Ruth Arts expands Core Grants to $25.35 million, backing 169 organizations with multi-year, unrestricted funding

The Ruth Foundation for the Arts (Ruth Arts) has announced its 2025-2028 Core Grant recipients, awarding $25.35 million in unrestricted support over three years to 169 arts and cultural organizations nationwide. The foundation says the program will distribute $8.45 million per year, a jump from the $4.5 million awarded to organizations in 2024.

At the center of the announcement is a structural shift: Core moved from a one-year grant to a multi-year model, with each recipient receiving $150,000 over three years in unrestricted funds. In an arts economy shaped by short cycles and project-specific restrictions, that structure matters because it supports planning, staffing, and operations across multiple seasons.

What Core Grants are, and who qualifies

Ruth Arts introduced Core Grants in 2022 as an application-based program open to organizations that have previously received an Artist Choice award. Applications are initially reviewed by a rotating group of readers working across disciplines and regions, with each cycle shaped by a theme that frames the questions.

For 2025, Ruth Arts framed the application around a guiding question: “What knowledges can we unearth to reorganize how we think, work, and be in this world?” The foundation positions that prompt as a way to push organizations into values-based reflection, while also giving the foundation a clearer view into what organizations say they need right now.

Why unrestricted, multi-year support changes the math

Unrestricted grants are rare at meaningful scale, and multi-year unrestricted support is rarer. The foundation’s Senior Grants Manager, Zola Yi, describes the program as intentionally designed to encourage self-reflection within organizations and to translate what reviewers learn into a grant structure that offers stability and room for long-term planning.

That shift is practical. Multi-year, flexible capital can cover the unglamorous line items that determine whether a cultural organization survives: staffing continuity, rent, insurance, archiving, accessibility costs, equipment replacement, and the time required to build partnerships. Project funding often leaves those costs squeezed. Core is structured to strengthen the base.

A national cohort that functions like a map

Ruth Arts calls Core a snapshot of the cultural landscape, spanning emergent organizations and longstanding institutions. The 2025-2028 list includes spaces and programs across disciplines and regions, including fiscally sponsored initiatives noted by an asterisk in the foundation’s own listing.

For Black art ecosystems specifically, the cohort includes organizations that operate as community anchors, archival engines, publishing platforms, and artist-led spaces. Among the recipients listed are South Side Community Art Center (Chicago), Black Art Library (Detroit), BlackStar Projects (Philadelphia), The Laundromat Project (Brooklyn), The Griot Museum of Black History (St. Louis), Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden (Bishopville, South Carolina), Mahogany Black Arts and Cultural Center (Racine, Wisconsin), and Project Row Houses (Houston).

This distribution matters because it supports infrastructure, along with programming. When funding reaches a mix of archives, small experimental spaces, and legacy institutions, it strengthens the connective tissue that moves artists through stages of visibility, documentation, and long-term care.

About Ruth Arts

Ruth Arts launched in 2022 to support organizations in the visual and performing arts, building around an artist-driven nomination process through its flagship Artist Choice program and expanding across ten grant programs. The foundation is rooted in the legacy of its founder Ruth DeYoung Kohler II (1941-2020) and says it has awarded over $55 million in grants to date.

The foundation also notes it opened an art space in Milwaukee in 2024 as an extension of its grantmaking and is collaborating with Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought on a presentation related to the artist Bettina Grossman, running through April 3, 2026.