Arts & Culture

The freedom to preserve the magic and wisdom of my ancestors and to create my own

Through coastal loss, natural and man-made disasters, the impacts of carcerality from enslavement to mass incarceration, as well as three centuries of colonization, Louisiana’s Black and Indigenous artists and culture bearers have preserved legacy, made movement wins possible, and innovated creative forms that have changed our world.

The emerging Arts & Culture program safeguards the cultural well-being of Louisianans, prevents cultural erasure, makes connections between movements for social change and culture, and works to create the infrastructure needed for native culture bearers to remain and thrive in Louisiana. Through research, participatory grantmaking, curated public dialogues, and field-building, this program intends to level the deep arts and culture funding disparities experienced throughout Louisiana and the South, particularly for Queer, Transgender, and BIPOC artists and culture bearers.

The Arts & Culture program invests in individual artists and culture bearers, builds the network needed for artists to remain and thrive in Louisiana, and transforms how culture is preserved.

INVEST BUILD TRANSFORM

INVEST

This program addresses the disinvestment in Louisiana arts and culture and responds to the opportunity gap facing Queer, Transgender, and BIPOC artists and culture bearers. Louisiana artists and culture bearers. It aims to support rural artists and creative work happening outside of metro areas and in unconventional structures or venues.

In 2021, FFL launched its inaugural round of Arts & Culture grantmaking, investing $320,000 to those whose work transforms our sense of what is possible in the areas of climate impacts, mass incarceration, cultural memory and legacy, and/or displacement and erasure of Black and Indigenous communities. This open call opportunity provided unrestricted cash grants to 32 Louisiana World Makers.

To learn more about our Arts & Culture grantees, our Who We’ve Funded page.

BUILD

FFL is dedicated to providing artists and culture bearers the support needed to develop or expand their practice. By building durable infrastructure for our cultural leaders, we are able to utilize arts as a tool for narrative change for Louisiana’s most critical issues. As a first step in the implementation of this program, FFL is conducting a scan of Southeast Louisiana’s arts and culture by illuminating the ways artists in the region have found to create and produce work.

TRANSFORM

Enabling artists to find the solutions needed to preserve Louisiana’s communities will have an impact not only on the arts ecosystem, but on the root factors that are impacting the lives of so many Louisianans. This is legacy work. As with other FFL programs, both program planning and grantmaking will be designed via a collaborative process with those people who are directly impacted.