As New York City Doubles Grants for Individual Artists to $10,000, Cultural Affairs Commissioner Diya Vij Discusses Vision for City Agency

New York will increase its direct support to artists, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Cultural Affairs commissioner Diya Vij announced today. Rising from $5,000 to up to $10,000, the increase doubles the funds given to artists and represents the first change in this funding stream in some 20 years.

The funding comes from the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and is distributed to each borough’s arts councils, which act as regrant partners and dole out grants to individual artists annually as part of an open call. The funds will come from the DCLA’s budget, totaling around $3.5 million given to all five councils cumulatively.

“Artists are working New Yorkers, and they pay the same rent and the same grocery bills as everyone else in this city,” Mayor Mamdani said in a statement. “A grant frozen at $5,000 for twenty years has been losing value every single year. Doubling it is a first step toward making sure the people who give this city its culture can afford to keep living here.”

As part of the news, any past and present recipients of arts councils funding will also have a dedicated shopping day at Materials for the Arts once a month.

Four of the art councils currently have their application period open: the Bronx Council on the Arts (with a deadline of October 30), the Brooklyn Arts Council (October 11), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (November 12), and Queens’ New York Foundation for the Arts (November 17). The Staten Island Arts council’s applications will open in November.

“We know the cost of living has increased, but the support hasn’t increased along with it,” Diya Vij told ARTnews in an interview Thursday. “What I know from being a curator and talking to so many artists is $5,000 is just not enough money to do a complete project. The last thing we want is artists going to debt to complete a project because of a grant.”

Vij was named the city’s next commissioner in February, becoming the first person of South Asian descent to hold the role. The DLCA is the largest municipal funder of arts and culture in the United States. In July, when the city budget for the 2027 fiscal year was adopted, the DCLA received the most funding in its history: $323.8 million, a 7.5 percent increase from the $299.6 million it received in 2026. The new budget also includes a $10 million per year Cultural Stability Fund for nonprofits that has been approved for the next three years.

ARTnews spoke with Vij twice for this article (by phone over the summer and in person at Materials for the Arts this week) to discuss her role as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, her vision for the city agency, and the increase in direct funding for artists.

This interview has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.

ARTnews: How is the new job going? How have you found taking over the Department Cultural of Affairs for New York City?

Diya Vij: I love it. It’s interesting because I’m returning to the agency after 10 years, and there are a lot of new initiatives within the agency. The world has also changed a lot, and on a personal level, I’ve changed a lot in that time, working at different organizations with so many artists and partners on projects of all scales. I’m coming back differently, and in a moment that’s unique in the city. All that knowledge that I’ve amassed in tandem with this moment in our city’s political landscape, there is so much amazing energy around transformational governance. It has been great to be in this position where I get to zoom out to the bird’s eye view on arts and culture in the city, after having been in organizations for so long.

How do you think your past experience at the DCLA will inform how you approach leading the agency?

What is so unique about this agency is that you get that bird’s eye view of the entire ecosystem of the city’s arts and culture. In the four years that I was at the agency last, we were in every single neighborhood across all five boroughs developing a cultural plan and launching different initiatives. I have carried so much of that into my curatorial practice since, and many of my projects have also been thinking about infrastructure or about making material change in ways that are not necessarily common to exhibition-making or commissioning artists. It’s a unique perspective that you can’t shake even after leaving the Department of Cultural Affairs. When I left Department of Cultural Affairs, the then-commissioner Tom Finkelpearl told me that the best thing to do is to work in the public sector, go to the private sector, and then come back to the public sector. At the time, I was like, “There’s no way that’s going to happen.” But here I am.

Expanding that purview, how do you think the work you did at different arts organizations, like the High Line and Creative Time in the past 10 years impacts your approach to the supporting arts and culture in New York?

One of my first programs at the High Line was with [artist and activist collective] What Would An HIV Doula Do? That came out of, in part, speaking to so many people in our field and just in the city in general about what needs there are in the ecosystem, one of which is that space is a scarcity. With a program like that one, I was thinking about bringing collectives into public space and dreaming concretely about community needs. I began programming around the mentality that space is a scarcity, and that communities need more opportunities to take care of each other.

That’s a throughline in a lot of the programs that I’ve organized. Another example is my project with New Red Order [for Creative Time]. That was a case of “how can public art be an opportunity to get more land back in Indigenous hands?” Rashid Johnson’s Red Stage [also for Creative Time] was coming out of Covid and saying, “We have an opportunity to make this a public stage.” So, I programmed 150 hours with 200-some artists across disciplines, and then we kept it open to the public to use, as a gesture toward what public space can be—or could be, or should be coming out of Covid. With Counterpublic 2023 in St. Louis, I went into that as a co-curator thinking about infrastructure, working with their municipal sewage department on an artist project with Jordan Weber to create [Defensive Landscape] a permanent rainwater garden. That was again thinking about how that work could mitigate this city problem of sewage runoff in rainwater. So that has like very much informed my curatorial practice.

Now coming back to Department of Cultural Affairs, I know intimately what artists want right now, having worked with them. I know what organizations need. I know what the challenges are. What’s been acutely hard in the past few years is space scarcity, federal funding cuts, an atmosphere of censorship, and dwindling philanthropy. In response, people are testing out different institutional models and trying to figure out what goes next. A lot of that work I was already thinking about at Creative Time when starting the CTHQ programming space, as well as a think tank there, where we thought about how institutional practices internally can mirror the values we want to have externally. That kind of infrastructural work has been a throughline for me, and I’m excited to take on the challenge of applying it at a city scale now.

I don’t think I would do this job in any other circumstance other than for Mayor Mamdani and for this political moment, where I do think we can do it. There’s a lot of possibility, and that possibility comes from being able to tell the truth about the conditions that we’re facing and experiencing. And then building from there, getting to say what doesn’t work, let’s stop doing it, and let’s start doing things differently. Let’s really reevaluate. I say this a lot to my team, and also across the field at public engagements, that this mandate to address the affordability crisis for me means thinking about artists, cultural workers, and organizations. That is both visionary but it’s also deeply operational in the day-to-day practices of the agency.

Historically, it has seemed like artists, cultural workers, and the creative sector generally have been left out of those conversations about affordability, when artists and creatives are what make New York such a vibrant city. You mentioned coming to the agency and knowing what artists need. Can you talk about what you’ve learned in the months since you became commissioner?

I’ve spent almost 20 years in the arts here in New York City. Listening is such a big part of my process. I think part of that comes from having worked socially engaged artists for most of my career. Listening is the backbone. When I started, I’ve met with our entire team one-on-one to a lot of listening internally. In the past six months as commissioner, I’ve been on this listening tour. I’ve been to all the boroughs, hosting open hours with various groups of people within the arts ecosystem—sometimes for coalitions, sometimes just for artists. I’ve done about 15 of them so far, and I’ve talked to thousands of artists, heard directly from them exactly how hard it is to make a living here during this affordability crisis and what artists need materially in order to be able to make work on their own terms. I did one at Performance Space New York that had the prompt of, “What does the city built for artists look like?” In the beginning [of the event], I also reoriented the prompt to include, “What does a city built by artists look like?” There were probably 200-plus people there, with a lot of big ideas, interesting ideas, amazing ideas.

Listening is a huge part of how we will shape the priorities for Department of Cultural Affairs under this administration. One thing that I am excited to do differently from the past administration is being in a two-way dialogue with our constituents and boldly taking on big problems, thinking infrastructurally, and trying to make big policy changes that might transform how we’re able to work. For me, one part of that is that the agency is focused on nonprofit arts organizations or nonprofit organizations that have arts and cultural programming. We provide grants and resources to 501(c)3 nonprofits.

But I’m also excited to think about like how does our work transform when we put more weight on individual artists and cultural workers? What does that allow us to think about in terms of policymaking, and what kind of infrastructures do we need to build that don’t exist yet in order to deeply tackle this affordability crisis? To your point earlier, we know there is no art world without artists living and working in New York City, as well as the cultural workers who live and work here being able to live here. This is not something that’s relegated to a few institutions.

How has that focus played out in policy changes so far?

In that process, I’m also proud to say that the city put forth the largest budget for arts and culture in its history, which I hope signals to folks that this is a priority for this administration. One amazing thing that came out of this budget is that for the first time ever, we have a Cultural Stability Fund, which is an initiative of $10 million a year for three years. That came from Mayor Mamdani himself asking me, “Is this something that you all need?” And me affirming that need and being very collaborative to think about how we support the field differently and how we’re able to meet the needs of organizations right now. This administration and myself—we really are all in. We believe in arts and culture as a priority to the well-being of all New Yorkers. It’s also just the first step. In order to make this a city that artists can live in and flourish in, it’s not just about funding; it’s about changing conditions that make it possible for all workers to be able to afford a vibrant life here.

This week, City Hall and the DCLA are announcing an increase in funding for direct-support grants to artists, administered by each borough’s local arts council. How does this initiative factor into the administration’s plan to make the city affordable for artists?

These artist grants haven’t been increased in almost 20 years, so immediately we knew that we needed to pull the levers that we could right away, and that was to more meaningfully support individual artists directly across all five boroughs. We fund through the local arts councils, and that’s a long-term relationship we have with them that is 50 years deep. They started when the agency formed in 1976. The grants are also one part of what the local arts councils do. They have affordable artist studios and professional development programs. They really are hubs for artists, and I actually don’t think enough people know about them. I don’t think enough artists know that it’s a resource for them.

How does this funding change relate to the DCLA’s other funding programs?

Direct artist support is really important, and that’s the place where we’re digging into and expanding. Our cultural policy has been focused on nonprofits and supporting nonprofits who deliver arts and culture as a public good to New Yorkers. That’s not going anywhere. We are deeply committed to keeping that robust, making it more efficient, making it meet the needs of organizations better. But in addition, we’re thinking about how we support artists directly and what how we grow that arm of the Department of Cultural Affairs.

This program is the only way we touch individual-artist funding, but it is absolutely paramount to any robust cultural policy because we’re supporting those who are making work by giving them what they need to experiment. Artists need to be able to try things. They need to be able to work together in new ways in order to get to the point where they’re presenting whole projects, be it on a stage in a museum or gallery or dance or music venue. They need the space to work. We know that artists are not supported in a stable way across the sector—our industry has yet to crack the code of how artists can have a stable living. Part of what we’re doing now is beginning to expand how we support artists and address that fundamental problem. We see this as a reliable, stable support structure.

How did you arrive at the $10,000 figure?

Really simply, we know the cost of living has increased, but the support hasn’t increased along with it. What I know from being a curator and talking to so many artists is $5,000 is just not enough money to do a complete project. The last thing we want is artists going to debt to complete a project because of a grant. What we also know is that artists need to be able to make without necessarily even the pressure of an output. Investing in the process was really important to me as a curator, too. That led to us saying, “How do we change this? Let’s increase it—that’s what we do.”

This increase in funding also comes in the wake of cuts in federal funding to the arts which have impacted numerous organizations. While the federal government no longer gives grants to artists directly (after the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s), several of those organizations who had received funding did give grants to artists. Do you see this as a stopgap for that loss in funding?

The artists grants and the Culture Stability Fund are both great opportunities to be able to meet the needs of the field, which is facing those federal funding cuts, as well as facing challenges with real estate and displacement. The Fund is a great way for us to be nimble and able to respond to those moments while we also build longer term solutions.

I think what people forget too is the those grants from the National Endowment from the Arts are incredibly important to smaller organizations. And there has been all kinds of other federal funding that goes to cultural organizations, from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is being stripped away or has been stripped away from the field. Even science organizations have lost funding from NASA and the US National Science Foundation. When you put all of that together, it is a lot of money gone, and there’s really no replacing it. We can step up and try to do what we can between private philanthropy and public funding on a local municipal level, but there’s no replacing that scale of funding at the federal level.

And why did you choose to have this interview at Materials for the Arts?

First of all, it’s a treasure. It’s just a beloved institution that’s part of the Department of Cultural Affairs. Every year, Materials for the Arts diverts over 4 million pounds of materials that would have gone into the waste stream, and instead they go into art productions, installations, public school classrooms. They just become creative projects. We’re standing in front of all these frames, Christmas trees, and fabrics, and just over there is the paint room. There are so many incredible materials for artists here, all for free. As part of this announcement, we are opening MTFA’s doors one day a month, starting in October, for anyone who has ever received a grant from their local arts councils to come and have a dedicated shopping day here.