Grantmakers in the Arts

Creative New York Reports on New York's Creative Sector

June 29, 2015 by Steve

A new report from the Center for an Urban Future looks into the state of New York’s creative sector to see how the people working there are doing in the wake of the city’s economic surge and the transition to a new administration. After an unprecedented investment in cultural capital projects and a strong emphasis on promoting tourism during the Bloomberg administration, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is taking steps to ensure that opportunities to produce and consume culture are broadly shared and that working artists and creative professionals can afford to live and work there. Creative New York proposes more than 20 steps that the de Blasio administration can take to address and ultimately overcome the chief obstacles documented in the report, that was authored by Adam Forman with financial support from New York Community Trust, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Edelman.

June 29, 2015 by Steve

By Ray Mark Rinaldi, Fine Arts Critic for The Denver Post:

Change comes slowly in the world of private foundations, and there’s a kind of comfort in that. Foundations are the bedrock funders of important institutions, like hospitals, universities and museums, and their dedicated giving is crucial to cities that count on their cash. But three years ago, Denver’s Bonfils-Stanton Foundation took a chance on change. Long a contributor to causes across the board, from homeless shelters to opera companies, the organization began steering all of its funding toward the arts. Culture needed the money, the thinking went, and by targeting one area, the foundation could set itself apart from its peers and become a real player in the community.

June 26, 2015 by Steve in Arts Education

Earlier this year, Arts Education Partnership (AEP) announced that the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education have initiated a process for finding a new home for AEP.The NEA has now released the Program Solicitation for the AEP, a competitive process to find the AEP a new home in January 2016. The Arts Endowment requires organizations to submit their proposals electronically through Grants.gov, the federal government’s online application system.

June 24, 2015 by Steve

Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge — a program aimed at supporting temporary public art projects that engage communities, enhance creativity and enrich the vibrancy of cities — has announced four winning projects:

Albany, Schenectady and Troy, New York — Breathing Lights, from artist Adam Frelin
Gary, Indiana — ArtHouse: A Social Kitchen, from artist Theaster Gates
Los Angeles, California — CURRENT: LA River, from artists to be selected
Spartanburg, South Carolina — Seeing Spartanburg in a New Light, from artist Erwin Redl

June 19, 2015 by Steve

From Mike Boehm at the Los Angeles Times:

Americans’ donations to arts and culture rose 9.2% in 2014, the highest increase in nine categories tracked by Giving USA, an annual report on charitable contributions. Overall, however, arts and culture commanded a modest share of the philanthropic pie. Estimated gifts to arts and culture totaled $17.2 billion, according to the report compiled by Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Although that was a record high, it represented only 4.8% of the $358.4-billion total.

June 19, 2015 by Steve

Featured in the current Reader is a review by Lynda Turet of Jeff Chang’s book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, a journey through the nation’s relationship with race from 1963 until today.

June 18, 2015 by Steve

From Mike Boehm, writing for the Los Angeles Times:

Gov. Jerry Brown has a reputation as a budget hawk who’ll pounce on stray spending he thinks could leave California’s state government with IOUs that its coffers can't cover — and he lived up to it Tuesday, striking a deal with lawmakers that pares $2.2 billion from the budget that the Legislature had passed the day before. But the hawk is sparing at least one mouse-sized spending increase that will begin to restore California’s perpetually withered funding of the California Arts Council, the state agency that makes grants to nonprofit arts organizations across the state.

June 18, 2015 by Steve

From Ruth McCambridge at Nonprofit Quarterly:

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, former porn theater The Dollhouse is no more, but it will soon be repurposed thanks to the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST). The building will soon become home to CounterPulse, a performance arts nonprofit that promotes risk-taking as a central part of its mission…Shelley Trott, the director of arts strategy and ventures at the Kenneth Rainin Foundation in San Francisco, sits on the board of CAST and was instrumental in getting the Trust off the ground.

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Future of the Field: Cross-Sector Creative Placemaking Series

Video from the GIA 2021 Conference are now available for streaming.

The Racial Equity Coding Project: Unpacking The “Why”

In this first of a three-part discussion, we are joined by Susan Feder, Adam Fong, and Maurine Knighton, as they discuss the Racial Equity Coding Project, why it was started, their experience with the earliest iterations of the coding measures, and how their reflections will inform steps forward.

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