Nadia Elokdah's Blog

Philanthropist Laurie M. Tisch announced this week that 14 New York City-based organizations will receive grants in the Illumination Fund’s new Arts & Mental Health program, an expansion of its Arts in Health Initiative.

"[Elizabeth] Alexander came to the organization with a specific mandate, she said, of 'sharpening the focus—doing all the work, every penny, through a social justice lens.' That meant asking what she called sharper questions," writes Maximilíano Durón in ArtNews' profile of Alexander's leadership at the helm of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018. “What are the stories that we haven’t heard about? What are the cultural points of view that have not been centered? What are the units that have not been resourced or uplifted?”

"Eighteen months after an unprecedented movement for racial justice, many organizations are feeling frustration and disappointment. What now?" writes Benjamin Abtan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as 2021 comes to a close. Abtan continues, "In many of these cases, racial equity fatigue stems from the distance between the high hopes for change felt in 2020 and the current situation."

Artist Kevin Beasley was invited to create an artwork in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. "Instead, he bought land, cleared it, and began to plant a garden," writes Siddhartha Mitter in the New York Times. "By now, many local faces were familiar to him; others were not, and he listened intently to their suggestions, and also to their doubts and cautions."

In a new report, "Creative Equity National Survey Culture: Race, Myth, Art = Justice," a project of Creative Justice Initiative, was designed in 2018 to address the racist, discriminatory, and unjust policies that continue to victimize disenfranchised communities.

Angelique Power, president and CEO of the Detroit-based Skillman Foundation, speaks with eJewishPhilanthropy on the power — and necessity — of centering trust within grantmaking. "What’s complicated about philanthropy is that money and power are often synonymous," Power says, "And so while the sector is directed at helping, being the arbiter of how capital moves makes you — in some ways, it jeopardizes trust, just in that act right there. It creates this uneven scenario where people are coming to you asking for funding."

In a recent review in Elle Decor, art critic Kimberly Drew surveys the first-of-its-kind period room that presents an imagined Black home in New York City. "The exercise coined by [Saidiya Hartman, Ph.D.] is the work of overlaying historical gaps with imaginative narrative building," Drew writes. "This practice stems from the reality that the everyday lives of Black people have often been underdocumented or plainly ignored."

In a new report series, "Overlooked: AAPI and Native American communities in philanthropy," Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) offers data and insight from AAPI and Native American nonprofit leaders and communities are shared that elucidate these concerning trends.

Sharnita C. Johnson, chair-elect of Grantmakers in the Arts Board, has been chosen as a winner of the 2021 Knight Arts Challenge in Detroit!.

National Performance Network (NPN) recently announced inaugural awardees of the Take Notice Fund, a pilot program awarding $5,000 grants to artists and culture bearers of color living and working throughout Louisiana whose bodies of work represent excellence, dedication to their practices, and contributions to this country’s discourse about racial equity and cultural preservation.