VIA Art Fund and Wagner Foundation have awarded grants totaling $200,000 to five U.S.-based visual arts organizations. The recipients of the 2020 VIA | Wagner Incubator Grant Fund grant are: Artspace (New Haven, CT), Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (Portland, OR), The Lab (San Francisco, CA), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), and The Luminary (St. Louis, MO).
Click here to read the press release.
Click here to learn more about the VIA | Wagner partnership and the Incubator Grant Fund.
Artspace is a non-profit organization championing the visual arts. Founded in 1987 by artists, Artspace centers community-building and education while providing a platform to present the work of visual artists in the city of New Haven. Exhibition and commissioning programs encourage experimentation, discovery, and lively civic discourse while fostering appreciation for the vital role artists play in improving our community. Artspace’s 5,000 square foot space in a former civil-war era furniture factory features a rotating set of thought-provoking exhibitions. Through an award-winning apprenticeship program, teams of teens from New Haven Public Schools collaborate with professional artists on the creation of artworks and installations.
For more information, please visit Artspace
Disjecta Contemporary Art Center builds ambitious programs that provide a catalytic platform for forward-thinking work by visual and performing artists in a sizeable warehouse space in Portland, Oregon. Dynamic programs showcase new ideas and engage new audiences while fueling collaborations between artists, curators, and viewers to impact and intervene in the larger contemporary arts dialogue. The organization is known for its boundary-pushing ethos fueled by its highly regarded Curator in Residence program, which presents an experimental program distinguished by ambitious solo and group shows. Host of the Portland Biennial, Disjecta exacts equal rigor from local and national artists, while recognizing and supporting the talent of the region.
For more information, please visit Disjecta
Founded by artists in 1998, Locust Projects is an arts incubator and Miami’s longest running nonprofit alternative art space with both hyperlocal and national reach. Locust Projects produces, presents, and nurtures ambitious and experimental new art and the exchange of ideas through commissioned exhibitions and projects, artist residencies, summer art intensives for teens, and public programs on contemporary art and curatorial practice. Projects emphasize boundary-pushing creative endeavors, risk-taking, and experimentation by artists at all career stages with a focus on new, non-specialist voices selected through an open call process designed to reach underrepresented communities.
For more information, please visit Locust Projects
The Lab is a catalyst for artistic experimentation, nurturing radical music, performance, and visual art from its home in San Francisco’s Mission District. With a focus on traditionally underrepresented artists, The Lab’s robust commissioning program gives artists significant funding, time, space, and the license to change any aspect of the organization’s operating model. In this, The Lab seeks to transform alongside artistic practices in order to engage meaningfully with visionary communities whose economic and cultural realities have been ignored for too long, to the impoverishment of us all.
For more information, please visit The Lab
As the largest and longest running independent art space in St. Louis, The Luminary is home to exceptional art that engages the pressing issues of the present. Through an active roster of exhibitions, residencies, performances, publications, and gatherings, the organization acts as a point of convergence for diverse local national, and international publics. Host of the acclaimed Counterpublic Triennial, The Luminary cultivates thoughtful platforms for exchange, supports forward-moving art and ideas, and attempts to model a more equitable and interconnected art world.
For more information, please visit The Luminary
The VIA l Wagner Incubator Grant Fund aims to strengthen the capacity and programming of organizations across the country in order to ensure a robust and inclusive national arts ecosystem.