Mission

Guided by the core values of Care, Trust, Slowness, and Mutual Aid, EC’s mission is to provide early-career, underrepresented, trans and queer artists of color from performance and nightlife communities with access to long-term curatorial guidance, production funds, and mentorship support leading up to the public dissemination of their work through exhibitions, parties, and or publishing.

EC’s mission serves historically marginalized and undervalued artists whose work is often overlooked or tokenized by mainstream art institutions.

Vision

Commercial galleries do not traditionally contribute to artist’s initial production or research costs. Non-profit art organizations are rarely able to provide support beyond exhibition production, except when a specific body of work is being commissioned. And although art production grants exist, they often have rigid and unrealistic fund dispersal timelines, and do not cover production costs retroactively. Most grant applications also require artists to already have work samples created, or a fully formed project to apply with. These realities mean there is a huge lack in representation and patronage of early-career artists who do not have access to generational wealth, and whose identities are currently targeted and historically denied access to resources.

EC’s vision is to uniquely provide artists with monthly, need-based, unrestricted stipends, leading up to a public exhibition of the their work. In addition to monetary support, EC also provides access to mentorship by arranging studio visits with established artists and meetings with industry leaders from its vast network.

Collaborative Exhibition Model

To funnel more resources directly to artists and foster network-building and collaboration, EC’s exhibitions are hosted at and with partnering art organizations.

This collaborative exhibition model also creates space for slowness and flexibility to guide EC’s programming structure.

Care Contracts

Our Care Contracts are consensual agreements that formally instate our core values: Care, Trust, Slowness, and Mutual Aid as professional working standards. They also outline our responsibilities, and in turn, our expectations from artists and collaborating partners.