Steve's Blog

For his newest blog post, Barry Hessenius talks with GIA Board Member Kristen Madsen, Senior Vice President of the GRAMMY Foundation and MusiCares Foundation, about the business of music.

As a bonus, Barry posted a video of Kristen's speech from earlier this year on Hip Hop and the power of vocabulary.

From her own blog, Beth Kanter reports from this week's Center for Effective Philanthropy conference where she participated in a panel discussion about social media, foundations, and grantees.

A new report from the Alliance of Artists Communities examines the current landscape of support for dance through residency programs, identifies some of the barriers and challenges to participation, and offers a call to action for residency programs, funders, and others to develop greater resources in support of dancemakers. More than 600 dancemakers contributed to this research, as well as 200 artist residency programs. The Alliance's Dance Project is supported wholly by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Library of Congress has made a vast collection of historical sound recordings available on the Internet. The National Jukebox includes recordings from the Library's Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation as well as other contributing libraries and archives. The online collection already includes more than 10,000 recordings produced between 1901 and 1925. But content will be added regularly.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced today that Marc Vogl will leave his position as Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program, effective June 3, 2011. Marc has accepted the job of executive director at a San Francisco arts organization. He's been with the Hewlett Foundation since 2007.

Alexis McGill Johnson has begun her stint with the GIA Talk Back series. Her first post is Living at an Intersection. Alexis is executive director of the American Values Institute, a consortium of researchers, educators, and social justice advocates focused on understanding the role of bias in our society. Join her conversation.

The organization Arizona Town Hall gathers every few months around an important issue and creates a "forum for education and exploration of the topic and fosters leadership development." So it's exciting to see that the town hall held May 1-4 was titled Capitalizing on Arizona's Arts & Culture. And the featured speakers were Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; and Marian Godfrey, Senior Director, Culture Initiatives, Pew Charitable Trusts.

The President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) has published its report Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools. The report was produced with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and represents the culmination of 18 months of research, meetings with stakeholders, and site visits all over the country. It represents an in-depth review of the current condition of arts education, including an update of the current research base about arts education outcomes. Cited in the report is the GIA Thought Leader Forum on Arts and Education

From Tyler Green at Artinfo.com:

Although you’d hardly know it from Americans’ comparative silence... decreases in U.S. government funding to arts groups are almost certainly going to be deeper than the ones that have provoked such a strong reaction in the U.K. At the federal level, President Barack Obama proposed 13 percent cuts for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Many organizations are joining the effort to aid the thousands of people who were affected by the enormous outbreak of tornados in late April. The Actors Fund has recently compiled a list of resources for artists who need help.