The Getty Trust and Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Will Give $15 Million in Emergency Relief to Ailing Artists and Art Organizations

The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Helen Frankenthaler
Foundation are the latest nonprofits to offer aid to artists
and arts organizations hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic in the
United States. Through separate initiatives, they will offer a
total of $15 million in relief funding over the never several
years.

The Getty’s $10 million fund will support small and mid-sized
institutions in Los Angeles that have struggled under the weight of
increasingly dire economic circumstances.

Grants of between $25,000 and $200,000 will be administered
through the California Community Foundation, which is also
redirecting funds from its annual Fellowship for the Visual Arts,
which is awarded to Los Angeles-based artists, into a separate
emergency fund.

The Getty hopes that other organizations will also join the
effort. “We don’t want to be doing it alone,” Getty president
and chief executive James Cuno told the Los Angeles
Times.

Meanwhile, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, which has
been active since 2013, will offer $5 million in relief funding
over the next three years—its largest commitment to date in support
of a single cause.

The first round of funding, which totals $1.25 million, will be
distributed immediately to three initiatives, including $500,000 in
support of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’s COVID-19 Relief
Fund, which is offering emergency grants to artists who have lost
income due to canceled performances or exhibitions, and $500,000 to
the Artist Relief Fund, a new initiative launching formally in
a few weeks that will offer grants to artists facing general
financial hardship.

The organization is also immediately granting $250,000 to small
New York City-based art organizations, including Artists Space,
Creative Time, Eyebeam, the Kitchen, the Laundromat Project, and
White Columns, to help them cover operating costs. Additional
funding recipients will be announced over the next three years.

Although smaller organizations can be more nimble and maintain
lower overhead than their larger peers, they also tend to have
smaller endowments and less runway to operate without income.
According to a 2016 survey by SMU DataArts, the median art museum
had just 1.5 months’ worth of working capital (or cash in hand),
underscoring the potentially catastrophic impact of a
two-month closure.

“None of us could ever have imagined the far-reaching medical
and financial disaster that has engulfed us as a result of this
pandemic,” said Clifford Ross, the Helen Frankenthaler
Foundation’s board chairman, in a statement. “Helen would have
given full-throated support to the board of her foundation making a
major effort to aid the creative community. The art world must
galvanize to support both its artists and those that work every day
at its museums and cultural institutions. We believe this is the
moment to step up.”

The Getty Trust and Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s efforts
join a growing number of similar initiatives.

Anonymous Was a Woman is
offering $250,000 in grants to female artists over 40
affected financially by the pandemic, while the Andy Warhol
Foundation has launched a $1.6 million emergency fund to help
artists cover living expenses, including food and rent.

Organizations including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Ford
Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund also came together to
establish the NYC Covid-19 Response & Impact Fund, which
provides grants and interest-free loans to small and mid-size
nonprofits that have faced losses in the pandemic.

The post The Getty Trust and Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
Will Give $15 Million in Emergency Relief to Ailing Artists and Art
Organizations appeared first on artnet News.