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DECEMBER 13, 2022
NEW YORK, NY - Today, the MAP Fund, the longest running private funding partner to performing artists working in non-commercial, disruptive, and often marginalized practices, announced it will award $2.6 million to more than 300 live-performance artists across 88 projects. Each grantee project will receive $30,000, which includes $25,000 towards the proposed work and $5,000 in unrestricted funds.
Following the largest number of applicants to the grant program, the 2022 cycle marks MAP’s most democratic process to-date and the largest one-time award distribution in the organization’s 35-year history. During this application and selection process, MAP implemented several changes to further ensure artists who are often left out of traditional arts philanthropy receive much-needed support.
Grantees will use jazz, ghost stories, clowning, butoh, puppetry, bharatanatyam, musical theater, folklorico, and more to explore connections between topics such as Japanese cultural erasure and consumer culture or Big Tech vulture capitalism and border imperialism. They take audiences inside an apartment building of immigrant families in Chicago; a runway with fashion designed to disrupt surveillance technologies in Albuquerque; a public water-and-fire ceremony in small town Sunbury, PA; and a historic intervention at the former home of Esek Hopkins, commander of the slavery ship Sally, in Providence. Grantees use their deep knowledge to push collective thinking forward with questions about how society might address environmental justice issues in Latiné American countries; the medical racism faced by Black women; and societal myths about aging. They envision better worlds – using their projects to call again and again for peace, rest, love, healing, space, connection, and joy.
“Performances are again live. But many artists, determined to take a radically different approach to how they make or share their work as a result of the pandemic and other seismic political and cultural shifts, are now on an uncharted new path,” said Moira Brennan, who announced that she will step down as MAP’s Executive Director in December 2022. “MAP’s support is essential to them, not only financially, but as a matter of encouragement to take those risks and to continue to follow their visions in a very new world.”
Since early-2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, MAP heightened its efforts on assisting artists who are confronting the survivability of performance as their life’s work, career, or practice. In March 2020, MAP suspended adjudication and provided all finalists with a grant of between $2,500 and $12,000, issuing 171 unrestricted grants. The organization also joined the Artist Relief coalition, which provided 4,682 relief grants of $5,000 each to artists across the country.
In 2021, MAP fully eliminated the grant application and selection process, and invited eligible past finalists to submit only their name and project title, randomly selecting 55 projects to receive $25,000 in flexible funds. In 2022, MAP returned to an open call invitation for applications, and required no budgets in the application. The organization also hybridized and further democratized the selection process, using both peer evaluation and randomized selection in the final cohort of grantees.
“We’ve noticed many different outcomes from the changes to our application and selection process over the past three years. This year, for example, 61% of the initial pool of eligible projects were led by artists of color,” said Lauren Slone, MAP’s Director of Grants and Research. “But the combination of peer review and randomized selection yielded a grantee list where 86% of the projects will be led by artists of color. We are interested to learn more about how and why that happened, and to explore those implications with colleagues who are also thinking about processes for resource distribution within the arts philanthropy community.”
Since its founding in 1988, MAP has brought more than $35 million and a national spotlight to artists working outside the traditional Western artistic canon and who are therefore less likely to be included in traditional funding mechanisms that are available to support their work. The organization’s efforts have centered on examining how philanthropy and potential changes to funding systems can impact the overall performance ecology.
“MAP is responsive to the evolving needs of individual artists who are exploring complex ideas and taking risks,” said Brandi Stewart, Senior Program Officer for the Arts and Interim Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. “The organization’s support helps create the conditions performing artists need to push the boundaries of content, form and imagination, which is critical in this moment of widespread transformation.”
MAP has provided early funding opportunities to artists who have later gone on to receive MacArthur Fellowships, Herb Alpert Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and more. Artists who receive MAP funding are often highly-influential on the general performance landscape, and have work that originates from varied traditions and world views, but are also under-acknowledged and unsupported from the greater arts philanthropy community.
“If there was no MAP Fund there would be no other entity committed to supporting performing artists’ long-term potential rather than their immediate products,” said Ms. Slone. “We say yes to their projects before many artists have gone into a studio to work out their ideas. We often say yes before other funders have gotten on board, to artists who do not currently have long lists of merit awards or institutional access, and to artists who are working with ideas and practices that are frequently coded as risky, radical, or dangerous. Not only do we need to keep supporting artists’ potential right now, we need to convince many more people and organizations to do it too.”
MAP Fund’s work is made possible through partnership with Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. Additional support comes from Jerome Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, Wilhelm Family Foundation, and dozens of individual donors.
For the full list of 2022 MAP Fund Grantees visit the artist database and filter for "2022" and "MAP Grant".
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About MAP Fund
MAP is the longest running private funding source for new performance works in the United States and its territories. Since 1989, MAP has championed cultural equity and formal innovation in performance practices with an investment of more than $34 million. Over three decades, thousands of artists have received grants and strategic support for groundbreaking projects that interrogate presumptive cultural norms, challenge entrenched ideologies, and remind us of our shared humanity.
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