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Founding director of Artists At Work Rachel Chanoff speaks to the Mellon Foundation about forging a new model for artist-driven community collaborations.

In 1935, amid the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project put artists to work in the service of the public good and economic recovery. Painter Diego Rivera created murals, sculptor Augusta Savage launched the Harlem Community Artist Center, and graphic artists designed posters for the National Park Service and Federal Theater Project productions. With a federal investment of $35 million, artworks and other work produced under the Federal Art Project are celebrated as iconic and historically significant in forging a distinctly American style of art making.  

In 2020, in response to pandemic-related loss of income for filmmakers, dancers, theatrical and visual artists, poets, and musicians, that same New Deal-era progressivism inspired a wave of social enterprise funding and job-creation initiatives. Among these is Artists At Work (AAW), launched by The Office Performing Arts + Film, a New York and London-based cultural production company...Keep reading on Mellon Foundation.