ARTNOIR Partners with Sotheby’s and SR_A on Grants Supporting Creatives of Color

L ooking back, creating the Jar of Love fund was never only about giving people money. What started as a way for ARTNOIR to help cash-strapped creatives of color survive the pandemic, distributing grants of $500 and, later, $1,000 to those in need, has evolved into a microgrant program. Its cofounder, Larry Ossei-Mensah, describes its aspirations to use “partnerships with organizations that have benefited from the creativity of artists to really reinvest in the community.”

Last year, Sotheby’s stepped up to the plate as one such partner.

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ARTNOIR’s Jar of Love – A Sotheby’s Impact Partnership

Ossei-Mensah started ARTNOIR in 2013 with Carolyn “CC” Concepcion, Danny Báez, Isis Arias, Melle Hock, Jane Aiello and Nadia Nascimento as a support system for Black and brown creators. One of its core tenets is giving creatives of color access to funds and resources typically not reserved for them in the mainstream art world – a principle that Jar of Love naturally coopted in order to stitch together a community centered on Black empowerment.

In its inaugural three years, the initiative has distributed nearly 150 grants to creatives of color ranging from poets to filmmakers to performance artists. The grant awards are sometimes used as emergency funding, like when artist vanessa german needed money to repair her Pittsburgh-based Arthouse after a fire. Other times, they count as lucky breaks. One grantee was on the brink of giving up being an artist altogether, only for the Jar of Love grant to keep him afloat long enough to achieve a string of career-defining successes.

In many cases, though, Jar of Love grantees find as much benefit in the money as they do in what is often missing from their lives as artists of color: positive encouragement.

“I think there’s much more value in finding somebody who has a radically exciting and different idea that may not get traditional support,” says Ossei-Mensah. “And all they need is a little bit of a push. They need someone to say: ‘Hey, you matter.’”

News of the fund has been spreading, with more and more creatives of color applying for the grant every year. Sometimes, though, the tight-knit nature of the POC art community brings a potential grantee right to Jar of Love’s doorstep.

Ossei-Mensah was once scrolling through his instagram feed when he stumbled upon an image of a group of women on a tour of photographer Dawoud Bey’s recent exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery in Hollywood. The group piqued his interest.

“Who are those amazing Black women?” he thought to himself.

They belonged to an organization called Black Girls in Art Spaces (which, as the name describes, brings Black women together to visit art shows across the US), founded by Kasi Merriwether-Hawkins – who herself was awarded a Jar of Love grant later that year.

In partnering with Sotheby’s now – effectively taking the initiative “to the next level,” Ossei-Mensah explains, by creating a cohort of grantees versus a decentralized group of recipients – the question for ARTNOIR becomes, according to Concepcion: “What would it look like if we would go deeper with the artists and provide more resources outside of only the financial?”

This year, the organization is expanding the grant to include recipients in New York and London. It has partnered with Dr. Samuel Ross MBE, founder of Black British Artist Grant Programme by SR_A, a fund aiming to identify and support talent within the Black community, to select the UK-based grantees for this year’s grant cycle.

Together, ARTNOIR, Sotheby’s and SR_A will offer hands-on mentorship, including specialist-led tours, events and workshops for the six grantees in each city. They will also conduct online programming connecting the two cohorts.

The Jar of Love is not only entering the global stage with a higher grant award, an unrestricted $5,000, but also a far more valuable asset: access to the professional networks of all three organizations. In that way, this grant year represents a crossroads for the Jar of Love. “How do we, with these special cycles that feel a bit more like a cohort, more like a prize, keep an ethos that anybody can apply?” Concepcion wondered.

Down the road, the organization wants to tap into the community while embodying one on its own. “We want to continue to expand how we create moments where our community can connect with each other,” says Ossei-Mensah, “and continue watering this tree so it can blossom.”

_{Banner: Aaron Kudi, alumni of SR_A’s Black British Arts Grant Programme. Image courtesy of Jake-Isaac Elwin.}