Artist Support

We envision a world that respects and supports traditional knowledge within a community, where artists have access to the tools they need to be successful, and where support for artists creates a sustained impact in their well-being and their community’s resiliency. We do not prescribe what traditional knowledge should look like or who gets to hold it. We listen, build relationships, and create the conditions for artists to sustain their practices on their own terms. 

How we Support Artists

SFA’s artist support programs are designed to meet artists where they are, providing direct financial investment, professional development, peer community, and pathways to broader audiences. 

Artists At Work

Artists at Work (AAW) is a national initiative that provides artists in six cities including Tucson with an eighteen-month salary, health care, and professional support as they work alongside community organizations to address local needs through their art practice.

Loom Network

Loom Network is SFA’s professional development and peer community program for traditional and heritage-based artists in the Southwest. SFA hosts and facilitates live gatherings, peer exchange, practical business skills, and community — a program designed by artists, for artists.

Master-Apprentice Artist Award

The Master-Apprentice Artist Award provides direct financial support for highly skilled traditional and heritage-based artists living in Arizona to pass on their artform, culture, and heritage to apprentice learners. The award is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Artist Support Program Leadership

Denise Uyehara

Programs Manager in Artist Services

Denise is a writer, contemporary performance artist, and director who manages SFA’s services for artists, including the Master-Apprentice Artist Award, working to make these programs more accessible for all. A fourth-generation Japanese and Okinawan American, Denise is deeply interested in how we shape identity, culture, and social movements. Her work includes helping create the multidisciplinary performance Shooting Columbus with the Fifth World Collective, a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists.

DUyehara@Arizona.edu