"When I learned about the devastating fires in Los Angeles, I was struck by the human impact on our creative community,” says Ryan Graves, a Hawaii-based entrepreneur and philanthropist. “Our team felt compelled to create a solution that could scale through technology while directly supporting artists in crisis.”
Following the outbreak of the wildfires, Graves reached out to CULTURED Magazine’s LA-based Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Harrelson, to discuss possible avenues for aiding the city’s many artists who had lost work and livelihoods. As painter Alec Egan told the magazine only a few days prior, “All the collectors, the viewers who follow artists, write them, help them. That's what's needed right now.” The result of these conversations is Aid For Artists, a new relief fund from Graves’s Saltwater investment firm and CULTURED Magazine, with support from Shopify and the Edward Charles Foundation.
The fund will be offering up to $20,000 grants to professional artists impacted by the fires, with an initial match of $200,000 from Saltwater. Artists will be reviewed through an application process and selected by the fund’s distribution committee, composed of Graves, Harrelson, Hauser & Wirth Senior Director Mike Davis, patron and Arkive founder Tom McLeod, and Supervsn Studios founder Gavin Mathieu. It’s a committee composed of collectors and life-long lovers of the arts—including Graves, a ground-floor member of the Uber team who grew up with an artist grandfather and mother. His relationship to art, he says, is “deeply personal and multigenerational.”
“Aid for Artists has an immediate, focused mission: helping displaced artists return to their creative practices as quickly as possible,” says Graves. “While we have ambitious long-term potential, we're starting with a clear, achievable goal of deploying $1 million in direct aid to the Los Angeles art community.”
This long-term model includes a new feature on Shopify’s platform: when checking out with participating partners on the platform, including CULTURED Magazine, shoppers will have the opportunity to donate directly to the fund and continue its work in LA’s creative community. "This is an incredible opportunity to provide help and hope for so many artists, creatives and friends who have lost homes, studios, and archives,” says Harrelson of the fund. "I'm so grateful to Ryan for stepping up and putting this into motion and when Shopify came on board, it provided another avenue for our readers to get involved, many of whom are just as tightly woven into this community as we are."
While the first wave of grant distribution is targeting those with immediate need for funding, Aid For Artists is in the process of organizing additional rounds that will support the Los Angeles community as tension points arise. “I've seen how powerful initiatives can grow from humble, focused beginnings,” explains Graves. “Our priority is making an immediate, meaningful impact in artists' lives, while remaining open to expanding our reach as we prove our model's effectiveness.”
