Fund your Art
“The art world has an access problem. Let’s fix it.”
The Craft of Getting Funded
GrantCraft.ART helps artists fund their art through grants, funding resources, interviews, and practical guidance. Our goal is simple: more artists getting paid, more ambitious work getting funded, and more artists learning the craft of becoming a funded artist.
Start with our latest art grants, watch interviews with funded artists, or join The GrantCraft Brief for practical funding opportunities and guidance.
Meet the Founder
Find me on Linkedin, Facebook Wikipedia
I created Grantcraft.ART to support artists who may lack the resources, networks, or confidence to access funding.
I’m Poem Johnson, the founder of Grantcraft.ART, and an award-winning artist, filmmaker, and educator. I hold a Master of Fine Arts, a Master of Architecture, and a PhD in Fine Arts. Over the past 20 years, I’ve exhibited internationally, won awards, and had work acquired by museum collections. In the last few years alone, I’ve secured major grants such as fellowships and production funding across multiple disciplines. I’ve also taught cultural entrepreneurship at several Universities, and I’ve noticed the same pain points come up over and over.
Learn more about my artistic practice at poemjohnson.com
Biography of Poem Johnson
Poem Johnson was born in Paris in 1986 with heritage that runs through Benin on his father’s side. His clan name, Woede, comes from his Congolese grandfather and translates from the Gen language, spoken by the Mina people of Benin and Togo, as “one who plans for the future as a form of care to the community.” That meaning has stayed close to his work.
He trained first at the École Maximilien Vox in Paris, where he was introduced to art history, typography, and drawing. He then studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, earning a Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts between 2006 and 2011, with a six-month exchange at Hunter College in New York. From there he moved into architecture, completing a Master of Architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais and earning his professional license to practice in 2014.
His shift from architecture to artistic research began with YuYu, a film made in China in 2014. The work marked a turn toward a more investigative practice, one that crossed disciplines and treated the archive not as a finished record but as a living material to be worked with.
The decade that followed was shaped by that turn. Through film, collage, and material experimentation, Johnson built a body of work concerned with how histories get told, who gets to tell them, and what gets left out. His practice treats the archive as something active rather than fixed, where past and present pull on each other and the lines between human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic, document and imagination are deliberately unsettled. The work sits in conversation with a wider lineage of Black artists who have used the archive as a site of re-imagination rather than retrieval, including Saidiya Hartman, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson.
Alongside his studio practice, Johnson has built a parallel life as an educator. He holds a PhD in Fine Arts and has secured significant grant funding across his career. He has mentored, tutored, lectured, and taught cultural entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts, UC Davis, Gothenburg University, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and other institutions.
Find Poem Johnson on Linkedin, Facebook Wikipedia
Selected projects by Poem Johnson
The Sea is History (After Derek Walcott)
Drawing on Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, my textile series “The Sea is History“ tells the story of the Middle Passage through figures where human bodies merge with coral, pearls, and oceanic matter. Developed through collage, drawing, and composition, each work is woven in cotton, wool, and polyester, translating archival and imaginative research into material form. Together, the works surface Afro-diasporic histories, rendering what the sea has long held submerged into the tactile, the sensual, and the colorful.
Practice-based PhD thesis
Imagine it’s the year 2088, and an artist named Poem Johnson has just died at 102, leaving behind a trove of woven textiles, videos, and performances. That speculative fiction is the starting point for Marc Johnson’s PhD research, a creative way of asking a real question: What happens to an artist’s work once institutions take over, and can artists from diasporic communities get ahead of that process on their own terms? The project is rooted in the poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics, which follows Caribbean routes and roots across multiple shores and time periods rather than tracing history back to a single origin point.
Parley: How would you feel about being denied the opportunity to speak your ancestral language?
Parley is a multi-channel video installation, artist book, and photographic series investigating the politics of erasure and access in relation to Indigenous cultural heritage. Developed through a residency at the Vancouver Biennale, the project brought me into collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, the Museum of Vancouver, the Vancouver Maritime Museum and 26 First Nations artists, curators, and knowledge keepers. Working inside museum reserve collections, the work examines how ancestral knowledge is shared, withheld, or revived within colonial institutions re-imagining fieldwork as an artistic methodology, foregrounding the tensions between custodianship and sovereignty.
Inaugural winner of The Cornish Family Prize for Art and Design Publishing
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Acknowledgement for the artist book
This work was made in collaboration with Inrap. Inrap conducts diagnostic operations and preventive archaeological excavations.
The project was made possible with the generous support of LVMH and David Alexandre Gadmer.