Arts and Social Justice

The Open Society Foundations announced recently the launch of its Culture and Art program, which "seeks to advance diverse artistic practices and strengthen locally-led cultural spaces around the world through grantmaking, capacity building, and convening power."

The Arts and Activism (A&A) ColLABoration, a pilot project funded jointly by The CrossCurrents and Compton Foundations to support the work of artists in partnership with organizers and activist organizations, announced five projects that were awarded $30,000 to engage in arts-integrated organizing through themes of democracy, power, and freedom in the United States.

Films like Roma, A Fantastic Woman, and Spotlight and Ava DuVernay’s scripted series When They See Us were produced by Participant Media, a production company founded "on the mission of using visual storytelling to amplify social issues and to spur equitable social change," as a recent article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review points out.

“Contested Memory” is an essay series I recently wrote for Monument Lab (see http://monumentlab.com/news/2019/2/24/the-rebel-archive). In the first two essays, I drew from a range of theorists and writers to examine how the historical record is constructed through active erasure and probed at the radical potential that imagination holds for charting black cartographies of freedom.

After a full day of leading workshops on how to talk about race thoughtfully and deliberately that showed an overrepresentation of employees of color and an underrepresentation of white employees, Ijeoma Oluo shares her thoughts on how "so often the white attendees have decided for themselves what will be discussed, what they will hear, what they will learn."

In a recent Nonprofit AF blog post, Vu Le states that the more privilege people have, the more likely they are to complain about the lack of solutions proposed. He calls it "solutions privilege,” "the privilege of expecting solutions that would align with one’s worldview and not challenge one’s privilege."

Each year, Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built as a punishing fortress in 1829 outside Philadelphia, gets hundreds of visitors to explore its grounds. At some point, tackling the site's history, as The New York Times reported, was not enough and addressing mass incarceration as a crisis in the United States was the answer.

The Highlander Research and Education Center, a civil rights center in Tennessee founded in 1932, stated that a fire that burned its main office last Friday may have been intentionally set, after a “symbol connected to the white power movement” was found spray-painted in the parking lot next to the rubble of the building, as The New York Times reported.

Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) announced Interchange, a new pilot program created to strengthen communities and individual artists within the organization's region by supporting artist-led projects focused on social impact.

Successful cultural organizations masterfully manage contributed and earned income. This income mix can include corporate grants, endowment income, foundation grants, government grants, individual donations, membership fees, ticket sales, and unrelated business income (National Endowment for the Arts 2012). Although Alicia Schatteman and Ben Bingle (2017) have suggested that government funding is the most stable of these sources of income, foundations have played a significant role in the development of the US cultural sector (Renz 1994; Negley 2017).