Artwork Archive Art
Business Accelerator Grant

The Artwork Archive Art Business Accelerator grant enables artists to create new work, purchase materials and pay for studio rent or personal expenses so that they can continue to make a positive impact in their communities. The grant distributes unrestricted funds to ten artists that work to address critical social, political and environmental issues in their role as citizen artists.

2021 Art Business Accelerator Grant Recipients


Monia Ben Hamouda
Monia Ben Hamouda
Milan, Italy

Monia Ben Hamouda’s artistic practice is based on exploring the human condition, especially its oppressing and traumatic characters. Significantly inspired by calligraphy, which stands as an extended part of Arabic culture, as well as on her own personal history, her works explore topics such as sociocultural identity, fatigue, anger and politics.

Jasmine Best
Jasmine Best
North Carolina, USA

Jasmine’s mixed-media work gathers narratives — taken both from personal memories of her Carolinian family and childhood as well as stories of past generations — to create dialogues around the Black female identity in the south in predominantly white spaces.

Samar Hejazi
Samar Hejazi
Toronto, Canada

Sarmar creates delicately embroidered textile pieces that channel her Palestinian heritage through the “historical choreography found in craft practices,” while simultaneously touching on the conceptual paradigms of social constructivism, ethnology, and the ethos of modernity.

Lynnea Holland-Weiss
Lynnea Holland-Weiss
Cleveland, USA

Lynnea’s large-scale paintings deal with human connection, somatic memory and sensation. Her work addresses processes of healing, comforting and mourning — human responses to trauma and grief that were upended during the pandemic.

Anna Mlasowsky
Anna Mlasowsky
Seattle, USA

Born in East Germany, a country that “no longer exists,” Anna’s glass art exposes states of fluid uncertainty, physical extremes, the hope for a society in which a multiplicity of realities can be accepted. In her recent curatorial work, she opened a gallery space during the pandemic for immigrant artists, artists with an activist practice and recent graduates who were without a place to exhibit.

Tahmina Negmat
Tahmina Negmat
London, UK

Tahmina’s work draws from embodied experience, collected materials, and stories taken from her childhood in Uzbekistan, adolescence in Russia, and adulthood in the UK. Her recent work incorporates terracotta pieces and found objects such as parachutes, sleeping bags, and bedsprings. Through the physical, unyielding weight of her artworks, she seeks to transcend her personal experience of temporality — constantly moving yet never arriving — which she describes as the immigrant’s experience.

Ramekon O'Arwisters
Ramekon O’Arwisters
San Francisco, USA

Ramekon began quilting with his grandmother while growing up in the Jim Crow south during the Civil Rights Movement. Today, his sculptural work combines crochet, embellished lace, and other textiles with broken and discarded decorative pottery and other symbolic materials. Speaking to his own experiences as Black and queer, Ramekon’s art also channels universal themes such as desire, destruction, and the beauty that emanates from the act of creation.

Amy Ritter
Amy Ritter
Brooklyn, USA

Amy’s work is influenced by working class people, their stories, workplaces, homes, and bodies; specifically those living in mobile homes—informed by memories of her experience growing up in a mobile home community and interviews with residents in over 30 different sites across the country. She also explores the queer female body at work, as another building material in her sculpture, a symbol of her own invisible labor as a queer female.

Carlie Trosclair
Carlie Trosclair
New Orleans, USA

Approached through a lens of reordering and discovery, Carlie’s site-responsive installations create new topographies and narratives that highlight the structural and decorative shifts encompassing a building's lifespan. Carlie has been awarded residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center (LA), Bemis MASS MoCA (MA), Oxbow (MI), and The Luminary Center for the Arts (MO), among others, and her work has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The New York Times, and Temporary Art Review.

Victoria-Idongesit Udondian

Born in Nigeria, “a country flooded with cast offs from the West,” Victoria-Idongesit’s work questions notions of cultural identity and post-colonial positions. Her art is driven by her interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at venues including the inaugural Nigerian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial in Italy; the Fisher Landau Centre for the Arts, New York; National Museum, Lagos and Lokoja; and the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester.

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Thanks to our jurors

Josely Carvalho

Josely Carvalho

Carvalho’s work seeks to highlight memory, identity, women issues and social justice. She has been awarded numerous grants for her work, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has most recently exhibited as part of Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-85 exhibition shown at the Hammer Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

Learn more here.

Thomas Evans

Thomas Evans

Thomas Evans a.k.a Detour, specializes in large scale public art, interactive visuals, portraiture, immersive spaces, and creative directing. He is also the author of Be the Artist, a guide that helps artists enter the art world and navigate the nuances of becoming self-sufficient.

Learn more here.

David Kassan

David Kassan

Kassan is an internationally recognized contemporary American painter who "captures humanity in its true form." In "Facing Survival," Kassan recorded the testimonies and intimate histories of Holocaust survivors for several years, culminating in over a dozen portraits capturing each subject’s spirit, pain and dignity.

Learn more here.

Charly Palmer

Charly Palmer

Palmer is a teacher, mentor and fine artist known for his compositions and unique technique and style. As a part of the Black Lives Matter movement, Palmer was selected to do the July 2020 cover for Time Magazine’s "America Must Change" issue. Palmer was chosen to work on the cover based on his 20 years of experience painting on the subject of race.

Learn more here.

Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder’s impact on abstract art and materialistic exploration of painting has brought her widespread critical claim and institutional recognition. She made her breakthrough in the late 1960s with ‘stroke’ paintings—this contribution at a moment of cultural dissent was a rebellion against the male-dominated abstract movements of Minimalism and Colour Field painting.

Learn more here.

This program would not be possible without the generous support of Chris Glode. Chris has helped fuel the success of entrepreneurs and businesses for over a decade. He understands the importance art plays in our society and is a strong believer in the role artists play in the creative economy.