The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has revealed the forty-nine recipients of its fall 2021 grants, which total $4.1 million and are issued to museums and arts organizations in support of their visual arts programs, exhibitions, and curatorial research, with up to 50 percent of the funding available to cover administrative expenses. Among first-time grantees, of which there are twenty, are those whose innovative, collaborative, and flexible programs have supported artists and allowed their practices to flourish in an especially turbulent time. These include Portland, Maine’s Indigo Arts Alliance, which assists Black and brown artists in New England, and Phoenix’s CALA Alliance, a multidisciplinary Latinx arts organization providing artists from Arizona, Mexico, and Latin America with opportunities to expand their networks and to exhibit their work.

“The fall 2021 grantees are adapting and inventing new ways to meet the needs of artists as they persevere in the face of obstacles that surface every day in these unpredictable times,” said Warhol Foundation president Joel Wachs. “Artists are at the heart of the foundation’s work, and it is more important than ever to shore up the organizations that sustain and empower them as they evolve their practices.”

Among the recipients cited by the foundation as representative of its own commitment to the principle of freedom of artistic expression are Brooklyn’s Artist Freedom Initiative, which provides pro-bono immigration services, resettlement assistance, and exhibition opportunities to artists who have been persecuted for their work, and New York’s National Coalition Against Censorship, which for over twenty years has assisted artists and arts presenters facing censorship pressure and which promoting public access to their work and champions their ability to freely express their views, no matter how controversial or unpopular.

“The economic, racial, and political turbulence of our contemporary moment affects the lives of artists as well as the work they produce,” noted Warhol Foundation program director Rachel Bers. “Museums, nonprofit galleries, and other artist-centered organizations are essential sites for artists to incubate, interrogate, develop and discuss projects that tangle with the complexity of the present; the foundation values the prominence these platforms give to artistic visions and voices, centering artists’ perspectives in conversations that extend far beyond the art world.”

A full list of grantees is below.

Fall 2021 Grant Recipients | Program Support Over 2 Years

A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY ($60,000)

Art Papers, Atlanta ($100,000)

Artistic Freedom Initiative, Brooklyn, NY ($100,000)

Artists Space, New York ($130,000)

Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL ($100,000)

Baxter Street at The Camera Club of New York, New York ($60,000)

CALA Alliance, Phoenix ($100,000)

Chicago Film Society, Chicago ($50,000)

Coaxial Arts Foundation, Los Angeles ($60,000)

Creative Time, Inc., New York ($100,000)

DiverseWorks, Houston ($100,000)

The Flaherty / International Film Seminars, Brooklyn, NY ($100,000)

FotoFest, Houston ($80,000)

Fulcrum Arts, Pasadena, CA ($50,000)

Indigo Arts Alliance, Portland, ME ($100,000)

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles ($100,000)

Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis ($100,000)

Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, CA ($60,000)

National Coalition Against Censorship, New York ($150,000)

Pike School of Art - Mississippi, McComb, MS ($60,000)

Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR ($150,000)

Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI ($80,000)

Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago ($100,000)

Root Division, San Francisco ($100,000)

Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA ($80,000)

SPACE Gallery, Portland, ME ($100,000)

Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, Buffalo ($100,000)

The Wende Museum of the Cold War, Culver City, CA ($80,000)

Fall 2021 Grant Recipients | Exhibition Support

Americas Society, New York, “Tropical is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime”($50,000)

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, “Dara Birnbaum: Reaction” ($35,000)

Bass Museum, Miami Beach, FL, exhibition program support (over 2 years) ($100,000)

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 58th Carnegie International ($150,000)

Cincinnati Art Museum, “Natural World” ($75,000)

Denver Art Museum, “Who tells a tale, adds a tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art” ($65,000)

Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, “African Modernism in America, 1947–1967” ($100,000)

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection / University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala,” ($100,000)

Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, “Faisal Abdu’Allah” ($50,000)

The Menil Collection, Houston, “John Akomfrah: ‘The SNCC Manifestoes’” ($100,000)

El Museo del Barrio, New York, “Juan Francisco Elso: Por América” ($100,000)

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today” ($100,000)

The Queens Museum, New York, “Xaviera Simmons” ($100,000)

San Jose Museum of Art, California, “Kelly Akashi: Of the Weeds” ($50,000)

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, “Pacita Abad” ($100,000)

The Wolfsonian - Florida International University (FIU), Miami Beach, Roberto Lugo exhibition and mural project ($40,000)

Fall 2021 Grant Recipients | Curatorial Research Fellowship

MASS MoCa, North Adams, MA, Denise Markonish ($50,000)

Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, CUNY, New York, Macarena Gómez-Barris and Alaina Claire Feldman ($50,000)

Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Miranda Lash ($50,000)

Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Teréz Iacovino and José López Serra ($47,000)

Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY, Sharon Dynak and Tracey Kikut ($47,000)