About our Artist Grants

Our artist grants are unrestricted awards in recognition of artistic merit. The Saltonstall Foundation is dedicated to sustaining artists and their artmaking.

The Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts annually awards grants of $5,000 to writers and visual artists who live in the central and western counties of New York state. (Please check our grant guidelines to see if you are eligible to apply. Previous Saltonstall Grant Recipients and Fellows are eligible to re-apply after four years.) Grant Recipients have used these grants in a variety of ways, including buying materials, preparing works for exhibit, and taking time to create new work. Grant categories change annually.

2009 Grant Categories: Deadline is January 15, 2009

New categories will be announced later in the summer.

A letter from H.G. Carrillo, 2003 Grant Recipient

Please allow me to reiterate the debt of gratitude and the feelings of joy that I cherish as the result of having been named a 2003 grant recipient by the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. One waits a very, very, very, very, very, very, very long time doing whatever gets done with words or paint and wishing for someone to call it art. So the phone call I received from the Foundation that very hot, near-summer day meant more to me than mere funding. For me, it was one of the most generous nods of approval that I have received to date.

It set me running. And during the year that followed, that one grand gesture of acknowledgement bolstered my confidence as much as it assisted with the paying of the rent, heat and electricity as well as the photocopying, telephone conversations, postage and research-travel necessary to see my first novel, Loosing My Espanish, published (October, Pantheon).

I can’t tell you if I completed the novel as a result of the funding I received from the Saltonstall Foundation. Nor can I necessarily say that I can identify a marked or measurable change in the progress that I made during the last year. I only know that from the moment that I got the news that I was a grant recipient, a growing awareness of the responsibility art and the artist has to others was shaken loose for me.

Funding from your organization was more than the peace of mind that my bills were paid on time, and that I could feed myself properly while I revised the final draft. At the time, it seemed to me that if I had the confidence of an organization like the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, I could afford to give myself some of the same confidence.

H.G. Carrillo

“Loosing My Espanish” tells the story of Oscar Delos-santos, a young Cuban-American schoolteacher coming to terms with his beloved Ama’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s. One of the biggest strengths of H.G. Carillo’s stunning fiction debut is the writer’s ability to navigate seamlessly through the Spanglish that’s second nature to U.S. Latinos. — MARIEL CRUZ