Carmen Graciela Díaz's Blog

For the month of May, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by First Nations Development Institute.

The Flamboyan Arts Fund and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Broadway Cares, launched a $1 million emergency relief fund to support individual artists and cultural organizations in Puerto Rico to help mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the arts and culture sector in the island.

"Approaching your grantmaking with a racial justice lens is not just for times of crisis. By employing this lens at all times, funders can unlock long-term transformational impact and strengthen the community-wide infrastructure needed to foresee, respond to, and avert potential damages from crises like the COVID-19 pandemic."

In a recent Monument Lab podcast, artist Mel Chin says the lesson from the coronavirus pandemic situation and other situations “is to exercise self-critique and empathy. How do you have to rekindle it for each situation,” he says.

When the research started in 2017 for Freedom Maps: Activating legacies of culture, art, and organizing in the U.S. South, an upcoming report, the authors could not have imagined our current reality.

As arts grantmakers navigate the current stages of "a prolonged effort to stem the impact of COVID-19, many are already looking beyond the pandemic," as Mike Scutari writes at Inside Philanthropy.

A page in Medium seeks to help Native Americans find actions and answers in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Michael Woestehoff, Navajo Tribal Citizen, compiled an information hub of agencies taking action as well as details on gaming facilities, Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) school closures, to tribal leader emergency declarations.

Assembly Bill 5, a California law that went into effect Jan. 1, 2020, impacts contract workers, including artists. A research paper breaks down the law and its effects on businesses of all types throughout California, including the nonprofit arts and culture sector. A recent agreement, however, signals this law could soon be adjusted to exempt music professionals.

The University of Florida, supported by ArtPlace, a ten-year project to position arts and culture as a core sector of community planning and development by supporting creative placemaking across the U.S., released of a COVID-19 Arts Response repository.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced guidelines to distribute funding to nonprofit arts organizations from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act "to preserve jobs and help support organizations forced to close operations due to the spread of COVID-19," according to the announcement.