NYC Arts and Entertainment Business News

The way the New York Foundation for the Arts distributes its Artist Fellowship grants changed this year due to a combination of changing discipline categories and funding cuts. In the past, NYFA awarded $7,000 grants to artists in sixteen disciplines over a two-year span, eight each year. Now the organization will award grants to five disciplines a year over the course of three.

David C. Terry, NYFA’s Senior Officer/Curator of Programs and Awards, says that while the number of disciplines decreased from sixteen to fifteen, the change will actually ensure that more types of art are represented. No categories were removed outright, but disciplines that were determined to overlap with each other, such as Crafts and Sculpture and Video and Film, were combined. A new category, Folk/Traditional Arts, was added. “So what may appear to be a narrowing of disciplines is actually an increase in opportunities,” Terry said in an email.

Artists who rely on NYFA’s flagship program can certainly use the help. Over the past three years, state and federal funding cuts significantly reduced the amount of money NYFA has to give away. According to New York state budget reports, the New York State Council for the Arts (from which NYFA receives “major funding” for its Artist Fellowship program) has seen drastic funding cuts every year since 2009. The result is that there are fewer fellowships to go around:

During the 2009-2010 cycle, NYSCA and NYFA embarked on an effort to reach out to artists in “traditionally under-represented areas” outside of Greater New York, according to Lisa Johnson, Senior Program Officer at NYSCA. The results, she said in an email, were “good,” but this created a spike in the number of applicants:

With less money to give away and more competition for funding, the chances of an individual artist winning one of those grants declined from 4.05% in 1999-2000 to 2.48% in 2009-2010:

NYFA’s new procedure should help bring that rate back up, as the number of applicants has decreased. Accordingly, the chance of winning a grant increased slightly this year to 2.82%, though the real effect of the change won’t be known until the end of the first three-year cycle in 2013.

That said, an artist must now wait an extra year for his discipline to come up in the grant cycle. Terry stresses that this will not be an issue for most: “There is seldom an artist that [sic] will have to wait a full three-year cycle. More artists are working in more disciplines, so there is a great deal of cross-over.”