Above: Tu Dance, whose principals Uri Sands and Tony Pierce-Sands, are USA Knight Fellows. Credit: Tu Dance. 

United States Artists Monday announced a $20 million endowment campaign, which includes a $1 million contribution from Knight Foundation. Here, President Carolina García Jayaram talks about the organization’s history and what the funding means to its future.

Carolina García Jayaram, president and CEO of United States Artists

This year marks the tenth anniversary of United States Artists. Over the past decade, we’ve used our fellowship program to distribute $21 million dollars to nearly 450 of the country’s most accomplished artists, writers, dancers, architects, actors, poets, and more—$50,000 dollars at a time. Of great importance is the fact the money is unrestricted and the award is peer selected. This means our fellows can use the money in any way they see fit, be it for materials or tools, assistance, travel and research, or just covering the cost of living. Providing economic autonomy and artistic validation, this simple model has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to support individual artists, and our country’s culture in general. However, it was exceedingly rare when we started ten years ago.

USA’s genesis is best explained in the context of seminal events of the 1990s. To begin with, in the wake of the Culture Wars, the National Endowment for the Arts stopped funding individual artists. This unfortunate policy decision had serious repercussions that weren’t fully understood until several years later, when the Urban Institute led a groundbreaking study that identified the biggest obstacles facing artists. At the top of the list was access to no-strings-attached funds.

Susan Berresford, then the president of the Ford Foundation, sought to correct this problem. She went to the leadership of the Rasmuson Foundation, the Prudential Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation to help start a fund that would seed the United States Artists’ fellows program.

The award has gone to artists living in the country’s largest cities, as well as those working in small communities across all 50 states and territories. Our fellows include Kara Walker, Toni and Uri Sands, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Annie Proulx, Teju Cole, and Catherine Opie, to name just a few.

Our board of trustees and committed staff have watched with excitement as the fellows community and alumni has grown over the years. Our fellows cohort is comprised of artists of all ages, stages of career, artistic practice and cultural background. Yet once they become USA Fellows, they become linked. USA’s more recent commitment has been to create an ongoing and dynamic network for them to benefit from. Fostering that alumni network is the second part of what we do, and it’s what brings us to Miami this week.

For our second annual Artists Assembly, we have invited our fellows, funders and colleagues in the field of arts philanthropy for three days of celebration and conversation. Importantly, we travel to a new city each year, introducing a local community to our organization and giving our guests the chance to learn about a new arts ecosystem. This year there will be performances at the Little Haiti Cultural Center, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the New World Center, and the National YoungArts Foundation. 

What’s more, we have several exciting announcements. One of them is that we’ll be launching an Impact Study. Led by Helicon and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, this year-long study will take stock of our work over the past decade, allowing us to better understand how the award has shaped the field and how the field is changing so we can be of greater service artists. 

USA is also thrilled to announce a $20 million operations endowment campaign, which will support the infrastructure USA needs to continue to focus on the work of supporting individual artists. Alberto Ibarguën, president and CEO of Knight Foundation had the honor of making the announcement at the celebration of the latest cohort of USA Fellows at New World Center Monday night. USA is proud to recognize Knight Foundation’s contribution of $1 million to the campaign, which will be counted towards a $10 million challenge grant from the Ford Foundation.

In many ways the story of United States Artists is the story of this country’s philanthropic relationship to the arts. As we enter this next period, we will evolve to better serve our creative community.

Carolina García Jayaram, president & CEO, United States Artists.