The National Endowment for the Arts has selected Clifford Murphy as its new director of folk and traditional arts, effective August 24, 2015. Murphy will manage NEA grantmaking in folk and traditional arts, oversee the NEA National Heritage Fellowship program, and represent the agency to the field. Murphy is currently director of Maryland Traditions, the folklife program of the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC). In 2011, Murphy launched the state’s first Maryland Traditions Folklife Festival, and also manages the Maryland Traditions grant program supporting apprenticeships and projects. Murphy also produces the state’s annual Achievement in Living Traditions and Arts (ALTA) Awards.
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From Phil Buchanan, writing for The Chronicle of Philanthropy:
Foundation staff and major donors may not hear much direct criticism of their foundations or giving, surrounded as they are by grantees and grant seekers. But it seems like everyone has a point of view on what philanthropists should be doing: You can’t flip through more than a few pages of The Chronicle of Philanthropy or Stanford Social Innovation Review — and recently The New York Times and Wall Street Journal — without finding an article with the words “foundations should” or “philanthropists should.”
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Nearly 28 million U.S. adults have some type of disability related to hearing, sight, cognition, walking, and other activities of daily living. A Matter of Choice? Arts Participation Patterns of Disabled Americans offers the first nationally representative analysis of arts-participation patterns among people with disabilities.
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From T. Lulani Arquette, President/CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a current member of the GIA Board of Directors:
In my lifetime, I have not seen this level of racial discrimination and hatred in our country since the 1960’s and early 1970’s. As a very young girl, too innocent to understand what was going on, but intuitive enough to know that something very wrong was happening, I remember seeing on national television these horrific images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on the demonstrators in Birmingham, the violence at the Pettus Bridge in Selma, and the burning neighborhoods of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. These images from Alabama and California flashed on TV screens across our nation and stayed with me for a long time.
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A new report from the Center for an Urban Future looks into the state of New York’s creative sector to see how the people working there are doing in the wake of the city’s economic surge and the transition to a new administration. After an unprecedented investment in cultural capital projects and a strong emphasis on promoting tourism during the Bloomberg administration, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is taking steps to ensure that opportunities to produce and consume culture are broadly shared and that working artists and creative professionals can afford to live and work there. Creative New York proposes more than 20 steps that the de Blasio administration can take to address and ultimately overcome the chief obstacles documented in the report, that was authored by Adam Forman with financial support from New York Community Trust, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Edelman.
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By Ray Mark Rinaldi, Fine Arts Critic for The Denver Post:
Change comes slowly in the world of private foundations, and there’s a kind of comfort in that. Foundations are the bedrock funders of important institutions, like hospitals, universities and museums, and their dedicated giving is crucial to cities that count on their cash. But three years ago, Denver’s Bonfils-Stanton Foundation took a chance on change. Long a contributor to causes across the board, from homeless shelters to opera companies, the organization began steering all of its funding toward the arts. Culture needed the money, the thinking went, and by targeting one area, the foundation could set itself apart from its peers and become a real player in the community.
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Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge — a program aimed at supporting temporary public art projects that engage communities, enhance creativity and enrich the vibrancy of cities — has announced four winning projects:
- Albany, Schenectady and Troy, New York — Breathing Lights, from artist Adam Frelin
- Gary, Indiana — ArtHouse: A Social Kitchen, from artist Theaster Gates
- Los Angeles, California — CURRENT: LA River, from artists to be selected
- Spartanburg, South Carolina — Seeing Spartanburg in a New Light, from artist Erwin Redl
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From Mike Boehm at the Los Angeles Times:
Americans’ donations to arts and culture rose 9.2% in 2014, the highest increase in nine categories tracked by Giving USA, an annual report on charitable contributions. Overall, however, arts and culture commanded a modest share of the philanthropic pie. Estimated gifts to arts and culture totaled $17.2 billion, according to the report compiled by Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Although that was a record high, it represented only 4.8% of the $358.4-billion total.
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Featured in the current Reader is a review by Lynda Turet of Jeff Chang’s book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, a journey through the nation’s relationship with race from 1963 until today.
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From Mike Boehm, writing for the Los Angeles Times:
Gov. Jerry Brown has a reputation as a budget hawk who’ll pounce on stray spending he thinks could leave California’s state government with IOUs that its coffers can't cover — and he lived up to it Tuesday, striking a deal with lawmakers that pares $2.2 billion from the budget that the Legislature had passed the day before. But the hawk is sparing at least one mouse-sized spending increase that will begin to restore California’s perpetually withered funding of the California Arts Council, the state agency that makes grants to nonprofit arts organizations across the state.