Traditional / Folk arts

2004, 171 pages. Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Washington, DC, 20063

As grantmakers, we have choices. Finding the right tool for the job and experimenting with tools to learn the range of their usefulness is what grantmakers do.

Immigrant and refugee communities historically have played key roles in the Bay Area's growth and rich diversity. As California enters the twenty-first century, demographic figures reflect significant increases in immigrant pop-ulations. Amongst these communities are myriad performance ensembles, in-dividual artists, teachers, and participatory arts events that strengthen comm-unity ties, reinforce a vibrant cultural heritage, and enrich the lives of Bay Area residents.

2003, 16 pages. The Fund for Folk Culture, P.O. Box 1566, Santa Fe, NM, 87504-1566, 505-984-2534, www.folkculture.org

Download pdf: http://www.folkculture.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=i%2fF30k5JKUk%3d&tabid=67

2004, 20 pages, with accompanying DVD. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94750, 510-849-2568, www.lapena.org

2004, 119 pages, ISBN 0-9759241-1-7. Global Business Network, 5900-X Hollis Street, Emeryville, CA, 94608, 510-547-6822

Download pdf: www.gbn.com/ArticleDisplayServlet.srv?aid=32655

As Tia Oros Peters so eloquently states in her essay that follows, there is no particular word for art in the thousands of Indigenous languages of the world. While there are hundreds of Native American languages, the same holds true; Native Americans do not and cannot separate the importance of art and culture from everyday life. It is one goal of GIA's Indigenous People's Network to bring this important way of life to the fore of grantmakers' thinking.

The fall 2002 issue of the Reader (volume 13, number 3) introduced an ongoing feature, "Why Art?" as a response to GIA's goal to strengthen the role of arts and culture in philanthropy and in society as a whole. This Reader feature aims to help members and others make stronger arguments for the support of arts and culture by sharing examples of arguments, case statements, insights, and stories that convey the multifaceted role that culture, the arts, and artists play in our society, neighborhoods, and individual lives.

The full text of this article is not yet available on this site. Below is a brief excerpt.

Lawrence Lessig sees Big Media waging war against culture in America. And he, for one, is fighting the battle. A professor at Stanford Law School, Lessig achieved notoriety when he represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Eric Eldred was a man who wanted to build a library of derivative versions of public domain books (e.g., Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter) and make them available for free on the Internet.