Calling Up Justice explores funding opportunities for artists, social justice practitioners, and entrepreneurs in our Open Development meeting. This post is highlighting a funder who is supporting work that is alignment with our values. Read more about Artists Relief below.

Artists Relief

To support artists during the COVID-19 crisis, a coalition of national arts grantmakers came together to create an emergency initiative to offer financial and informational resources to artists across the United States.

Artist Relief was organized by the Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, YoungArts, and United States Artists. Artist Relief raised $25 million, beginning with seed funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and then an important lead gift from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. 

In total, Artist Relief distributed close to $23.4 million in emergency grants to 4,682 artists over 15 months. Artist Relief operated 13 cycles of funding from April 2020 to June 2021 that supported artists with $5,000 emergency relief grants. 

In addition, Artist Relief worked with Americans for the Arts and Yancey Consulting on research efforts to allow us to better identify and address the needs of artists, and independent creative workers, moving forward.

Artist Relief is deeply grateful to the dozens of national, artist-endowed and family foundations, field partners, and companies, and thousands of individuals that came together to invest in artists whose personal and professional lives were severely impacted by COVID-19. For a list of major Artist Relief funding partners please visit, artistrelief.org/partners.