GIA Reader (2000-present)

These are the sooty days and nights of fire, ashes and displacement. The aftermath of loss is reassessment and ultimately, response. We artists — poets, musicians, painters, photographers, craftspeople, writers, graphic designers, actors, sculptors, singers — possess the skills that can unpack the events and emotions brought forward by the devastating inferno of 2007. Our skills will also help us imagine a new San Diego. Our creative response to this tragedy serves neighbors, but our colleagues, students, and ourselves as well. We have not suffered more than others. Instead we suffer in league with our fellow San Diegans. We must help them cope, recover and flourish anew.

Sixteen years ago when venture capital frenzy was sweeping the country, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and its partners decided that our nation’s boldest, most inventive creative artists would also benefit from many aspects of the venture capital (VC) approach, such as providing comprehensive, flexible, and ever-evolving structures of support. They launched Creative Capital and hired Ruby Lerner as its founding executive director to lead what was touted at the time as a major new experiment in supporting individual artists.

In the late 1980s, several hundred people met twice at remote locations on two islands, one on the US East Coast and one on the West, to consider “the creative support of the creative artist.” Sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the first conference was held in May 1986 at Montauk on the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, and the second in November 1988 on Orcas Island near the Canadian border in Washington State. Although I attended both, I am deeply grateful to have had sources with agile memories so I didn’t have to rely only on my own.

The opportunities to connect communities through culture and to use that cultural engagement to educate one another are simultaneously compelling and challenging to cultural foundations and philanthropists. Recent reports and research provide strong arguments and preliminary insights into ways that culture can advance engagement across boundaries, both geographic and societal. But the most challenging efforts may be those intended to connect the United States to Muslim populations abroad.