Artists & Mothers Names 2026 Grant Recipients as Childcare Costs Reshape the Studio
A New York City nonprofit is using a modest grant to address one of the art world’s least glamorous pressures: childcare. Artists & Mothers has announced the 2026 recipients of its $25,000 award for artists who identify as mothers, a program that provides funding intended to cover nine months of childcare for emerging and mid-career artists raising a child under the age of 3.
This year’s recipients are Mimi Ọnụọha, Nickola Pottinger, Sara Cwynar, and Trisha Baga. Their practices span photography, sculpture, collage, installation, and performance, but the grant’s significance lies less in medium than in the conditions it acknowledges. For artists with very young children, time is often the scarcest material in the studio.
Artists & Mothers was founded by artist Maria De Victoria and arts consultant Julia Trotta, who set the grant amount to approximate the average annual cost of full-time childcare in New York City. The program is now in its second grant cycle. Its first award went to Carissa Rodriguez.
The 2026 recipients each work in distinct registers. Ọnụọha’s practice often examines the relationship between human and machine systems; Pottinger, born in Jamaica and raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, makes sculptural works she calls “duppies,” drawing on Jamaican patois for ghosts; Cwynar, a Vancouver-born photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist based in Brooklyn, is known for collages that probe domesticity, consumption, and capitalism; and Baga, a Queens native, moves between multimedia installation, ceramics, and performance while exploring technology’s reach into everyday life.
The artists’ responses to the grant were strikingly direct. Pottinger said the support gives her daughter access to childcare and education while allowing her to continue her practice. Ọnụọha called the organization rare for treating both motherhood and creative labor as work. Cwynar described having a baby as an artist in America as “a daunting proposition,” adding that the grant is “an absolute game changer.”
Baga, meanwhile, has spoken about returning to filmmaking while sharing a studio with a toddler, a reminder that the logistics of making art rarely unfold in isolation. In that sense, Artists & Mothers is not simply underwriting childcare. It is naming a structural reality that many artists have long absorbed privately: without support, the studio and the nursery can become competing claims on the same day.
As more institutions talk about access and sustainability, the program offers a concrete model for what support can look like when it is tied to the actual cost of care.
