Family Foundation

"Anonymous Was a Woman" is a brilliant name for a grant program focused on supporting individual women artists. The phrase is taken from A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf's classic statement of the challenges facing females seeking to create art. With these four words, Woolf succinctly and powerfully evoked the centuries long struggle of women to gain recognition as artists. Yet there is much more to this innovative grant program than its thought-provoking name.

On November 12, 2000, a headline on the front page of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution read, "Study finds Atlanta arts community trailing peers." A full-page story in Section A followed. This one headline challenged the city's cherished self-assessment as "cultural jewel of the South" and quietly affirmed the suspicions of many of its artists and cultural workers.

This is the story about the headline, the study, and the volunteer efforts of an incorporated ad hoc group that calls itself the Atlanta Arts Think Tank and that commissioned the landmark study.

Meetings are big business. Or, in other words, talk is not cheap. An economic impact study by Deloitte & Touche LLP demonstrated that conventions, expositions, and meetings generated $82 billion in total direct spending in 1994, supporting 1.57 million jobs.1 Meetings of associations and membership organizations, as opposed to corporate-sponsored events, account for the lion's share of this spending (68 percent). Many of these associations serve the arts and culture.

A New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts
Kevin F. McCarthy and Kimberly Jinnett, RAND, 2001,
112 pages, 310-451-7002, order@rand.org.

Another research report lands on your desk. Do you make time to read it, or does it add to a growing pile of things-to-read-someday?

Two streams of thought come together here. On the one hand, we want the Reader to reflect the continuing impact on our lives of the events of September 11, 2001. On the other, we want to follow an emphasis in GIA's current plan on the organization's second purpose — to increase the presence of arts philanthropy within philanthropy in order to strengthen support for arts and culture.

At the Fund for Folk Culture (FFC), we have been working with Laurel Jones and Morrie Warshawski of the Bay Consulting Group (BCG) to survey the range of private support for the folk and traditional arts and investigate opportunities for increased private support in this cultural sector.

This article is based on a presentation to a gathering of grantees held in the fall 2000 and aimed at building arts participation. The meeting was sponsored by the Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.

Last month I was signed up by a colleague to give a lecture to a class of graduate students at New York University studying arts management, all of whom were intending to pursue careers as managers and administrators in cultural institutions, and most of whom already had some experience in line management under their belts. My session was slotted into the finance elective.

David B. Pankratz, principal investigator and project manager, Celia O'Donnell, research assistant

2001, 80 pages. California Arts Council, 1300 I Street, Suite 930, Sacramento, CA 95814, 916-322-6555.