Artists Still Starving

Got a piece of mail today which was actually a hard copy of an e-mail I got last week, but didn't get around to blogging about. It seems that the NJ State Arts Council has decided to suspend its 2010 Fellowship program. This decision was made less than 2 weeks after all the materials were due, less than 2 weeks after I drove all over the county to download and edit photos of my recent work, and to print out the official consent form that had to be mailed separately. Not to mention all the time I spent online filling in all the pages of the application. The reason is logical enough (the state is pretty much broke right now), but that situation was known many months ago, well before the application process was even made available. I can't complain too much about the state deciding not to give me some free money, but I (and hundreds of other NJ artists) could have saved many hours of work and still been just as poor.

For the moment they are retaining all the materials and could, in theory, restart the process in the future. (this happened to me back in the 1990's- they accepted the applications, suspended the program for a few years, then finally evaluated everyone's two year old applications) Meanwhile, the money that would have gone to that will be used for arts organizations, possibly ones I am involved with.