Several of the selected artists have communicated how difficult the pandemic has been on their practice. In a statement, Garmendia said that she has been painting over her old canvases because she ran out of materials, limiting the scale of my work with understandable thrift, but this money will help change that. Similarly, Johnston said that this grant would help materialize ideas that have been sitting in my sketchbook over the last couple of years.
Last summer, Artist Trust went under an immense amount of scrutiny after several artists signed an open letter blasting the organization as being “inequitable, opaque and unresponsive to community needs” with “long-held practices that have unjustly impacted Black, Indigenous and otherwise racialized peoples” and a misogynistic and toxic work environment. The letter came after the board dismissed all of the majority-WOC jury s suggestions for the winners of the 2020 Artist Innovator Awards (AIA) process, as well as the del