Public Agency

As a new administration enters our nation’s White House, it is timely to reflect on the way that private philanthropy and public foundations joined forces to step into the gap when federal funding for the arts was dramatically reduced in the early 1990s.

As our country prepares for a Trump presidency, the issue of economic revitalization in rural American has much more urgency than eight months ago when I started collecting data for this work. Here is a sampling of headlines from coverage by the New York Times of the economic decline in the rust belt, or more specifically, coal country and Appalachian towns: “Trump’s Promises Will Be Hard to Keep, but Coal Country Has Faith” (Nov. 28, 2016); “A Bleak Outlook for Trump’s Promises to Coal Miners” (Nov.

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 Arts Funding Snapshot: GIA’s Annual Research on Support for Arts and Culture (3 Mb)

Earned income and private giving make up the largest share of arts funding in the United States, but government funds are an essential piece of the arts ecosystem. Public investments in the arts are citizen driven and beholden to the public interest. They support inclusive experiences, promulgated by representative democracy covering every part of the country.

In 2015, Americans for the Arts partnered with the National Endowment for the Arts to conduct the Local Arts Agency Census, the most comprehensive survey of the local arts agency field ever conducted. Its purpose was to illuminate the ever-adapting role these organizations play in ensuring the arts have a vital presence in every community.

What Is a Local Arts Agency?

In 2008 I wrote Le facteur C (later translated as No Culture, No Future) because I felt an urgent need to respond to a troubling trend: a growing chasm between the art experiences that were being offered by arts professionals and those being sought out by an ever-growing portion of the public. My book argued that for the arts to thrive and to be a force in our everyday lives, the professional arts sector needed to do more and differently to engage people in the arts in meaningful, life-enriching ways.

The Initiative

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase cultural policy? Given the GIA Reader’s audience, I imagine answers that run the gamut from dry-as-dust studies to brilliant proposals for weaving new cultural fabric.

But in my role as Chief Policy Wonk for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC), when I set out to write about our new generative cultural policy proposals in An Act of Collective Imagination: The First Two Years of the USDAC’s Action Research, I had a whole different audience in mind: people who may never have heard the phrase before.

The arts in America are supported by a complex mix of funds, including individual contributions, corporate and foundation support, earned revenues, and government grants. Although government funds comprise a modest percentage of total arts income, they are an essential part of the American arts ecosystem, supporting community arts development, achieving a wide geographic dispersal of grants, and making arts funds accessible to communities that may have limited access to other resources.

Despite New York City’s status as the dance capital of the United States, rising real estate prices are challenging the city’s ability to serve as a creative incubator, with space — an essential resource for making dance — in waning supply. Choreographers and dancers need to work in a large open area with a sprung floor, but as real estate values climb, long-standing dance studios are being bought by developers and converted into residential or commercial spaces.

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez. 2015, 208 pages, Palgrave Macmillan; Houndmills