A GARDEN BUILT ACCORDING TO ALCHEMY, FUNDED BY THE MAN WHO PAINTED SOUP CANS

In Los Angeles, a small nonprofit called Golden Dome is about to break ground on a garden. Nothing about its layout will be arbitrary: every path, every planting bed, every sightline is being arranged according to the celestial bodies as ancient alchemists once understood them — the sun, the moon, the seven classical planets, each assigned its own patch of earth, its own hour of shade. The organization's annual operating budget is under $200,000. The money for the garden is coming from the estate of a man who spent his career painting Campbell's soup cans and screen-printing Marilyn Monroe's face into rows of candy-colored repetition.


This July, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced $5,166,000 in grants to 78 organizations across 26 states, Washington DC, Mexico City, and Berlin. Thirty-three of the recipients had never received Warhol Foundation money before. And for the first time in the foundation's history, part of that sum — $530,000 of it, spread across twenty separate awards — was set aside specifically for organizations too small to have ever qualified for a grant like this before: nonprofits with annual budgets under $200,000, the kind of place, in the foundation's own words, that might be "someone doing exciting things in their garage on a Sunday."


Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain (author died 1611) — "An Allegory of Alchemy." Reference image only.
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain (author died 1611) — "An Allegory of Alchemy." Reference image only.


Warhol himself worked at the exact opposite scale. He built an empire on repetition, celebrity, and instantly recognizable images — soup cans, Marilyn, dollar signs, his own bleach-blond wig — sold in editions, licensed, endlessly reproduced across posters and t-shirts and museum gift shops. The foundation that carries his name, funded by his estate after his death in 1987, has spent decades quietly doing something close to the reverse: funding one-of-a-kind projects by artists and organizations most people will never have heard of, in cities most gallery-goers will never visit. Among this cycle's grantees are Soon Is Now in Beacon, New York, building a site-specific installation, and Seafoam Palace in Detroit, commissioning a new work for its space — alongside the exhibition support grants going to more established names, and curatorial research fellowships worth up to $50,000 apiece.


This year's new small-grants category means the foundation is now funding, in the same cycle, a garden shaped like a 16th-century alchemical diagram in Los Angeles and a ceramics show by a self-described "gay folk artist" in a former sewing-machine factory in Springfield, Oregon. Foundation program director Rachel Bers has described small organizations, at their best, as incubators for new ideas and platforms for underrepresented voices — community anchors that make an artist's vision legible to the public.


None of this is happening in a vacuum. The expansion comes as the National Endowment for the Arts has canceled its Challenge America program — a resource many small cultural organizations viewed as their one foothold into federal funding — amid an estimated $27 million in federal arts cuts. Earlier this year, the Warhol Foundation and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation jointly stepped in to cover $800,000 for organizations that had already been approved for that now-canceled federal grant, without waiting for anyone to apply first.


The man whose face became a product, whose signature became a commodity, spent his afterlife bankrolling the projects least likely to ever become one.

Source : hyperallergic

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A NAME FOUND INSIDE A SCRIBBLE NOBODY HAD READ YET

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  The room had been excavated in 2010 by the National Geographic Explorer William Saturno. Sixteen years later, someone was still staring at one faint patch of paint on its east wall, trying to work out what it said. The building is a small masonry structure at Xultun, a Maya site in the jungle of northeastern Guatemala, 340 kilometers southwest of Guatemala City. Its interior walls are covered with portraits of seated and kneeling men, each labeled with the title taaj — "obsidian," a term for a class of scribes and scholars — and with more than fifty faint mathematical notations scattered across the plaster like a scratch pad nobody bothered to erase. One cluster, designated Text 19, sat below a larger, already-deciphered inscription: eleven small hieroglyphs, ten centimeters tall in total, easy to miss even for people who had been staring at this room for years. The Met, Public Domain — Chakalte', "Relief with enthroned ruler" (770 CE), Maya, La Pasadita, Guat...
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