Current Context: Community and Conditions

In the first round of grantmaking (2021-2022), 120 artists, collectives, and organizations across the BIPOC arts ecosystem were awarded a total of $2 million.

BANF’s grantees are dancers, dreamers, poets, painters, musicians, actors, writers, culture workers who are from Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and many other communities of color. They are queer, disabled, multi-generational, and cross-disciplinary immigrants, refugees, and people born and raised in Houston.

Grantee groups also varied in formation:

of grantees are 501c3 organizations

0 %

are fiscally-sponsored artist collectives in communities of color

0 %

While most grantees have a mission that is not tied to a particular cultural history:

of grantees report their mission is tied to a Black, Afro-Caribbean or African-American tradition

0 %

have a Latinx focus

0 %

are rooted in an Asian American or Pacific Islander cultural traditions

0 %

Meet our 2022 grantees here.

This grantmaking phase was focused on providing emergency relief from the natural disasters and COVID-19 pandemic that hit the BIPOC arts community particularly hard. BANF understood that this crisis moment existed within broader systems of inequity that affect BIPOC artists’ and culture workers ability to thrive. Thus, BANF set out to understand more about who the grantees are, their context, and hopes, and move planfully to seed change for the long-term in Houston.