Sustainable Arts Foundation

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Sustainable Arts Foundation

The Sustainable Arts Foundation supports artists and writers with children.

We make annual unrestricted cash awards to individuals; at least half of these awards are made to applicants of color. We also support artist residencies in their efforts to make their programs more family friendly.

05/22/2026

Time to share this tip sheet for your summer (and other) residencies

05/10/2026

Reposting this lovely essay by and inviting your comments on your favorite Mother’s Day writing (link in bio)

05/08/2026

Day 4 of my SAF IG takeover, the day to talk a bit about mentors & inspirations. That’s next to impossible to do justice to. This is nowhere near enough gratitude or acknowledgement. Just a few:
1. Nathan C. Hale, my first serious figure drawing teacher, at the Art Students’ League of New York. I was 16 and felt like I was losing my mind, because I couldn’t stop trying to strip the layers off of everything, until there was nothing left. His Wednesday night classes made me sane again. He taught me the structure beneath everything (beneath the skin and muscle, anyway), and how to perceive it with my eye, hand, and charcoal.
2. Love & Rockets. The best comics ever made. I’m forever starstruck.
3. Isaac Bashevis Singer. I once dreamed that he gave me his notebooks and blessed me.
4. Primo Levi, the moral core.
5. Ana Mendieta. We should be learning at her feet.
6. Lisa Carver. In 2021, when my broken reading brain started to work again, I could only read her books, and Primo Levi.
7. My best friend and forever cosmic spouse, Corazon Higgins, who I met in a performance art class at Massart in 1994 but have loved since the beginning of time.
8. The films of Pedro Almodovar.
9. The painter Aleksandra Waliszewska, and the whole Polish/Eastern European swamp witch painting tradition that precedes her work. Swamp Witches Forever.
10. USED RECORDS! Any records! I am most myself when digging through crates of used records. My child says I have too many. Bonus: That’s a Rowland S. Howard album in that top row and he’s a huge influence on me, too. When I was 20, I had a dream that his voice was all around me in a landscape, singing the same line over and over. I recently wrote that line into a song and tried to reproduce the melody I heard in that dream. You can hear it when Insomnies’ first album comes out next fall, or come see us this summer. I’m really proud of what we made and happy to add some noise to the universe.

05/06/2026

Day two of my SAF takeover, a little late in the evening because I had a very long and busy day. Tonight I’m sharing a few selections from the ballpoint pen drawing practice I engaged in last year, trying to break some old habits and find new settings and characters, after finishing my graphic novel Victory Parade, an accidental body-horror WWII story. The drawings became a place where I worked out some old stuff from my past. They’re memories both real and fictional, depicting an almost-me and some almost-friends-of-mine in Boston and Florida, two places where I lived a lot of similar but maybe very different experiences in similar environments: poorly insulated rickety wooden houses lit by bare bulbs, sodden summer house shows you can’t believe aren’t getting shut down by the cops, half-assed clearish plastic tarp over the windows in one place; live oaks, Spanish moss, and prosperity gospel billboards frying in the razor sun in another. And always you, and whatever you’re listening to and whoever you’re arguing with.

And I’m sharing a few panels from Victory Parade, too.

04/27/2026

Hi Sustainable Arts friends! I’m Cinelle Barnes, author of MONSOON MANSION and the forthcoming travel-medical memoir, A WAY HOME (June 9) which received support from Sustainable Arts back in 2020. Back then, the project was solely a travelogue, but in 2023 I survived a brain aneurysm rupture and required emergency brain surgery. I practically had to relearn how to walk and write and talk with ease, and without really meaning or expecting to, I completed A WAY HOME by doing the very exercises assigned to me by my OT, PT, speech language pathologist, neuropsychologist, and neurologist. I inadvertently created a hybrid form, the travel-medical memoir. I’ve always said that as a nonfiction writer, life tells me what to write and how to write, and here I am again proving this point. Megha Majumdar says this book is “a miraculous achievement,” and truthfully, I think all nonfiction works are. I love this genre. It’s a place where life becomes art, and for me recently, an opportunity for art to bring me back to life.

03/30/2026

Hello, its me Lauren! You can find me at . I have a new book out called “Wild That We’re Alive!” — it just launched last week! And I will have my launch party at the best bookstore in Iowa City, Prairie Lights, on Wednesday. It will be fine! I am sure it will be fine. But also I am so nervous. Sometimes I feel like crying? And then I think, what is wrong with me? I should be happy! And I am, I am! But look, my nervous system is a mess. Sometimes I don’t even like having a new book out because it means there are so many scary things to do, like readings and travel and leaving your bed.

Anyhow, I’ll be posting here this week, showing you pages and pieces from the book.

03/23/2026

Hello and Happy Spring! I’m Yvonne. You’ll find me on where I post about why I write, what inspires me, and finding my way back home. This week I’ll be sharing who I am through some of the things I’ve loved seeing over the year. It’s a glimpse into my writing life and how I think. Thanks for joining me this week. Make yourself at home. I will too.

03/10/2026

Day 2 here from .Hannum_Art and today I am featuring some of my more recent sculptures.

“As you surmised, the pods are, in a sense, seed pods, though not in the sense that we know seeds. But in any case, they are living matter, capable, just as are seeds, of enormous and complex growth and development. And they did drift through space, the original ones, anyway, over enormous distances, and through millenniums of time...” - Jack Finney “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”

All of these are 3D printed sculptures in either PLA, ABS or Resin and with various custom acrylic vitrines.

I typically model these in various software such as Blender, Mudbox, Meshmixer, etc. and then 3D print them through a variety of applications from FDM to SLA. Then I laser cut and etch the boxes after taking a few measurements.

Some of these are from my recent solo exhibition at .gallery while another is from the group show “Artificial” that I am in right now at .

02/18/2026

😍

02/08/2026

Alisa Dworsky is a visual artist and architectural designer who lives in Montpelier, Vermont with her husband. She is the mother of two daughters who are now young adults.

Address

1032 Irving Street, # 609
San Francisco, CA
94122

Website

http://www.sustainableartsfoundation.org/

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