Arts and Social Justice

In a recent article in Alliance Magazine, Nicolette Naylor and David Sampson examine legal action as a key tool for interrogating and challenging power and advancing justice.

Grace Nicolette, vice president, Programming and External Relations of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, wrote recently that her observation from working in philanthropy for more than 15 years "is that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are often left out of conversations around race, either purposefully or by neglect."

In its inaugural year, NPN’s Southern Artists for Social Change program awarded $300,000 through 12 project grants to artists and culture bearers of color engaging in social change in urban, rural, and tribal communities of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Toya Lillard wrote a piece in Hyperallergic that asks "the philanthropic, nonprofit, and education sectors to expand their circles of trust beyond white or white-adjacent executive leadership in order to water the roots."

Philanthropic organizations and funders launched together the California Black Freedom Fund, a new $100 million initiative to provide resources to Black-led power-building organizations in the state over the next five years.

“Where is the point of connection between people who are impacted by these systems of injustice and people who may have thought they had some distance from it? Where do they actually share a similar experience and how do you build a cultural strategy out of that point of connection?”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project initiative will fund, according to the announcement, five projects "focused on confronting the past and shaping the future by challenging the narratives behind America’s monuments."

In a recent Artsy article, Kemi Ilesanmi, executive director of The Laundromat Project (The LP), discussed the mission and the work of this New York–based, POC-centered organization "that aims to meet the concerns of local communities of color and enact change through public engagements with the arts by actualizing spaces like community gardens, plazas, and, yes, laundromats."

This session shared findings from a partnership between GIA and the Cultural Strategies Council and the National Accelerator for Cultural Innovation to explore how non-arts funders can transform their practice to advance racial justice via cultural expression and the arts.

As another systems practitioner aspiring to transformational systems change (from the public health sector and local government), I greatly appreciated and enjoyed the breadth and sharpness of this panel’s expertise and analysis. First was the reminder by Kiley Arroyo of the Cultural Strategies Council that transformational change involves engaging multiple levers at once—at the foundational level, that of “deep culture” or paradigm change. What happens when we start by decentering the Western, settler colonial, extractive worldview? What happens when we start with a different story?

Coco Fusco writes in Hyperallergic that “equity won’t be achieved by a new biennial, another emerging artist of color survey, or a record auction sale by a Black artist.”