Spokane Arts Grant Awards (SAGA) funds multiple programs and projects three times every year through a competitive application process. Grant winners carry out arts related activities in the Spokane area during the twelve months following their award date. Awards can be for any amount up to $10,000.
SAGA defines the term “arts” by observing our community’s creative activity. We live in a region populated by many cultures, talented in varied crafts and trades, and curious about learning and engaging in technique, expression, and artistic community. SAGA has funded blacksmithing and glassblowing, cultural art forms such as canoe making, performance, exhibition, education, therapy, and individual artistic development. We have also funded arts-based businesses and new collaborations.
SAGA stands on the principle that creatives should be paid for the work they do and we educate both the broader community and the artistic sector that creative work has value.
Due to Covid, the City of Spokane faced a 60% drop in its admissions tax income in 2020. The City’s 2020 tax revenue was the basis for SAGA grants in 2022, leaving us with less than half of the funds we required to sustain meaningful grantmaking to arts and culture that year. We were prepared for relatively normal tax base downturns, so we were able to offset some of the Covid shortfall, but even exhausting our emergency fund, the tax base losses outstripped our resources by well over $50,000.
To maintain our grantmaking in 2022, SAGA was grateful to receive $50,000 in support from the NEA Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) program. This support meant we were able to fund an additional seven projects in 2022 during a time when organizations were feeling a second pinch: that audiences and customers were not yet returning to pre-Covid levels. We are grateful to the NEA for supporting Spokane’s arts and culture at that critical time.
At the end of 2023, SAGA had funded 171 proposals providing a total of more than $800,000 dollars to local artists, organizations, and businesses.
2024 is SAGA’s eighth year serving the Spokane region. Below we provide a complete list of each of our awardees since our first year of funding in 2017. View just the most recent year’s winners here.
Richmond Art Collective (RAC) is a dynamic, place-based community of multi-disciplinary artists, designers, curators, and academics practicing in the Spokane area. Its aims are to create a nurturing space for creativity, to perpetuate and disseminate the arts, to provide peer support, and to sustain the Spokane artist.
West Plains Arts Academy was formed in the summer of 2016 by Debbie Gerber, Nancy Gasper and Heather Hubbard: a group of concerned citizens and parents who felt there was an unmet demand for quality arts programs in their community.
The Spokane: The VR Film Collective are all time-based artists, coming together to blaze a pathway for VR Film production in the Spokane region.
Art Salvage seeks to promote creativity while also educating Spokane’s art communities about sustainability through their ongoing collection and reuse of materials and art supplies that otherwise would be thrown away.
The Get Lit! Festival began in 1998 as a one-day marathon of literary readings sponsored by Eastern Washington University Press and EWU’s Department of Creative Writing. Housed within Eastern Washington University’s College of Arts, Letters, and Education, the Get Lit! Festival continues to expand.
Monoliths of Memory is a two-person art exhibition, lecture, and gallery talk. Through research and investigation of form and material, ceramic sculptor Tybre Newcomer and mixed-media sculptor Cozette Phillips will reflect on the influence of man-made materials within natural environments.
The Garageland Chronicles was the brain child of film producer, Shaun Springer. It is a collection of short stories that encompasses many Spokane local artists, story tellers, writers, filmmakers, and actors while using a local hangout as its central hub: Garageland.
Daniel Kytonen is a visual artist whose current body of work is producing large monotypes. With these works he is investigating the in-between world of meaning and experience, which is connected to his life and the learning disabilities that are a part of who he is.
The mission of One Heart Native Arts and Film Festival is to share and showcase innovative, compelling and empowering stories from Native perspectives through film and art, celebrating the diversity and vitality of contemporary Native culture in our community today.
Omy Karorero, musically known as Ras Omy K, is from Rwanda, Africa. He is a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The lyrics and messages gave Omy hope and purpose. He began writing and performing songs as a way to heal himself from the trauma that he had experienced.
LTYM readers are all community members who have auditioned through a competitive process to be featured in the show, many of whom do not have any experience, and have been guided through the process of public storytelling performance tools developed by Stacey Conner and Elise Raimi.
This project is a special collaboration among three artists who have each resided in Spokane for more than 30 years and each of whom has attained a national reputation: humor writer (and retired EWU professor) Patrick F. McManus, composer/arranger and musician Olivia Brownlee, and touring professional actor Tim Behrens.
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