The term Emerging Artist almost summons the image of a baby bird, gently breaking out of its shell and guided by Mom through a gentle flying lesson or a fully equipped practitioner hatched in a gallery space, unshackled by student loans. There’s no Artists’ Runway or America’s Got Talented Artists. Those who emerge, indeed, do not bloom and thrive through the divine divine providence of Mother Nature. Artists take the courage of a vision, invest years on technique, pound on doors, pay for supplies, and along with the inevitable “starving” along the way, work towards opening a show. This Spring, when so many achieved the self-made opportunity to share work and maybe recoup expenses, they were thwarted by Mother Nature’s darker side, with the abrupt cancellation of much anticipated gallery shows.
Enter Ever Gold (Projects) and the Internet Archive, who are redirecting funds from their artists in residency program to offer relief support for San Francisco Bay Area artists whose exhibitions have been delayed or cancelled. With help from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and some individual generosity, $30,000 has been raised to be distributed as thirty $1000 grants. Check out the details below.
Qualifications for artists to apply:
- You must be a Bay Area resident.
- You must have had a solo, two, or three-person exhibition that has been cancelled or delayed due to the pandemic.
- The exhibition needs to be with a commercial Bay Area art gallery and had an original opening date of between March and September 2020.
- Provide visual documentation of the body of work made or in progress.
- Provide a basic summary of production costs spent out of pocket for this work (besides materials, this can also include studio rent, and other related costs)
- Provide a finished or draft of the press release for the exhibition.
- Only 400 application slots available, open May 12 – 15, funds distributed the following week.
- Participation in an online exhibition featuring the awardees, which will place mid-June.
The fourth annual Internet Archive artist in residency exhibition, organized in collaboration with Ever Gold [Projects], has been cancelled this year—along with so many other visual art exhibitions in the Bay Area and across the globe. Part of the residency program involves Ever Gold and the Internet Archive providing participating artists with funds to support production costs to create their research project and the artworks they exhibit.
Typically, emerging artists creating a body of work for a solo or two-person exhibition at an art gallery pay for these production costs out of their own pocket, and wait for their dealers to place their finished artworks with collectors, patrons, or institutions to recoup this overhead.
With exhibitions cancelled and art sales slowing down to a crawl, these lost revenues compound for emerging artists who have already invested in production costs for said exhibitions–not to mention, most already being on a thin budget.
As this is a specific problem to practicing emerging artists which the artist in residency program is designed to support—Ever Gold and the Internet Archive have decided to use the funds allocated for this year’s residency program and create a relief grant to support other Bay Area artists with lost and out of pocket exhibition production costs.
Click here to submit
