Physical comedian, mime and magician Michael Trautman makes folks express mirth with more a few ping pong balls in his rima oris at a 2019 Street to Phase effect on Myrtle Street. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

PORTLAND, Maine — A local arts system wants to requite dozens of individual Maine artists grant coin for their projects.

Space, a multidisciplinary arts nonprofit, received $250,000 in pandemic relief funds that they intend to re-distribute to Maine artists. The arrangement is one of 66 U.Southward. organizations to receive $twenty million in funds via the National Endowment for the Arts made available through the American Rescue Plan and designed to help artists during the pandemic.

"I'grand really pleased to be standing right by the actual arts workforce," said Kelsey Halladay Johnson, the organization'southward executive director. "We're able to consider different kinds of arts programming work that we haven't been able to touch with grant-making before."

Funds volition be given to independent artists who work in a diverseness of disciplines, including creative writing, music, film, operation and visual arts. That'due south different from a lot of other arts funding, which is oft used to support programming or administrative work at regional arts organizations, who also have had access to PPP loans over the final 18 months.

Musicians, performers and other artists have been hit difficult by the pandemic, which has shuttered or limited the functions of venues offering in-person stages, galleries or other services. One-third of nonprofit organizations in the U.Due south. were in fiscal jeopardy equally a result of the pandemic, co-ordinate to joint study in March 2021 by the research group Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, and many of them were arts organizations.

According to Johnson, the pandemic has widened the gaps betwixt well-heeled artists and recent higher graduates and other young artists who don't have access to wealth or resources. Grants similar these can assist address that.

"These kinds of projection-based grants are actually about the integrity of an idea and artistic excellence," Johnson said. "They tin be huge portals for artists to motility from one phase of their career to the adjacent."

The arrangement volition announce application dates separated past discipline in January 2022. Johnson estimates private grant awards will be betwixt $three,500 and $five,000.

SPACE has distributed more than $284,000 in grant coin to Maine artists during the pandemic, including the project-based Sonic Visions Fund and a Maine Musician Relief Fund that awarded $1,000 grants to seventy musicians statewide. The organization also hosts the annual Kindling Fund, which awards grant money to visual artists through the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Local artists accept also received help through the Maine Arts Committee. The country program distributed more than $127,000 in March, with $36,000 going to individual artists and more than $91,000 going to arts organizations.

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who oversees NEA funding as Chair of the Firm Appropriations Subcommittee for the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, touted the emergency relief grants equally tools to help the land's creative economy.

"Arts are a $one.v billion manufacture and support thousands of jobs—but despite previous assistance from the CARES Human activity, our cultural institutions and arts community go along to face profound hardships as they work to recover," Pingree said.

Entering its 20th year, SPACE recently expanded the number of board seats from 10 to 15, hoping to "bring more diversity and cultural perspectives [for] a better residuum of inputs to our conclusion making," said board chair Emily Bruce.

The organization so far added three notable names with Maine ties to its lath, creative person Rachel Gloria Adams; Pablo Anaya of the ACLU of Maine, and Justine Ludwig, Colby College grad and executive managing director of the New York Metropolis-based public arts system Creative Time.