Arts Writers Grant Opportunity

The Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant is a three-year pilot program designed to support writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through project-based grants issued directly to individual authors. The first program of its type, it was founded in recognition of both the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture.

In its first year, the Arts Writers Grant Program issued awards for books, articles, and experiments in new and alternative media. This round, it introduces a new grant category for short-form writing (texts of 1,000 words or less). In addition, the program seeks an increased engagement in the coming grant round with article-based projects and with art of the current moment. Of particular interest are articles that identify and explore pressing issues in the contemporary visual arts. Also of interest are texts that illuminate the value contemporary art holds for all viewers through its ability to complicate and enrich our understanding of our world and ourselves and to offer a space of freedom from and critical engagement with prevailing norms.

Through all its grants, regardless of topic or category type, the Arts Writers Grant Program aims to honor and encourage:

* Writing about art that is rigorous, passionate, eloquent and precise
* Writing about art in which a keen engagement with the present is infused with an appreciation of the historical
* Writing about art that is neither afraid to take a stand, nor content to deliver authoritative pronouncements, but serves rather to pose questions and to generate new possibilities for thinking, seeing, and making
* Writing about art that is sensitive to both the importance and difficulty of situating aesthetic objects within their broader social and political contexts
* Writing about art that does not dilute or sidestep complex ideas but renders accessible their meaning and value
* Writing about art that challenges creatively the limits of existing conventions, without valorizing novelty as an end in itself

Awards range from $3000 to $50,000. The application will be available on line in August, with a deadline of Sept 12.

To find out more about the grant, visit their website at
http://www.artswriters.org