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Eleanor Savage has been with Jerome Foundation since 2007. She is active in the philanthropic and arts communities as an agitator for equitable practice. Eleanor is the Vice Chair on the Board of Directors for Grantmakers in the Arts. She is a media artist, an activist and has instigated, curated and produced many community-focused/artist-centered events in the Twin Cities: Naked Stages; Forbidden Fruit Radio; Vulva Riot; and Dyke Night at the Walker Art Center. She was previously the Associate Director of Event and Media Production at the Walker Art Center for sixteen years.
Eleanor's life-long commitment is promoting human rights as a guiding force and working actively as a white, gender-queer butch against racism and all the other intersecting oppressions.
Melissa Levin is a values-driven arts administrator, artist-centered curator, and steadfast advocate for just and equitable practices in the arts. For more than 12 years, Melissa worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) where she was the Vice President of Cultural Programs. Her role encompassed wide-ranging institutional and artistic leadership, overseeing LMCC’s major artist-centered and public-facing initiatives including the River To River Festival, the Arts Center at Governors Island, and LMCC’s artist residency programs. She next led a newly formed Artists, Estates, and Foundations division at Art Agency, Partners in its inaugural three years. Starting in 2016, with collaborator Alex Fialho, Melissa has stewarded the legacy of and curated critically acclaimed exhibitions dedicated to the late artist Michael Richards, including Michael Richards: Winged (LMCC, 2016; Stanford University, 2019) and Richards’ first museum retrospective, Michael Richards: Are You Down? (The Bronx Museum, 2023–24; North Carolina Museum of Art, 2023; MOCA North Miami, 2021).
Melissa additionally serves on the boards of the Artist Communities Alliance and Danspace Project. She holds a B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.
Andrea Brown joined the Jerome Foundation in 2016. She came to the Jerome Foundation after five years at the Walker Art Center, where she was Associate Director of Strategic Marketing, and prior to that Associate Director of Digital Marketing and Marketing Manager. She worked in the New York office of the American Academy in Berlin before taking a 7-year detour into software at Marketing Bridge/Gage Marketing where she was Lead Account Supervisor.
Andrea has a B.A. in American Studies from Smith College.
Jerome Foundation’s focus is support for early career generative artists, through direct support to artists and through arts organizations that nurture these artists. In our funding to arts organizations, we seek to support organizations whose values are aligned with ours and who are committed and passionate about their work with early career artists.
We seek to support a cohort of arts organizations that collectively capture the diversity (including aesthetic, cultural, racial, gender, geographic, relative scale and genre, among other factors) of the larger arts fields.
We invite you to learn about previously funded organizations/programs. Please note that we are interested in many kinds of programs that may or may not be represented there.
The Foundation knows that submitting a grant application is time consuming for any organization, and that more organizations will apply than our panels can reasonably consider. By speaking with Program Staff, we can together immediately determine your eligibility and the appropriateness of your programs for Jerome’s consideration. This can spare you valuable time completing a lengthy proposal for which your organization is not eligible and your programs not a fit.
We currently support 80 organizations across all fields, 32 in MN and 48 in NYC. Given anticipated limits in Foundation resources, the Foundation does not anticipate expanding beyond our current level of funding.
The Jerome Foundation supports artists in the early stages of their generative career, defined by the Foundation, expansively, as having more than 2 and less than 10 years of experience generating their own creative work outside of a degree-granting program. Jerome-eligible artists must be early career generative artists, who are residents in the state of Minnesota or the five boroughs of New York City, who have an active creative practice making new original work and who are taking creative risks in expanding, questioning, experimenting with or re-imagining artistic forms. They are developing their artistic voice and vision, show enormous potential and have demonstrated seriousness about pursuing the arts as a central vocational goal, see themselves as part of a larger aesthetic or social community, and have a sense of purpose beyond financial gain or fame.
Any artist who would be described as mid-career or established in any artistic discipline is ineligible for Jerome support, even if they are changing disciplines and would make the case that they are early career in their new field. Artists who have been working in their field for more than ten years, who receive ongoing support and recognition for their work, or who are at a point in their career where they are mentoring other artists are generally beyond early career artists.
Artists who have won major awards (e.g., multiple MAP Grants or Creative Capital grants, a Doris Duke or MacArthur) have moved beyond Jerome consideration, as have artists who have achieved ongoing commercial or financial success, including completing feature films with commercial studios, publishing multiple books, receiving major commissions and productions in various locations in dance, theater or music, having ongoing commercial representation with major galleries.
The Foundation does not support beginning artists. Jerome-eligible artists must have at least 2 years of experience beyond their time in a degree-granting program, if applicable. Artists must have completed their own original work.
The Foundation values and supports artists and organizations that take creative risks in expanding, questioning, experimenting with or re-imagining artistic forms. Jerome priority artists bring an original perspective to the reclaiming or reviving of traditional cultural forms.
No. Jerome’s value of innovation/risk is expansive, supporting the varied ways artists and organizations engage creative risk-taking and innovation—social, cultural or aesthetic–we prioritize artists whose work is focused on:
- shifting how we, individually or collectively, think and/or behave;
- challenging and engaging creative forms or social dimensions;
- reclaiming or reviving traditional cultural practices;
- using an artistic practice as a form of resistance or empowerment;
- creating space for and building a sense of community;
- exploring new subject matter;
- creating and/or presenting work in new contexts; and/or
- engaging new collaborators or communities in the creation or presentation of work;
- brings an original perspective and unique voice and vision to the work they create.
Panels have been deeply concerned and unsupportive of programs, opportunities or services that do not compensate artists for their investment of time, and that compel artists to use significant levels of personal resources or incur significant debt to complete their work. Such programs have been seen as inadvertently promoting a kind of class bias and limiting their reach about the kind of artists who could even consider applying.
The Foundation recognizes that the differences in scope and scale of programs (a commission vs. a workshop or class, for example); the variations between fields, organizational sizes and infrastructures; and in local cost of living make it impossible to articulate rigid standards.
Highest priority will be given to organizations who amply compensate artists for their time, their materials and their process, as appropriate for the given field, project and financial capacity.
The grant guidelines include some resources you may want to look at for reasonable and adequate compensation for artists.
The Foundation understands that small organizations may find it difficult to meet these fees and that compensation to artists that significantly exceeds that to ongoing staff or resident artists can affect organizational dynamics. In such cases, panels may consider the percentage of the overall organizational budget dedicated to artist compensation.
"Tipping" refers to a large grant (made by a private foundation or individual contributor) to a tax-exempt not-for-profit organization that qualifies as a "public charity" under IRS rules and regulations. Tipping can interfere with the public charity status of the recipient organization because the large dollar amount may cause certain IRS tests to be violated. Public charity status generally requires one-third of the organization's support to come from the general public and/or governmental sources (the "public support test"). For more information on how this is defined, visit https://grantspace.org/resources/knowledge-base/public-support-test
Disproportionately large grants from a single source can upset this ratio, resulting in the potential loss of charitable status for the grantee nonprofit. Additionally, organizations overly dependent on a single source of income are often de-stabilized—sometimes fatally— if that single funding source changes direction or alters its level of funding. Concerned both with IRS regulations and with an organization’s longer-term stability and viability, the Foundation has decided to institute this maximum grant size cap.
The terms “exit grant” and “extension grant” were used in your grant letter. If you cannot locate your grant letter or cannot locate such language in your letter, please contact Jerome staff for clarification.
The Jerome Foundation recognizes that many funding programs, while building stronger programs, do nothing to build stronger organizations. The optional 25% of grant funds allows you to strengthen the organization beyond the programs and can be used for general operating expenses, including overhead, utilities, marketing, organizational consultants, etc. if you choose to do so. You can also use any or all of this 25% to amplify and increase the support for the programs that the other 75% is supporting. These funds are not, however, designed to “plug holes” or address shortfalls in other programs, services and activities that omit or exclude participation by early career artists. Using these funds to offer a commissioning program for established artists, for example, would not be permitted. Additionally, funds cannot be used for lobbying.
No. Jerome Foundation supports only artists and not-for-profit arts organizations located in Minnesota and the five boroughs of New York City in this program. Organizations with multiple office sites must have their primary legal mailing address in New York City or Minnesota. All artists who benefit from Jerome Foundation funds must be legal residents of New York City or Minnesota.
No, not in this program. This program is open only to nonprofit organizations or organizations with a fiscal sponsor that offer programs for early career artists. Individual artists, collaboratives or ensembles who meet eligibility requirements and are interested in support for their own work should look for opportunities for artists on our website.
The earliest payment date available for the first year of funds is on or around May 9, 2024.
Payments are made through direct deposit; organizations which do not yet have direct deposit established for Jerome should expect approximately three weeks for the completion of paperwork and the establishment of that system before the first direct deposit payment can be processed. The Foundation makes grant payments monthly on the second Thursday of the month. Your payment schedule will be stated in your letter of agreement/grant contract.
Grantees are required to submit interim and/or final reports, established by the Foundation in the letter of agreement/grant contract.
Contact the Foundation staff no later than March 31, 2023 to discuss your circumstances.
Submittable, the online software we use for our applications, meets the Level AA standard according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. You can learn more about the accessibility of the application form at www.submittable.com/accessibility