When the Santa Fe Arts Commission kicked off its Art is the Solution Fund grant program in 2022, it tasked applying artists with creating works on the theme of “water & displacement.” In 2023, the fund adopted a theme of “structural inequity.” For the now-open 2024-2025 cycle however, the constraints are much looser and instead ask applicants to simply consider how or what art might be the solution to, be it personal, societal, environmental or otherwise—and there are five $10,000 grants available to make that happen.
“Rather than issuing a theme, we thought why not just go with ‘art is the solution’ and see how the artists respond,” the city’s Arts & Culture Department Director Chelsey Johnson tells SFR. “Instead of prescribing the solution—you tell us.”
The Arts & Culture Department will fund the five grants using revenue from the city’s lodger’s tax, which is specifically meant to draw tourists to Santa Fe (perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “heads in beds?”) through the arts. Johnson says the final decisions for the grant awardees are in the hands of the city’s nine arts commissioners, who include Poeh Cultural Center Executive Director Karl Duncan (Arikara/Hidatsa/Mandan/San Carlos Apache), Vital Spaces Executive Director Raashan Ahmad, Fulbright Scholar Andrew Lovato and arts educator/scholar Winoka Yepa (Diné), among others.
The eligibility requirements are otherwise fairly straightforward: Applicants must reside in Santa Fe County, their projects must take place within the city or county, be completed by June 2025 and provide room for community accessibility and engagement. Interested parties must apply online through this link by 11:59 pm on Oct. 15. The final cohort will be announced in November.
Previous winners of the Art is the Solution Fund grants include progressive DIY movie house No Name Cinema for a series of screenings; artist Hernan Gomez Chavez for art classes at the Pete’s Place shelter for the unhoused; Alas de Agua Art Collective for its ongoing Barrio Art School initiative; Kim Fowler and the Women of the Diaspora Writing Group for the Blacks Seen and Unseen documentary theater project; and Robert Washington-Vaughns for the Black Men Flower Project, a nonprofit dedicated to the mental health and well-being of Black men through arts, nature and community. Several of the projects are still underway. Alas de Agua’s Barrio Art School, for example, will unveil a show at the Santa Fe Community Gallery in the coming months, and other grantees have more in the works for 2024.
Those with questions can reach the Arts & Culture Department through artsandsculture@santafenm.gov.
“We’re really pushing the outreach, because I think the last call [for applicants] was only open about a month,” Johnson adds. “It’s a two-month window now, because we really want to get a lot of applicants…we really want these projects to have a life.”
