Pasadena Art Alliance President Alfrida King convened the 2013 Grants Tea Party with the comment that the annaul event “is probably our most favorite day of the Art Alliance year, it’s such a happy day. To be able to give $237,000 in grants in one fell swoop, it’s just great.”

The event expresses the Pasadena Art Alliance’s mission to tangibly support the contemporary arts. Since 1976, the women of the PAA have awarded in excess of $4.3 million in grants to Southern California artists and arts organizations.

Dubbed the Mad Hatter Tea party, Alliance members gathered at the home of member Betty Duker donning artist chapeaux extraordinaire.

PAA Grants Chair Janice Bea greeted arriving members, explaining that the grants give “seed money for small projects that might not otherwise have broken ground and have been a catalyst in some monumental arts initiatives and exhibition like Pacific Standard Time.”

“You may not know it,” Bea told the gathering, “but the Art Alliance provided funds for one of Marcel Duchamp’s original shows at what is now the Pacific Asia Museum. And we’re active on the sidelines as some of the first Warhol, Oldenburg, Pollock and Stella Exhibitions to name a few.”

Eloquently, Bea told fellow members that her Grants Committee values “each artist that you bring us. Their creative process and varying styles and mediums from ceramics to woodwork, painting, digital and video art, print-making and drawing, you make it apparent that art is a language that all people speak.”

The selection from applicants of grants recipients is ultimately approved by the entire membership.

This year’s list, long and impressive, manifested itself in a platoon of grateful artists and organization representatives at the event to be handed their check.

When Scott Ward received the grant on behalf the Armory Center for the Arts, he said (and perhaps summarized best what all present were thinking): “The truth is that these projects wouldn’t be possible without you. They might exist on paper in some way, they might exist in some pale version, but to have the kind of excellence that the projects come to take on, it’s entirely dependent on you. So we’re extremely grateful”

For more information about the Pasadena Art Alliance, please visit: http://pasadenaartalliance.org/.

Here is a complete list of this year’s awardees:

Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena
Art Center College of Design Pasadena
Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock Pasadena
Craft and Folk Art Museum Los Angeles
Descanto Gardens Pasadena
Fowler Museum at UCLA Los Angeles
Hammer Museum and LA Art Los Angeles
KA Freewaves Los Angeles
LA Art Los Angeles
LACE Los Angeles
LAPS (LA Printmaking Society) Los Angeles
Long Beach Art Museum Long Beach
Los Angeles County Museum Art Los Angeles
Machine Project Los Angeles
Materials and Applications Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles
NewTown Pasadena
Otis Los Angeles
Pacific Asia Musuem Pasadena
Pasadena City College/Visual Arts and Media Studies Division Pasadena
Pasadena Museum of Californa Art Pasadena
Pitzer Art Galleries/Pitzer College Claremont
Pomona College Museum of California Arts Claremont
Sci-Arc Los Angeles
Scripps College/Williamson Gallery Claremont
Self Help Graphics and Art Los Angeles
Side Street Projects Pasadena
Skirball Cultural Center Los Angeles
X-tra Los Angeles