Carmen Graciela Díaz's Blog

For the months of December and January, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by 4Culture.

As a multi-disciplinary public development authority, 4Culture represents a unique model of funding, tackling “culture” via a four-pronged approach: arts, heritage, preservation, and public art. Chartered by the King County Council in Washington State, the agency invests public dollars into the area’s cultural ecosystem, which is home to Seattle, that state’s largest city.

"All art is political. In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political."

Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter co-founder and performance artist has created a new online MFA program, the Social and Environmental Arts Practice, that combines art, social justice, and community organizing at Prescott College in Arizona, the Los Angeles Times reported.

In "Who Are Land Acknowledgments Really For?," Lauren Wingenroth writes about land acknowledgments in the dance world.

The City of Seattle published recently its first Creative Economy report. According to the report, the Office of Film & Music, Office of Economic Development, and Office of Arts & Culture undertook studying the local creative economy "because we know that creativity is vital to the health of our economy, both now and in the future."

Seven colleges and universities across the United States are receiving nearly $2M from ArtPlaceAmerica (ArtPlace) to support creative placemaking teaching, learning, and research for undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.

Sometimes information comes from unexpected places. National information on U.S. students’ engagement and performance in music and visual arts came from an unexpected place: NAEP’s 2019 math assessment, as Claus von Zastrow, principal at Education Commission of the States, wrote in a recent blog post.

In its 80 year history, Guggenheim Museum has named Ashley James as its first black curator to work at the museum full-time, ArtNews reported.

A couple of days ago, men and women marched 26 miles through New Orleans, dressed as participants from a slave rebellion that happened there two centuries ago, as The Guardian and The New York Times reported. The re-enactment, led by New York artist Dread Scott, retraced the route of one of the largest -and overlooked- slave rebellions in US history: the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which 500 enslaved people of African descent marched toward New Orleans from the surrounding sugar plantations.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded recently $750,000 to the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law to support its work in investigating and archiving acts of racial terror in the South between 1930 and the 1970s, explains the announcement.