The Nonprofit Finance Fund is hosting a webinar called The Case for Change Capital in the Arts: Building Vibrant and viable Cultural Organizations. Presented by NFF's Rodney Christopher and Rebecca Thomas, the webinar will take place 3:00pm EDT / noon PDT on Thursday, April 19. Also participating in the webinar presentation are Cynthia Hedstrom and Jamie Poskin of The Wooster Group, and Amanda Nelson and Thomas Cott of Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation.
Grantmakers in the Arts
by Steve
From Patricia Cohen at The New York Times:
Online financial crowd-sourcing of artists still represents only a smidgen of the more than $8 billion that private individuals donate to the arts each year. Nonetheless, the speedy proliferation of such Web sites has attracted notice. “Everybody right now is looking for ways to exploit technology to maximize and customize the ways people engage with the arts,” said Sunil Iyengar, research director at the National Endowment for the Arts.
by Steve
The Friday installment of the weeklong Clout: A Blogfest on Art and Political Power is penned by Dudley Cocke, artistic director of Roadside Theater and a former GIA Board member:
...So the question is: What would it take for a theater like Roadside to have real political clout? Part of the answer: For low income, working class, and middle class audience members like ours to have real political clout.
This raises the question of how, in our democracy, the majority of us have become subjugated to a wealthy minority of us. When we talk about the arts gaining political power, I think this is the bigger problem we need to address, and I’m worried that we’ve lost the democratic infrastructure to pursue a solution.
by Steve
Ariel Schwartz for Co.Exist:
Stick a bunch of artists, web designers, developers, and hackers in a room, and what do you get? A visual and acoustic representation of Bay Area earthquake data, a sound collage of randomly dialed phone numbers, and on-the-fly digital art created from MP3 files.
by Steve
The latest installment of the online discussion Clout: A Blogfest on Art and Political Power is Ra Joy, executive director of Arts Alliance Illinois:
The best way to move the needle on arts policy issues (whether it’s Barry’s NEA budget or Arlene’s WPA 2.0 idea) is to create strong grassroots and grasstops networks that transcend age, race, ethnicity, geography, and other factors.
by Steve
Theatre Bay Area has published Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art, a book that builds from “Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Live Theatre,” the final report of a two-year national research study, prepared by research firm WolfBrown. Interviews with 20 prominent artistic directors, as well as essays by Diane Ragsdale, Arlene Goldbard, Rebecca Novick and others, are all available in the book.
by Steve
From Marjorie Pritchard at Boston.com:
At a time of great stress on Boston’s school budget, private philanthropists and charitable foundations launched an initiative to raise $10 million to increase access, equity and quality of arts learning for all students. The city and its schools stepped up with increased public funding for arts teachers... This year, 14,000 more Boston students are experiencing the arts in schools than three years ago. Nine of 10 students in the elementary and middle grades now receive weekly, year-long arts instruction in school, up from two-thirds in 2009. In the same period, twice as many high school students are accessing arts learning during the school day.
by Steve
The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (ACAC) announced that Lisa Cremin is the recipient of the third annual Nexus Award. Cremin is the founding director of the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund at The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. She will receive the Nexus Award at a celebration at ACAC on Thursday, May 24, 2012.