Ruth Foundation for the Arts gives $240,000 to Wisconsin groups to fund local artists
In a new initiative, Milwaukee-based Ruth Foundation for the Arts is giving funds to three Wisconsin groups so they can make grants to individual artists.
Under its new Wisconsin Grants to Artists Program, the Ruth Foundation is giving a total of $240,000 to these organizations:
Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design will receive $75,000 to support up to 15 artists in research and development of new work through a new Faculty and Staff Fine Arts Grant program.
Lynden Sculpture Garden will receive $100,000 to expand its fellowship program. Specifically, Lynden will make $25,000 grants to artists who previously have won a Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. Lynden executive director Polly Morris said the new grants will go to Nohl alumni who won awards between 2003 and 2015. Three grants will go to artists who have stayed in the Milwaukee area, with a fourth grant going to a Nohl winner who has moved away. Morris sees the new program as a step in building comprehensive support for artists in Milwaukee. Morris said Nohl alumni will apply for the new grants; she will ask alumni Nohl jurors to help in the selection process.
The Open Fund Artist Project Grant, administered by the experimental artist-run spaces The Poor Farm and The Open, will receive $65,000 to double its grantmaking. The Open Fund will now distribute $130,000 in grants across 24 projects.
"It was important to us to round out our fiscal year with support for artists and creative practitioners in Milwaukee," said foundation executive director Karen Patterson.
"We selected three organizations with the infrastructure and expertise to connect with artists in the city. We are grateful to these organizations for piloting this program with us and are so pleased that they can now augment their already existing support for artists in the city," Patterson explained in a statement released by the foundation.
The foundation plans to make Wisconsin Grants to Artists an annual program and to continue working with these three organizations.
Funded by a bequest from the late Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, the foundation launched in June with an endowment of $440 million. The foundation calls itself "Midwestern at heart, and national in scope."
More: 2023 Nohl Fellowship winners include Mikal Floyd-Pruitt, Janelle VanderKelen
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Ruth Foundation for the Arts gives $240,000 to fund local artists
