Grantmakers in the Arts

by Steve

Arts and culture blogger Ellen Berkovitch for the Santa Fe Reporter:

Since 2010... two distinct arts funding initiatives have marched off the federal and private-sector collaborative fields: respectively Our Town and ArtPlaceAmerica. These exemplify the latest linguistic leaps in turning “creative” into a verb: “creative placemaking.”

Just as at the beginning of any new movement, much effort goes to understanding beyond the slogans and into the meaning.

by Janet

The blogesphere and pressophere (I made that word up) lit up on Monday, October 10 with the release of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s (NCRP) essay on private foundation arts funding to marginalized communities.

by Steve

Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer's latest post to the conference blog:

In 2011 and 2012, the New York Community Trust made grants to middle and high schools that linked youth, art, science, museums, libraries and new partners with the intent to gain insight to the community, extend into the five boroughs and to serve the most disadvantaged kids. Was it possible to create an innovative process where learning happened anytime, anywhere that could scale? And could this happen on their preferred devices where they become creators?
by Steve

Conference blogger Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer sat in on the conference session Grantmaking with a Racial Equity Lens, a salon discussion facilitated by GIA Board member Justin Laing of The Heinz Endowments. For this year's conference, GIA initiated the Salon Session as a way of providing more participatory discussions around a topic.

No question, racial equity is a highly charged topic that brings people together with complex emotions simmering beneath their conference badges. No question, we work in a dominant society that is managing our system of race and culture. It is structured racialism, poverty and colonization, all the time.
by Steve

Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer reports on the session on Art and Aging, The Big Shift: The Velocity of Change in America's Aging Society, presented on Monday morning at the GIA conference in San Francisco:

“Age is a time to bloom, a time of great fertility, a time to celebrate their best work when they are ‘over the hill’,” said Marc Freedman, founder and CEO, Civic Ventures. “People think genius happens early in life but actually many artists were late bloomers such as Paul Cézanne.
by Tommer

Appropriart! A graphic article about copyright by Susie Cagle, commissioned by GIA and the Media Democracy Fund for the Fall 2011 GIA Reader is featured on Boing Boing this week.

by Steve

Conference blogger Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer reports on Mondays' morning plenary keynote performance from Marc Bamuthi Joseph:

As a conference blogger, I sat at Marc’s Keynote Performance at the Plenary Breakfast Session on Monday at the Grantmakers for the Arts 2011 Conference, confident in capturing the essence of the experience while having my morning coffee with a ballroom full of my colleagues.

It became very clear that Marc operates at speeds unfamiliar to most people and I was left both delighted and bewildered by his message.

by Steve

The inimitable Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, our third official conference blogger, checks in post-conference with a rundown of her preconference experience. Photos, and Hoong Yee drawings enrich the report. Look forward to more from her as she documents her San Francisco Conference experience.