The J. Paul Getty Trust and California Community Foundation have announced grants totaling $2.7 million in support of COVID-19 relief for visual arts organizations and artists across Southern California.

The grants include more than $2 million in emergency relief funding over the next three months to eighty arts organizations to address urgent financial needs, including staff salaries, rent, and the purchase of supplies to comply with public health guidelines. In addition, emergency grants of $2,000 were awarded to four hundred individual artists through the foundation's Relief Fund for L.A. County Visual Artists.

According to the Getty, small and midsize arts organizations have been especially hard hit by the virus, exposing longstanding inequities in funding, particularly for organizations serving communities of color.

"The arts are a source of expression, resistance, and healing," said Joan Weinstein, director of the Getty Foundation, an operating program of the Getty Trust, which established the $10 million LA Arts COVID-19 Relief and Recovery Fund. "But our creative artists and arts organizations, who do so much to advocate for social change, will not survive this pandemic and its economic fallout if we don’t take action now to support them."