for this pioneering performance series in Rockaway Beach, Queens, that commissions, produces, and presents free, site-responsive choreographic work on New York’s shoreline, creating ambitious new work that expands the boundary of contemporary dance and its audiences.
 
Chinatown Art Brigade*
Support for this intergenerational cultural collective of Asian diasporic artists, media makers, and activists with deep roots in Manhattan’s Chinatown who are making work that centers art and culture as a way to address issues of gentrification and displacement.  
 
Chocolate Factory Theater*
Renewed support for this artist-centered organization, built by and for artists that, since 1995, has grown by centering its programs on the development of new work as guided by experimental performance-based makers. 

Colorado Plateau Foundation
General operating support, for this native-led philanthropic organization serving the tribal nations of the Colorado Plateau region (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah) that reinforces the self-determination, land, and cultures of native-led organizations in the region.
 
Genderfail Press*
Support for three years to this publishing initiative that encourages projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity by looking at work that pushes against a capitalist, racist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-environmental ideology. This Brooklyn-based organization is fueled by collaboration, education, and community.
 
Half Letter Press*
Support for three years to this Chicago-based publishing imprint and online store, which endeavors to build long-term support and expanded audiences for experimental work, particularly supporting people and projects that have had difficulty finding assistance through mainstream commercial channels.
 
Heart of Dinner*
Renewed support for this organization that evolved during the pandemic to combat food insecurity and isolation among elders in Chinatown by delivering culturally appropriate meals accompanied by handwritten notes while also supporting small businesses as they recover financially.
 
Interference Archive*
Support for three years to this collectively-run space in Brooklyn that explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements by supporting an archival collection, publications, study center, and public programs that encourage critical and creative engagement with the history of social movements.
 
MARSH (Materializing and Activating Radical Social Habitus)*
Support for three years to this bio-cultural laboratory located in St. Louis, MO, that investigates and directly practices relational forms of social, economic, ecological, and cultural activities designed to explore emergent models of human-scaled and generative social practices including providing food, transitional housing, and residencies.
 
Moms 4 Housing*
Renewed support for a collective of unsheltered and marginally housed mothers in Oakland, California working to reclaim housing from big banks and real estate speculators in the belief that housing is a human right.

NYFA Rauschenberg Dancer Emergency Grants, administered by New York Foundation for the Arts
Renewed support that provides one-time grants of up to $5,000 to professional dancers who have a dire financial emergency due to the pandemic.
 
Participant*
Renewed support for this NYC-based venue in which artists, curators, and writers can develop and present ambitious exhibition projects within a context that recognizes the social and cultural value of artistic experimentation.
 
Project EATS*
Support for this NYC-based organization that creates community-based agricultural enterprises in urban settings while building understanding of good nutrition  and strengthening ties between neighbors.
 
Protect the Sacred*
Renewed support to assist this grassroots initiative to educate and empower Navajo youth and young people through Indian Country to rise up as the next generation of leaders and enhance opportunities for voting in the mid-term elections.
 
Public Assistants*
Renewed support for this Crown Heights, New York mutual aid hub that provides a creative sanctuary for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists while also serving as a Resistance Community Space that offers communal farm, garden, bike repair services, mural projects for youth, toy and coat drives, meal giveaways, and an apothecary clinic among a host of others.
 
The Union for Contemporary Art*
Support for three years to this Omaha, Nebraska cultural center that works to strengthen the cultural and social landscape of North Omaha by using the arts as a vehicle to inspire positive social and civic outcomes including increased civic participation.
 
Wendy’s Subway*
Support for three years to this reading room, writing space, and independent publisher based in Bushwick, Brooklyn that provides an open and versatile platform for expanding modes of reading, writing, and publishing, and is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature, with the belief that equitable access to reading and collaborative forms of knowledge-production are catalysts for social transformation.
 
Woodbine*
Renewed support for this volunteer-run experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens that pivoted from developing the creative and organizing tools needed to build civic autonomy to providing food for the local community during the pandemic. 

2021

Abrons Art Center*
Continued support  to early and mid-career artists through cross-disciplinary performances, exhibitions and residency programs. Funds also aid the Abrons’ Food Access Initiative that delivers weekly fresh groceries, prepared meals and key supplies to over 900 food insecure households across Lower Manhattan.

Artist Relief 
Helped launch second round with other endowed organizations to provide lead funding for the Artist Relief Fund to continue distributing $5,000 grants to artists facing dire financial emergencies due to COVID-19, serving as an ongoing informational resource and co-launching the COVID-19 Impact Survey for Artists and Creative Workers, designed by Americans for the Arts, to better identify and address the needs of artists moving forward.

Artists Space
Emergency funds for this arts organization to continue fostering the artistic and cultural life of New York City as a primary venue for artists' work in all forms, uniting visual, media and performing arts together under one roof.

Beach Sessions Dance Series: Moriah Evans’ Repose
Support for the choreographer and 20 dancers involved in this free, newly commissioned performance taking place one day on Rockaway Beach for six hours.

COUSIN
To assist with costs associated with a publication, undertaken in partnership with Light Industry, that  is the first collection of writings, most newly commissioned, on Indigenous film. Cousin is a collective of four Indigenous filmmakers that supports artists expanding experimental forms of moving picture genres, from documentaries to installation.

Dance Rehearsal Space
To provide free and subsidized rehearsal space for two years at six small dance-focused organizations across the country— the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Topaz Arts in Queens, MOVO Space in Minneapolis, Performance WorksNW in Portland, CounterPulse in San Francisco, and Movement Research in New York City, where the opening of the Bob Studio is scheduled for Fall of 2022.

Danspace Project
Emergency funds to sustain dancers and choreographers’ creative efforts during COVID-19. 

Heart of Dinner*
Support for this culinary inspired organization that evolved to combat food insecurity and isolation among elders by delivering culturally appropriate meals, fresh produce and groceries paired with handwritten letters and heartwarming illustrations, meanwhile supporting small businesses as they recover from the impacts of COVID-19.

The Kitchen
Emergency general operating funds supporting the innovative work of emerging and established artists across dance, music, performance, theater, video, film and art.

Laundromat Project
Support for this Bedford Stuyvesant organization’s build-out of its first space to simultaneously house all its staff and artists-driven community programs.

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
Funds for a partnership with The Clemente, a cultural center on the Lower Eastside, to produce performance events and dance commissions as part of the 2021 and 2022 River to River Festival.

Mision Peniel in Support of Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Emergency assistance for farm workers in Immokalee, Florida to provide financial support and COVID-19 relief by offering free testing and cash assistance.

Moms 4 Housing*
General Operating Support for a collective of homeless and marginally housed mothers working to reclaim housing for the Oakland community from big banks and real estate speculators fighting under the banner that housing is a human right.

Nuwu Art, Cultural Arts and Activism Complex*
Support for the POC-owned and operated space in Las Vegas that works to uplift and advocate the equity of the Indigenous community by strengthening cultural knowledge and identity through the arts, activism and education. Nuwu renovated an old synagogue and rents the space as studios and a gallery for Indigenous artists.

NYFA Rauschenberg Dancer Emergency Grants, administered by New York Foundation for the Arts
To provide one-time grants of up to $5,000 to professional dancers who have a dire financial emergency due to the pandemic.

Protect the Sacred*
Funds will assist this grassroots initiative to educate and empower Navajo youth and young people through Indian Country to rise up as the next generation of leaders that will protect the elders, preserve the languages, medicine ways, and fortify cultural practices and traditions.

Public Assistants*
Support for the Crown Heights mutual aid hub provides a sanctuary for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists to create freely without expectation, while also serving as a Resistance Community Space: housing a communal farm, garden, bike repair services, a mural project for youth, toy and coat drives, meal giveaways and an apothecary clinic among a host of others.

Rauschenberg Artists Fund* / COVID-19
Emergency funds for 13 artists nominated by the Artists Council: Arto Lindsay, Azikiwe Mohammed, Keijaun Thomas, Bernadette Van-Huy, Brenda Shaugnessy, Jennifer Teresa Villanueva, Juliana Huxtable, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Kenzi Shiokava, Luciana Achugar, Mariame Kaba, Paolo Javier and Sam Eng. Administered by New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA)

Shelterwood
To provide support for infrastructure upgrades and repairs for the collective of community activists and artists to live on-site and host programs. Shelterwood is a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-led community forest and retreat center working to restore damaged ecosystems through land justice, community revitalization, and active forest stewardship.

Summaeverythang Community Center*
Provide general operating support for the community center in South Central Los Angeles that delivers local, organic food to the Watts, South Central and Compton neighborhoods.

Together and Free
General operating support for this volunteer-run organization that provides legal, financial and mental health assistance to immigrant families from the time they cross the border between Mexico and Texas.

The Underground Museum
Funds for the renovations and programming of the museum’s Purple Garden, a singular oasis in the South Los Angeles neighborhood where everything from meditation classes and film viewings to educational panels take place.

Wide Rainbow*
Funds for this after-school program to continue making the arts and arts education accessible to underserved communities by connecting contemporary artists with students from low-income neighborhoods and hosting art workshops, tours of leading museums and studio visits.  

Woodbine*
Support for the volunteer-run experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens to expand its workshops, lectures, discussions and meeting space into a new and bigger setting.

2020

Artist Relief
Funding partner for the Artist Relief, a new national, multidisciplinary initiative that offers immediate individual grants of $5,000 to alleviate the effects of the pandemic.

Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico
Ongoing support of an organization providing swift, on-the-ground legal aid and educational services to the people of Puerto Rico, specifically in efforts to prevent foreclosures and evictions.

Bidoun Projects
Support publishing operations for two years, allowing Bidoun to continue to fill the gaping hole in the arts and culture coverage of the Middle East by supporting 15-20 Middle Eastern artists, writers, and critics per year, which will yield dozens of essays and articles, translations from Arabic and Farsi, as well as artist projects.

Blank Forms
Provide funds for two years to bolster the publishing work of Blank Forms, which supports experimental music across generations and geographies, and is dedicated to supporting emerging and underrepresented artists through curatorial assistance, residencies, commissions and publications well as identifying and placing at-risk underrepresented artists’ archives.

Light Industry
Provide general funds for two years to support Light Industry’s focus on experimental and under-recognized filmmakers and the expansion of its publishing initiative focusing on writings and criticisms of pioneering figures in the field.

Studio Museum in Harlem
Endowment of a named curatorial fellowship, part of a program at the Museum that serves as an incubator for new talent thereby developing the next generation of museum professionals. The Robert Rauschenberg Curatorial Fellowship will be awarded by the Museum on an annual basis to one awardee, for a period of one year, beginning in 2021.

Teaching and Learning through Photography: Tanzania
Support for the creation of affordable visual aids, aligned with the national curriculum, to enhance teaching and learning in secondary schools in Tanzania.

Ugly Duckling Presse
Provide two years of organizational support to Ugly Duckling Presse, a publisher that favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and publishes poetry, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists including translations from under-recognized Eastern European and Latin American authors.

Vida Legal Assistance
Multi-year support of their work providing legal resources and representation to the most vulnerable populations in south Florida – immigrant victims of human trafficking and survivors of domestic abuse.

2019

Beta-Local
Three-year funding for this artist-run center to develop three of its key programs - La Práctica, The Harbor, and La Ivan Illich - as well as plan for a transition in leadership.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Five-year general operating support including to fortify its Fair Food Program and expand the worker-driven social responsibility paradigm it has developed to provide a Bill of Rights for farm workers.

LaGuardia Community College
Three-year funding to establish an experiential learning program focused on ecology, activism and wealth inequality.

 

* Funded by the recommendation of the Artists Council, an ongoing group of working artists that assists in shaping the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's philanthropy and oversees a portion of the Foundation’s grant giving. Artists Council stipends and expenses are funded through a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.

*** Funded by The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fund through the Southwest Florida Community Foundation.

People at table

Community event at Beta-Local. Photo: Beta-Local