ArtHome was created out of a desire to build a cultural support program that could provide innovative stabilization to the financial lives of individual artists. 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 home-buyer education and financial literacy should be vital components 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.