New Fund to Support Emerging Artists Awards 75 Grants Totaling Over $560,000

Creative Capital, a new fund to support emerging artists, announced its first round of grant winners this month.

It awarded some $563,700 to 75 artists.

The fund was created by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, in New York, which persuaded 27 grant makers (not counting the Warhol fund) to contribute a total of $5-million to the project to cover its first five years of operation.

Citing the strong support from foundations and an applicant pool that was double the size expected, Creative Capital’s leaders say they are hopeful that they can raise an additional $50-million — and possibly more — over the next five years for an endowment. They expect that such an endowment would generate an estimated $2.5-million a year in income, allowing the fund to award about $1.6-million a year in grants, provide services to the artists, and cover its annual operating costs.

The Warhol Foundation started Creative Capital last spring in an effort to help individual artists, who have faced especially hard times since 1995 when Congress voted to prohibit the National Endowment for the Arts from supporting individual artists (The Chronicle, May 6).

The awards announced this month ranged in size from $3,200 to $20,000, with an average of about $7,500. They were made in the areas of media, performance, visual arts, and “emerging fields,” which includes various works that use computers and other technology as a medium.

The new fund has also set aside $356,219 to provide additional support to the 75 artists over coming years, for a total commitment of $919,919, or an average of $12,266 per artist. The fund hasn’t yet decided what artists need to do to receive the extra money, but they will probably be judged on financial need and the general artistic merit of their work, among other things.

Artists are required to return a portion of any profits they earn through works created with a Creative Capital grant. The money will be put into a fund to support future fellowships to other artists.

Creative Capital expects to provide additional services, such as helping artists to market their work and secure additional financing from other sources.

A panel of arts experts selected the 75 artists from a pool of 1,807 applicants. The winners are mainly young and mid-career artists.

The artists hail from 16 states, with 42 of the 75 coming from New York and 12 from California.

Those figures reflect the pool of applicants, said Archibald Gillies, president of the Warhol Foundation, as well as the fact that many artists who grow up elsewhere eventually gravitate to those geographic areas.

However, Creative Capital hopes its future grant making will become more geographically diverse. It will make a special effort to encourage applications from artists in the Southeast, Hawaii, and Minnesota, and also in California — places where foundations that support Creative Capital have insisted that their money must go.

“I think a real challenge for us will be to dip into areas of the country that don’t have the same degree of visibility and find those folks who are doing wonderfully creative stuff,” says Dennis Collins, president of the James Irvine Foundation, in San Francisco, and a board member of Creative Capital.

His fund, which has contributed $300,000, expects to contribute another $300,000.

Among the projects supported in the first round of grants is one that has a purpose very close to that of Creative Capital itself.

Ray Thomas, a Loudonville, N.Y., filmmaker, received $5,000 for a World-Wide Web data base designed to link potentially controversial artists with investors by describing their proposed artworks on the Web site and helping them seek financial support.

The youngest winner is Alex Rivera, 26, a New York filmmaker who earns a living by running Second Generation Media, a company that rents out digital editing equipment and provides editing services.

Mr. Rivera says grants like the $10,000 Creative Capital award are what allow him to devote time to his career as an aspiring filmmaker and artist.

While Mr. Rivera has won four other foundation grants totaling close to $70,000 over the past three years, he says has been “squirreling away” that money for a film he hopes to make in the future.

But he plans to use the Creative Capital money for another project he is working on now: “Tijuana 2000,” a video mural that pays homage to Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera.

Instead of having a relationship with a foundation “begin and end in the 10 seconds you receive the check,” Mr. Rivera relishes the notion that Creative Capital will serve as an advocate and a partner on a continuing basis — something he considers equally as valuable as the cash he is receiving from the fund.

“As a new artist, I’ve gotten my feet wet, I know people out there, but I still sometimes have trouble getting my phone calls returned,” Mr. Rivera explains. “Having a big name who can back me up and help me move onto the next level is what can make a real difference.”