Abigail's Blog

For her latest post to GIA's 2011 Talk Back blog, Alexis McGill Johnson addresses anxiety as an outcome of personal racial and cultural bias. She provides a link to web-based set of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) designed to ascertain levels of racial, age, and other bias. I took the race-related test and not only was I intrigued by the results, I had to consider the potential impossibility of a truly bias-free test.

From Graydon Royce, writing for the Minneapolis StarTribune, an inspiring report on four Minnesota arts leaders who have turned their organizations around, through innovation and elbow grease. One featured leader, Laura Zabel, executive director of Springboard for the Arts, made a notable appearance at the 2010 GIA Conference in Chicago as a presenter at the Support for Individual Artists Preconference.

Culturelab is a joint initiative of leading arts consultants and the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, a nationally recognized interdisciplinary research center dedicated to informing policies that affect the arts, humanities, and cultural heritage. On April 29, Culturelab staged the Emerging Practice Seminar 2011, billed as a concerted effort to bring forward promising new practices in the cultural sector and transmit them to the field.

In May, the photo banner at the top of the website features a rotating series of performance and artwork photographs provided by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, a GIA member. The photographs document projects funded through the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Haas Fund supported by two additional GIA members, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation. Our gratitude to Frances Phillips, Program Director for the Arts and The Creative Work Fund at the Haas Fund, for curating this first-class selection of images.

Video from last week's Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media webinar, a funder briefing co-sponsored by GIA, is now available on the GFEM website, here. Titled Sustaining and Growing Community Media Centers: A Funder Briefing, the excellent presentation—I participated and walked away with a great deal—covers the following:

Chris Langston, program director at the John A. Hartford Foundation, participated in the April 6th Thought Leader Forum on Arts and Aging, which was co-sponsored by GIA, Grantmakers in Aging, and the National Center for Creative Aging. He reflects on the days proceedings on the Hartford Foundation blog, outlining several potential strategies for a collaboration between arts, aging, and health funders.

I have Tyler Green's daily 3rd of May (titled after Goya's painting of the same name) post supplied to my iGoogle home page, also daily. Green's description of his undertaking follows below. My two cents: By pairing current events (or opinions or quips) with art, the gravity of the moment and the resonance of the artwork, they both grow.

In an article for boston.com, Michael Rezendes outlines Boston's updated tax-related-non-taxing of the city's larger education, health, and cultural nonprofits. He explains:

Last fall, I blogged about the launch of Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes' nonprofit social networking site, Jumo. Since then, over 15,000 nonprofits and NGOs have created profiles on the Facebook-intertwined Beta site. Kerry A. Dolan interviewed Hughes and reported yesterday on the website's progress for Forbes:

An April 2011 report by the American Association of Museums outlines the major findings of a survey completed by 383 AAM members. Drawing from a cross-section of U.S. museum and collection types, the authors of U.S. Museums Continue to Serve Despite Stress identify a series of common practices and challenges: