ArtHome History
ArtHome founder Esther Robinson became intimately aware of the financial reality of working artists’ lives during her seven-year tenure at The Creative Capital Foundation. As one of the principal architects of Creative Capital's innovative grant-making system and a program officer overseeing film video and the performing arts, Esther traveled the nation meeting and speaking with thousands of artists. Her close collaboration nationally with funders and artists and her annual adjudication of up to 1800 Creative Capital grant proposals (of which only two dozen would see funding), led her to question whether traditional grantmaking was the only way to support a stable and thriving culture sector in America.
Recognizing the crucial role that financial solvency and home ownership had played in the lives of successful artists she had met across the country, Esther became convinced that asset-building should be a vital component of a new support system for the arts. Determined to build a program that makes measurable change in the lives of individual artists, has broad impact regardless of aesthetic or cultural trends, and that builds vital communities both in and outside the cultural sector, Esther founded ArtHome.
ArtHome is a project of the Fund for the City of New York.
The Fund for the City of New York
The Fund for the City of New York was established by the Ford Foundation in 1968 with the mandate to improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers. For over four decades, in partnership with government agencies, nonprofit institutions and foundations, the Fund has developed and helped to implement innovations in policy, programs, practices and technology in order to advance the functioning of government and nonprofit organizations in New York City and beyond. In the early 1990s, The Fund created an Incubator/Partner Project Program as one of its major initiatives to provide support to start-ups so they can concentrate their energy and resources on programming and fundraising.
