Art To Be Seen exists for one reason: to make sure LGBTQ+ artists are seen — in their own towns, in their statehouses, and in the halls of power in Washington, D.C. We fund artists where they live, connect them to a national community, and turn their work into a voice that lawmakers can't ignore.

Where This Began

I grew up in Rustburg, Virginia — a small town near Lynchburg, at the edge of the Blue Ridge. It's the kind of place where everyone knows your name, your family, and your business. For a kid figuring out he was different, it was a hard place to be seen.

About ten miles away was Lynchburg, where Jerry Falwell built his empire. Thomas Road Baptist Church. Liberty University. The Moral Majority. Falwell was one of the most vocal anti-gay figures in the country, and his shadow didn't stop at the city limits. The evangelical church shaped everything in our part of the state — how people voted, who was welcome at the dinner table, what got said from the pulpit on Sunday. You didn't have to go looking for it. It was just the air.

I was looking for a way to feel something other than fear. A way to belong somewhere, even if that somewhere was just in my own head.

Art was it. Poetry, painting, music, building things, refinishing old furniture. Anything that let me put something into the world that was mine. In a place where I kept so much of myself hidden, art was the one place I didn't have to.

That never really changed. Through nearly two decades in Washington, DC — on the Hill, on campaigns, in PACs, and across the nonprofit world — I kept coming back to it. Not as a hobby, but as the thing that kept me grounded in work that otherwise would have eaten me alive. And somewhere in there I realized that what had carried me through was the same thing I'd spent my whole career relying on in a different form: storytelling. The difference is that art conveys what testimony can't. It doesn't make an argument. It makes you feel something, and that feeling stays with you.

That's what led me to create Art To Be Seen.

Across the country, LGBTQ+ artists are pouring their souls into work that tells the unvarnished story of their lives. A lot of them are in towns like the one I grew up in, making work with no funding, no network, and no one paying attention. Art To Be Seen exists to change that. We will fund, elevate, and mobilize LGBTQ+ artists from every state in America and carry their work directly into the civic, cultural, and legislative spaces where decisions about LGBTQ+ lives get made.

This is not a protest organization. It is an undeniable presence.

Through Art To Be Seen, LGBTQ+ artists will be heard, seen, and connected to a body of work so comprehensive and so undeniably American that no institution and no administration can ignore it forever.

Alex Grant

Founder and Executive Director, Art To Be Seen