Anonymous Was a Woman, a grant-making organization that has quietly funded woman-identifying artists since 1996, has announced its 2025 recipients: 15 artists receiving $50,000 each to support their work without strings or expectations.
The list spans photographers, painters, sculptors, and performance artists whose work is already gaining institutional recognition. Candida Alvarez, a painter whose retrospective recently closed at El Museo del Barrio in New York, is among them. So are Park McArthur, whose survey exhibition traveled to major museums in Vienna and Germany this year, and Lola Flash, whose photographs are currently on view at MoMA. Kunié Sugiura, a photographer with a recent show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Sonya Kelliher-Combs, a sculptor featured in "An Indigenous Present" at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, round out the visible tier of the cohort.
What makes this different
The organization's founder, Susan Unterberg, kept her identity hidden for 22 years after launching the fund in 1996. She only revealed herself publicly in 2018, by which point the organization had already supported artists like Joan Jonas and Simone Leigh. That anonymity wasn't a gimmick — it was a deliberate choice to let the work, not the donor's identity, be the story.
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Start Your News DetoxUnterberg's statement on this year's class carries particular weight: "In a period when both artistic freedom and women's rights are increasingly vulnerable, I am more inspired than ever by this year's recipients. Their vision, rigor, and originality remind us what is at stake."
The full 2025 cohort also includes Ambreen Butt, JoAnne Carson, Cecelia Condit, Michelle Marcuse, Nicole Miller, Narcissister, Dhara Rivera, Linda Stark, Hong-An Truong, and Paula Wilson.
For artists navigating a funding landscape that has historically favored certain voices, unrestricted grants like these function as both practical support and institutional validation. The money arrives without the burden of explaining how it will be spent or proving its impact in advance.
The organization's three-decade track record suggests this year's recipients will join a lineage of artists whose work will shape conversations for years to come.
