Trump mural, Downtown Los Angeles, California, USA (Credit: Cory Doctorow, via Creative Commons)

A bitter and divisive 2016 Presidential election is finally over, and Donald J. Trump’s seat in the Oval Office awaits him, with Republicans holding their grip on both houses of Congress. Trump’s views on the arts are vague; the Irish Times reported that, when asked his position on the arts, Trump spoke of decorating his promised border wall with Mexico so that it “looks real nice.” His main connection to the arts is through architecture, although he has a contemptuous relationship with the critics and an American Institute of Architects letter congratulating his victory left many of the organization’s members reeling. (For whatever reason, a similarly congratulatory message from Americans for the Arts escaped an analogous public backlash.) As with nearly every other sector, questions abound about what a Trump presidency will look like. The litany of artists’ concerns include the future of public arts funding, the fate of the Affordable Care Act (which provides insurance for many independent artists), the possibility of a rollback of the tax incentive for charitable giving, and fear of moving backward after decades of work to ensure equity for all Americans. Trump’s authoritarian impulses could have a major impact on freedom of expression, including in the arts: while the likelihood of overturning a mountain of precedent favoring the first amendment, be it flag burning or lecturing Mike Pence at a Hamilton curtain call, is relatively slim, Trump has many legal and quasi-legal means at his disposal to intimidate policymakers, journalists, and artists. The bizarre contours of the election likewise have “provided significant thought-fuel for cultural organizations” and called into question the role of truth and evidence in public dialogue. On the plus side, several pro-arts ballot measures passed electoral muster on November 8 (the most significant of these being the reauthorization of a $50+ million public funding stream in the Denver area through 2030), several museums publicly affirmed that they will continue to provide safe spaces and work to ensure the arts and culture are available to all, and healthcare robber baron Martin Shkreli is keeping at least the first part of his promise to release the only known copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album in the event of a Trump victory.

Yet more regulations in the rapidly growing Chinese film market. A new law further promotes nationalism in Chinese films. According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, the law imposes massive fines against companies that fabricate box-office earnings or other data, and further states that films should “serve the people and socialism, prioritizing social benefits and bringing about harmony of economic returns and contribution to society.” The growing film industry in China is second only to the United States, and may soon take over the top spot with plans to build a new $2 billion studio in Chongqing. Anxious to join the Chinese market, U.S. studios have been able to avoid the country’s quota to release just 34 foreign films per year by incorporating Chinese characters and plot lines. China appears equally anxious to find a grip in the U.S. market, with the Chinese firm Dalian Wanda picking up big swaths of the entertainment industry, buying AMC Theatres in 2012, and more recently adding Legendary Entertainment and Dick Clark Productions for $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. As the world’s largest media conglomerate, Dalian Wanda’s recent moves made Congress sit up straighter, raising concerns about the potential influence of Chinese nationalism and socialist propaganda infusing the American entertainment industry.

Is impact investing finally hitting its stride? The arts could benefit from an emerging trend among wealthy donors. Of those surveyed in the 2016 U.S. Trust Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy and the First National Benchmark Survey of Family Foundations, the Denver Post reported that a third are interested in impact investing, or taking a financial stake in ventures designed to create social, economic, cultural or environmental impact. The arts are a little late to the game, because it’s tricky to create a competitive return on investment in many areas of the arts sector. So despite corporate donations of $2.4 billion annually toward impact investing, the arts’ best chance for joining the trend may be with individuals. At least that’s what the folks at Upstart Co-Lab believe; the startup headed by former NEA Senior Deputy Chairman Laura Callanan has forged an agreement with Calvert Foundation to create a Community Investment Note for opportunities like low-income artist housing developments. For corporations and foundations, impact investing is partly about who they give to, and partly about who they don’t. The Brooklyn Community Foundation is leading the charge in this area, committing to divest all its interests in corporations or initiatives that harm communities of color.

Equity is the newest Indiegogo perk. The crowdfunding platform Indiegogo announced a new partnership with Microventures, joining the lesser-known Crowdfunder, OurCrowd, and EquityNet as vehicles for regular folks who want to invest in new companies. Budding entrepreneurs can now offer potential investors a financial stake in their companies (think Shark Tank on the Internet) instead of the traditional crowdfunding model that trades products and other perks for donations. Equity crowdfunding became possible in 2012 due in part to President Obama’s Jumpstart our Startups (JOBS) Act lifting regulations on capital investments that kept average Americans from seeking a financial stake in new companies. Rival crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, whose main difference from Indiegogo is its “all-or-nothing” model, remains committed to project-based funding over entrepreneurial pursuits, and does not currently have plans to implement equity crowdfunding.

Philly parks and libraries get a facelift. The William Penn Foundation announced it will give up to $100 million to the city of Philadelphia’s Rebuild initiative to enhance community parks, libraries, and recreation centers. The gift, which is the largest in the foundation’s history by a factor of four, covers more than 80% of the city’s fundraising goal for foundations and private donors. Penn intends not only revitalize Philadelphia’s infrastructure but also make a significant social and economic impact by creating jobs and promoting community engagement. The big news follows on the heels of executive director Laura Sparks’s departure from the foundation, the latest in a series of such transitions for Penn that has prompted a renewed call from the author of a previously published critical report to diversify its board and delegate greater authority to staff leadership.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• University of Iowa Museum of Art names former Congressman and National Endowment for the Humanities head Jim Leach as its interim director.
• Former Colorado Business Committee for the Arts head Deborah Jordy has been appointed as the new executive director of Denver’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District.
• Ken Tabachnick will be the new executive director of the Merce Cunningham Trust.
• A tenure-track Assistant Professor position is available at the University of Arizona in the Division of Art and Visual Culture Education
• University of Oklahoma’s School of Visual Arts seeks a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Art, Technology & Culture.
• Queens Museum seeks a full-time Director of Education, supervising in-school and community programs and New New Yorkers, an arts and literacy initiative for and with adult immigrants.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• A new study on tax filings by the Institute for Policy Studies found that U.S. giving is top-heavy, with more than half of donations coming from the top 10%. Market Watch summarized the report, noting that the middle class is giving less to charity compared to 10 years ago while those earning at least $100,000 annually have increased donations by 40%.
• GLAAD reported record-high representation of LGBTQ, black, and disabled characters on broadcast television series this season.
• New evidence further links viewing of reality TV to narcissism. And a study out of Michigan State University explains why we gravitate toward ideological bubbles, surrounding ourselves with those who agree with us. The short version: it’s more comfortable.
• U.S. orchestras fare relying more on donations than ticket sales, according to a report by League of American Orchestras. With subscriptions down and donations up, the shift is forcing organizations to revisit funding models and mission statements. Similarly, the Arts Council of England reports that UK nonprofits are increasingly relying on private funds, with revenues dropping despite an uptick in charitable giving.
• The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s data dashboard reveals online giving trends to arts and culture, among other causes, using data from the Network for Good platform.
• The MacArthur Foundation released an evaluation of a loan fund program designed for small and mid-size arts and culture organizations.
• Women in the arts are not exempt from the wage gap between genders, according to a study in the journal Social Currents. And men are the most creative of the sexes…and the least, says Pacific Standard’s Tom Jacobs in a review of the literature.
• New research at the University of Waterloo makes the case that arts experiences should be accessible to all because they are tied to wellbeing.
• European researchers may have found the heart of creativity, locating structures in the brain that form novel connections between known and new information. Meanwhile, a new study funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China suggests that the brain responds differently to classical music compared to popular music. And Keith Sawyer discusses interesting new research on musical improvisation and the influence improvisers have on each other’s contributions in a jam session.
• A study from Fort Collins, CO yields promising results about music’s positive effects on delaying and perhaps preventing dementia. Sadly, though, a survey of 2,200 musicians conducted by the charitable organization Help Musicians UK found high rates of anxiety and depression.
• Belgian researchers find that even experts have a difficult time discerning between fake art and real art.
• The New England Foundation for the Arts published “Moving Dance Forward,” an in-depth report analyzing the dance field’s pressing needs and the impact of the National Dance Project.
• Theater is a more popular leisure activity than sports for Brits, according to a survey by Birmingham’s Town Hall Symphony Hall. The results suggest that younger generations are even more likely to attend a show, with nearly two-thirds of respondents under age 25 saying they enjoy live performance across all genres.
• A new Slover Linett report highlights the changemaking potential of the Levitt chain of music venues (disclosure: Createquity founder Ian David Moss was an advisor to the project).
• Chicago-based Ingenuity’s report on “State of the Arts” in Chicago Public Schools indicates that access to arts education during the school day is on the rise.
• UNESCO’s Culture for Sustainable Urban Development initiative aims to become a policy framework to support governments in promoting arts and culture as a means of sustainability.
• A meta-analysis published in EPJ Data Science claims that most fiction falls into one of six core story lines.
• Tim Robbins’ “Improv for Inmates” expands to 10 California correctional facilities next year, as promising data from a preliminary study by the California Department of Corrections suggests that the program reduces recidivism.
• A study from the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that robots will eventually take over nearly a third of our jobs.

The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: One: About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. Two: By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. Three: For us. That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. Four: Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.

–W.E.B. Du Bois, from the program for the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theater in 1925, reprinted in Crisis magazine (published by the NAACP) in 1926

About us. By us. For us. Near us. It has been almost a century since the great W.E.B. Du Bois–one of the co-founders of the NAACP–offered this stirring call for what, today, we would call “cultural equity.” To say much has happened in those ninety years would be to oversimplify. Significant progress has been made. And yet for many, and on many levels, it is not enough. In a speech given just last year, Jeff Chang, executive director of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, exclaimed: “at a moment when…our images depict us as one happy rainbow nation, and yet the structures of power, including the national culture complex…is still overwhelmingly white, we begin to recognize that we have not yet achieved cultural equity.”

It is certainly not for lack of effort–a deep, ongoing, heroic effort by dedicated activists, institutions, artists, funders, and even the government. And yet, read Chang–and below, Campbell, Lowry, Rosen, Erickson, Kourlas, Sonntag, Vega, and Grams–and one thing soon becomes clear: “cultural equity” means different things to different people. Over the course of some ninety years, distinct, and sometimes competing, visions of success have jostled for attention, complicating a complex conversation, and creating tensions that often go unresolved. Diverse goals and desired outcomes–over time and between different groups–have made change a juggling act; meanwhile, efforts to add on fixes to a system that was not built with equity in mind have met with mixed results.

Just as we cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it, we cannot achieve cultural democracy or equity with the same tools, strategies, and structures that built and have maintained our current inequitable systems. To move forward, we must look, think, and act widely.

–Figuring the Plural, a research report about ethnocultural organizations published in 2014

The past few years have been deeply trying for race relations in the United States. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to widely publicized violence against unarmed black people at the hands of private citizens and the police, along with an increasing anti-immigration rhetoric on the political stage, have given new urgency to initiatives focusing on decreasing racial inequality and combating racial bias. The relevance of cultural equity in the nonprofit arts world is all the more immediate against this backdrop. As borne out by the results of our reader poll earlier this year, along with our own observations, perhaps no other issue is more present for arts professionals in 2016 than this.

Many of the core issues in today’s debate around cultural equity harken back to the beginning of arts in America. As outlined in our earlier article on growth and change in the nonprofit arts sector, the “beginning” here can be traced to the 19th century, when, in the aftermath of the Civil War and amid an influx of immigration, a new class of urban white commercial elites established institutions–such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and Metropolitan Opera, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–to preserve and present art in the classical European canon. While these well-heeled individuals–America’s early philanthropists–sought to promote civic pride and validate America’s position as a “civilized” world power, they also used these institutions to establish and protect their own class status. It was not until the 1960s that private philanthropy began to focus on broader cultural expressions. By then, however, this structural disparity, which showered the lion’s share of philanthropic funding and policy attention on art forms originating in Western European traditions and wealthy organizations upholding those traditions, had thoroughly defined the very word “arts” as well as nearly all of the infrastructure associated with it.

Institutional efforts to bring equity to the arts have a long history. The African American theater tradition envisioned by DuBois at the opening of this article, for example, was developed in part thanks to New Deal programs in the 1930s. Since then, the federal and some state governments have stepped in for periods of time to create dedicated funding streams for organizations rooted in communities of color. In 1968, the New York State Council on the Arts launched its Ghetto Arts Program (later wisely renamed the Special Arts Services Program), which provided opportunities for black artists to work in their communities, and three years later, the nascent National Endowment for the Arts launched the Expansion Arts Program, designed to support “community-based arts activities.”

The NEA has succeeded in encouraging programmatic diversity in terms of the projects offered by a wide range of institutions. What it now requires is structural diversity that is within the boards, staffs, and patronage systems of institutions.

– Mary Schmidt Campbell, former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner [From her 1998 A New Mission for the NEA]

Many of these policy interventions, however, ultimately proved fleeting in the face of shifting political winds, especially at the federal level. Undeterred, several generations of artists and activists worked in the latter half of the 20th century to support participation in and expression of cultural heritage, sometimes with the help of private philanthropy and sometimes without any outside help at all. The fruits of those efforts today include a number of prominent institutions presenting works by artists of color, several national service organizations such as the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and Association of African American Museums, and thousands of ethnocultural organizations providing important services within their communities.

In my own experience I have found that ethnic origin is not a bar to artistic response if there is equal access. I cannot believe that persons of color do not respond to good art.

–W. McNeil Lowry, former Vice President of the Ford Foundation who launched the foundation’s arts funding program, in a 1991 article in response to the
Arts and Government report from the American Assembly

In recent years, cultural equity has once again risen to the top of the national arts agenda in the United States. From coast to coast, foundations, arts councils, advocacy organizations, universities and others have doubled down on their commitment to diversity and equity in the arts. Though many factors have led to that shift, a clearly pivotal moment was the 2011 publication of Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” A monograph completed as part of the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy’s review of social justice grantmaking practices in various fields, “Fusing” reported figures suggesting that the majority of arts funding in the United States does not benefit communities of color, and called decisively for change. Grantmakers in the Arts gave substantial visibility to the report and its ideas within the arts funding community over a period of several years, which culminated in the organization releasing a statement of purpose detailing its commitment to racial equity in arts philanthropy in April of 2015.

[S]ocial inequities continue to be reflected in the funding practices of private philanthropy and governmental funders in the arts. Therefore, in order to more equitably support ALAANA [African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American] communities, arts organizations, and artists, funders should take explicit actions to structurally change funding behaviors and norms.

–Grantmakers in the Arts, Racial Equity in Arts Philanthropy Statement of Purpose

Sidford’s and GIA’s calls for equity have reverberated with increasing volume among other national service organizations, local arts agencies, and foundations across the land. In 2014, following in the footsteps of a Mellon Foundation program to increase the diversity of curatorial staff at encyclopedic museums, the American Alliance of Museums released a diversity and inclusion policy statement. In the past two years, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission have engaged in something of a bicoastal dance, with the former conducting a study of the diversity of the arts organizations it funds and the latter undertaking a Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative to improve “diversity in cultural organizations, in the areas of their leadership, staffing, programming and audience composition.” Americans for the Arts, the national service organization that represents these and other local arts councils, released its own widely circulated and discussed Statement on Cultural Equity in May of this year.

I heartily support the NCRP report’s recommendation that philanthropic investment in the arts should benefit underserved communities and promote greater equity, opportunity, and justice. But I take issue with the suggestion that foundation support to large-budget organizations and those that perform the Western canon is, by definition, at odds with these goals.

–Jesse Rosen, League of American Orchestras, 2011

Our goal here is not to present a detailed history of the movement for cultural equity. Folks far more qualified than us have done so already. Instead, we are more interested in looking forward: what is the change we collectively want to create, and what will it take to make that change happen?

At Createquity, we are on a long-term mission to investigate the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them. Yet in order to use research and evidence to help our sector move forward, we must have a clear, and shared, understanding of what success looks like. And therein lies the rub: the further we delved into the literature around cultural equity, and the more we consulted experts and connected with some of the activists who precede us, the more we came to realize that shared understanding simply doesn’t exist.

That there are different visions for cultural equity is clear. Where exactly the lines are drawn, however, is somewhat less so. There is an inherent difficulty in examining positions forged through dialogue via documents authored by a few, and any attempt to develop a taxonomy will have its flaws. But in our own conversations, we found it helpful to divide the visions for success we were reading and hearing from advocates into four archetypes: Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution, and Self-Determination. In the rest of this article, we present the differences between these visions, and consider the implications for a healthy arts ecosystem.

Let’s take a closer look.

Vision One: Diversity

There is another argument for inclusion, one that is at least as powerful as inequity in employment, and that is what it means for the audience to see a fully inclusive world on our stages….

–Brad Erickson, Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area, March 2016

The one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called “mainstream” institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous. The “Diversity” vision for cultural equity seeks to rectify this, calling for these institutions to become more reflective of the communities they serve.

What does that actually mean in practice? Over the course of the past half-century, conversations about diversity have tended to focus first on audiences, then on programming, and finally on leadership. Diversity’s core concern is about who is ultimately benefiting from the work; if diverse audiences are taking advantage, then that is the surest sign of success. Many early efforts thus adopted the theme of “access” to the arts, on the assumption that underrepresented audiences wanted to participate but could not because of barriers like cost or convenience. Gradually, however, as organizations discovered that simply offering free events and pursuing more targeted marketing wasn’t enough, the focus shifted to artists themselves–who was on stage, on the page, on the walls, on screen, or coming out of the speakers–and the cultural narratives they represented. In recent years, attention has turned more and more to the staffs and boards of arts organizations as advocates have sought to diversify the decision-makers behind the scenes. Thus, whereas the Diversity vision began as a simple push for more diverse audiences, today it calls for change at the infrastructural level in addition to the programmatic level.

“Misty Copeland, American Ballet Theatre” by flickr user Kent G Becker

More than equality is at stake when Ms. Copeland—the first African-American principal female dancer in the [American Ballet Theater’s] 75-year history—dances. When a company is diverse, the audience becomes more diverse, too, and for those faced with aging, dwindling audiences, that is priceless.

– Gia Kourlas, New York Times, 2015

Why do mainstream institutions and their stakeholders care about diversity? Much of the interest springs from a recognition of the changing demographics of America. Non-Hispanic whites have made up a smaller proportion of the US population in every Census since 1940, and the Census Bureau projects that people of color will become the majority nationwide by 2044. Meanwhile, figures from the National Endowment for the Arts show a long-term decline in rates of participation in so-called “benchmark” art forms (a definition that includes classical music, jazz, opera, plays, ballet, and visits to an art museum or gallery), as well as relatively lower engagement from non-white, young, poorer, and less-educated audiences. These statistics pose a strong threat to the narrative of universal relevance that many mainstream organizations actively promote, particularly when such institutions are located in heavily diversified downtown urban cores. The more an individual feels reflected within the culture of a mainstream institution, it is assumed, the more comfortable that individual will be engaging with the institution’s programming. If that reflection is not taking place, a significant proportion of the population is being left out in systematic ways.

While many proponents see Diversity as morally righteous on the strength of these arguments alone, there is a solid business case for relevance too. If the assumption above is true, mainstream institutions have a better chance of making out in the long run if they can successfully engage more members of their ever-shifting communities through diversification strategies.

Vision Two: Prosperity

It’s an incredibly appealing product. Ailey is an admirable company that has capitalized on its artistic strengths to ensure its financial future.

–Douglas C. Sonntag, director of dance at the National Endowment for the Arts, referring to Ailey’s artistic product, staff, and board, quoted in a 2004 article for the Washington Post

Though Diversity is unmistakably a call for change, its supporters share early American philanthropists’ faith that the institutions they founded can and must play a central, unifying role in the cultural life of their communities. Not everyone agrees.

The Prosperity vision takes Diversity’s belief in the power of organizational scale and applies it to institutions started and led by artists of color. These institutions follow the standard model of nonprofit growth–cultivating a wide audience, a fundraising board, diversified streams of income, and professional staff–all with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Though rarely stated outright, an underlying assumption of Prosperity is that large, established institutions of color will last longer, and thus provide more benefit to society over many generations, than an ecosystem of smaller organizations that may be more transitory in nature.

What we are calling the Prosperity vision evolved out of the success of a cohort of pioneering artists who created their own organizations in the late 1950s through the1970s in response to a lack of existing opportunities for pursuing their creative work. Many of these artists adopted the nonprofit model that was gaining ground during that period in order to improve their access to philanthropic resources. The seminal organizations they founded–like the Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, Studio Museum in Harlem, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Negro Ensemble Company, among others–received sustained support from private foundations early in their history, and the legacies of those organizations play an important role today both in the cultural life of their communities and more broadly.

Negro Ensemble Company National Tour, 1968 (source)

The Prosperity vision lives on in several more recent institutions, including the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, set to open this September in Washington, DC. It is worth noting that, like many of their predecessors, both of these institutions came to be thanks to a collaboration between one or more artists or advocates of color and a white champion or champions. The August Wilson Center materialized when Pittsburgh mayor Thomas J. Murphy, Jr. accepted a challenge from the local NAACP president, Tim Stevens, to organize a funding drive for the new institution that Stevens had dreamed up. Representative John Lewis (D-GA) introduced legislation for an African American Smithsonian museum and tried for many years to get it through Congress; it finally passed because of support from a new Smithsonian head, Lawrence M. Small. This pattern of community leaders of different races forming alliances to celebrate artists of color is highly characteristic of the Prosperity vision.

Vision Three: Redistribution

Eurocentric aesthetic products continue to be viewed as superior to those of people of color and poor white communities. Funders from both the public and private agencies have historically invested in institutions and art forms that reflect their assumed superiority; they have consistently under resourced and underfunded the art forms that they consider marginal, ethnic, folk, etc.

–Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, president and founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, in a 2016 online conversation posted to the Center’s website.

Diversity and Prosperity both embrace the standard market dynamics of the nonprofit arts sector, in which a small number of high-profile institutions dominate. By contrast, the Redistribution vision favors a larger pool of recipients for contributed income, particularly from grantmakers. Advocates of Redistribution argue that people of color, rural communities, LGBT communities, and others are socially and economically marginalized by our society and therefore have less access to wealth to support their work in the arts. The cultural contributions of these communities have likewise been devalued by arts funders historically. An equitable distribution–a redistribution–of funds towards organizations originating in and serving marginalized communities is the best way to address this imbalance. For advocates of Redistribution, therefore, a shift in the funding paradigm is what’s most urgently needed to achieve cultural equity.

The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute was founded in New York City in 1976 by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, pictured here third from the left. (Source)

Unlike Prosperity’s institution-centric frame, Redistribution focuses on the full ecosystem of individuals and institutions that comprise a community. A core belief of Redistribution is that all participants–from large institutions to one-person operations–should be afforded the opportunity to succeed. (Advocates of Redistribution don’t have a problem with large institutions that celebrate artists of color, as long as smaller organizations are able to share in the wealth.) Beyond the inherent justice in giving funds to oppressed groups, advocates point to the country’s changing demographics as additional justification for Redistribution. For advocates of Redistribution, it is more efficient to accomplish the goals of cultural equity by redirecting resources to organizations with already diverse staff and audiences rather than to put effort into diversifying mainstream organizations.

Redistribution gained a significant boost of attention from the publication of Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change,” which is perhaps best known for a much-cited statistic that just 2% of arts organizations in the United States receive more than half of total contributed income. Many of the most difficult conversations about arts policy in America in the past several years have centered on the future of longstanding public and private funding streams supporting those institutions in the proverbial 2%. That’s because many of those streams were set up following the logic that the size of an organization’s budget is its own justification for the amount of funding it receives.

For example, in the Denver region, small arts groups make up 90% of the organizations funded by the local Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, but share only 16% of the pie. These so-called “Tier III” organizations demanded a more equitable distribution of resources last year, arguing the current distribution was unfair and biased toward Denver’s big cultural institutions. (Redistribution advocates mostly lost that particular battle.) Another conflagration erupted in San Francisco in 2014, after the city released a damning study on the allocations to organizations serving communities of color through its Grants for the Arts (GFTA) agency. Cultural equity activists asked that resources be redirected from GFTA to the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, eventually winning a commitment of more than $2 million in new funds from Mayor Ed Lee. Major sources of operating support to arts organizations in New York City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and beyond operate in a similar tiered or graduated system.

Vision Four: Self-Determination

We finally determined that self-sustainability is not how many memberships or season subscriptions you have or any of those things. It’s if we lost our funding, if there was a global downturn, if the ferry stopped running, if any of these things happened, who’s going to keep the doors to the Debaj Creation Centre open? Who’s going to be standing there with us when the funding is gone? Oh, our neighbors, our friends, our families, the people around us, that’s who this matters to, that’s who our sustainability is linked to. No one else… It’s right here, it’s the people right around us. So our absolute priority has got to be the relationships with those closest to us…

–Figuring the Plural, The Debajehmujig Creation Centre case study, published in 2014

You may have noticed that each successive vision on this list represents a further rejection of the status quo. Self-Determination, in many ways, is the most radical departure of all. The Self-Determination theory of cultural equity calls for full participation in and expression of cultural life for communities of color through models that are organic to those communities, and that look beyond established nonprofit arts funding and advocacy tactics.

At its zenith, Self-Determination seeks nothing less than wholesale societal and cultural transformation. With Self-Determination, ownership of cultural decisions is located within the community: it’s the community members themselves who get to shape cultural life. Advocates of Self-Determination view the current nonprofit and funding system in the United States with heavy skepticism. To them, its legacy of racism and class hegemony is still very much alive today, and will remain so as long as it continues to be largely controlled by the same wealthy, white elite class that founded it.

Because of this history, Self-Determination questions the notion that people of color could ever feel truly welcome engaging with mainstream nonprofit organizations, regardless of changes to programming or diversification of staff, as imagined in Diversity. Furthermore, working within the system to grow nonprofits led by artists of color, as imagined in Prosperity, validates and perpetuates white capitalist models of success, and often takes decision-making power out of the hands of the community. Finally, as these disparities of access are the direct result of global white supremacy, resolving them will require moving beyond Redistribution to dismantling the inherently racist elements of the system and/or creating alternative elements outside of it. This thinking naturally leads to an emphasis on the application of art towards social justice goals, and a de-emphasis of the traditional nonprofit model — though advocates do agree that subsidy for arts projects and organizations remains important.

“Protest” by flickr user S Pakhrin

Self-Determination sees the battleground for cultural equity extending well beyond the nonprofit arts sector as conventionally conceived. For many, devaluing of non-European culture starts in the education system. Communities of color have unequal access to quality public education in general, including arts education. What arts education they do receive tends to emphasize European art forms and works by white artists. Advocates argue that the valuable contributions that members of oppressed communities have made to society should be validated by the prestigious label of “art” in curricula.

Advocates of this vision also note that a large portion of opportunities to participate in the arts exist outside of the nonprofit sector, and argue this is especially true for people of color. Many organizations outside of the professional nonprofit arts sector play an important role in the cultural life of communities of color: churches, social service agencies, businesses, small volunteer nonprofits, and unincorporated community groups. Self-Determination argues that these organizations should also be eligible for arts subsidy, and that distribution of that subsidy should honor the goals and approaches of those organizations rather than prescribing measures of success or activities that are not generated by the community.

Fault Lines

The above list of visions represents a distillation, though we hope not too much an oversimplification, of the efforts, thinking and successes of many different advocates over many years. It’s important to acknowledge that these visions are not mutually exclusive, nor are their advocates. They exist in dialogue with each other, and it’s not unusual to hear a single person endorse aspects of different visions at different points in the same conversation. Yet that should not blind us to the reality that in practice, the tensions between these ideas can be a source of great confusion if they are not called out explicitly.

In particular, we perceive five key fault lines running across and through these visions as we’ve laid them out:

The Role of Race
Cultural equity is a conversation that is rooted in, but not exclusively about, race. While race is undeniably important to all four visions of success, they each incorporate other aspects of identity and community infrastructure in subtly distinct ways. Diversity often starts from a reference point of race, but advocates for Diversity frequently encounter pressure to include measures of social difference such as age, class, and disability status. Prosperity tends to be squarely focused on artists of color, but the Redistribution and Self-Determination visions are more directly aligned with the social justice movement, and thus consider LGBT, rural and other frames alongside race (albeit from an intersectional perspective). Because Redistribution and Self-Determination consider community to be defined by heritage, they often treat marginalized white ethnic communities as part of the same conversation as communities of color. Finally, Self-Determination is particularly sensitive to class considerations, given its skeptical orientation towards capitalism.

The Value (and Cost) of Integration
Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” the Diversity vision is in love with the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, the expectation to share and share alike implied by this utopian, color-blind harmony ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own. The Prosperity, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination visions all incorporate elements of ownership based on common heritage and identity, with no explicit obligation to be inclusive toward other cultures within those contexts.

The Centrality of Institutions
There are stark differences between the visions in how they value (or don’t value) institutions and the traditional ways of growing and running them. Diversity and Prosperity see institutions as vital infrastructure with enormous potential for community benefit. Redistribution sees value in institutions too, but is also keenly aware of how institutional values (e.g., prioritizing financial growth, sustainability, and formal structures) have historically been biased against communities of color. Self-Determination thinks institutional values are a corrupting influence and rejects the idea of institutions being the only model of health, questioning even bedrock institutions like the nonprofit sector itself.

Cultural Norms
Implicitly, Diversity and Prosperity embrace several core elements of dominant American culture that Redistribution and Self-Determination tend to be wary of. One of the most important of these norms involves using an individual rather than group lens to talk about benefits and harm. The difference can be seen in how Diversity and Prosperity very often celebrate or cultivate specific people of color, LGBT individuals, etc., whereas Redistribution and Self-Determination more frequently speak of impacts on, and seek to represent, whole communities. Redistribution and Self-Determination also tend to see culture as defined more by heritage than creativity, placing a relatively higher value on elders, ancestors, and tradition, and critiquing Diversity and Prosperity’s emphasis on originality and individual expression in the context of judging artistic merit. Finally, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination see social consciousness as an important element of artistic work, and are less excited about purely abstract expressions.

The Money
The Redistribution vision sees a lack of access to financial capital as the principal (or at least most immediate) source of problems and restored access to foundation and government funding as the solution. Like Diversity and Prosperity, Redistribution thus implicitly buys into a capitalist framework. The Self-Determination vision, on the other hand, sees capitalism as a white supremacist institution and is more interested in creating spaces and contexts for communities of color to have full control over their circumstances, even if that means leaving money on the table.

Examining real-life debates in the context of these fault lines can be instructive. We noted earlier that many cultural-equity-themed battles in recent years have involved Redistribution trying to chip away at funding streams that disproportionately favor mainstream institutions. Often in response, mainstream institutions will seek to highlight their Diversity bona fides. In a 2011 forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts inviting responses to Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change,” the president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, Jesse Rosen, pointed out that the majority of concerts presented by his organization’s membership “are specifically dedicated to education or community engagement,” highlighting efforts such as “the South Dakota Symphony’s recent tour of their state to perform on three Lakota reservations with a newly commissioned orchestral work by a Lakota composer.” But in a post in the same forum the next day (trenchantly titled “So What’s New?”), Marta Moreno Vega described efforts at diversification by organizations rooted in a Western European tradition as “patronizing.”

A conflict between Prosperity and Redistribution was at the root of reactions to a controversial report issued by the DeVos Institute of Arts Management in 2015. The report investigated the financial and management challenges facing higher-budget black and Latino arts organizations, and concluded the field would be better served if funders provided larger grants to a smaller pool of promising organizations, even if that meant cutting funding to smaller organizations within communities of color. “It’s not politically easy or palatable, but it’s a potential solution that does need to be considered,” suggested DeVos Institute chair Michael Kaiser in defense of the report’s recommendations. This argument provoked a firestorm of criticism: Grantmakers in the Arts released a statement charging that the report “lacks the real understanding of the barriers faced by many of these organizations to surviving and thriving in the nonprofit marketplace,” while Jason Tseng’s widely circulated editorial cartoon highlighted the absurdity of suggesting that black and Latino organizations duke it out Hunger Games-style. In many ways, reactions like these surfaced the reality that, although Prosperity was once considered a daring and progressive vision, it is now increasingly seen as retrograde absent the additional value of Redistribution.

Finally, an especially instructive case study is the institutional arc of El Museo del Barrio, in New York City, which surfaced tensions between the ideals of Prosperity and the goals of Self-Determination. Founded by Puerto Rican activists and educators in 1969 with funding from the New York State Board of Regents, the museum originally had the mission of increasing representation for Puerto Rican culture. After losing much of its funding in the 1970s, El Museo broadened its mission to encompass art by all Latin American artists, transitioned leadership on the board from community members to individuals with traditional gallery and art world experience, and eventually relocated to the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. While these changes allowed the museum to increase revenue and attract new supporters, it also resulted in significant pushback from community members, who noted that the many changes had decreased opportunities for local Puerto Rican artists at the museum. Pressure to undertake mainstream model expansion resulted in a museum that, while successful by capitalist markers, failed to stay true to its original vision.

El Museo del Barrio’s Three Kings Day Parade, 2016 (source)

We can also use the four visions to help us understand the ramifications of new policy ideas intended to advance cultural equity. One proposal that has come up from time to time is to tie funding levels directly to the diversity of organizations. While many private funders in the United States ask questions about staff and board diversity and incorporate such information into funding decisions informally, the most assertive stands on this front are currently being staked out by other countries. In December 2014, Arts Council England announced that it would hold organizations accountable for promoting and developing diversity throughout their work across leadership, workforce, programming and audiences–or risk the loss of critical ACE funding. Meanwhile, the Canada Council for the Arts will now reduce funding for organizations that do not share a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of [their] geographic community or region.”

What reactions could we expect if the National Endowment for the Arts proposed to weigh diversity equally against its current review criteria of artistic excellence and artistic merit? Certainly, the Prosperity and Redistribution visions would see much to celebrate in such a proposal, given the increased access to different forms of capital it would represent. Supporters of the status quo, naturally, would resist. Perhaps the most interesting question is how such a policy move would sit with Self-Determination. While ostensibly a step in the direction of justice and thus unlikely to be opposed, it could be seen as giving too much emphasis to the goals of Diversity at the expense of broader social change. To maintain funding levels, mainstream institutions could shake up the composition of their staffs and boards, but the arts activities that take place through small organizations, churches, and informal collectives outside of the NEA’s reach might not realize much benefit. Moreover, the move would still leave control of resources firmly within the dominant system–resources that could disappear as soon as priorities shift, as has happened historically with NEA and state government funding.

Cultural Equity in a Healthy Arts Ecosystem

“Change is not a uniform process…the goal of building participation in the arts requires that leaders and organizations rethink the meaning of success.”

– Diane Grams and Betty Farrell, writing in Entering Cultural Communities, 2008

Createquity’s own vision of success is that every opportunity is taken to make people’s lives better through the arts. Clearly, in order to understand how to do that, we need to make sense of cultural equity in the context of our own work. Although this project started out as an investigation of the history of cultural equity activism, we soon realized we would provide more value both to ourselves and the field if we made an attempt to untangle the unnamed assumptions that so often confuse or complicate conversations about cultural equity.

As a first step, we set ourselves the task of writing arguments in favor of each of the four visions articulated above in the context of Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, in which each individual (now and in the future) has the opportunity to participate in the arts at a level suited to that person’s interest and skill. Because Createquity has identified specific outcomes that we believe characterize a healthy arts ecosystem, many of these arguments diverge a bit from the language that activists use (e.g., “institutions rooted in communities of color will hire more artists of color than mainstream institutions would and pay them a market wage, thus distributing very scarce opportunities to participate in the arts more equitably”). However, we tried our best throughout the exercise to make an authentic translation between each of the visions and our own.

Next, we took the arguments for each of the visions and attempted to articulate the fact-based assumptions undergirding each of them, staying as close to the healthy arts ecosystem definition as possible. (You can see these assumptions in the same document linked above.) To establish a preliminary sense of where we were as an organization, we asked our editorial team to rate each of the resulting fifty-odd assumptions on a scale of one (“I am very confident this is not true”) to five (“I am very confident this is true.”) The assumptions were presented at face value, without the context of a vision, and in no particular order. Ten Createquity team members participated.

In developing these arguments and assumptions, we wanted to acknowledge that one reason why cultural equity initiatives fall short is because they often face resistance from parties who argue against any change to the status quo. As a thought exercise, we included “Status Quo” as a fifth vision for success, developing as many arguments in its favor as we could think of. While Status Quo arguments in practice often take an institution- or discipline-centric frame that is at odds with Createquity’s concern for the entire ecosystem, we did manage to come up with a few rationales that could be consistent with the idea of making people’s lives better through the arts. For example, one could argue that mainstream institutions are crucial to artistic professions where it is difficult, though possible, to make a living as an artist (such as ballet dancer or orchestra musician). Perhaps it is the case that the Eurocentric programming presented by mainstream institutions is inherently expensive to produce, and thus it is natural and expected for institutions that offer this programming to receive a disproportionate amount of subsidy. Status Quo advocates frequently seek to avoid setting up the choice between maintaining subsidy or supporting smaller organizations as an either/or; they argue that mainstream institutions deliver a lot of benefits to their communities by operating at scale, which allows them to serve many more people and–importantly–to bring in tourism dollars. They may also argue that most donors to mainstream arts organizations would not have considered contributing to smaller organizations anyway.

“Museum Mile” by flickr user MichelinStar

On the whole, our team did not find the assumptions underlying the pro-Status Quo arguments particularly compelling, with one exception: we agreed that mainstream institutions could likely serve as an anchor for tourism, regardless of efforts to diversify. The remaining ratings did not yield an unambiguous endorsement of any vision in particular. That said, the following assumptions received high ratings across the board, and we presently consider these to be our “working assumptions” in the context of our work on cultural equity:

• At a basic level, we agree that mainstream institutions grew out of a white, racist system, and continue to disproportionately serve white people and certain other demographics.
• There is further agreement that funding disproportionately flows to these mainstream institutions.
• We agree that a lack of diverse cultural programming, either from mainstream institutions or those that receive some other form of validation from the broader culture, is problematic for the wellbeing of people of color.
• There is a general trust that people of color, whether in the context of mainstream institutions or institutions of color, will be more likely to provide programming opportunities to artists of color.
• And finally, there is agreement that many of the dominant organizing logics within the current nonprofit sector provide disproportionate control over individual institutions to those with wealth and influence.

It’s important to note that these are working assumptions, which means they could change in response to new information or data. But for now, the combination of these views means that Createquity sees the concentration of resources within mainstream institutions as likely problematic absent meaningful diversification of those institutions. It also offers an endorsement of involving more people of color in programming decisions, whether through mainstream institutions or some other means.

We are much less clear as a group on how resources should be optimally distributed than we are on the idea that the current arrangement is probably not for the best. That outcome is not terribly surprising; after all, little is known about many of the assumptions that distinguish the Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution and Self-Determination visions from one another. We see this as a crucial opportunity for future research in the sector. In our own efforts, we plan to prioritize the following questions going forward:

VALUABLE CULTURAL EXPERIENCES
What are the ingredients of a cultural experience that people find valuable? Are those ingredients consistent across demographics? Are the demographics of the staff (artistic, programming, and administrative) and board at arts and cultural organizations predictive of a) the demographics of their participants and b) the quality of experience that participants have?

THE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF SCALE
What effect does the scale of an arts organization (or an organization with arts programming) have on its ability to create specific benefits for artists, audiences, and communities of color? How do networks of larger and smaller organizations perform relative to each other in facilitating these benefits? Does the influence of wealthy donors, funders, and customers tend to promote or harm an organization’s ability to deliver these benefits?

ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Are arts activities designed to combat racism and other forms of oppression effective in that goal? How do they compare to other anti-oppression strategies, and do they make those strategies more effective when used in combination?

In the United States, we have data showing the distribution of funding to different kinds of arts organizations, including those primarily serving communities of color. We have data on the demographics of arts audiences, of artists, and increasingly of the cultural workforce. And there’s more research on these topics being commissioned all the time. Isn’t that enough?

We would argue that it’s not. Knowledge of this nature can only ever establish that there might be a problem; it gives us very little insight on what we should do about it. We might each have intuitions about the right path forward, but as this article amply demonstrates, reasonable people are coming to different conclusions about where those paths lead. So long as that remains the case, we suspect the fight for cultural equity will continue to be a long, slow, uncertain slog.

At Createquity, we’ve embraced the framework of wellbeing–which groups the various components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella–as a way of binding together the outcomes of a healthy arts ecosystem holistically. While there are many ways of conceptualizing and measuring wellbeing, one of the most common involves simply asking people how satisfied they are with their lives–which sounds pretty self-determining to us. Pursuing future inquiry through a wellbeing or quality-of-life lens may be an effective tactic for building bridges between visions and the ideologies they represent, by enabling the relative value of components of each vision to be understood as part of an integrated whole. We can all agree, hopefully, that the goals of cultural equity are compatible with the goal of a happier and more meaningful life for all. We hope our work here can be one small step towards creating that better future.

A full bibliography for this piece as well as several endnotes can be found here. Createquity would like to thank Plural (Mina Matlon, Ingrid van Haastrecht, and Kaitlyn Wittig Mengüç), Andrea Louie, and Marc Vogl for their invaluable feedback in the course of developing this article.

Lincoln Center (photo by flickr user Peter Miller)

Raising money is tough, and raising money for the arts can be particularly so. And yet, at this moment in New York, sixteen arts institutions in Manhattan alone are in the process of raising a whopping $3.47 billion for ambitious capital projects–from a revamped building for the New York Philharmonic (price tag: $500 million) to the long-awaited new home for the Irish Arts Center (price tag: $60 million). While there’s no one way to raise this kind of dollar, the New York Times has a compelling explanation of the various strategies cultural institutions are using to bring home the bacon. Lurking underneath all the glitz and ambition, however, is an unasked question: is this all a good idea? After all, cultural equity and disparities of wealth among cultural institutions is an issue with increasing resonance both in New York City and nationally, and in many ways the current administration’s proposed cultural plan has been seen as a step towards addressing those issues. Will this giant slate of capital projects claim resources that might otherwise have been available to a broader constituency? And given the dim results of past research on the long-term effects of building projects, are these decisions that even the institutions themselves will come to regret?

Violence Threatens Free Expression in the Internet Age. On October 26, SXSW Interactive, the annual media festival held in Austin, Texas every March, canceled two sessions for its 2016 event, citing threats of violence. The panels–”SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games“– were seen as #Gamergate panels, though the movement was not specifically invoked by either. The decision drew outrage from various corners of the internet world; media heavy-hitters BuzzFeed and Vox threatened to withdraw altogether from the conference if the panels were not reinstated. In response to the backlash, SXSW was forced to develop a full day’s worth of programming, an online harassment summit, which will include a significantly expanded list of panelists such as Congresswoman Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts) and former Texas senator Wendy Davis. Threats of violence are terrible enough, but on the Indian subcontinent this month intellectuals are increasingly victims of the real thing. Two Bangledeshi publishers were stabbed to death purportedly for having printed the work of Avijit Roy, a Bangladeshi-American known for his critical writings on religious extremism. (Roy was himself assassinated in February of this year.) This comes amidst a protest among many of India’s most prominent writers in response to prime minister Narendra Modi’s failure to condemn recent violence by Hindu nationalists in that country.

Colorado’s Small Arts Organizations Lose the Resource Equity Battle. The Denver area’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, which oversees the distribution of some $50 million in sales tax subsidies to some 300 arts organizations, is up for a third reauthorization in 2016. In May, the SCFD proposed a plan for the next decade that would keep shares of arts funds close to what they are now. Small arts groups–especially the 270 organizations in “Tier III” who under the proposed plan would split a mere 15.7% of the pie–revolted, arguing the distribution is unfair and biased toward Denver’s big cultural institutions. In response, a group called the Friends of Arts and Cultural Equity presented a plan with a more equitable distribution of resources. This month, the SCFD rejected calls for a redistribution, reaffirming its own funding recommendations to the legislature. The question now becomes: will the legislature send the reauthorization to ballot, or take control of funding measures themselves?

Nonprofits Crowd In On the Crowdfunding Pie. Since it first launched in 2008, Indiegogo–and hundreds of similar crowdfunding platforms–have revolutionized how and for what individuals raise money (Greek bailout, anyone?). This month, Indiegogo launched Generosity, an Indiegogo spinoff where nonprofit organizations can host campaigns–for free. Unlike its competitors, such as Razoo and FirstGiving, the only fees collected on Generosity by Indiegogo will go to the credit card processor. The demand is there: in the last five years, Indiegogo has hosted some 15,000 nonprofit fundraisers. Indiegogo’s main competitor, Kickstarter, doesn’t allow fundraising for charity, but that hasn’t stopped the company from making its own recent moves towards the altruism bandwagon, having announced its reformation as a public benefit corporation and raised money for Syrian refugees at the request of the Obama administration. Crowdfunding won’t replace grants and major individual giving any time soon, but as anyone who’s put in time on the development side of the nonprofit world knows, every little bit counts.

Not All Is Lost: An Alt-Weekly Newspaper Revival. We’ve heard it before: “print is dead” and especially so when it comes to newspaper print. Alt-weeklies, the scrappy punk siblings of the Times and Chronicles of the world, have been hit especially hard, and October witnessed the demise of yet another one: Philadelphia’s much loved City Paper. Yet in an interesting twist, this same month New York City’s storied Village Voice was essentially rescued by Pennsylvania newspaper man, Peter Barbey. Barbey, president of the Reading Eagle Company, a family-owned media company that has published newspapers in Pennsylvania for more than 200 years, bought the paper from Voice Media Group, and has already announced big plans for the sixty-year old circular, including an increase in cultural coverage.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Poet, essayist, playwright, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander was named director of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program.
• Terry Carbone has been appointed director of the Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art program. She succeeds Ellen Holtzman, who served in the role for 23 years.
• Veteran art museum curator and director Maxwell Anderson was named Director of Grant Programs for the New Cities Foundation.
• Lynne McCormack, longtime Director of Providence’s Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, is leaving to become the national program director for creative placemaking at LISC.
• Reynold Levy, who was president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts from 2002–2014, has been appointed president of the Robin Hood Foundation in New York.
• After 14 years, Susan Patterson has announced she will retire from her position as director of the Charlotte program at The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation at the end of 2015.
• MK Wegmann has announced she will retire from her position of President and CEO of the New Orleans-based National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network in January 2016. A search for her replacement is underway; deadline December 1, salary $125-130k.
• The Arts Consulting Group, Inc. seeks Vice Presidents for its expanded Canada office. Posted October 5; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A study conducted at the University Hospital Erlangen in Germany and published in journal PLoS One suggests that actively participating in art-making keeps the brain healthy.
• Michigan State University analyzed several data sources, and found that Nobel prize winning scientists are 2.85x more likely than average scientists to have a significant artistic hobby.
• A new report by the University of Maryland’s DeVos Institute of Arts Management, “Diversity in the Arts,” reviews the economic picture of African American and Latino nonprofit museums and performing arts companies and suggests some controversial solutions.
• The Creative Diversity report, published this month by Creative Industries Federation in partnership with Music of Black Origin, suggests that theater is significantly less ethnically diverse than other creative industries.
• Two studies published this month looked into the question of music consumption. The first, by two Irish psychologists, looks at the many reasons why people choose to listen to music. The second, published in the journal Poetics, examines what your musical tastes say about you.
• Columbia Law School program and the Urban Institute released preliminary findings that, despite rapid increase in the number of 501(c)3 organizations–in 2014 the rate of newly formed entities nearly tripled– states are doing little to hire new regulators to police charities.
• A survey conducted in the UK this month reveals that “one in four performing arts careers are halted by parenthood.”

The National Endowment for the Arts will soon have a new Chairman. Rocco Landesman announced yesterday his plans to retire at the end of the year, in a decision widely anticipated among arts insiders. Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa will serve as acting chair until a successor is named.

The Supreme Court will consider a case involving first sale doctrine and whether consumers have the right to resell copyrighted items bought abroad in the United States. The New York Times comes out in favor of copyright holders on this one. I’m more skeptical though – limiting consumers’ rights in this way seems like a recipe for convoluted legal restrictions and the Grey Lady offers no prescriptions for how the limitations should be put into practice. Meanwhile, the FCC is adopting new regulations pertaining to the use of wireless microphones (relevant for some large theaters and performing arts centers).

What do this month’s election results mean for copyright, anyway? Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman speculate that in the short term, we probably won’t see any major (successful) efforts to expand copyright protection, especially with two of Hollywood’s favorite pro-copyright Congressmen, Howard Berman and Mary Bono Mack, losing their elections. In the longer term, we may see Republicans try to pursue a libertarian line on copyright in an effort to draw a wedge between Democrats and younger voters. I’m not sure how well that would work, but there is already evidence that, among its many civil wars, there is also a generational divide among Republicans on this issue. Last week, the conservative Republican Study Committee released and then pulled a memo by 24-year-old Congressional staffer Derek Khanna advocating for meaningful copyright reform. Future of Music Coalition’s Casey Rae has more.

DOMESTIC – STATE AND LOCAL

Denver’s arts community is in an unusual situation, finding itself with $57 million in publicly approved bond money for capital construction to spend after a planned renovation of Boettcher Concert Hall failed to go through. The mayor has submitted a list of recommendations redirecting the cash to nine institutions. Denver’s not the only city with new publicly approved money for the arts: as previously reported here, the city of Portland, OR’s Regional Arts and Culture Commission will get $5.7 million a year in new arts funding because of a recently passed ballot measure. Eloise Damrosch explains how it happened.

Obviously inspired by the recent passage of a millage (property tax) to support the Detroit Institute of Arts, arts advocates in Ann Arbor put a similar millage proposal on the ballot for this month’s elections – this time to support public art. The measure would have cost taxpayers $11 per year and raised about $450,000 for public art programs, but failed to garner enough votes to pass on Election Day. Aaron Seagraves, Ann Arbor’s public art administrator who is interviewed in the article, says he doesn’t know why the measure didn’t pass, but I’m guessing the DIA’s $2.5 million advocacy campaign (and presumably the lack of same in Ann Arbor) might have had something to do with it.

INTERNATIONAL

For the second Createquity update in a row, the arts policy news from abroad ranges from inconvenient to tragic. Canada’s oldest arts advocacy group, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, is no more. The organization had received continuous funding from the federal government since 1965 which represented about three-quarters of its budget, but Canada’s conservative leaders decided to cut the cord. CCA had at times been critical of government-supported policies, though the decision appears to have been more financial than political. Advocacy is not completely dead in Canada, though – Shannon Litzenberger has a report from the all-volunteer Canadian Arts Coalition’s Arts Day festivities (similar to Americans for the Arts’s Arts Advocacy Day).

In the UK, Arts Council England is reducing its staff by 21% as part of a previously negotiated agreement with the government, and Creative Scotland is adjusting its grantmaking procedures in the face of artist concerns. Folks don’t seem to be happy with the general direction of things. In Newcastle, the local government has cut all funding to the arts for a whopping £90 million savings, losing 1300 jobs in the process – similarly drastic cuts had already happened in the cities of Somerset, Derby, and Darlington.

A very sad story comes from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the 124-year-old National Museum is closing due to lack of funds. The museum, in Sarajevo, is the victim of a political crisis that is destabilizing the government of the young country. Several other revered cultural institutions are in danger of failing as well. Things are a little better in Greece, where Ira-Ilana Papadopoulou reports on how the economic crisis there has affected the cultural sector.

Even sadder news continues to come from the Muslim world, as news of arts-related tragedies attributable to conflict or oppression continues to pour in. In Syria, the ancient city of Aleppo is losing its cultural heritage in the wake of the civil war taking place there. In Mali, where the militant group Ansar Dine has already destroyed mosques in the ancient city of Timbuktu, Salafists are now threatening and harassing musicians. In Somalia, a popular poet, playwright and songwriter was assassinated in Mogadishu by Al Queda-aligned group Al-Shabab. Astonishingly, he is the 18th media figure killed by the group this year. Iran, thankfully, is not beset with this kind of violence, but its national orchestra is virtually dead in the face of financial difficulties and political pressure.

While most everyone was in agreement that Obama’s administration promises to be more arts-friendly than previous editions–one panelist opined frankly that the “fact that [an arts agenda] exists is a miracle”–there seemed to be a general feeling as well that those in power could be doing more. Of particular concern are two things: first, that on the change.gov website, the arts are identified under “Additional Issues” instead of as its own policy area; and second, that the arts policy advisory committee that helped define the Obama arts agenda during the campaign appears to have no equivalent during the transition to governing mode. It seems that the original arts agenda was developed very early on in the campaign’s lifecycle and was modified only slightly in subsequent months. Sheffer noted that many seemingly excellent ideas generated by the advisory committee before his own tenure began had not been adopted by the campaign, including the creation of more local arts councils, incorporating the arts into Small Business Administration loan programs, tax credits for “cultural investors” such as real estate developers who include artists in their plans, creative community block grants through the Office of Housing and Urban Development, and more.

Sheffer also recounted a promising tale of arts support from his prior home base of Cleveland: a 30-cent per pack cigarette tax passed in 2006 with 55% of the vote will bring in nearly $20 million a year to arts organizations in Cuyahoga County. As an aside, it seems to me that many of the more successful municipal arts programs in the country rely on creative taxation schemes like this–see, for example, San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts, which is funded by a hotel tax, or Denver’s Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, which is made possible by a 0.1% retail sales tax. These initiatives have broad public support (Denver’s has been renewed twice), sound modest in scale, and yet provide significant resources for local arts activities.

Going forward, several panelists had ideas for better coordinating the various arts-related activities in the federal government (did you know that there is a National Council on the Arts, for example?) through the appointment of a “culture czar” or similar position. Sheffer felt that some of these proposals might prove unrealistic, but suggested as a starting point the creation of a position under the Office of Public Liaison to ensure that the arts have a “seat at the table” during policy discussions involving other agencies.

All in all, this was a very worthwhile event, drawing a robust audience despite the early morning time. Congratulations to SNEAC, the new-ish student organization that put this together. I wish them well and look forward to seeing what else they have in store.