Grantee Database
Life On Art
Grant Year
2026-27
Grant Program
General Operating Support
Award Amount
$12,000.00
Project Description
With support from the California Arts Council (CAC), Life On Art will sustain and grow our community-based healing arts programs across Northern California, reaching communities that traditional arts access leaves out.
CAC funds will support planning, program delivery, and partnership development across our four program areas:
– Large-scale community-made public art installations that fuse community artmaking, creative arts therapies, and public exhibition;
– Programming inside psychiatric, correctional, transitional-housing, education, and mental-health facilities;
– Youth and community arts education, including our annual Arts and Social Activism community service weeks for Petaluma teens; and
– Our Copeland Street community art space in Petaluma — a gallery, exhibition space, and artist collective open to the public.
Our participants include people experiencing incarceration, psychiatric patients, at-promise youth, LGBTQIA+ community members, care partners, low-income residents, those in transitional housing, and anyone seeking mental well-being.
Organization Summary
Life On Art’s work takes shape across studios, public installations, and institutional partnerships, with each program below extending the healing power of art to a different community.
Large-scale collaborative installations. Sites have included the Museum of Sonoma County (Santa Rosa, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023); the Marin County Civic Center; the County of Monterey Administration Building (Salinas); the Soledad Post Office; our studio in Petaluma; and San Quentin State Prison.
In-institution programming. Community artmaking inside psychiatric facilities (California Department of State Hospitals, Napa); correctional institutions (San Quentin Rehabilitation Center; Central California Women’s Facility, Chowchilla; Correctional Training Facility, Soledad); and the LifeMoves transitional housing facility in Palo Alto.
Heart Stories. Our flagship community-artmaking model, scalable and deployable to institutions and communities nationwide. Designed for people navigating hardship: participants build, paint, and story a winged heart over multiple weeks, with their winged hearts exhibited publicly.
Feather Journeys. For frontline staff who carry other people’s pain. In connective multiple short art sessions, participants create a hand-crafted feather that becomes part of a permanent winged heart sculpture at their workplace.
Community Hub. Studio artmaking and workshops, resident artists, community builds, volunteer artmaking, and hosted events at our 10,000 sq. ft. Copeland Street space.
Custom educational program. For schools, organizations, other nonprofits, and corporations on the transformational and rehabilitative power of art.
The ‘Free People Project’. A partnership with Sonoma County Library launching in Summer 2026 — a multi-year community art initiative that builds twelve winged hearts, one for each of Sonoma County’s library branches, with hundreds of community members. The twelve hearts will tour libraries, county agencies, hospitals, and the Museum of Sonoma County before joining the library’s permanent special collection.
Organization
Life On Art
Address
133 Copeland Street Suite C1A
PETALUMA
94952
County
Sonoma
Region
Bay Area – Other
Website
Congressional District
CA2
State Assembly District
District #10
State Senate District
District #3
