Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY) is a group of fifteen small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts nonprofits committed to sustaining and advancing our diverse institutional practices through collective efforts. Together, we undertake fundraising, organizational initiatives, and promotion to grow and evolve our work, and to ensure that through our unique contributions to this field, our artists, staff members, and publics will continue to experience art as a place of flexibility, experimentation, and artistic community. CANNY members are nimble and flexible, holding a unique space in New York City for artists to develop experimental work that foregrounds crucial issues in our field, while also being a platform for organizational leaders and curators to develop new practices where critical and imaginative dialogues around culture and community are fostered. Together, CANNY member organizations represent a historical nonprofit infrastructure within the five boroughs of New York City, created to sustain, support, and promote artists within a broader local, national, and international art community. Strengthening this infrastructure while at the same time evolving our organizations to meet the challenges and changes of the twenty-first century is central to CANNY’s mission. 

ABOUT CANNY

Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY) is a group of fifteen nonprofit multidisciplinary arts organizations (all with annual operating budgets ranging from $1m to $4m) based in New York City that first aligned in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic in a collective emergency fundraising effort around shared principles of artistic independence and a desire for a sustainable, supported ecosystem of small nonprofits across the city. 

In 2023, our organizations have collectively served nearly 6,000 artists across 97 exhibitions and 817 public and educational programs. We have welcomed 426,000 in-person visitors to our galleries, parks, and performance venues, and served 181,000 attendees with virtual programming. We believe that New York City deserves a strong, independent arts ecosystem, with a plurality of voices that can only exist when we work collectively to ensure that our peer institutions continue to thrive alongside our own. We each pursue different but sympathetic missions in the service of very specific, often hyper-local communities with international reach. Together, we are catalysts for textured and diverse art experiences, and we work to assure that this community of artists and art workers is the standard-bearer in the field of contemporary art and culture. 

CANNY includes the following organizations in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens: Artists Space, Creative Time, The Drawing Center, Eyebeam, The Kitchen, The Laundromat Project, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Performance Space New York, Printed Matter, Recess, SculptureCenter, Socrates Sculpture Park, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Swiss Institute, and White Columns.