MISSION STATEMENT OF THE GRANT PROGRAM
“Anonymous Was a Woman” is a grant program focused on supporting individual women artists. The phrase is taken from A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's classic statement of the challenges facing females seeking to create art. With these four words, Woolf succinctly and powerfully evoked the centuries long struggle of women to gain recognition as artists. Yet there is much more to this innovative grant program than its thought-provoking name. Anonymous Was a Woman was created to fill a national need. In 1995, the National Endowment for the Arts, under intense political pressure, discontinued funding for individual artists. This galvanized an unnamed woman artist in New York to take action. “It was obvious there was a need for more private support,” she later wrote. So she used her personal funds to help fill that void. Since 1996, Anonymous Was a Woman has awarded ten grants of $25,000 each per year, except one year when eleven were given. The purpose is to support women visual artists over the age of forty-five who are at a critical juncture in their lives or careers. The overriding purpose of the grants is to allow the artists to pursue their work.