In a recent chat with Lu Zhang, the executive director of A Blade of Grass (ABoG), the Long Island City, New York-based funder dedicated to nurturing socially engaged art, we hit on the evergreen question of how grantmakers can best serve artists’ needs.
“I was talking to a friend about this, and she said, ‘We already know what artists need. They need money. They need time,’” recalled Zhang, who is a multidisciplinary artist herself and served as director of initiatives at United States Artists, which provides direct support to artists, prior to joining ABoG in 2023. “Sometimes, we keep having these conversations, but the basic things don’t change that much.”
But sometimes things do change, and it’s incumbent on the funder to calibrate its approach accordingly. For ABoG, change was galvanized by the pandemic.
Launched in 2014, ABoG’s Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art provided $20,000 annually to eight artist fellows to advance socially engaged projects. But leadership paused the fellowship in 2020 when social distancing prevented artists from engaging in an in-person setting. The following year brought more change, as ABoG founders Shelley Frost Rubin and Deborah Fisher began a process that transferred governance and leadership to a board composed of socially engaged arts practitioners.
Fast-forward to mid-February. ABoG announced that three artist groups — Great Leap, Wild Path Collective and What Would an HIV Doula Do? — were each awarded a $25,000 honorarium through its new A Blade of Grass In Fellowship to foster collaboration and empower socially engaged artistic practices.
ABoG supports individual artists through other programs. But by funding arts groups, A Blade of Grass In Fellowship underscores how socially engaged arts practitioners emerged from the pandemic with a strong desire to connect with the broader field.
“There is something that happens in person and in real time that we haven’t been able to recreate virtually,” Zhang said. “We use the term ‘in fellowship’ because we’re exploring the different facets of socially engaged practice. We’re gathering folks in conversation.”
Addressing the needs of socially engaged artists
A Blade of Grass was founded in 2011 by Fisher and Rubin to support and deepen understanding for socially engaged artists enacting social change within a community.
In its first year, the foundation established an advisory committee of thought leaders that led to the Artist Files, a pilot granting program that supported 20 artists. Feedback gleaned for Artist Files informed the creation of ABoG’s Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, which supported 57 artists and collectives from 2014 to 2020.
In the winter of 2022, ABoG’s artist-led board partnered with the Center for Artistic Activism on a year-long, field-wide research initiative to get a sense of socially engaged practitioners’ needs. When I spoke with Zhang in June of 2023, she had just assumed the role of executive director and was digging into the findings.
Looking back now, Zhang said the research initiative boiled down to “What does the broader community of artists and practitioners need right now, in this moment?” One answer to that question was more direct funding.
Last March, ABoG launched Field Funds, a program that will distribute $25,000 to artists and creative practitioners working throughout the country with 50 $500 microgrants. The funding is earmarked to support three needs common to socially engaged art: artist-led gatherings, accessibility and translation, and documentation and archiving.
Zhang called Field Funds “the third pillar” in ABoG’s work. The other two are Landscapes, a digital platform that commissions artists, curators, organizers and writers, and the new A Blade of Grass In Fellowship.
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Arts groups are seeking to balance individual and collective goals
Again, ABoG’s leaders are artists themselves, so they know well that artists can always use more direct funding. But their research and conversation with other artists underscored what Zhang called “this idea of shared power and collective work more broadly, which led to us thinking about a cohort of artist groups.”
No artist is an island, to paraphrase an overused idiom, and so, beginning last February, Zhang, Program Director Lee Heinemann and ABoG’s board of artists, many of whom are Socially Engaged Art fellows, began to formulate what became A Blade of Grass In Fellowship.
All three of the initiative’s fellows represent how socially engaged art can galvanize local community engagement.
The Los Angeles-based Great Leap has an initiative called the Manzanar Baseball Project, which recognizes the legacy of wartime baseball in the Japanese American internment camp located near Death Valley to “shed light on the profound significance of baseball as a symbol of resilience, cultural identity and community spirit in the face of injustice.”
Wild Path Collective, among other activities, holds “cultural, ceremonial and counselling spaces on the land, so that visitors and members may find healing alongside land that has been harmed by extractive practices of farming and living.” What Would an HIV Doula Do? produces screenings, workshops and events complementing its mission of responding to the AIDS crisis.
Zhang and her team will stay in touch with In Fellowship’s cohort and study how each group uses its $25,000 honorarium to evolve their practices. ABoG will use the findings to inform future iterations and convey them to the broader community in the Landscapes digital publication. “In Fellowship may also fund individual artists as we explore other facets of socially engaged work,” Zhang said.
ABoG is digging into “what it means to be a socially engaged organization”
Since the honorarium is unrestricted, the groups could channel some of that support to individual artists. Time will tell if this plays out, but ABoG’s research revealed that arts groups typically tackle priorities that balance individual and collective goals, such as navigating leadership transitions, strengthening conflict resolution and consensus-building practices, and formalizing issues of authorship and credit.
Or to put it another way, arts groups’ to-do list looks different than individual artists’ needs, which can be boiled down to more money and time. For Zhang, groups are responding to “the constant onslaught” of the last five years and are seeking out “moments of being in conversation with people responding within their communities and exploring possibilities of existing together.”
Zhang’s takeaway is a succinct articulation of ABoG’s evolving views of socially engaged art. When it launched in 2011, its leaders made the case for what was, at the time, a niche area in arts philanthropy. “In the first decade of ABoG’s work,” Zhang said, “there was an emphasis, and I think a necessity, to make the field of socially engaged art legible, to make a case for how it should be talked about within museum settings.”
Now that the rest of the field has come around to ABoG’s way of thinking, its leaders are “more interested in what it means to be a socially engaged organization,” Zhang said. “And because we have an artist-led board and staff, we’re able to have that conversation in a more nuanced and collaborative way.”
