- Location:
- Los Angeles, CA
- Grant Cycle:
- 2023
- Amount:
- $8,000
- Type of Grant:
- Programming
- Disciplines:
- Public Art, Social Practice
Fulcrum Arts empowers artists to invent, inspire, and provoke. We provide resources and opportunities for artists, collectives, and independent arts organizations to advance their visions and contribute to a vibrant, challenging, and inclusive creative community. Our vision is to be an influential cultivator of art and science-informed actions that illuminate vital social and humanitarian perspectives.
We promote radical collaboration and experimentation between diverse artists and scientists, asking what might be possible, with a hypothesis that the work may transform perspectives in contemporary society. We are committed to supporting experimental and multidisciplinary programming, created by diverse artists, that builds community throughout the region. To this end, we build collaborative partnerships between institutions, artists, and communities, with participation of high profile leaders in the fields of art and science. Partners include Caltech; Carnegie Observatories; NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratories; LIGO; Art Center College of Design; Pitzer College Art Galleries; The Huntington; the Getty Research Institute; among many more.
Programming reaches diverse audiences, starting with scientists, artists, and institutional partner collaborators, which include some of the nation’s top organizations. We are in dialogue with scientists from communities of color, LGBTQ, and women, all underrepresented in the fields, to begin to identify the most urgent questions of our time in scientific fields, extending that dialogue in the arts.
Fulcrum Arts organizes 2-4 Fulcrum Incubator artist residencies with top science institutions per year; Sequencing, our new online platform, launches one paid artist commission per month and was our primary public programming during the pandemic. We organize and present symposia at the nexus of art and science; preceding Fulcrum Arts’ 2-week Fulcrum Festival, with institutional partners across the region.
Fulcrum serves the community through Emerge, our fiscal sponsorship and professional development program that empowers diverse new cultural voices. With over 80 grassroots projects and small arts organizations participating, Emerge brings new tools and resources to artists to better serve their communities. We provide workshop training to 200 artists each year in key areas such as fundraising and marketing. Emerge projects include artist-run spaces, job training in the arts for formerly incarcerated women, theatre training for veterans, arts education programs for at-risk populations, dance, opera, publishing, and myriad projects of social benefit. 57% of Emerge projects are run by women, and 44% by people of color.
We are committed to promoting underrepresented voices in all of our work—and in diversifying audiences by making representation in programming reflective of that of the LA region. Fulcrum Arts brings new voices into critical cultural conversations about the history and the future of our planet: working with artists and thinkers at the edge of the field. Our annual audience of 50,000 or more; as well as our staff; and board reflect the makeup of our service area, among the most diverse in the world.