Carmen Graciela Díaz's Blog

The State Data Infrastructure Project in the Arts, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and Education Commission of the States, released recently "50-State Comparison: Arts Education Data Collection and Reporting," a tool that assesses the capacity of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to aggregate and report on arts education data already housed in statewide education data systems.

The educational initiative 400 Years of Inequality is partnering with the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, a grassroots artist network, for a free Citizen Artist Salon on May 16th. This salon, according to the announcement, would explore place-based creative strategies for truth-telling and collective healing.

Big philanthropy came under scrutiny at the recent Skoll World Forum, where 1,200 people from 81 countries gathered at the University of Oxford, England, according to Forbes.

The International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD), a Mellon Foundation grantee through its Comprehensive Organizational Health Initiative, is key in "ensuring that a rich legacy of dance in America—and around the world—is preserved and continues to grow," as the foundation writes in its blog.

For the month of May, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by PBS.

The arts have been a major staple of PBS for almost 50 years. The PBS Foundation provides millions of Americans hundreds of hours of arts programming annually and a front row seat to world-class drama and performances.

In response to the "philanthropic neglect of rural, small city and suburban communities in the region," The Heartland Fund, a donor collaborative housed at the Windward Fund, was launched in 2018 by the Franciscan Sisters of Mercy and the Wallace Global Fund, according to a piece in the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

“Imagine a monument for today, for your city, for your community.” That's the question “New Monuments for New Cities,” a public art project, asked local artists when encouraging them to create proposals (in the form of posters) for new monuments. Houston, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, and New York City will produce an exhibition of the resulting 25 artworks specific to their site, as ArtNews reports.

The first annual impact report on the NYC Inclusive Creative Economy Fund, released by LISC NYC, looks at the creative economy as a driver of comprehensive community development.

A column in The New York Times is devoted to those who are combating social isolation, at a local level: community builders, weaving the social fabric.

After a full day of leading workshops on how to talk about race thoughtfully and deliberately that showed an overrepresentation of employees of color and an underrepresentation of white employees, Ijeoma Oluo shares her thoughts on how "so often the white attendees have decided for themselves what will be discussed, what they will hear, what they will learn."