ART WORKS CONTINUUM  Project Description & Awards

A Master’s Level Fine Arts Program serving those at the 

Margins and Extreme Interiors of Community

Art Works Works Continuum Project is a Master of Fine Arts Model program, mentoring, and support program serving homeless, previously homeless, and other societally marginalized and underserved artists.  

INCLUSIVE:

The Project is stylistically and thematically non-hierarchal and all-inclusive, embracing 

traditional as well as cutting edge art forms.

Art Continuum offers both pathways of full instruction and then support for totally independent artists for whom support, space, and materials are critical.  

While no style is posited as superior, nevertheless key to 

the project’s history has been a strength in oil painting, (and  

teaching and support in that domain) as well as classical rendering and drawing, with 

subject matter often being urban or edge-of-urban/outsider themes.  

The Art Works Continuum dynamic has evolved through its earlier 

iterations and reiterations such as the first ten years of 

the Lamp Art Project, then the East Hollywood based Art Works Project,

and now is re-shaping itself with San Pedro as its pied de tierre, and 

serving artist-members that are both new to the project, but some who have

been members for up to 20 years, starting, and some still residing in,

Skid Row, and other inner-city areas, as well as all of the Greater Los Angeles

Area.  

AWARDS:

Past and present forms of the project have received awards and grants from: 

Frederick Weisman Foundation, 

Annenberg Family Foundation, 

Eli Lilly Welcome

Back Award Program, 

Aileen Getty Foundation, and many other validating and 

existence sustaining grant-sources.   

Currently the project is utilizing the very small studio of its director,

Rory White, while looking for a larger facility, and currently receives 

Fiscal Sponsorship through Fractured Atlas a nationally acclaimed 

501c3 Fine Arts Fiscal Sponsorship entity. 

The project has previously always worked with a fiscal sponsor or

umbrella nonprofit, with an attempt to keep the project small, Master’s 

Studio in feel and quality, and utilizing film and website to model itself

as a replicable model on a national basis.  

The latter media-dynamics have

impact on large numbers of people, but the former keeps the quality 

and one to one interaction levels exceedingly high and individualized.   

A major focus of the project in its current status has been the involvement

in the documentary motion picture, now complete and released

through Gravitas Ventures, “Passing Through”, directed by Mr. Leslie Dektor,

who is simultaneously making the major Hollywood dramatic film on 

the life of Dorothea Lange, “Lange”, with executive producer David Fincher.

Documentaries and web presence have always been an important

virtual exhibition dynamic for the project.   Previous films, such as 

“Humble Beauty: Skid Row Artists” have showcased the project and 

garnered many film festival, and other, awards, the latter currently 

getting national distribution on public television.   

These dynamics have kept the project successful, aesthetically-educationally 

intimate or personalized, and yet with proven macro-impact at a 

national level.   

Currently the project, while completing the main thrust of its heavy involvement

as subject of “Passing Through”, is now seeking a new studio space and new or renewed sources of funding.