Participation / audience development

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has announced nearly $1 million in grant funding through its Creative Inflections program, a first-of-its-kind initiative to support leading jazz artists and presenting organizations in innovative collaborations that enable artists to take creative risks and expand the genre’s listenership by attracting younger and more diverse audiences.

Main streets in rural Colorado are getting a jolt of creativity and economic vitality thanks to an innovative partnership between the State of Colorado, philanthropic funders, local leaders, and a nonprofit housing developer. The Space to Create Colorado initiative, launched in July 2015, is transforming rural communities throughout the state by providing affordable housing/workspace as well as community spaces for creatives.

Gains in arts attendance totals, rates, and demographic groups plus sizeable growth in poetry-reading are part of the latest survey findings from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The U.S. Trends in Arts Attendance and Literary Reading: 2002-2017 is a first look at results from the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), a partnership of the NEA and the U.S. Census Bureau.

January 2016, 19 pages. The James Irvine Foundation, One Bush Street, Suite 800, San Francisco, California, 94104. www.irvine.org.

February 2015, 32 pages. Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, 2233 University Avenue W. #355, St Paul, Minnesota, 55114, (651) 251-0868. creativemn.org.

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65 pages, January 2013. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 1615 L St., NW – Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20036, (202) 419-4500, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Arts-and-technology.aspx.

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   “Only Connect the Prose and the Passion” (12 Mb)

73 pages, June 2012. Cultural Policy Center at the Harris School and NORC at the University of Chicago, 1155 East 60th Street, Suite 285, Chicago, IL 60637, (773) 702-1999, http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/setinstone/.

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   Set in Stone (4.5Mb)

Spurred on by technological advances, the number of aspiring professional artists in the United States has reached unprecedented levels. The arts’ current system of philanthropic support is woefully underequipped to evaluate this explosion of content — but we believe that the solution to the crisis is sitting right in front of us. Philanthropic institutions, in their efforts to provide stewardship to a thriving arts community, have largely overlooked perhaps the single most valuable resource at their disposal: audience members.