Grantmakers in the Arts

On the book, Are the Arts Essential?: “As Arthurs puts it, in addressing ideas and ‘challenging our systems’ we have been more easily in awe of the arts than activated by them. To begin with, I am greatly in favor of the ‘we,’ for this convergence of intelligent minds and pens speaks for all of us, wherever we are meeting it,” explains The Brooklyn Rail contributor Mary Ann Caws. “I shall borrow the words of Catharine R. Stimpson about our need for ‘cultural interpreters who can tell the story of this brilliant pluralism’ and affirm that we have exactly those here.”

Forecast Public Art announced the Public Art for Racial Justice Fund to, “provide much needed guidance, coaching and technical assistance to artists and communities as they undertake the complex task of confronting racial inequities...”

From the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation:

In the first episode of a three-part podcast series by Grantmakers in the Arts, DDCF Program Director for the Arts Maurine Knighton spoke about the impetus behind the Racial Equity Coding Project, which aims to gather data around racial equity funding practices to illustrate a more nuanced and accurate accounting of grantmaking efforts to advance racial equity. The Equity Coding Project began with a culmination of research led by DDCF with Callahan Consulting for the Arts and provides funders with an opportunity to examine and refine their own coding practices, as well as to adopt new data collection practices for the future.

President Biden paid a rare visit to Marín Elementary School in North Philadelphia, a program that received funding from the American Rescue Plan. ArtistYear teaching artist fellow Coco Allred reflected on her experience of having the American leader come to the classroom.

Dr. Manuel Pastor was the featured guest on the Bioneers’ podcast episode Building the Solidarity Economy: Awakening to Our Mutuality and Shifting the Terrain of Power. The distinguished Professor discussed, “how shocks to the system are precipitating a great awakening and growing movements to transform the economy to our economy.”

Memphis Music Initiative (MMI) recently announced the launch of "Call & Response: The Sound of Black Arts Revolution," a campaign and "a call to funders in the creative youth development nonprofit space to do better by the Black and brown leaders who give so much of themselves to their communities, and the young people they serve. Black Pay Matters. Black Legacy Matters. Black Rest Matters," according to the announcement in late March.

“When we fight pipelines, when we fight oil projects, when we fight all of the extractive development that harms our mother, we don’t do that just for ourselves,” Krystal Two Bulls says, director of the LANDBACK Campaign within the Indigenous advocacy organization NDN Collective in Grist. Elaborating, “We do that so we can all actually have an earth to live on in the future. So that future generations that aren’t even born yet have an earth to come to.”

"For decades, arts and music education in California has been dying a slow death in many schools, strangled by budget cuts amid an ongoing emphasis on core subjects like reading and math and test scores as the measure of student success," reports Louis Freedberg in EdSource.