Fifteen Artists Each Win US$50,000 From Anonymous Was A Woman
Fifteen artists will each receive US$50,000 from Anonymous Was A Woman, the United States grant-maker that has announced its 2026 recipients, ArtNews reported on 11 November 2026.
The money is unrestricted, which means winners can use it as they choose, without a set project or report to fill. The awards go to women, gender non-conforming and trans artists over the age of 40 who are at a critical point in their careers.
The list includes Kay WalkingStick, born in 1935, who is the oldest of this year's winners. Trisha Baga, born in 1985, is the youngest. The other named recipients are Beatriz Cortez, Elisabeth Kley and Candace Hill-Montgomery.
Two of the awards were made possible by Fotene Demoulas, a philanthropist based in Boston, Massachusetts. A further award was funded by an anonymous donor.
The programme began in 1996, when the National Endowment for the Arts, the American federal agency that supports the arts, stopped funding individual artists. The foundation took its name from a line in Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own," which argues that women writers needed money and a room of their own to work. Since 1996, the awards have given more than US$10 million to more than 400 artists.
The organisation is also running the second edition of Artists Speak, a survey of women, trans and non-binary visual artists. It is run with SMU DataArts, a research group at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and with the journalist Charlotte Burns. The first survey, in 2024, drew more than 1,200 responses.
Artists of any age can take part until 3 January 2027. The foundation will hold a webinar about the survey on 18 November at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. Findings will feed into a new report and a digital resource guide, due in the fall of 2027.
A separate scheme, the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grant, started in 2022. It offers up to US$20,000 for projects led by women-identifying artists in the United States and its territories. The New York Foundation for the Arts administers it and will hand out a total of US$250,000.
For artists who have been working for decades, an unrestricted grant can mean time to make new work without taking on other jobs. The survey, meanwhile, aims to collect data on artists who are often left out of official figures. Both are routes for the foundation to say who is working and under what conditions.
