Applications Open For Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant

LARGO, FL — Creative Pinellas announced the opening of applications for its 2023 Emerging Artist Grant.

These awards, which are open to applicants now through Sept. 6, aim to assist artists that are early in their career, are quickly growing as artists and find themselves at an important moment when these grants would have an especially large impact on their development as a professional artist.

“This is an especially significant grant for Creative Pinellas and for the arts community,” said Barbara St. Clair, CEO of Creative Pinellas. “By providing financial support, mentoring and an opportunity for an exhibition or performance, we are empowering individual artists and investing in their future. With these Emerging Artist Grants, we have been able to and continue to be committed to making space, resources, and recognition available to artists and communities who may not have had such access in the past.”

Emerging artists are defined as those who demonstrate excellence in their work, are widely recognized by their peers and the community at large for their work, and still have some ground to cover on their path to recognition as professional artists.

For example, the emerging visual artist may have shown some work, but is still building a strong record of exhibition history, awards and commissions, or sustaining an income derived solely from sales and/or production and performance of their work.

The Emerging Artist Grant program, now in its sixth year, selects up to 10 artists for the annual program.

Each artist will receive a financial grant of $2,000, a professional artist mentor chosen specifically for them, who will work with them on a one-to-one basis during the grant period, and will be part of the Emerging Artist group exhibition, sponsored each year by Creative Pinellas.

Artists are carefully selected by a panel of artists and curators based on their work, vision for the future and commitment to show or perform their work for the benefit of residents and visitors to Pinellas County.

Grants will be awarded for original work in the disciplines of choreography, literature, media arts, music composition, theater/musical theater, visual arts and interdisciplinary arts.

“Receiving the Emerging Artist Grant has been life-changing," said 2022 emerging artist grantee Heather Rippert. "Having a dedicated time frame, a wonderful mentor, the Creative Pinellas team, and the connection with fellow grantees all provided a network of support for my creativity like none before. It’s as if I was given permission to be the artist I always wanted to be.”

Program guidelines and eligibility details, grant FAQs and the online application are available here.

Grantees will be selected on or around Oct. 8.

Working with their artist mentors, emerging artists will have several months to create new work culminating in an exhibition at the Gallery at Creative Pinellas in the spring as well as a virtual gallery exhibit.

Over the course of the funding period, recipients will provide an insight into their creative processes for interested visitors through blogs posted at creativepinellas.org. Past awardees have written about current projects, critiques on work in progress, reflections on life as an artist and more.

As the county’s local arts agency, Creative Pinellas is funded by the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners, Visit St Petersburg/Clearwater, the state of Florida's Division of Cultural Affairs and by sales of the State of the Arts specialty license plate in Pinellas County.