Groundwork Grants Awardee: Corita Art Center
One year ago, the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires swept through Los Angeles, impacting thousands of homes and businesses in California. The Corita Art Center, located in downtown Los Angeles, preserves and promotes Corita Kent’s art, teaching, and passion for social justice. Corita’s work reflected her concerns about poverty, racism, and war, and her messages of peace and social justice continue to resonate with audiences today. Today, Corita Art Center supports exhibition loans and public programs, oversees image and merchandising rights, and serves as a resource and archive on her life and work.
The Corita Art Center had recently moved into a new location in downtown Los Angeles when the fires struck. In 2024, the Center received a Groundwork Grant to purchase disaster recovery and preservation supplies along with storage equipment and staff training. Staff quickly began rehousing fragile archival materials and finalizing a disaster preparedness plan for the new space with support from their award and the Northeast Document Conservation Center. The fires forced the Center to put plans into practice and become “a steady point of connection,’ as Executive Director Nellie Scott explains, “linking arms with trusted partners to offer creativity, comfort, and hope when it was needed most.”
“We were able to move quickly, stay connected as a team, protect what we steward and most importantly, keep our doors and hearts open to our community,” Scott recounts.
Corita Art Center volunteers distributing art kits after the LA fires in January 2025
With the Corita Art Center anchoring as a point of community and connection, they distributed more than 1,700 art kits to youth displaced by the fires.
“Receiving the Groundwork Grant met us at a moment of transition into our new location,” says Scott. “It allowed us to […] thoughtfully prepare for the unexpected by strengthening our emergency and disaster plan.” And when devastating fires swept through Los Angeles, “that preparation became real.”
