In alignment with Haystack's mission to connect people through craft, the Artist Grant Initiative (AGI) is a 3-year program intended to provide financial support and mentorship for three annual cohorts of emerging and early-career artists.

Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is pleased to announce a Grants for Arts Projects award of $30,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This grant will support The Downeast Maine Arts Residency, a program focused on empowering artists and strengthening the community through digital fabrication and STEAM. In total, the NEA will award 958 Grants for Arts Projects awards, totaling more than $27 million, which were announced as part of its first round of fiscal year 2024 grants.

This is the question asked by Session 1 Haystack Visiting Artist Namita Gupta Wiggers (she/her) as she spent hours among the stacks in the Haystack Library. She is examining how libraries construct knowledge and reflect systems of power, and asks what the collection of books in the Haystack Library conveys about representation in craft. In this video, Wiggers details how she applies her research, and the Shelf Life Project rubric created by Related Tactics, to the Haystack Library.

Haystack is renowned as a place for artists–teachers and students alike–to come together and dig deep into materials and methods through our intensive 1- and 2-week workshops. While this is at the forefront of our programming, the School also serves as a space for visionaries to come and explore ideas and practices that challenge and advance the field of craft. Haystack’s Visiting Artist Program extends our commitment to providing time and space for the development of in-progress projects and new ideas in a variety of creative disciplines…