This Prize for Art came from my observations of the artworld in the Bay Area over many years. As costs have skyrocketed for rent for artists’ studios ($3.75+/sf in Alameda County which has no subsidized art studio space), galleries and venues as well as for everything else, artists in the Bay Area needed a lot of help, which was not being provided to them. Newspapers and magazines have stopped covering the arts on a consistent basis, venues and colleges are closing, artists are finding they must work 2 and 3 jobs and many are leaving the Bay Area – or face a difficult time if they want to remain artists. All this is unnecessary and based on greed but it is the terrible environment artists find themselves in.
I wanted to create something to help as many people as possible and it seemed the only way to do that was to create a new space, never before tried in the Bay Area, that was a platform open to ALL artists at low or no cost, with a very large number of cash awards, compared to the usual 3 to 5 awards of most art competitions. And then to hold it annually so that it will become an anticipated event that would showcase as many artists who wished to participate as possible. Without curation and without gate-keeping or censorship. Hate speech and illegal or abusive imagery is the only thing that is not allowed – but all other experiments are.
I hope people will view this Prize for Art as a new infrastructure, long-needed in the Bay Area artworld, and the beginning of some kind of remedy for the neglect artists have endured for many years. It offers something for everyone, finally.