Jacolby Satterwhite has been named the inaugural recipient of the Artists Living With Cancer Grant, a new $25,000 award co-presented by the Rema Hort Mann Fund (RHMF) and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Satterwhite will be presented with the inaugural grant, the first such partnership between RHMF and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, at the former’s 30th anniversary gala on October 28.
The new grant is meant to build on RHMF’s Peter Hort Quality of Life Cancer Grants, which have provided over $9 million in funding to over 400 artists living with cancer and 2,300 cancer patients over the last 30 years. (The grant’s namesake, art collector Peter Hort, died in 2022 of bile duct cancer at 51.)
The new program provides unrestricted, direct financial support to New York City–based visual artists undergoing active cancer treatment, and is meant to help artists address the financial and emotional challenges that arise during treatment.
Satterwhite, who was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1986 and lives and works in Brooklyn, has been celebrated for a conceptual practice that spans immersive installation, virtual reality, and digital media, engaging themes of ritual, fantasy, freedom, and world-building. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, among others. Most recently, his six-channel video commission A Metta Prayer was on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall from October 2023 to January 2024. His 2020 film We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other was on view at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College earlier this year.
“I have extreme gratitude for the grant. I’ve known the Fund for almost two decades now,” Satterwhite told ARTnews, adding that he first connected with the Horts in 2013 and has long admired their activism around cancer. He said he has often donated artworks to RHMF’s fundraisers. “As a cancer patient since I was 12 years old, I always thought there needs to be more done for artists dealing with this.”
Last year, Satterwhite started a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for his medical treatment after receiving a dire diagnosis from his doctor, who informed him that he would likely need seven surgeries to recover from osteomyelitis. While he is now in recovery, Satterwhite said that he is just now going through occupational therapy and rehab and is still rebuilding his studio practice.
“It’s literally changed my entire perspective and DNA around how I operate as an artist,” he said. “That level of community outreach and support made me feel full in a way where I can only think about my reciprocity and what form that will take.”
Satterwhite called the grants “a necessary bridge” for artists like him, who are often left unable to support themselves while they go through treatment and recovery.
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s involvement in the grant reflects a long institutional history of artist emergency support. Rauschenberg himself founded Change, Inc. in 1970 to provide emergency medical aid to professional artists. Since 2020, the foundation has partnered with New York Foundation for the Arts to provide Rauschenberg Emergency Medical Grants, and since 2022, has funded the Rauschenberg Dancer Emergency Grants program through the same organization.
“Robert Rauschenberg understood the need to provide urgent and treatment-related financial stability to artists at moments when care is critical, and the Foundation is honored to carry this mission forward by co-presenting the Artists Living With Cancer grant,” Courtney J. Martin, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, said in a statement.
Elysia Borowy, executive director of RHMF, noted that the grant reflects the organization’s broader mission as it marks its third decade. “As we celebrate 30 years of impact, we are reminded that meaningful change is only possible through the generosity, vision, and partnership of our community,” Borowy said in a statement. “Together, we are building a stronger network of care and support for artists facing cancer.”
