Artist Resources, Grants for Artists, Creative Projects, Making Money for Artists

Reader, is there anything more painful than driving over a jagged pothole? The crunch of your spine, the desperate prayers for your car’s suspension and steering, and of course, a profound shame for not avoiding the pothole in the first place. Now imagine driving down a beat up backroad, no streetlights, with nothing to guide you and your poor steed to safety except your murky intuition. This is how a lot of us go into the grant application process — vaguely uneasy, completely lost, and proceeding valiantly into a mysterious void (i.e. the review panel). But what if you had a cheat sheet, a map, with every pitfall illuminated by bright, flashing warning signs?

The way we are bringing artist opportunities to your attention is changing.

In the face of uncertainty, we often turn to leaders for wisdom, guidance, and strength. I don’t know about you, but there are plenty of people in positions of authority and influence right now who don’t inspire me — people who have betrayed their most vulnerable constituents, abandoned due process, and sunk to new levels of corruption and self-serving greed. If you’re asking yourself what leadership even means in a time like this, I can assure you that I’m right there with you: angry, confused, searching.

Many of us, myself included, were raised in a world where competing with the people around you is the norm — even when it leads us nowhere. Don’t get me wrong: I’m an incredibly competitive person at heart and have been forcibly removed from a number of casual board game groups. But when it comes to art, I believe that competition creates a false sense of scarcity among artists and keeps all of us hungry for the everyday magic of art.

You’re staring at the screen, your finger hovering over the submit button as you run through your application materials one last time — the artist statement you’ve rewritten seven (oh, wait…now eight) times, the project budget you’ve tweaked and retweaked, the work samples you’ve agonized over selecting. We’ve all hit submit with the same, well-worn mixture of hope and resignation.

As the summer rolls along, we catch wind of more artist opportunities coming down the pike. A gentle reminder to consider signing up for the weekly newsletter to stay updated on artist opportunities as we find them.

Craving attention, recognition, and validation for your work is a painfully relatable experience for most artists, especially those of us trying to make a living within the attention economy. It can take a lifetime to cultivate a marketing mindset, and the process often raises profound, unanswerable questions about the nature and boundaries of artmaking and attention. Who are we making art for, and why?

With every approach of summer, Fractured Atlas packs a picnic basket full of grants, residencies, awards, and other artist opportunities for you to pick and choose from. If you haven't yet, consider signing up for our weekly newsletter to stay updated on artist opportunities throughout the year, along with helpful articles for artists, usually by artists. Here are the upcoming opportunities for July 2025. Good luck!

Years ago, I had a roommate who built sets for local theater productions. I would come home from a closing shift and he would be painting a sign for some make-believe business. I would get back from the movies and he’d be hammering nails into some crude, unfinished structure. I wondered what it was like to move through the day the way he did, from project to project, seemingly paying little to no attention to what time of day it was, whether it was time to eat lunch or go to bed.

Whether you’re new to the big wide world of arts funding or an (understandably) jaded expert, it can be hard to understand why grants exist, who funds them, what you can use them for, where to find them, and how to (hopefully) win one. It breaks our hearts when artists come to us feeling confused, lost, or misled when it comes to grant funding. Let this article be a snarky, shining lighthouse in these unnecessarily murky waters.