GRANTS FOR ARTS HABITAT IN CALIFORNIA AND PUBLIC ART IN WASHINGTON, DC

Arts Habitat, a Carmel, California–based group that supports Monterey County–area artists, announced yesterday that it has received a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bequest from an anonymous donor as well as thousands of dollars in grants from other sources, reports the Salinas Californian. The Koret Foundation gave a grant of five thousand dollars and the National Endowment for the Arts chairman gave a ten-thousand-dollar grant to help fund Houses Art, an arts project presented by Arts Habitat in collaboration with the Independent Living Center in Salinas. The group also received a five-thousand-dollar donation from an anonymous family fund, and a grant of seventy-five hundred dollars from the Community Foundation’s “Communities Advancing the Arts” initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation.

In other news, the Washington Business Journal notes that the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities has endowed a fifty-thousand-dollar matching grant to install art in a plaza space in the neighborhood north of the US Capitol and Union Station in Washington, DC. The program injects artists and nonprofits with funds to put permanent public art projects in the city, including sculptures, mosaics, murals, special paving, custom benches, and artistic gates. The North of Massachusetts Avenue Business Improvement District, the grant administrator, will soon publish a call to artists for proposals. Preference will be given to local artists. Three semifinalists will be picked in early 2009, and each will get a grant of one thousand dollars to create models of their ideas. A review committee will pick the winner around April.