New Genres / New Media

Key findings of this report are based on arts grants of $10,000 or more reported to the Foundation Center by 1,154 of the largest U.S. foundations.

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Arts Funding Snapshot 2005 (445K)

Collaborative Circles: A Review

Frances Phillips

In the Reader last issue I reported on the Cleveland Foundation's decade-long effort (in partnership with other area funders, cultural institutions, and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture) to make the case for local public support for the arts here. At the GIA conference last November, anyone within shouting distance of those of us from Cleveland must have heard that we were suc-cessful. The grins on our faces lit up the host celebration that first night.

Background

New Year's Day, 1980, found Arlene Goldbard living in Washington, D.C. monitoring and reporting on our nation's de facto cultural policy. The fact that Arlene was doing this says a lot about the leadership role that many of us were counting on the federal government to play in leveling the field so that our many U.S. cultures would have an equal chance to express themselves, to develop, and, inevitably, to cross-pollinate. It was a substantial and beautiful vision then, and remains so today.

Artist Rene Yung's presentation of this paper generated lively discussion at a forum of the Arts Loan Fund of Northern California Grantmakers, in October 2006. It was written just as Arlene Goldbard's new book, New Creative Community, was published. Although Yung refers to an earlier publication (Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, by Don Adams and Gold-bard, 2001), she touches on many of the same themes discussed by the authors of "The Art of Social Imagination" (page 27 in this Reader) and reveals how the ideas have been adopted by an artist in practice.

Over the past forty years, several hundred legal frameworks have been established for cooperative action by governments on ecological issues — treaties such as the Biodiversity Convention, the Climate Change Convention, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. How do these relate to art?

Outreach

Intersections
This report began as a standard travelog, factual, but listless. The GIA conference title, Intersections, seemed appropriate, but irritating as it pricked at some memory I could not grasp.

This past April, physicians, hospital administrators, therapists, artists, and healthcare designers from all over the country arrived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the ninth annual meeting of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, being held this year at Spectrum Health. This year's conference, The Art of Becoming, drew 124 participants, including twenty-seven speakers.

William L. McKnight, for many years president and chairman of the board of the 3M Company, and his wife, Maude L. McKnight, founded The McKnight Foundation in 1953. The Foundation's assets totaled $1.5 billion in 1996 and its grantmaking in that year totaled $68.3 million. The Foundation has no affiliation with the 3M Company.