Art and the Public

Art and the Public as a whole is designed to engage communities more deeply in the arts than by simply bringing a performance to their neighborhood or school and expecting them to turn into lifelong arts patrons overnight. A central theory behind the Art and the Public program is that many of the arts’ most acute benefits flow from participation at a creative or performative level, rather than from “appreciation” alone. As such, the most significant project of the A&P program would be an annual citywide festival rotating among the four disciplines of art, music, theater, and dance. This festival would involve simultaneous events all over the city, featuring participatory opportunities for adults and children alike. For example, organizers might set up in places like Flushing Meadows Park, Central Park, Coney Island, and so on for NYC Paints, with materials on hand and art instructors roving around to answer questions and show off particularly interesting or fun creations. An NYC Sings event would be a giant choral festival with sheet music to be provided, various types of music in different locales, and so on.

Another Art and the Public project would be the Ortiz Club, a series of themed discussions about current artistic creations. Again, events would be neighborhood-based and provide an opportunity for arts lovers to meet and interact while engaging with the works in question more deeply.

Finally, Art and the Public would present performances and exhibitions of lesser-known and emerging artists in combination with better known ones across the city. The model would borrow elements from both traditional rock festivals (that combine artists of varying notoriety) and the Wordless Music series (that combine artists from different genres). The pool of Supporting Start-Ups applicants and grantees would receive consideration for exposure through this program as well.

Arts Research

As I’ve written in the past, the research on the benefits (both intrinsic and instrumental) of the arts is still in many ways in a nascent stage. OFA has an opportunity to dramatically change that with targeted efforts to learn what we don’t yet know.

Despite a long history of support from the philanthropic community, the role of the arts in society remains one of life’s great enigmas. Countless individuals can tell passionate stories about how the arts have changed (or even saved) their lives, yet the actual benefits of the arts on a large scale are not well understood. In contrast to programs aimed at, for example, reversing climate change or ending poverty, initiatives in the arts can rarely claim such concrete, easily comprehended goals. This is in part due to the multiplicity of positive effects associated with active arts creation and participation:

• individual benefits such as the development of self-esteem and the pure enjoyment of experiencing or creating art;
• educational benefits such as improved visuo-spatial reasoning, enhanced school performance, and lower delinquency rates;
• social benefits such as the development of professional and personal networks;
• cultural benefits such as the building of links between disparate groups and the promotion of tolerance and diversity;
• economic benefits related to cultural tourism and community revitalization; and
• society-wide benefits such as better integration of creativity into the workforce and a livelier political and civic discourse.

While a growing body of literature attempts to study in depth the various social impacts of the arts, both consistent, reliable data sources and robust, sophisticated studies remain few and far between, particularly in comparison with fields like healthcare and education. Furthermore, those studies that do exist overwhelmingly tend to examine quantity of arts experiences without considering the quality thereof, thereby missing perhaps one of the most important determinants of impact. Finally, rigorous evaluations of individual arts programs are rare, with the result that most artistic providers are “flying blind” as to the true impact of their work and must base important strategic decisions on anecdotal evidence and intuition alone.

Arts research efforts at Ortiz would connect seamlessly with other programs at the foundation, incorporating literature review and sometimes small-scale studies in support of the theories underlying those programs (for example, the Arts Research program may study past attempts to turn for-profit enterprises into nonprofits in order to understand best practices and pitfalls in such efforts). I also shamelessly borrowed the cultural asset map concept from my work last summer at the Hewlett Foundation, proposing to create a version of the tool for New York City that would help to inform better grantmaking decisions and enable a baseline assessment of arts health.

Beyond that, the Arts Research program would engage in proactive research of important questions facing the field, with a particular focus on questions that have not received sufficient attention to date. To wit:

Professional evaluators with proven track records of innovation and rigor will be invited to compete for these contracts. Where possible, a technical advisory board will be employed to guide methodologies and serve as an independent check. Initial areas of focus will include:

• further study of the intrinsic benefits of the arts, with particular focus on different types and intensity levels of artistic experiences
• examination of how much the quality of arts programming as perceived by producers and consumers affects its impact on the latter
• efforts to clarify the causal link between neighborhood artistic activity and economic revitalization

Finally, the Arts Research program would offer a competitive opportunity for organizations to have their own programs evaluated professionally — whether or not they are existing grantees of the foundation. There’s one catch, though: participating organizations would have to agree in advance that the results of the evaluation would be made public, no matter the outcome. (Opportunities to respond and engage in dialogue about controversial studies would be made available, of course.)

Through it all, it’s very important that the foundation be able to evaluate itself. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a truly independent evaluation that is initiated in some way by the entity being evaluated. So, we decided to do the next best thing and place evaluation responsibility with the Board, which at least bears ultimate financial responsibility for the organization. An evaluation committee will develop goals and targets with staff on a yearly basis and a strategic framework for programs a few times a decade. We also decided to incorporate formative evaluation elements in programs themselves, through focus groups and site visits. Finally, just to keep everyone honest, I inserted this language in our report:

Furthermore, all foundation staff will regularly participate in the New York City arts community as patrons, ticket-buyers, and visitors, both to grantee organizations and non-grantee organizations. Each program staff member will be expected to attend a minimum of two performances or exhibitions a week throughout the year, vacation weeks excluded, and each non-program staff member and each board member will attend a minimum of two arts events a month. These visits will be unannounced and tickets or entrance fees will be paid for by the Foundation to ensure an unbiased audience experience. Staff will fill out basic reports for the Foundation’s internal databases describing the attendance at the event and anything notable or unusual about what transpired. The purpose of this regulation is threefold: first, to ensure that Foundation staff remains “in touch” with developments in the arts community through firsthand experience rather than the secondhand received wisdom of grant applications; second, to enable the Foundation to pursue giving opportunities proactively when appropriate, particularly in the context of its Supporting Start-ups program, rather than being able to respond only to organizations with existing grantwriting apparatus; and third, to “check up” on grantees as a way of informally auditing their activities and checking future proposals for internal consistency.

We also delved quite a bit into the operational details of the foundation (my colleague Michael Shay created an extraordinarily detailed 10-year budget and investment plan based on extensive research of peer institutions), but I figured this blog’s readers would be more interested in the program stuff. So, how’d we do? If you had $800 million to give away to the arts, where would you put it?

I can’t afford to finish my works. I can design them, draw them out on my computer, archive them. But to print a giclee, to frame them for show, that runs me about 1500 dollars per image. – Hairy Carrion

Specialized shipping services for artwork can be very expensive-from building crates to fees for the actual carrier. – Richard

Money for visual artists to do their work is almost impossible to find. There are some residencies if you want to go somewhere to work or sometimes there is a little money to give a lecture but there isn’t support to just stay in your studio and make work. And when an artist shows work, there usually isn’t an honorarium or rental fee for showing the work. – jgoldner

In addition, multiple posters (more performing artists, I suspect) mentioned space rental, money to buy equipment as opposed to just renting it, and startup costs like building a website, insurance, demo CDs, legal fees, and so on. Money to “buy time” (i.e., to compose or write or create) was also a popular request.

Essentially all of the issues that have been identified above are symptoms of the winner-take-all economy in the arts. That is to say, it takes a certain amount of startup capital to create a successful artistic enterprise, whether as an individual or organization, and if one doesn’t have access to that startup capital, opportunities to exercise one’s talents are limited. Furthermore, essentials such as space, equipment and materials are in a sense more expensive to younger and smaller organizations because they take up a greater proportion of those organizations’ or individuals’ budgets, leaving less for “luxuries” like, um, paying the artists. This contributes to a feedback loop in which the artists who are already undercapitalized stay undercapitalized, because the system is set up to reward those who supply those basic essentials before it rewards the artistic output of those who use them.

Two of the Ortiz Foundation‘s four programs are designed to work in concert to attack this issue. The first, Building Infrastructure: Giving the Artists the Tools to Strengthen Communities, is designed to lower the costs for all artists by investing heavily in three key expense categories — space, materials, and equipment — and making them available on a non-curated basis at subsidized rates. The second, Supporting Start-Ups: Funding Emerging and Early-Stage Organizations, is a competitive program whose purpose is to provide that key initial capitalization to new projects and organizations that hint at untapped potential, raising the income for emerging artists as a result. Let’s take a look at these two programs in more detail.

Building Infrastructure

This program would be the Ortiz Foundation’s largest, starting off with an investment of $8.5 million a year and growing to $23.5 million per year by 2019. The initial undertaking would be the construction of a new community arts center in an easily accessible neighborhood of Queens with the following features:

• A deep proscenium theater with sprung floors suitable for theater, dance, and musical performance;
• A recording studio;
• A ground-floor gallery that doubles as the lobby of the theater;
• Numerous smaller, acoustically-sound rehearsal and studio spaces;
• Bulletin boards for information about events and training throughout the city; and
• Offices for the foundation itself.

The arts center would have a cache of materials and equipment on hand that would be available for rental at subsidized rates. There would also be a small fund to help artists buy equipment on a competitive basis. The center would be managed by an outside organization (either hired or created for this purpose) which would have a rotating advisory board of local artists to ensure broad community representation.

While this new construction would occupy the bulk of program funds for the first few years, the idea is that over time the Foundation would construct similar spaces in other parts of the city, with some including studio space for visual artists, others incorporating smaller more club-like performance venues, and so on. By consciously increasing the supply of these goods (space, materials and equipment) and directing them to those that need them the most, the Foundation hopes to make it easier for talented emerging artists to get off the ground.

A smaller part of the Building Infrastructure program would be aimed at existing venues and organizations. The first prong of this strategy would involve expanding the NYSCA dance rehearsal space subsidies to theater, music, and visual art spaces. The second is a unique idea: identify key for-profit companies that provide an important service to the arts community and find themselves struggling financially because of it (think Tonic), and offer them a package of management/legal consulting services and up to five years’ worth of bridge funding to turn them nonprofit. This “offer they can’t refuse” would be primarily targeted at organizations that are at severe risk of failing, but the program could also consider comparatively healthy organizations that wish to take a more proactive approach to their situation. (Depending on how the L3C develops, that could be a viable alternative to nonprofit status as well.)

Supporting Start-Ups

The Supporting Start-Ups program is essentially a classic venture philanthropy model writ small. Each organization accepted into the program would eligible for up to a total of $50,000 in funding over a period of up to five years. (The actual amount granted may be quite a bit less, depending on the specific budget needs of the organization in question.) The goal would not be to grow organizations “to scale” in the usual sense, so much as to grow them to the point where they can conduct their operations and programs insulated somewhat from the constant threat of extinction. After five years, organizations will have had ample opportunity to demonstrate their worth to the larger funding world and can continue on to greater heights if appropriate. The Supporting Start-Ups program will provide a significant level of technical support along with the money granted, and set realistic interim goals for each year in collaboration with the grantee. Failure to meet these interim goals on a consistent basis would result in an early termination of funding.

Decisions for Supporting Start-Ups grant awards would be made by an advisory group made up of journalists, curators, booking agents, publishers, mid-career artistic directors, and other individuals whose jobs require them to evaluate unsolicited work on a regular basis. The purpose of this model would be twofold: first, to rely on the expertise of field experts in determining the difference between, for example, a demo CD that sounds bad because it was recorded in somebody’s basement vs. a demo CD that sounds bad because the music stinks; and second, to build a bridge between these emerging artists, whether selected for a grant or not, and influential tastemakers in their field. (It is assumed that because of the low profile of most grant applicants, there will only be rare instances in which a panelist is already familiar with the work of the applicant; thus, conflict of interest is not a major concern.)

The combination of these two programs, it is hoped, would do much to enable emerging artists to overcome some of the systemic disadvantages that cause such burnout and attrition in the field. For our fourth and final installment tomorrow, we’ll look at the Ortiz Foundation’s other two programs, Arts Research and Art and the Public.

The Ortiz Foundation for the Arts (OFA) works to foster the visual, musical, theatrical, and terpsichorean arts in the five boroughs of New York City. In doing so, we aim to stimulate a highly creative environment that brings the community of artists and the city-wide community of New Yorkers together, strengthening each. Our grants are designed to enhance the vitality of both communities through diverse support for participation in the arts by artists and audiences, professional and nonprofessionals, and experts and amateurs.

In the course of our research, we found that the NYC arts community currently enjoys strong support from a trio of private and public funders, all in the $30 million range (stats for the city only). These are the Mellon Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. (Technically, the New York City DCA has a [much] larger budget, but for the purposes of this discussion we’ll consider its competitive program funding pool only.) The Ford and Peter Jay Sharp Foundations follow at $22 million and $20 million respectively, while the National Endowment for the Arts provided just over $14 million in 2008. The most significant corporate giver is the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, with $6 million in NYC arts funding.

At $41 million, then, the Ortiz Foundation would be the largest arts funder in the city by 2015. How to set ourselves apart? We identified five key areas of differentiation:

• Emphasis on smaller players. Although we recognize the indispensable role of large and institutional organizations like the Metropolitan Museum, the Public Theater, the Metropolitan Opera, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, we believe that the Ortiz foundation’s resources would be better spent fostering creativity among less-established artists and organizations. Although this emphasis means that many grants will not end up producing art that turns out to be popular, this is an important gap in the current structure of arts funding. Supporting organizations early in their careers—and later in their careers, if they do not wish to scale up to the size of a large institution—will have tremendous benefits to a large number of artists, and a corresponding large and disparate potential audience.
• Attention to non-professional artists. Primary and secondary arts education receives a good deal of attention from existing foundations. Citi’s arts funding is entirely devoted to education, a portion of Starr, JP Morgan Chase, and Hewlett’s giving is earmarked for it, and the Wallace Foundation, an education foundation, gives a small amount to arts education. However, the existing foundations mostly treat adults who are not (aspiring) professional artists as primarily potential audience members. This is a mistake. The benefits of the arts are many. Some of them accrue primarily to the artist; others are enjoyed by the audience, but would be enhanced if the audience has some experience with the art themselves. Part of the Ortiz Foundation’s mission is to support amateur or informal artists, contributing to the vitality of artistic life and the overall creativity of the city.
• Encouragement to experiment. The tendency to support established, professional artists and large institutions presumably arises because of the lack of objective standards in judging art. Arts funders are wary of saying, “We support the production of 100 new paintings,” without the imprimatur of a major museum or artist’s name to indicate the quality of the work. While this motivates a great deal of valuable arts funding, it reflects an erroneous belief about the arts: namely, that the only art worth supporting is the kind approved by one or another external force. In fact, the arts thrive on unrestrained experimentation and innovation. Supporting this by supporting start-up organizations and below-the-radar community groups is central to Ortiz’s mission, and is another factor that makes it distinctive as a grantmaker.
• Building community. The watchword at OFA is “community,” by which we mean not just the artistic community by the New York community, and all the communities within it. The arts have an indispensable role to play in tying and uniting us as New Yorkers. In a city as delightfully multitudinous as ours, the arts serve the important civic function of helping us understand one another’s beliefs, backgrounds, and cultures. The arts also bring together people of entirely different walks of life, and allow them to exchange ideas and experiences. While many foundations seem to classify their programs into those that serve communities and those that serve the arts, we believe that we serve New York as a whole by serving the arts, professional and otherwise.
• Supporting the field holistically. Many foundations and arts funders tend to treat each grant as a separate project, too often ignoring its interactions with other arts organizations and its implications for the field as a whole. With its strong emphasis on infrastructure and research, the Ortiz Foundation for the Arts seeks to achieve superior leverage for its funds by ensuring that many more stakeholders will benefit from the work supported by the grant than just the initial recipients. In this way, OFA supports the city’s arts ecosystem holistically rather than haphazardly.

(above section mostly written by my colleague Daniel Reid, with minor editing from me)

Tomorrow, a look at the specific program areas we developed, as well as our evaluation procedures.

A family in New York that has long been involved with the arts wishes to establish a foundation that will provide funding for visual arts, music, theater, and dance. Although they have a particular interest in the support of New York institutions, they are also consider a foundation program that funds the arts nationally. The donor’s family will hold many, but not all of the seats on the board, and together they will donate approximately $400 million to the foundation in the first year and then add another $400 million over the next five years.

This week, in a series of posts, I’ll go through some of the decisions that my partners, Shiri Friedman, Daniel Reid, Michael Shay, and Michelle Zhao, and I made in approaching this project. It was a fun experience that, among other things, resulted in my learning what “terpsichorean” means. I welcome comments and reactions.

Generally speaking, we wanted our foundation to be as creative as the work that it was supporting, and it was very important to us to find the gaps in the current infrastructure so as to make our work more effective. We thus conducted extensive review of peer institutions, the results of which I’ll discuss in more detail tomorrow. We were also anxious to experiment with integrating some aspects of “new philanthropy” models like those of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation or New Profit into the arts world, which has seen less of this type of innovation.

Today, we’ll begin with the “Values and Philosophies” section of our report. It goes like this:

Our grantees are critical to our success. The Ortiz Foundation deeply respects the vibrant work of the New York City arts organizations it supports. The Foundation will ensure that its processes are transparent, timely, and streamlined so as to promote a healthy and productive relationship between grantor and grantee. The Foundation recognizes that it has much to learn from its grantees as well as much to teach them.

Knowledge is power. The Ortiz Foundation for the Arts will attempt at every turn to justify its policy decisions, program priorities, and individual grant decisions with objective evidence. In doing so, the Foundation recognizes that an honest accounting of what is known and what is unknown is more valuable than a blind trust in statistics.

The best opportunities are not always the obvious ones. The Ortiz Foundation believes that competition for grants is healthy and desirable, and that the most interesting and diverse pool of proposals is generally yielded by an open-call process rather than application by invitation only. Recognizing that a purely reactive stance is less likely to reach artists and communities outside of traditional institutional networks, the Ortiz Foundation will take the initiative to ensure the visibility of its programs in a variety of contexts.

Grantmaking is both a privilege and a responsibility. The decisions made by any funding organization have a real and significant impact on the lives of individuals and organizations alike. Yet the consequences of missteps are all too often borne by a funder’s constituents, rather than the funder itself. Accordingly, the Ortiz Foundation for the Arts will hold its staff and Board to the highest standards of performance. Foundation personnel will maintain a deep dedication to and respect for the Foundation’s mission and the hard work that is necessary to serve it.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the role of OFA within the New York City arts funding world and describe ways in which the Foundation seeks to differentiate itself.