Public Agency

1997, 98 pages, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and
Association of Performing Arts Presenters, 1112 16th Street N.W., Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20036-4823, 202-833-2787

The highlight of summer in Santa Fe this year was the June 17 (1997) opening of the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, a project of the Burnett Foundation. Anyone needing a caterer, carpenter, or waiter was...well, disappointed. The entire town was consumed by opening festivities. As one grantmaker noted, this was Georgia's version of “Desert Storm.” The number of museum visitors staff predicted for the entire year was roughly 150,000—but in the six weeks following the opening, numbers have already totaled 90,000.

Pueblo people believe that the primary and most important relationship for humans is with the land, the natural environment — or the cosmos. In the Pueblo world, the cosmos, the natural environment, and the landscape are synonymous. Humans exist within the cosmos and are an integral part of the functioning of the earth community. The mystical nature of the land, the earth, is recognized and honored. Direct contact and interaction with the land, the natural environment, is sought. In the Pueblo, there are no manipulated outdoor areas that serve to distinguish humans from nature.

Classical musics are comparatively rare; they seem to need for their existence not only a leisured class able to command a quantity of surplus resources but also a situation where that class is to some degree isolated from the majority of the people and possesses the social power to represent its own tastes as superior.

1997, 75 pages, ARTS Action Research, P.O. Box 401082, Brooklyn, New York 11240, 718-797-3661

On March 7, 1997, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, in conjunction with Community Partners, ARTS Inc., and the California Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, convened a workshop titled "Arts Incubators: Building Healthy Arts Organizations and Healthy Economies." The seventy-plus participants included representatives of arts organizations, local arts agencies, municipalities, and foundations.

I still remember my first sight of New York. It was really another city when I was born—where I was born. We looked down over the Park Avenue streetcar tracks. It was Park Avenue, but I didn't know what Park Avenue meant downtown. The Park Avenue I grew up on, which is still standing, is dark and dirty. No one would dream of opening up a Tiffany's on that Park Avenue, and when you go downtown you discover that you are literally in the white world. It is rich—or at least it looks rich. It is clean—because they collect the garbage downtown. There are doormen.

The NEA has been mired in controversy for most of the past decade, during which time it has lost much of its appropriation and even more of its autonomy, as Congress has directed larger chunks of its annual appropriation to the states, earmarked other moneys for special purposes, and effectively placed off limits NEA fellowships for most kinds of artists.

February 1998, appx. 40 pages, Arts International, 809 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017, 212-984-5370, fax 212-984-5574, ainternational[at]iie.org

What is the financial health of the nonprofit sector and how do arts organizations compare with other nonprofits? A year-long study of the financial health of Illinois state's nonprofit sector — including the arts — provides a tool to begin answering such questions.