Broome County Arts Council was a Shortlisted Collaboration with local artist and professor Luanne Redeye. Congratulations to Broome County organization Truth Pharm for being selected as one of the participating organizations:
“Artists Sullivan Harris, Sammie Werkheiser, Mia Hause, Yohance Bailey, Dustin Tang Chung, Michael Rudolph, and Mick Thomas will join Truth Pharm in Broome County, New York. Through photography, videography, public art, and community workshops, the artists will work alongside staff and volunteers to provide therapeutic art making opportunities that elevate the issue of drug fatalities locally and nationwide.”
Additionally, “visual artist Ellen Blalock will work with the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, NY to document African American family stories using video, quilt making, photography, and mixed media. The project will engage underrepresented communities throughout Cayuga County and result in a multi-media exhibit. As an artist-in-residence, Blalock will also work on her own narrative textile pieces for future exhibitions.”
Read the official press release below, and see other statewide recipients here: https://www.creativesrebuildny.org/participants/
Creatives Rebuild New York Announces Artist Employment Program Recipients $61.6M to Support Artists’ Jobs
June 30, 2022, New York, NY—Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) today named its Artist Employment Program (AEP) recipients, 98 collaborations involving a dynamic group of 300 artists employed by community-based organizations, municipalities, and tribal governments across New York State. A total of $49.9M in funding will support artists’ salaries and benefits, with an additional $11.7M in funding provided to the organizations holding employment. Participating artists will receive an annual salary of $65,000 with benefits and dedicated time to focus on their artistic practice.
“Since 2016, I have wanted to create work based on the personal archives and lived experiences of underrepresented people in my region of rural upstate New York,” says artist Christina Hunt Wood, who will work with the Prattsville Art Center, Youth Clubhouses of Columbia-Greene Counties (MHACG), and Community Action of Greene County, Inc. “However, with a busy full-time job and limited resources, it felt impossible to focus my energies on such a complex endeavor. Through CRNY’s Artist Employment Program I now have the time, resources, and capacity to devote my attention to this creative project I have been dreaming of pursuing for years.”
Inspired by programs like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973 and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs City Artist Corps funding in 2021, CRNY’s Artist Employment Program is rooted in a dual commitment to direct support for artists and community-driven social impact. The funded work ranges from theater programming that engages Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities across Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan to address recent violence and public safety; to community-based public art workshops that bring awareness to substance use, drug fatalities, and overdose crises in Broome County; to Haudenosaunee-led storytelling and gatherings that uplift Indigenous women’s community contributions through foodways, traditional arts, craft, oral traditions, media arts, film, photography, and comedy.
“If we are to truly rebuild our amazing state, we must celebrate artists’ contributions not only to the economy but to what makes us human,” says CRNY’s executive director Sarah Calderon. “Working alongside community-based organizations, artists preserve local histories, nurture social cohesion, and inspire significant progress in the realms of health, climate change, public safety, agriculture, immigration, education, housing, and more. The incredible work being funded through CRNY’s Artist Employment Program underscores the importance of direct support for both individual artists and the organizations that hold their employment. We can’t wait to engage policymakers and other funders in building out support systems that acknowledge and sustain this labor.”
Artist Employment Program recipients were selected through a two-stage process by a group of twenty external peer reviewers alongside CRNY staff. From an initial pool of over 2,700 written applications, 167 were shortlisted for interviews with reviewers. The reviewers represented a diverse mix of artists and organizational representatives from a broad range of artistic disciplines, regions across New York State, cultural identities, and lived experiences that were reflective of the applicant pool.
In keeping with CRNY’s commitment to equitable funding distribution, final selection was balanced across a number of variables. AEP recipients hail from all ten geographic regions of New York State, including substantial representation from rural communities, as well as six of the nine Indigenous nations recognized by the state. The cohort represents myriad approaches to collaboration and a diverse array of artistic and cultural practices—ranging from the performing and visual arts to oral traditions, craft, literature, and social practice. Organizations range from small, grassroots, community-based collaboratives to large, established cultural institutions. One hundred percent of the collaborations will work with and alongside Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQIAP+, Deaf/Disabled, criminal legal system involved, low-income, and/or rural communities.
“In creating a process through which artists and community organizations jointly applied to participate, the leadership council and artist-led CRNY think tank underscore the important role that artists play not just in their own creative pursuits, but also as workers and activists who remain on the forefront of issues most crucial to communities across the state of New York and beyond,” said Emil J. Kang, CRNY’s leadership council chair and program director for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation.
Of the 300 individual artists in the selected collaborations, 165 will join Tribeworks, a worker cooperative providing employment and benefits for artists collaborating with smaller organizations that do not have the infrastructure to employ them directly. CRNY selected Tribeworks as an intermediary partner because of their commitment to creative labor and equitable access to employment.
To view the full list of artists and organizations participating in the Artist Employment Program, visit https://www.creativesrebuildny.org/participants/. To read more about the selection process, visit https://www.creativesrebuildny.org/2022/06/30/aep-selection-process/. Please note that information about CRNY’s Guaranteed Income for Artists program will be released in October 2022. Media inquiries may be directed to press@creativesrebuildny.org.
###
About Creatives Rebuild New York
Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) is a three-year, $125 million initiative that provides guaranteed income and employment opportunities to artists across New York State. CRNY believes that artists are workers who deserve equitable, sustainable support structures, and that improving the lives of artists is paramount to the vitality of New York State’s collective social and economic wellbeing. Fiscally sponsored by Tides Center, CRNY represents a $125
million funding commitment, anchored by $115 million from the Mellon Foundation and $5 million each from the Ford Foundation and Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). Learn more at creativesrebuildny.org.
