About Us
Artists Futures Fund is an independent charity, founded in 1810, and formerly known as the Artists’ Benevolent Fund.
Through our annual Artist Fellowship programme, we award bursaries to emerging visual artists who are facing economic, social, cultural or health barriers that would otherwise prevent them from undertaking their creative practice and advancing their career.
Our Vision
Artists Futures Fund believes that difference and/or disadvantage of any form should never act as a barrier to creative development and artistic expression.
Participation in art and culture enriches people’s lives. Through art we can express ourselves, share our perspectives on our world and our place within it and gain a greater understanding of the lives of others.
Our Vision is to enrich and diversify the UK’s cultural landscape. We do this by providing financial support, mentoring and networking opportunities for early career artists who face wide-ranging challenges so that they can pursue their own artistic futures.
Our Values
As a charitable institution committed to supporting individual artists, Artists Futures Fund strives to:
Listen, learn and respond to artists’ needs.
Be inclusive and accessible.
Support outstanding, distinctive, visionary artists from diverse backgrounds.
Embrace and promote equality and diversity across all that we do and say.
Be an engine for good, creating societal benefits through all that we do.
Be accountable to our beneficiaries and our board.
Improve environmental sustainability.
Be a responsible investor and raiser of funds.
Female artist painting in a studio
“I have the freedom to research, to experiment, and to push the boundaries of what I can do without financial worry.”Sarah Kirk ceramicist Step Change Fellow, 2021–22
Detail of our Royal Charter privy seal (1827)
at the London Metropolitan Archives
Photo: Des Lloyd Behari
History
Founded in 1810, incorporated by Royal Charter in 1827, the Fund is formally named as the ‘The Society for the Management and Distribution of The Artists Fund’. More recently, the charity was known as the ‘Artists’ Benevolent Fund’.
Further information about the history of the charity can be gained through the archives which have been deposited at the London Metropolitan Archives.
In 2024, the Board of Trustees took the decision to change the working name of the charity to Artists Futures Fund.
Today, the work of the Fund reflects the changes in the art world that have happened since the beginning of the 19th century. Its objectives were re-defined by the Trustees as being ‘a charity that supports visual artists of all kinds’.