Four Artists Just Got $25,000 Each to Cover One Very Specific Cost

For any artist who also happens to be a mother, the daily juggle often feels less like a dance and more like a high-wire act with no net. Especially in a city like New York, where childcare costs can make your eyes water faster than an onion.

Enter Artists & Mothers, a NYC nonprofit that just stepped in with a refreshingly practical solution: a $25,000 grant to cover nine months of childcare.

Because apparently, creative labor is work, motherhood is work, and sometimes, you just need someone to acknowledge that with a truly satisfying number.

Meet the Parents (and Artists)

This year's four recipients — Mimi Ọnụọha, Nickola Pottinger, Sara Cwynar, and Trisha Baga — are working across every medium imaginable, from photography to sculpture to multimedia installations. And they're all raising children under three years old, which, if you've ever met a toddler, means they're already operating at peak human capacity.

Mimi Ọnụọha, for instance, explores the fascinating (and sometimes terrifying) dance between humans and machines. She's the artist who, in her 2025 video Ground Truths, used a computer model to uncover a mass grave in Sugar Land, Texas. Because apparently, art can also be investigative journalism.

Nickola Pottinger, a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Jamaica, crafts drawings, collages, and sculptures she calls "duppies" (the Jamaican word for ghosts). She blends recycled materials, old family items, and even pigmented pulp from personal documents in a kitchen mixer. Which is one way to repurpose your bills, we suppose.

Pottinger called the grant a "pivotal chapter," noting it provides "invaluable time and space" to make art while being a mom. Ọnụọha put it more bluntly: "Artists & Mothers is the rare organization willing to act like it" when it comes to the double demands of creative work and motherhood.

Then there's Sara Cwynar, a photographer and filmmaker from Vancouver now based in Brooklyn. Her work often critiques capitalism and the idealized images of domestic life we're fed through pop culture and social media. She even uses search engine algorithms to create collages of reclining women and perfect-looking food. Because who among us hasn't been lured in by a perfectly lit muffin?

And Trisha Baga, a Queens-based multimedia artist, is now sharing her studio with her toddler. She told Art in America about her son, Homer, getting excited and saying, "It's time to make video art! Where's my tripod?" Which, frankly, sounds like the opening scene of a very charming documentary.

Cwynar summed up the experience of being an artist-mother in America as "daunting," describing the "insane cognitive dissonance" of immense joy mixed with immense stress. The grant, she says, is an "absolute game changer."

The Why

Founded by artist Maria De Victoria and arts consultant Julia Trotta, the program's $25,000 grant amount wasn't pulled from thin air. It’s roughly the average yearly cost of full-time childcare in New York City. Because sometimes, the most revolutionary thing you can do is just pay for the basics. And let artists get back to making art, not just making ends meet.