NEW YORK, NY.- The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts awarded grants to 51 visual arts organizations across the country and in Puerto Rico. These grants will support programs that foster creative experimentation and respond to the evolving needs of artists. Fifteen are first-time grantees.
The total for the Spring 2025 grant cycle is $4.3 million. This follows the recent collaborative contribution of $800,000 with the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation to organizations whose NEA funding was abruptly cut earlier this year.
“The Spring 2025 grant cycle occurs amidst reductions in federal funding for the arts and humanities and new requirements for cultural production to align with executive orders and the administration’s priorities,” says Joel Wachs, President of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “We have observed – and applaud – arts organizations across the country continuing to fulfill their missions, focusing on promoting artists’ expressions. We remain dedicated to supporting organizations that amplify the voices of artists, contributing to their individual wellbeing and to the overall health of our society.”
30 small to mid-sized arts organizations have been recognized for programs that enhance artists’ creative practices and careers through exhibitions, commissions, residencies, publications, and other community-oriented activities. One grantee, Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) (New York, NY), will receive The Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Expression Award for providing practical resources and support to artists and cultural workers around the world facing censorship, ostracism or physical danger because of their work. Since its inception, ARC has assisted more than 2,000 artists across 60 countries with emergency grants, relocation support, legal assistance, and public awareness campaigns. In early March, the organization lost nearly $1million dollars in federal grants for its international work; it will now bring its expertise to support artists within the US context.
In the face of intensifying political pressures, some new grantees offer a safe space for artists to express ideas that may not align with the prevailing values of the communities in which they are located.
Moscow Contemporary (Moscow, ID), an outpost for cultural exchange and understanding in a predominantly conservative region, foregrounds artists, artworks, and exhibitions that bring underrepresented perspectives to the area. The only artist run organization in the South committed to archiving the creative efforts of the region’s punk and DIY culture, 309 Punk Project (Pensacola, FL) amplifies punk’s historical and present-day potential as both an artistic practice and ethos; it is committed to risk-taking art, mutual aid, and supportive regional networks. Dedicated to showing and contextualizing the work of artists from South Asian diaspora, many of whom have lived through periods of state-sponsored censorship and the repression of difference, Twelve Gates Arts (Philadelphia, PA) presents work free of the reductive cultural categorization that larger institutions often fall back on.
Two new grantees ground their programming in the Native American practices of respect, reciprocity, and collectivity. IndigenousAF (Las Vegas, NV) supports, maintains, and celebrates Indigenous artistic communities by providing exhibition opportunities, public programs, and long-term studio residencies to Indigenous artists across North America, Latin America, and beyond. Racing Magpie (Rapid City, SD) is a Lakota-centric arts and culture organization that presents exhibitions and public programs, operates studio programs for adults and elders, and runs an annual knowledge-sharing program. It is fueled by communal input and reflects that knowledge back into its Lakota community, and the creative community at large.
Several first-time grantees are situated in rural or historically unique areas, which influence their programming to engage with their natural surroundings, site history, and local communities. Located at the Mouth of Puget Sound in Washington state and occupying a repurposed military structure, Centrum (Port Townsend, WA) is a residency program for artists, curators, musicians, and writers from the region and beyond. Responding to its rural location, the Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN) emphasizes artists’ connection to the community and promotes their work through on- and off-site receptions, conversations, local radio interviews and press, fostering on-the-ground exchange of perspectives between visiting and local artists and the public. Para la Naturaleza (San Juan, PR) is an arts-forward conservation organization that manages a land trust of nearly 40,000 acres across 86 sites in Puerto Rico, and supports artists’ engagement in ecologically oriented residencies, programming, and study initiatives.
Other grantees work towards disrupting the notion that artists with disabilities can only excel as “outsider” artists, or that their artmaking is merely therapeutic or recreational. New grantee Progressive Art Studio Collective (Detroit, MI) is an incubator for creativity, providing artists with production support and career opportunities, while Arts of Life (Chicago, IL) gives artists access to high- quality art materials, opportunities to work in project-based or career-focused groups, and exposure to broad contemporary art audiences.
Additionally, several grantees provide alternatives to the MFA model for artists at any stage of their careers. First-time grantee Amplify Arts’ (Omaha, NE) Alternate Currents program parallels the two-year structure of an MFA with cohorts attending monthly discussions, studio visits, critiques, and planning sessions. Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Arts (Buffalo, NY) offers a free, self-directed, and collaborative program, BICA school, with weekly meetings for conversation, studio crits, access to labs, and peer mentorship.
“Arts organizations across the country are facing a financially precarious and culturally challenging moment,” says Rachel Bers, Program Director, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “The foundation is committed to supporting institutions that are actively bolstering and emboldening the artists they serve; the vital platforms they provide allow artists to engage with, push back against, and help shape our world.”
16 museums, university art galleries and other organizations will receive support for large-scale solo and group exhibitions that highlight the work of under-represented or overlooked artists, and thematic shows that address the current sociopolitical, economic, and cultural moment. The first major career retrospective of artist Maren Hassinger, presented by Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA) will feature more than twenty large-scale sculptures, video works, and installations, alongside documents and recreations of site-specific ephemeral works. The Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, CA) will host Midred Howard’s first major museum survey, presenting mixed-media assemblages and sculptural installations that provide a broad view of the artist’s exploration into themes of belonging, displacement, memory, identity, and the social construct of race.
Several group exhibitions receiving Foundation funding will explore themes of spirituality and religion as they pertain to ancestral lineage, cultural traditions, and community. Speaking in Tongues, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, explores international perspectives on the sacred, tracing expressions of the divine across cultures and emphasizing the universal web of connections between humans and a shared cosmic whole. The UCLA Hammer Museum will present Several Eternities in a Day: Brownness and the Spiritual Turn in Art, an exhibition featuring the work of nineteen artists of Latinx, Mestizo and Indigenous descent from across the Americas who draw upon ancestral spiritual and aesthetic traditions. Similarly, in 2026, Creative Time (New York, NY) will focus its program on the theme of “Religion and Spirituality” with the production and presentation of artists’ projects that tap into belief systems, sanctuary movements, and interfaith organizing.
Other group exhibitions include Raving into the Future, presented by the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, CA) that looks at rave culture as a site of resistance and joy; the ICA Philadelphia’s (Philadelphia, PA) The Condition of Being Near that will explore sociopolitical solidarities that connect Black, African, and Chinese diasporas across North America, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean; Overexposed: Autonomy and Cinema 1960-2025, presented by the Museum of the Moving Image (Long Island City, NY) that examines visual artists’ use of medical images; and the Wheelwright Museum of American Indian’s (Santa Fe, NM) Outburst: Native American Art After Vietnam, featuring sixty works exploring activism, creativity, and the effects of military service on Native American artists and their creative output.
Additionally, five Curatorial Research Fellowships will support scholarly research for contemporary art projects in early stages of development. Topics range from a historical look at the photography and film around the Spanish-American war; the intersection of outdoor recreation culture and the American landscape; the history and impact of the Chicano and Indigenous arts collective Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado; an exploration of ancient technologies to expand consciousness and healing; and the legacy of artist Alvin Loving.
