Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit organization founded by the artist and downtown New York scenemaker John Giorno in 1965, has launched a new need-based grant program inspired by a decade-long AIDS Treatment Project that Giorno oversaw in the 1980s and ’90s.
The new Treat a Stranger Grant awards $4,545 each to a group of 12 artists: Samiya Bashir, Malcolm-X Betts, Pe Ferreira, Mercy Kelly, Agosto Machado, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Gavilán Rayna Russom, Jacolby Satterwhite, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Christopher Udemezue, and two who chose to remain anonymous. (The funds for Machado will be given to his estate following his death last month, after the selection process was complete.)
The unrestricted grant resurrects the spirt of the AIDS Treatment Project, which Giorno started when the epidemic left so many artists in need beginning in the early ’80s. “My intention is to treat a complete stranger as a lover or close friend,” Giorno wrote in reference to the project, for which he gave payments in different amounts to people suffering. “It is in the same spirit as in the golden age of promiscuity, we celebrated life with glorious substances, and made fabulous love with beautiful strangers. Now that life is ravaged with AIDS, we offer love from the same root, in the form of boundless compassion.”
The Treat a Stranger Grant will be an annual program for which an allotment of money will be distributed however the selection jury sees fit—to a group of artists, one artist, or through other arrangements. This year’s jury was identified as anonymous as a result of “a decision made to center the needs of the grant recipients,” according to a press release.
“GPS is all about artists showing up for other artists, which is a simple idea that can take many different forms,” said Anthony Huberman, executive artistic director of Giorno Poetry Systems. “With the Treat a Stranger Grant, GPS allows artists, poets, and musicians to award unrestricted cash grants to other artists, poets, and musicians. The cost of living in New York never seems to stop rising, and this initiative builds on what John Giorno established in the 1980s: in order to continue making great art, artists need money for securing their own livelihoods.”
The new grant is the latest undertaking of GPS, which for the past two years has been presenting events of different kinds at its homebase on the Bowery known as The Bunker. This week features a three-night program of music, lectures, and other activities organized by the artist Mark Leckey. Next month will include a conference on artist-curated exhibitions, and in June, Zoe Leonard will talk to curator Lynne Cooke about the Roma artist Ceila Stojka.
