GIA Blog

From Patricia Brandes, executive director of the Barr Foundation....

"We are delighted to announce the appointment of San San Wong as Senior Program Officer in the Arts, effective August 13, 2012. San San brings rich experience in arts administration, innovative program development, and philanthropy to Barr. 

The next installment of the 2012 GIA Web Conference Series, Arts and Journalism in the Digital Age, has been rescheduled for Tuesday, June 19 at 11:00 PDT/2:00 EDT. Join Douglas McLennan, ArtsJournal, and Bill O'Brien, National Endowment for the Arts, for an overview of the field of arts journalism and initiatives supporting its evolution in a changing culture. The 50-minute Web Conferences is free to members and open to everyone. The non-member rate is $35.

The business section of the most recent Sunday New York Times featured an article by Caitlin Kelly on artists' relief funds and the significant impact they have on an artist's ability to recover from a career-threatening emergency. The article includes interviews with emergency funders like Cornelia Carey, executive director of GIA member CERF+. The article can be found on the Times website, here.

In June, GIA's photo banner features projects supported by Mertz GIlmore Foundation in New York. Founded as the Mertz Foundation in 1959 by Joyce Mertz Gilmore and her parents, Harold and LuEsther Mertz, the foundation was renamed in 2002 to honor the memory of Joyce’s husband, Robert Wallace Gilmore, an active steward of the foundation. The foundation’s program areas, climate change solutions and support for New York City arts and communities, reflect the interest of the founders.

I spoke at the Association of Arts Administration Educators(AAAE) annual conference at Claremont University, in Claremont, CA last week. Since I taught in a masters in arts administration program for 12 years and chaired an undergraduate performing and visual arts department for four, I was delighted to be part of this conference and to attempt to connect my current world of arts philanthropy with those who are teaching arts managers and leaders.

Reports are available from the recent international seminar, Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture which was convened by the Salzburg Global Seminar in collaboration with the Washington-based Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Linda Essig, director of the Arizona State University arts entrepreneurship program, posts to her blog Creative Infrastructure:

Yesterday, a great victory has been won by everyone in the state of Kansas who loves the arts. The Governor this morning signed the budget, which includes $700,000 for the newly-created Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission.

For the first time in the 47-year history of the National Endowment for the Arts, the agency's Office of Research & Analysis will award grants to 15 research projects to investigate the value and impact of the arts in the United States. These grants, totaling $250,000, support projects designed to use existing, high-quality datasets to examine novel and significant research questions about the arts. The grantees are from 11 states and their awards range from $10,000 to $30,000.

The region’s cultural organizations are showing signs of recovery from the fiscal crisis and deep recession that began in 2007, according to an annual survey conducted by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Individual giving is up, foundation support is up, earned income is up, and even some hiring is under way, the survey shows.