Arts and Higher Education

Edirin Oputu from Temple News interviewed Linda Earle, associate graduate director in the Art History Department for the arts management MA at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Oputu summarized, “We spoke with her about how organizations and artists can push for greater equity, how the arts scene is developing and what needs to be done to bring about institutional change.”

Last month, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, along with Omidyar Network, announced more than $40 million in grants to support the establishment of multidisciplinary academic centers dedicated to reimagining the relationships among markets, governments, and people. "At a time when conventional economic prescriptions are failing and democratic governance is threatened around the world, scholars at leading academic institutions will investigate how economies should work in the 21st century and the aims they should serve," the Foundation stated in their announcement.

The Henry Luce Foundation announced recently the commitment of $14 Million in new grants intended to amplify diverse experiences and fund community-engaged projects.

We all know by now how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the educational system. Inevitably, the pandemic has greatly impacted arts education in university-level art programs as some colleges continue to change or revisit their plans for in-person learning, remote classes, a hybrid model, as an article in The Los Angeles Times reports.

A $150,000 planning grant to James Madison University from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow the University’s College of Arts and Letters and the JMU Libraries to learn, grow, and deepen their partnership for an integrated library, states the announcement.

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.

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.

Spelman College received recently a $5.4 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation to establish the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies.