The potential for artists to thrive is at the heart of United States Artists (USA). For twenty years, USA has provided unrestricted awards to artists across the country — recognizing the extraordinary diversity of artists and creative practitioners who shape our nation's cultural life and affirming their essential contributions to our collective imagination, well-being, and civic vitality.

From the beginning, our awards program has done something powerful: it celebrates visionary artistic and cultural practitioners across disciplines, geographies, and communities. It heightens public awareness. It captures imagination. It affirms that artists working in every corner of the country deserve recognition and trust. That celebration matters deeply — not only to the recipients, but to the broader field of arts and culture.

Two decades in, we have come to understand that celebration and sustainability must move together. Recognition alone is not enough. Grant support is essential — and so too are the structural conditions that make creative and cultural practices sustainable over time.

Unrestricted Support as an Act of Care

USA was founded in direct response to the elimination of federal funding for individual artists. We believed then, as we do now, that artists should be trusted to know what they need. Our unrestricted United States Artists Fellowships are built on that principle.

Each year, we award grants in the form of fellowships to artists across every discipline with flexible funding that can be used for anything — from rent to research, healthcare to experimentation. It is an act of trust: to affirm that the artist, not the funder, is best positioned to decide what sustains their practice.

That trust-based approach has had remarkable results. Fellows tell us that unrestricted support gives them not only time and space, but confidence — the freedom to take risks, to rest, and to innovate on their own terms. They use the award to reduce debt, care for their families, restore their health, and invest more deeply in their practice. In doing so, the fellowship does more than fund a moment — it stabilizes lives and expands possibility.

And yet we have listened closely to what artists tell us about the conditions in which they work. An award, however meaningful, cannot by itself meet all the needs of artists who are navigating rising costs of living and limited access to benefits or protections.

Thriving Requires Acts of Celebration and Sustainability

The cultural ecosystem depends on the artists we celebrate publicly and on the vast and interconnected ways in which their creative labor sustains communities every day — artists teaching, organizing, preserving knowledge, healing, experimenting, and contributing in important ways to cultural life. The visible and the less visible are interdependent. Celebration generates momentum, while infrastructure is what gives that momentum continuity.

At USA, our evolution as an organization reflects that understanding. In addition to unrestricted funding, we offer tailored professional services through our Artist Services initiative — connecting fellows to financial advisors, legal counsel, and wellness resources. And since the beginning of artists services over five years ago, we have come to see that the best kind of financial support is coupled with the kind of centered, human care that helps artists navigate the full complexity of their lives.

And, through artists' own reflections, we know that services alone cannot correct structural instability. The conditions shaping artists' lives — access to healthcare, housing affordability, tax policy, labor classification, intellectual property protections — are ultimately determined by public policy. When those systems fail to support or include creative workers, no single grant or technical program can compensate.

That is what compelled hundreds of people and core partners, including USA, to launch the National Arts Policy Alliance (NAPA), a national effort to move toward systemic reform. NAPA brings together artists, funders, and cultural workers to advocate for policies that recognize creative labor as labor — deserving of the same protections, benefits, and economic rights afforded to other professions. 

For United States Artists, NAPA is the first in what will be many systems-focused efforts to improve conditions for artists.

Artists are too often treated as exceptional in ways that are romantic, even heroic — but economically precarious. We celebrate their vision while excluding them from the safety nets available to other workers. A thriving cultural ecosystem requires more than admiration; it requires structural alignment. If artists are essential contributors to our democracy — shaping public discourse, preserving cultural tradition, fostering civic imagination — then the policies that govern economic life must reflect that reality. Thriving cannot depend solely on grants. It must be embedded in the frameworks that shape wages, access to capital, healthcare access, retirement security, and worker protections.

Infrastructure, in this sense, is foundational to artists' ability to flourish. Unrestricted awards generate powerful signals of trust and recognition, and infrastructure ensures that signal reaches more people, more consistently — so that support becomes cumulative rather than episodic. These commitments deepen each other. Celebrating the diversity of artists across the country expands public imagination, and building the infrastructure to sustain that work ensures the imagination can endure.

The Next 20 Years Starts Now

The landscape for artists today is more precarious than ever. The gig economy has reshaped how creative labor is valued and compensated, and our systems have not kept pace with the realities of how artists work. Few other professionals are expected to sustain and grow their craft while simultaneously subsidizing their lives through unrelated employment to the same degree.

At the same time, artists are at the center of our most urgent conversations — about justice, climate, health, and democracy. They preserve endangered cultural knowledge. They foster empathy. As we rely on artists for meaning and connection, we must be equally committed to securing their stability.

If we believe artists are essential, our support must reflect that belief — not only in how we celebrate them, but in how we invest in the conditions that allow them to commit to their craft.

Philanthropy alone cannot create lasting change. It will take genuine collaboration across sectors — artists and cultural institutions, bankers and funders, policymakers and advocates — to build an ecosystem in which creative people can truly flourish.

Twenty years in, our answer to this challenge is more complete than ever. It takes trust — extended through unrestricted funding and genuine recognition. It takes structure — the kind embedded in policy and finance. And it takes sustained commitment from all of us who believe that when artists thrive, our communities don't just survive. They flourish. And when artists flourish, so do we all.