The Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis will make one of its largest grants allocations ever this year — nearly $4.5 million in grants to a total of 350 local artists and arts organizations.
Vanessa Cooksey, RAC CEO and president, and Andréa Purnell, commission chair, announced the new grants today at Old North's Central Print, one of the dozens of nonprofit grant recipients.
“This is a significant, celebratory moment for artists, arts organizations and all of us who embrace the artist within,” Purnell said at the event. “We are energized by our investment in a local arts and culture sector that continues to enrich so many aspects of our daily lives and bring visitors to our uniquely artistic region.”
The funds will support 181 individual artists, more than double than in 2022. Additionally, 129 arts programs and 40 arts and culture organizations, such as Cinema St. Louis and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, will receive a share of the funds. This application cycle, nearly 80 percent of eligible grant applicants were selected to receive funding.
Last year, RAC awarded $1.15 million in grants to 175 artists and art programs, compared to the average annual award amount of $3.5 million pre-pandemic. This year’s sum follows months of economic uncertainty and internal sacrifice to uphold the commission's long-held role in St. Louis’s arts community.
“The last three years have felt like a roller coaster ride of ups and downs for our team,” said Cooksey, referencing RAC’s need for reduced operational costs amid the pandemic. “Success is an outcome of sacrifice, and RAC is moving from surviving to thriving.”
Both Cooksey and Purnell expressed a steadfast belief that St. Louis will continue to prosper as an arts city and that the RAC will continue to support St. Louis’ creatives.
“I think in the next five years you’ll see a visual difference. We’ll have more public art, more people coming to St. Louis to visit and experience our artists and arts organizations,” Cooksey says. “This next generation of artists are doing the work.”
Dannie Boyd, one of the funded artists, began his speech with a call and repeat: “I love art / Art is for me / Art is for my city.” Boyd, a multimedia and teaching artist, centers his work around re-contextualizing the events after Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson. Funding provided by the RAC will allow him to purchase equipment to better create and share his work.
“[The grant] shows that it’s possible,” Boyd said. He feels the RAC grants will inspire young artists to pursue an arts career in St. Louis.
Elisa Bender, an organizer at the Hispanic Festival, Inc. and founder of the Latinx Arts Network, represented one of 40 arts and culture organizations receiving funding. The Hispanic Festival, Inc. has grown into a vibrant celebration of a growing Hispanic culture in St. Louis since its start in the late ’90s.
“In the beginning, a lot of St. Louis didn’t understand supporting the Hispanic community and Hispanic arts, but the Regional Arts Commission is one of the organizations that did,” Bender said. “[RAC] has been behind us this whole time.”
The grants announcement isn’t the only thing on RAC’s horizon. On August 2, the commission will launch “Art Before the Arts,” a program that will distribute $9.5 million in revenue replacement in tourism development grants to local artists and arts organizations. Then on October 23, RAC will host “Cultura,” the commission's inaugural arts and culture international research conference. The conference will unveil two comprehensive economic studies of artists and arts in the St. Louis area.
“This is a significant, celebratory moment for artists, arts organizations and all of us who embrace the artist within. St. Louis creatives have always been a major driving force for building the economy and community,” Purnell said. “We are energized by our investment in a local arts and culture sector that continues to enrich so many aspects of our daily lives and bring visitors to our uniquely artistic region.”
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