RE:IMAGINE ARTIST FUND CENTERS ARTISTS IN REIMAGINING NEW WAYS OF ENGAGING WITH ART Earlier this year, the Museum and Northwest Film Center announced the continuation of the Re:Imagine Artist Fund, which launched in 2020 and supported artists through direct relief and sustainability grants at the start of the pandemic. This phase of the Fund provides expanded, equitable financial support for artists developing new projects and programs that engage with the issues of our time. The Re:Imagine Artist Fund was created in 2020 as a reaction to the pressures of the pandemic on artists in Portland and Southwest Washington. In initial phases of the Fund, the Museum and Film Center provided relief grants of $2,000 for 25 artists demonstrating severe economic need and $5,000 sustainability grants for 20 artists who are pivoting their practices toward greater impact and innovation. The grant programs aimed to center BIPOC, LGBTQ+ artists and artists living with disabilities who had been most impacted during the months of COVID-19 shutdown, and over 80 percent of the funding went to artists who self-identified as such. Through our current programming efforts, the Artist Fund has supported a number of programs, exhibitions, and partnerships. This past spring, we kicked off this phase of the Artist Fund with Epic Ephemera, a digital art installation series curated by Mobile
Portland Winter Lights Festival, 2021 from the series Epic Ephemera, a digital art installation series curated by Mobile Projection Unit (Fernanda D’Agostino and Sarah Turner).
Projection Unit (Fernanda D’Agostino and Sarah Turner), and the Film Center funded BIPOC filmmakers, storytellers, and new media artists as part of a new experimental series of multimedia workshops and classes called Co:Laboratory. The Fund also supported the Film Center’s Cinema//Care, a program that reinforces a commitment to care and community through the programming of independent films at art houses and festivals. In addition to new projects and programs, the Artist Fund has supported continued and evolving partnerships like the residency with The Numberz FM, a radio station committed to Black music for Black Portland (see page 20). Another partnership that dates back decades is the Museum and Film Center’s connection to educators, and over the summer the Fund helped to support collaborative conversations around the role and future of monuments and public space through two programs— Re-imagining Portland: Parks, Public Space, Memory, Creativity, and Spatial Justice, and Memory and Public Space: An Educator UnConference.
On the horizon are more projects that champion the work that artists do in our community, including VR to Go this fall (see page 27), a program where audiences check out and gain access to pre-loaded virtual-reality headsets with immersive stories, and next year Black Artists of Oregon (see page 17), an exhibition that will highlight and celebrate the work of Black artists in Oregon. The Artist Fund will also provide seed funding for Spencer Garland, founder and creative director of BRENDA ARTS, and his team to launch a yearlong series of bimonthly videos that uses works on view and in the Museum’s collection to teach media literacy for high school ages and up through a Black art history and Afrofuturist lens. Amid the uncertainty of the pandemic, the Museum and Film Center remain committed to supporting artists and collaborating directly to create ongoing paths for local artists to live in, and share their talents with, our community. Major funding for the Re:Imagine Artist Fund is made possible by the Museum’s Art Gym endowment, a restricted endowment established with support from the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation, and grants from Tim and Mary Boyle, The Collins Foundation, Kirk and Cynthia Day, and longtime artist advocate Sarah Miller Meigs.
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