Light Work Awarded $100,000 Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has honored Light Work with a $100,000 multi-year programming grant. Distributed over the next two years, these funds will support Light Work’s renowned residency and exhibition programs, offering support and visibility to emerging and under-recognized artists working in photography and image-based media. This is the second Warhol Foundation grant that the forty-six year-old arts institution has received, following the first in 2015. Light Work extends our congratulations to all the other grant recipients for their great contributions in the field.
The highly-coveted Andy Warhol Foundation grants focus on serving the needs of artists by funding the institutions that support them. In total, 42 organizations nationwide will receive more than $3.6 Million in support of scholarly exhibitions, publications, and visual arts programming, including artist residencies and new commissions.
“We’re extremely grateful to the Warhol Foundation for their recognition of Light Work as one of the leading arts organizations in the country,” said Light Work Director Shane Lavalette. “With their ongoing funding of our programs, we will continue to focus on our mission of providing direct support to artists.”
One testament to Light Work’s artist-centered mission comes from award-winning photographer, author, curator, and former artist-in-residence Debra Willis, who reflected on the benchmark importance of the organization in her early career, “During my month-long residency at Light Work I discovered what many artists had already known — Light Work is a place where photographers are embraced, supported and treasured. Whenever photographers talk to me about their work and the place where they feel most comfortable, Light Work is evoked as a spiritual-like place where photographers can be totally involved in their work.”
In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, The Andy Warhol Foundation’s mission is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation’s primary focus in making grants is to support the creation, presentation, and documentation of contemporary visual art, particularly work that is experimental, under-recognized, or challenging in nature, emphasizing that the Foundation “believes that arts and culture are a fundamental part of an open, enlightened society.” The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogues raisonnés projects. To date, the Foundation has given more than $200 million in cash grants to more than 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide. For more information, see warholfoundation.org.
For more on the selected organizations and projects receiving funding read the online announcement and browse the the Awarded Grants page.
