Backing ambitious ideas in visual art.
A performance recital at 2023 Potential Grantee Agatha Falls
A grant for artists in Erie and Niagara Counties to make and share new work.
Background
Western New York is where electric power as we know it began—when Nikola Tesla harnessed the force of the Niagara River to transmit energy over a great distance, lighting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and transforming the world. Inspired by this legacy of innovation and possibility, the Generator Fund supports artists who are generating new ways of making, sharing, and thinking about art in our region.
What we Fund
Launched in August 2023 by the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA), the Generator Fund is part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program. It is designed to reach artists, experimental collectives, independent organizers, and practitioners whose work often falls outside traditional funding models.
The Fund is grounded in a simple but increasingly rare premise: that visual artists deserve support to develop their practices, pursue ambitious ideas, and make great work.
We believe in the public power of art—but we start by investing in the artists themselves.
The Generator Fund supports projects that are public-facing, community-engaged, and materially inventive, but it is not prescriptive about the outcomes. Instead of framing art as a means to an end, the Fund creates space for artists to take risks, explore process, and push creative boundaries on their own terms.
To date, the Generator Fund has awarded 40 grants across two rounds, supporting exhibitions, performances, workshops, publications, gardens, sound works, and new artist-run spaces.
Join an info session to learn more!
Types of Grants
Kinetic Grants are awards up to $5000 to fund an artist’s production for a new project with a publicly accessible component.
Examples may include but are in no way limited to exhibitions, performances, videos or film screenings, books/zines/brochures.
Potential Grants are awards up to $10,000 and are intended to act as seed fund for longer-term projects that foster experimentation, collaboration, and community.
Examples may include, but are not limited to, exhibition spaces (from formal to informal; your bedroom to a rented space); podcasts or radio stations; zines or forums for arts writing; collective spaces; community gardens; public lecture series. This grant is meant to fund artists in collaboration to create new platforms for presentation.
Explore Past Grant Recipients
Take a look at the creative energy Generator artists have sparked across Western New York.
These projects reflect a wide spectrum of voices, materials, and approaches—and may even ignite ideas for what’s possible next.
What Are Jurors Looking For?
Across both grant types, jurors will prioritize proposals that are:
Firmly rooted in visual art. Projects must be visual arts–based in their materials, methods, or goals. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, but proposals should demonstrate how visual art is central to the work.
Innovative and original. We’re looking for ideas that feel fresh—projects that take risks, experiment with form or format, or offer something unexpected. Innovation doesn’t have to mean high-tech; it might mean a new context, a surprising collaboration, or responding to a community need with creativity.
Publicly accessible. Funded projects must be shared with the public in Erie or Niagara Counties. This can take many forms: an exhibition, screening, lecture, publication, installation, performance, workshop, or something else entirely.
Grounded in purpose. We’re drawn to projects that feel specific and intentional—not vague concepts, but clear ideas that reflect the artist’s voice and vision.
Potential Grants in particular should also show:
Collaborative thinking and long-term potential. These projects should build something durable—an ongoing platform, publication, or structure that opens space for future work.
2025 Jury
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Devin T. Mays
Devin T. Mays (b. Detroit, MI) is an artist interested in the here and there of things. He uses sculpture, installation, performance and pictures for pleasure. He often refers to his practice as a place for things to become Things.
Mays has exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; The Power Station, Dallas; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; gta exhibitions, Zürich; Sweetwater, Berlin; F Gallery, Houston; SculptureCenter, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Regards, Chicago among others.
Mays is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Rice University.
Photo: Morgan Mueller -
Full List of 2025 Juoros to be Announced
Program Sponsors
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA) is an art and education project for Buffalo founded by Nando Alvarez-Perez and Emily Ebba Reynolds. Through innovative exhibitions, cross-disciplinary skills-based programming, and arts ecology development, BICA works with artists and creatives to sustain communities through focused, practical engagements with contemporary art. Learn more at thebica.org.
The Andy warhol foundation for the visual arts
Established in 1987 in accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ mission is the advancement of the visual arts. The primary focus of its grant making activity is to support the creation, presentation, and documentation of contemporary visual art, particularly work that is experimental, under-recognized, or challenging in nature.
The foundation’s Regional Regranting Program, launched in 2007, aims to support vibrant, under-the-radar artistic activity by partnering with leading cultural institutions in communities across the country. The program allows the Warhol Foundation to reach the sizable population of informal, non-incorporated artist collectives and to support their alternative gathering spaces, publications, websites, events and other projects.