Ann McQueen

March 2015, 44 pages. The Kresge Foundation, 3215 W. Big Beaver Road, Troy, Michigan 48084, (248) 643-9630, http://kresge.org

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Rocco Landesman spoke for the first time in the role of the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts at the 2009 GIA conference, Navigating the Art of Change. The Brooklyn convening was subtitled “The Recession Conference,” which Landesman, stating the obvious, translated as “the news is bad.” Nonetheless, he urged us to be optimistic. “Art is the most optimistic of activities.… There is grandeur in art. There is boldness. There is even, to use a very loaded word, the possibility for change, and we mortals need that.”

Like program officers everywhere, I spend a lot of time immersed in the minutia that pours from one proposal folder after another. How, then, can I keep my eyes on the big picture? Individual programs are evaluated, of course, but how can my colleagues and I measure the overall health of the city's arts and cultural sector? And what about the rest of the city? Where do the arts and artists fit into the city's economy? Our public school system? Housing? My search for the big picture reminds me of the Gauguin painting at the Museum of Fine Arts which asks “Where Do We Come From? What Are We?

Recently, several studies of arts funding have been conducted in specific cities and regions. We report on a few of these here. In the winter 2002 issue of the GIA Reader Vol. 13, No. 1, Lisa Cremin and Kathie de Nobriga reported on a comparative study of arts funding in Atlanta and nineteen other cities. The report was both an inspiring and a cautionary tale for Ann McQueen and others in Boston as they planned the study that Cindy Gehrig reviews below.

2001, 120 pages. The Rockefeller Foundation.