Visual arts

Last October I attended my first "Social Theory, Politics and the Arts" conference, speaking on a panel with playwright Brian Freeman, writer Karen Clark, and puppeteer/actor Jonathan Youtt to offer reflections from artists at the conference's culmination. The gathering's international scope was refreshing and eye-opening.

"Anonymous Was a Woman" is a brilliant name for a grant program focused on supporting individual women artists. The phrase is taken from A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's classic statement of the challenges facing females seeking to create art. With these four words, Woolf succinctly and powerfully evoked the centuries long struggle of women to gain recognition as artists. Yet there is much more to this innovative grant program than its thought-provoking name.

As a company built on creative expression, Hallmark Cards has maintained a longstanding commitment to supporting the arts. Hallmark's charitable contributions come from the profits of Hallmark Cards, Inc., and from the Hallmark Corporate Foundation, an endowed foundation funded solely by Hallmark Cards. During the year 2000, arts and culture philanthropy totaled $2,173,897 or 23 percent of the company's overall charitable program.

On November 12, 2000, a headline on the front page of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution read, "Study finds Atlanta arts community trailing peers." A full-page story in Section A followed. This one headline challenged the city's cherished self-assessment as "cultural jewel of the South" and quietly affirmed the suspicions of many of its artists and cultural workers.

This is the story about the headline, the study, and the volunteer efforts of an incorporated ad hoc group that calls itself the Atlanta Arts Think Tank and that commissioned the landmark study.

The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture by John Seabrook
2000, 215 pages, Alfred A. Knopf

American Culture, American Tastes Social Change and the Twentieth Century by Michael Kammen
1999, 320 pages, Basic Books

The cultural landscape of Maine is as rich and diverse as its natural landscape, although it is less well known. Recent initiatives have brought attention to the arts and culture of this rural state that is home to 1.4 million residents and covers two million acres, 2,000 miles of rugged (and increasingly developed) shoreline, and a vast area of working forest, farms, and urban settings not unlike its northern NewEngland neighbors.

Allen Ginsberg begins his essay "Meditation and Poetics" with this paragraph: "It's an old tradition in the West among great poets that poetry is rarely thought of as 'just poetry.' Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness, or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with the phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it. Poetics isn't mere picturesque dilettantism or egotistical expressionism for craven motives grasping for sensation and flattery.

In a past report on challenges facing San Francisco Bay Area arts nonprofits (Reader, Vol. 11, No. 2), I wrote at length about space. Many nonprofits had been forced to seek new office, rehearsal, and storage space due to a steep rise in Bay Area real estate costs fueled by demand from a dot-com economy for start-up locations. The situation seems to have eased somewhat, in part due to funder- and municipally-driven programs as well as to a general downturn in the economy.

We are at a new turning point in the field of aging. The past twenty-five years have witnessed two major conceptual shifts that have fundamentally influenced the course of research, practice, and policy deliberations.

When we initiated an artist award program at The Durfee Foundation a few years ago, we decided to use financial need as one of several criteria for support. Durfee is a relatively small family foundation, and the trustees feel strongly that the foundation's modest resources should be applied where they will make the most difference. This is true across the board at the foundation, not only in the arts, but in our other programs as well.