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Learn more about Past Grantees with our Grant Archive

Learn more about the Kindling Fund with the PDF of our 5 year publication (2018)

The Kindling Fund currently awards project grants ranging from $3,000 - $7,000 (with smaller Research and Development Grants) to Maine-based artists of all career levels, who organize projects that engage audiences and the visual arts in inventive and meaningful ways. With a focus on experimentation, successful applications value unconventional engagement, critical dialogue, collaboration, and create new models for presenting artists’ work.

Grants support a variety of publicly accessible projects with a strong interest in alternative spaces, pioneering practices, and site-specific presentations that do not fit in established institutions or conventional venues. Projects supported by The Kindling Fund have included: performative dinners, public art initiatives, site-responsive installations, the publication of writing directly related to the visual arts, the creation of artist-run spaces, visual art components of mutual aid initiatives, smartphone apps and web based projects, and so much more.

SPACE established the granting program in 2014, responding to the needs of individual artists across the state and Maine’s arts community at large. In 2020 and 2021, SPACE offered emergency relief grants during the pandemic to individual artists and platforms/collectives. In 2021-22, SPACE supplemented the regranting funds with $200k of additional grants to distribute from the National Endowment of the Arts through the American Rescue Plan Grant which went to additional artist projects throughout the state, with no limitation on medium.

The Kindling Fund is administered by SPACE as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts’ Regional Regranting Program.