Support for Local New York City Artists
Steve McCurry
The Foundation’s NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, launched in 2007, supports creativity and the arts, with an emphasis on innovation. The Foundation awards two-year grants, ranging from $50,000 to $250,000, for groundbreaking creative work that enriches the city’s cultural life and strengthens the role that the arts will play in the future of New York.
With the Foundation’s support, artists and art communities can build an innovative creative sector that provokes us to react, question and learn. These grants underscore our commitment to the impact and influence that creative expression and innovation can exert on social progress.
2009 NYC Cultural Innovation Fund Winners
Many of the 18 winners in 2009, selected from more than 500 diverse projects, focused on innovative survival strategies for the arts during a time of severe economic decline. Strong themes among the winning entries were: fresh business models, imaginative prototypes for public/private partnerships, entrepreneurial approaches to capital generation, artist peer loan programs, and new spins on marketing, especially to rapidly growing Latino communities.
- Alliance for Downtown New York, Inc., for a creative arts district prototype that supports permanent artists’ workspaces and commercial growth
- Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, to develop sustainable business models that enable Off Off-Broadway theaters to survive and thrive
- Asia Society, for a series of debates in which artists, scientists, business leaders and scholars use ancient forms of dialogue to address contemporary challenges
- BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn, to inaugurate a creative laboratory and residency linking the visual, media and performing arts
- The Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island, to redesign and repurpose the North Shore waterfront as a creative sector incubator
- Creative Capital, to harvest successful business and NGO capital-generation models for the benefit of artists
- HERE Arts Center, for an interactive video, blog, and podcast series examining the real-life survival challenges of New York City performing artists
- Institute for Urban Design, to launch Urban Design Week, an open-air festival celebrating the year’s innovations in architecture and urban design
- The Joyce Theater Foundation, Inc., to use creative arts residencies to support projects combining theater and dance
- New York City Ballet, for a convergence of architecture and dance through commissioning new ballets for a set designed by architect Santiago Calatrava
- The New School, for a design and public policy partnership to research, promote, and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability
- Polytechnic Institute of NYU, for community access to Betaville, an online platform showing proposed urban design and public art projects in 3D on real streets
- Pregones Theater, to expand Zip Tickets, the VIP discount ticket service for South Bronx, Washington Heights, and East Harlem zip codes
- Project Enterprise, in partnership with ArtHome, to help artist entrepreneurs build assets and equity through an artist peer loan program
- Queens Council on the Arts, to design an interactive cell phone cultural map to transform the #7 train into an art express
- Ringside Inc. (STREB), to spark new dance forms by incorporating extreme action techniques such as high wire feats and skydiving
- Teatro Círculo, to grow Latino audiences by training micro-entrepreneurs, from empanada vendors to beauty shop owners, to become sales agents for cultural events
