John R. Killacky

Right now I’m learning from a four-hundred-pound animal with the brain of a three-year-old child, as I train a Shetland pony to pull a cart. Ponies, like horses, are prey animals whose first instinct is to flee, so this can be a daunting and humbling task. Anything new is suspect, a first encounter with the unfamiliar unsettling.

Recently I served as a panelist for the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Forty-nine applicants wanted to be embedded in scientific research teams. They sought to explore the ethos, mythologies, and realities of this extraordinary continent.

Composers wanted to listen to the wind, water, animals, and shifting ice. Visual artists hoped to delve into infinite striations of whiteness: the effects of transparency on ice, the glitter of ice crystals, and light and shadow patterns on the surface and internal features of the frozen landscape.

In 2003, the Ford Foundation launched Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) with the publication of Investing in Creativity: A Study of Support Structure for U.S. Artists. Holly Sidford led the initial research and planning efforts, and then Sam Miller took over the running of LINC, designed as a ten-year nationwide initiative to improve conditions for artists working in all disciplines. Judilee Reed took over the reins in 2008.

Gourd Girls
Priscilla Wilson
2005, 220 pages
Mt. Yonah Press, Sautee, Georgia

As a program officer at The San Francisco Foundation, I say “No” to artists and arts organizations daily. I try to soften the blow, detailing the reality of limited resources and an overabundance of projects, seldom discussing quality or appropriateness, thinking I am kinder in vagueness.

Walking to my office in the financial district of San Francisco, I was stopped by a man who asked me if I remembered him. The man, Rick Hood, reminded me we were both students at Harkness Ballet in New York. We had not seen each other in more than thirty years.

At lunch a few weeks later we reminisced about the early days. Those were heady times for my twenty-year old self. I had arrived from Chicago and was in David Howard's class alongside Gelsey Kirkland. Once doing jumps, she landed badly and had to be carried out. Of course the class continued...

The recently formed GIA Community Foundations Working Group has begun to plan a variety of initiatives in response to members' interest in learning more about how community foundations work and the different ways they support the arts. Members who attended the GIA conference in 2003 and heard Lucy Bernholz's plenary remarks could not forget the facts about the remarkable current and projected growth in donor advised funds.

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These remarks were presented at the Art Museum Development Association Conference at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on April 23, 2004. They are presented here with permission from John Killacky.

Keeping dreams alive in this period of draconian change is daunting, but I am a hopeful person. This is not the time to merely work harder to make things better. We need to adapt and work differently.