Arts and Community Development

"Artists are used to dancing in the complexity. We like to make something where nothing exists; to explore new language around a struggle; to listen profoundly; to create new ways to see the world. Why not put artists in problem-solving roles?"

A recent article on the Oakland Museum of California tackles the challenges and outcomes the institution has faced in the process of understanding and measuring the museum's impact on the local community.

A white paper released by Kresge Foundation explores creative placemaking initiatives and the assessment of community development strategies. The latest white paper on creative placemaking, penned by Maria Rosario Jackson, makes the case on how the field could benefit from a more nuanced understanding of the roots of urban inequality, and improved ways of tracking change in communities.

The Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI)'s AmbitioUS is an initiative designed to act as an experimental arm of the artist-support sector.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced the expansion of its Regional Regranting Program to Cleveland and Denver where it will be administered by the non-profit arts organizations SPACES and RedLine respectively. Baltimore’s program, The Grit Fund (TGF), will come back on line after a one-year hiatus under the new administration of Baltimore Arts Realty Corp (BARCO).

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced it awarded $3.775 million in arts grants to ten organizations that support artists and the creative process.

SOMA Pilipinas, San Francisco’s first Filipino cultural district in the city’s South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood, is meant to celebrate and preserve the Filipino-American community that has been in the neighborhood for over 100 years, reports Next City.

When tasked with presenting the dynamic and multiscalar ecosystem of arts and culture in the Bay Area, the Grantmakers in the Arts team knew that we needed to call upon those engaging deeply with the forces effecting change. Given the evolving nature of space availability, access, and affordability in cities, any system of disruption will, by design, engage a diversity of stakeholders and intervene at multiple levels. From the strongly held position that the arts drive strong, vibrant, diverse communities, Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST) exemplifies one such model.

When I first got to Oakland, I didn’t know where I was. I gave the cabbie who picked me up at the Emeryville Amtrak station an address on Apgar Street. The house where he dropped me off, near 40th and Market, within walking distance of the MacArthur BART station, was where I lived for my first year in California.

The place where my mother met my father, West Oakland’s Esther’s Orbit Lounge, is long shuttered now. The cultural and social institutions that sprang up along Seventh Street made the moment feel like “Harlem of the West.” There is a storied existence in Oakland. It is buried over by unaffordable luxury apartments and gutted out of once black-owned row houses and Victorian homes. When I chose to be a writer, I didn’t know I was choosing to be an anthropologist, archaeologist, and hero.