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Early Career Artist Tools and Equipment Grant

Tools and equipment expenses can stall creative projects. With the support of the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, ACC awards early career artists with small grants of $1,500 to ease the burden and help make their dreams a reality.

Leather working tools including a hammer, pliers, awl, and cordage laying atop a pile of leather.

Meet the awardees.

While ACC seeks to eventually expand a Tools and Equipment Grant program to a broader audience of artists, this pilot program provides nine grants of $1,500 to past participants of the Emerging Artist Cohort program. Artists are asked to explain how these funds would sustain or grow their craft career or business, and complete a simple follow-up survey 3 months later, demonstrating the impact of the spent funds. See the awardees of the grants below:

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  • Angela Miracle Gladue

    Angela Miracle Gladue aka Lunacee, is a nehiyaw (Cree)/Greek Interdisciplinary Artist from the Treaty 6 Territory of amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta) and is a proud member of Frog Lake First Nation. At age 6 she began cultural dancing through a Metis and Powwow dance program at her school - Prince Charles Elementary and performed regularly throughout western Canada with the Red River Wheelers and her school's powwow performance group. Her background in Hip-Hop dance began as a B-gir...

  • Ann Erickson

    Ann Erickson is a Minneapolis artist and metalsmith making functional handmade adornments — including jewelry, hair accessories, and hand-forged hooks in sterling silver, brass, 10kt, and 14kt gold. Often inspired by historical motifs, found art, and the natural world, Ann fabricates every piece by hand using a combination of traditional methods, adapted tools, and handmade stamps. Ann makes versatile utilitarian pieces that complement the user's sense of beauty and expression.

  • Charity Ridpath

    Charity Ridpath grew up above a landfill. Years of trash and illegally dumped chemicals gradually surfaced through erosion until the spaces she played in shut down. With this experience as a guide, she wonders how future generations will be impacted by her waste. She works with single-use plastic and the wearability of jewelry to create work inspired by various imagined futures and presently endangered ecosystems. In 2019, she earned a BFA in Studio Practice from Texas State University.

  • Jill Caruana

    Jill’s journey into art began after completing a graduate degree in Business. Her path shifted when she secured an apprenticeship at a metal design studio in Brooklyn, New York, where she honed her craft working with copper, brass, and sterling silver. After her two eldest children left for college, Jill fully embraced her passion for metalsmithing, finding fulfillment in creating unique, wearable sculptural jewelry. She is influenced from her roots in New York City, historical architecture an...

  • Kadey Ambrose

    Kadey made her first basket sitting in the dirt of the Arizona desert in 2009. She then went on to study traditional skills and ethnobotany – including basketry – under the tutelage of her long-time mentor Karen Magnuson at Earthwalk Northwest in Issaquah, WA. She has since dedicated herself to the art, craft, and cultural significance of basketry. Kadey holds a BAS in Ethnobotany from The Evergreen State College and a MA in Studio Art from Eastern Illinois University, both degrees focused o...

  • Kento Saisho

    Kento Saisho is an artist and metalworker currently based in Los Angeles, CA. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2016, where he was a Windgate Fellowship recipient from the Center for Craft, and a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft from 2018-2020. Through an intuitive process between patchwork and collage, Kento makes sculptural objects, vessels, and contemporary artifacts in forged and fabricated steel.

  • LB Buchan

    LB Buchan (they/them) is a trans non-binary wood sculptor working in the Pacific Northwest. Their work examines our society’s stigmatization of grief and how we physically and psychologically respond to difficult subject matter. Their pieces tend to be amalgams, inspired by various sources of anatomy in the natural world.

  • Michelle Im

    Michelle Im (b. Atlanta, GA) is a Korean-American ceramic artist based in Queens, NY. She is a 2024 Artist Fellow at the Museum of Arts & Design and is an award recipient of the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort (2023), American Craft Council Emerging Artist Cohort (2022), and Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist (2022). Her residencies and fellowships include Township10 (2024), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Guest Artist, 2023), Penland School of Craft (Distinguished Fellow, 2023), an...

  • Renata Cassiano Alvarez

    Renata Cassiano Alvarez is a Mexican-Italian artist born in Mexico City and currently a VAP at the University of Arkansas School of Art. She works predominantly in the medium of clay, searching to develop an intimate collaborative relationship with material. Influenced by archeology and history, she is interested in the power of objects with a sense of permanence and timelessness and language as transformation. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in public and private co...

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