Private Foundation

1997, 98 pages, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and
Association of Performing Arts Presenters, 1112 16th Street N.W., Suite 400, Washington, D.C. 20036-4823, 202-833-2787

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.

The Henry Luce Foundation was founded in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc. The Foundation's assets total approximately $700 million and support programs in American art, Asia, higher education, public affairs, theology, and women in science.

For four years now at the Walter and Elise Haas Fund I have been evaluating San Francisco projects in the arena of audience development. From my years as executive director of Intersection for the Arts I remember planning around percent of capacity, marketing strategies, and collaborative programming, but more than that, when I think of our audience I think about the difficult relationship between our arts organization and the street.

1997, 75 pages, ARTS Action Research, P.O. Box 401082, Brooklyn, New York 11240, 718-797-3661

The highlight of summer in Santa Fe this year was the June 17 (1997) opening of the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, a project of the Burnett Foundation. Anyone needing a caterer, carpenter, or waiter was...well, disappointed. The entire town was consumed by opening festivities. As one grantmaker noted, this was Georgia's version of “Desert Storm.” The number of museum visitors staff predicted for the entire year was roughly 150,000—but in the six weeks following the opening, numbers have already totaled 90,000.

GIA Newsletter editors welcome reports on conferences and meetings that might be of interest to GIA members. The following report also led to a longer feature by Stanley Katz in this issue.

Conflicting Visions of Philanthropy
June 3, 1998
Presented by the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers at the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundations).

Presenters: Gene Bryan Johnson, senior producer for news, WNYC New York Public Radio; Dr. Stanley Katz, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Sandra Silverman, president, the Scherman Foundation

Currently they hold almost $70 million in assets. With some luck and hard work, they hope in ten years to increase that amount ten-fold to over $750 million. They can be found east and west, north and south. They are modest and ambitious. They are large and they are small. And, most importantly, they are changing and challenging the very nature of public funding of the arts nationwide.

1998, 178 pages, Independent Sector/Jossey-Bass Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, California 94104, 415-433-1740

On March 7, 1997, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, in conjunction with Community Partners, ARTS Inc., and the California Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, convened a workshop titled "Arts Incubators: Building Healthy Arts Organizations and Healthy Economies." The seventy-plus participants included representatives of arts organizations, local arts agencies, municipalities, and foundations.