Jacolby Satterwhite Receives $25k Artists Living with Cancer Grant
3July 17, 2026
The Artists Living With Cancer Grant, an unrestricted award of $25,000 that was co-developed by theRema Hort Mann Fund(RHMF) and theRobert Rauschenberg Foundation, has just named its inauguralrecipient. The awardee is Jacolby Satterwhite, a prolific conceptual and digital artist who has grappled with cancer since he was twelve years old.
Satterwhite, who hails from Columbia, South Carolina, will be presented with the Artists Living With Cancer Grant at the RHMF’s thirtieth anniversary gala in October. A childhood diagnosis of bone cancer threatened to end Satterwhite’s creative career before it began, but instead, the artist has created a dizzyingly varied body of work that employs 3D animation, sculpture, performance, and video; his work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and presented at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in 2021.
In 2023, A Metta Prayer, Satterwhite’s joyful multimedia installation project, was projected across the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall. Satterwhite’s art is also in the collections of the MoMA and the Whitney in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, Finland. The artist is currently undergoing treatment to remove and recover from an infection that had developed in a prosthetic in his right arm.
“I hope this grant creates a shift in the art world,” Satterwhite told the Art Newspaper in an interview. “The art world can be very fickle and fleeting, but artists give their whole lives to their work. When serious illness interrupts that, there should be more space for care, dignity and support. This is my third stint, and it feels especially transformative, because it forced me to stop in a way I never had before. I had to step off the hamster wheel and become domestic, focused on healing and survival, and that meant losing access to parts of my artistic process. It made me understand even more deeply that my life and my practice are not separate.”
The Artists Living With Cancer Grant was developed to aid visual artists in the New York City metro area who are also undergoing cancer treatment; the one-time award is intended that the funds will go towards helping artists keep up with medical bills, caregiving bills, studio costs, and housing costs.
The Rema Hort Mann Fund, a nonprofit which has supported over 650 artists fighting cancer since launching thirty years ago, also awards funds to emerging artists and individual cancer patients. In addition to collaborating on the Artists Living With Cancer Grant, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation also offers $5,000 medical emergency grants for artists with medical or dental emergencies.
“We envision the grant growing into a sustainable program that provides direct support to more visual artists each year, while building a broader network of care across the arts community,” Elysia Borowy, director of RHMF, said. “We are actively fundraising to expand the programme and ensure its long-term impact.”