The Art for Justice Fund believes that art creates the compassion and empathy necessary to drive social change. Art is transformative and can imagine for us a future of empathy and shared safety.

The founder, Agnes Gund, was inspired to take a stand against inequality in the criminal justice system after reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and watching Ava DuVernay’s 13th. These storytellers paint a picture of the human toll of mass incarceration that moved her to launch the Art for Justice Fund through the sale of a beloved piece of artwork from her private collection.

The Art for Justice Fund is disrupting mass incarceration by funding artists and advocates working together to reform our criminal justice system. The Fund disrupts the very processes and policies that lead to high prison populations in the first place. In other words, we’re a “de-carceration” fund.