GIA Blog

Aditi Kapil posts to HowlRound:

President Obama released his fiscal year 2015 budget request of $146.021 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, the same amount as the current year's budget. In fiscal year 2013 with a budget of $138.383 million, the agency awarded 2,153 grants totaling $112.734 million.

Read the full announcement.

The Creative Interventions Tour, a new placemaking project led by artist Hunter Franks, will travel through Akron, Detroit, Macon, and Philadelphia, where Franks will lead workshops that bring people from diverse social and economic backgrounds together. He will craft the interactive activities with input from local organizations, taking into account specific community needs. Franks will document his experiences in each of the cities to share lessons and assess how small-scale, temporary interventions can create wide community impact.

During the month of March, our photo banner features grantees of GIA member The Herb Alpert Foundation. Founded by musician, producer, and artist Herb Alpert and his wife, Grammy-award winning singer Lani Hall, the Foundation’s mission is to support young people in the discovery and development of their creative potential, an objective they achieve through the Herb Alpert Scholarships for Emerging Young Artists, a program administered by the California State Summer School for the Arts, and support of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, which is devoted to the performance and study of music in all of its global diversity.

Evidence-based philanthropy. To some, that phrase offers the promise of long-overdue rigor. If the first principle of philanthropy and social impact is to do good, then evidence-based philanthropy ensures that we honor its corollary: Do no harm.

To others, that phrase represents all that is going wrong with philanthropy and social innovation—the rise of the ivory-tower theorists and technocrats whose logic models and fixation with metrics blind them to real-world knowledge and common sense.

Robert Booker, executive director, Arizona Commission on the Arts connects the dots for nonprofit arts board members: "Often, when I meet with the Board of Directors of an Arizona arts organization or institution, I am asked to provide more money to the organization.

Robert Booker, Executive Director, Arizona Commission on the Arts connects the dots for nonprofit arts board members.

Posted to Supporting Today's Artists by Paul Tyler, Grants Director, ArtsKC

We’ve had limited financial resources to invest in direct support for artists over the past few years, but I have come to realize that our work supporting artists through professional development training may have substantially more impact than our grantmaking over the long run.

Since 1998, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation has supported contemporary art exhibitions through its biennial Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. This opportunity provides funding for thematic exhibitions that are fresh and experimental in nature, and for which other funding is not yet forthcoming. The award provides assistance at the beginning stage of the exhibition’s development and offers the curator the support needed to realize the concept.

A new study by Music Machine aggregated data  on streaming music from Spotify users and broke down musical preferences by state and region. Previous research has analyzed the same data by gender and age.