We are happy to announce that Matplotlib has been selected to receive a grant from NASA as part of the Open Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries program. We proposed a mix of maintenance and a redesign of the data storage on the artists (the full proposal is here).
This grant will provide partial support for @tacaswell and a second full-time RSE. We will be posting a job description soon.
This call was extremely competative with only 8 of 61 proposals funded (see the list of selected proposals).