GIA Blog

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.

Cultural organizations are increasingly being called upon to refuse funding that their critics regard as ethically questionable, such as private prisons, tear gas, opioids, environmentally damaging sources of energy, etc.

Humans inherently process change as loss, and there is a foundation for this. Change is loss of the past. And, change imposed upon us from without is especially painful, as so many in the cultural world are learning. The only way out of this pain is to be the leaders of it.

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.

An article in Stanford Social Innovation Review tells the story of a 1970s partnership between wealthy white liberals and black activists "to improve race relations and the living standards of urban black citizens in Boston."

In a recent post, Melissa A. Berman, Renee Karibi-Whyte, and Olga Tarasov of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, state that "trust in philanthropy is eroding."

A new Artist in Residence Program was announced by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) and the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH), the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) reported in a blog post.