A Blade of Grass
/OVERVIEW: A Blade of Grass seeks social change through the arts. It supports of out-of-the- artistic thinkers and artists through fellowship programs.
IP TAKE: To qualify for A Blade of Grass art fellowship, your artistic work must not only be socially inflected, but you must also be active in social justice — either through your art or at the community level. Visual artists looking for a fellowship should pursue art that is similarly conscious and active. The visual artists it supports are typically multi-disciplinary in their work.
This is a supportive arts funder that invests in their grantees beyond fellowships. The foundation’s support also comes with capacity-building tools, such as strategic support, assessment tools, and video documentation of the artists’ work.
Accessible and approachable, this is a transparent, but focused funder to which you can reach out with questions. There are fewer opportunities for funding here in the journalism field, but to be competitive, make sure your work has both an artistic bent and is socially engaged.
PROFILE: A Blade of Grass was established in 2011 by Shelley Frost Rubin, not to be confused with Shelley Rubin the current chairman of the right wing extremist organization, Jewish Defense League. With her husband Donald Rubin, founder of health insurance provider MultiPlan, she is also a founder of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. A Blade of Grass seeks to “provide resources to artists who demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change” and aims to create an environment of “inclusive, practical discourse about the aesthetics, function, ethics and meaning of socially engaged art.” The organization awards funding through its Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art.
Grants for Arts and Culture
A Blade of Grass’s Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art awards a total of eight one-year fellowships of $20,000 each per year in support of individual artists and artist collectives. Perusing past recipients will also give a strong sense of how this funder views and pursues its visual arts support: immersive, multi-disciplinary, collaborative, often simultaneously making use of other artistic forms. In addition to the national fellowship, A Blade of Grass has recently announced that two of its eight annual awards will now take the form of special fellowships. The Blade of Grass-SPArt Fellowship for Los Angeles will be support projects that “are located in and meaningfully engage with Los Angeles County communities.” Any applicant who marks Los Angeles as their project location will be automatically considered. The Fellowship for POC Emerging Artists in NYC will be awarded to a New York City-based artist who is under the age of 30 and a person of color. The New York City fellowship will be granted for a period of 18 months rather than 12.
Past Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art recipients who express their work through visual arts include: Sol Aramendi, whose project "Apps for Power" links the struggle for immigrant workers’ rights to the concept of community accountability; Brett Cook, whose project "Reflections of Healing" promoted health equity through participatory public art installations and wellness clinics; Mary Mattingly, whose project "Swale," a mobile food forest, was grown on a 50-foot diameter floating platform that docked at different piers around New York City’s harbor for months at a time.
Grants for Journalism
Grantseekers should look over A Blade of Grass’ past fellowship recipients page to better understand the organizations’ expectations for social engagement. Perusing past recipients will also give a strong sense of how this funder views and pursues its journalism support: not only with output that is artistic but also that wholly engages those who might traditionally only be viewed as the subjects of the journalism.
Important Grant Details:
A Blade of Grass awards eight fellowships of $20,000 per year. While the foundation seeks applicants from throughout the United States, two of the fellowships each year are targeted at Los Angeles and New York. Grantseekers may review the foundation’s Past Fellows for more information on the types of projects it supports.
Unlike many artist fellowship opportunities, this one is an open application. The deadline is in November.
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