“Masterpiece,” by Roy Lichtenstein (1962). Photo by Lindsey Davis, via Creative Commons

Art collector and patron Agnes Gund has sold the 1962 artwork “Masterpiece” by Roy Lichtenstein for $150 million – the bulk of which she’ll use to fund the creation of the Art for Justice Fund. In addition to supporting organizations working toward criminal justice reform, the Art for Justice Fund will finance a select number of artistic initiatives aimed at addressing mass incarceration. Currently president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, Gund will work with the Ford Foundation – whom she’s partnered with to administer the fund – in hopes of encouraging other art collectors to follow her lead and doubling her $100 million seed money over the next five years. The peer pressure appears to be working: at least four additional “founding donors” are selling some of their holdings to contribute to the fund. Among them is Laurie M. Tisch, a chairwoman of the board at the Whitney Museum, who donated $500,000 to the Fund with proceeds from a Max Weber painting.

Snapchat gets in the original content game. The media giant Time Warner recently signed a $100 million deal to produce content exclusively for the social media platform Snapchat. Running no more than seven minutes, the made-for-Snapchat mini-shows are designed to assure Snapchat’s advertisers that its users are spending plenty of time engaging with the platform, while the benefit to Time Warner is unfettered access to market its other holdings – including HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. – on the app. Time Warner’s $85 billion deal with AT&T last year is expected to go through by the end of 2017 (despite President Trump’s intentions of blocking the deal), meaning Snapchat is potentially getting in bed with the largest media company in the nation. The deal is yet another example of service providers following Netflix and Hulu’s leads by developing original content for streaming (see also: Apple, The Onion, Sony and Buzzfeed).

Shakespearean depiction of Trump prompts outrage and debate. A recent performance of Julius Caesar depicting the authoritarian Roman dictator in the image of Donald Trump has sparked a wide-ranging debate about free speech in the arts. The show was staged in Central Park by New York’s Public Theater, whose artistic director Oskar Eustis, among others, defended the provocative production as a commentary on current events. Despite theater critics’ appeals to free speech rights and reminders that the play does not condone assassination, right-wing activists have vehemently opposed the Caesar/Trump parallel, rushing the stage at a performance, threatening other theater companies performing Shakespeare (even ones that had nothing to do with Julius Caesar), and speaking out online in conservative-leaning media. In the wake of the controversy, corporate sponsors Bank of America and Delta Airlines withdrew their funding of the production (though a 2012 production of Julius Caesar funded by Delta in Minneapolis depicting a likeness of president Obama as Caesar got to keep the check), while the City of New York and the lead sponsor Jerome L. Greene Foundation have stood by Eustis and the Public Theater.

Malaysian film company in hot water over money laundering scandal. Associates of the film production company Red Granite are under investigation for embezzlement after allegedly diverting $4.5 billion from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) fund. Red Granite was co-founded by Jho Low and Riza Aziz, who is stepson of Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Razak. Razak established the 1MDB fund to promote economic development in the country, and several top officials in the government are accused of participating in the scheme by stashing its money in offshore accounts. As part of the investigation, the U.S. Justice Department is seeking the rights to two films funded by Red Granite: Dumb and Dumber To and Daddy’s Home. Additionally, Leonardo DiCaprio has agreed to hand over three pieces from his art collection (including a $3.2 million Picasso) that are tied up in the scandal, which had been gifted to DiCaprio after the production of another Red Granite film, The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio had intended to auction the artwork for his charity, but instead they are now en route to the FBI, which is attempting to recover an additional $100 million worth of art thought to be acquired by Jho Low with 1MDB money. Works by Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Yves Klein and Roy Lichtenstein are among those on the list.

Facebook hate speech rules are under scrutiny. Facebook’s stringent policies regarding images – specifically its hard line against nudity – have long been a topic of conversation in arts circles, with artists and journalists whose work depicts nakedness or content otherwise deemed offensive by Facebook unable to present their work on the world’s biggest social media platform. Now, a ProPublica investigation of internal documents at Facebook is shedding new light on the company’s hate speech policies. Giving equal weight to all races, ethnicities and religions in defining what constitutes “protected groups,” Facebook’s policy is an attempt to create a more unilateral approach that might be perceived as fair across the world, rather than guided by the norms around free speech and political expression prevalent in the United States. But these rules can counterintuitively favor white men (because race and gender are both “protected” categories) over marginalized groups who may be more likely to experience threatening or inflammatory speech online. To make matters worse, content is reviewed by actual people, and therefore subject to human biases; many exceptions to the rules – such as when then-candidate Donald Trump got a pass on exclusionary statements about Muslims, a violation of Facebook’s written policy, at the behest of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – have been granted. Another concern: Facebook’s lack of transparency about what is and isn’t allowed on the platform presents potential barriers to artists, who rely on free access to the network’s two billion users as one of their most effective tools for promoting and selling their work.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• Upheaval continues in the print publication world: after a late-May announcement that the staff and board of the arts-focused publication Brooklyn Rail would be dissolved, longtime publisher/editor Phong Bui says it will relaunch with a bigger staff and no planned break in the publication schedule. Meanwhile, publisher Louise Blouin – whose publications include Art + Auction and Modern Painters – has terminated all of her full-time employees, giving them the option to re-apply as contract freelancers.
• Christine Morse has announced her retirement as CEO of Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies. She will stay on as the organization’s board chair and will be CEO Emeritus through January 2018. The foundation’s current president, Paul Busch, assumed the CEO role on July 1.
• The president of New York’s F.B. Heron Foundation, Clara Miller, will step down in December.
• Cleveland-area arts leader Tom Schorgl recently announced he will retire from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture ‏at the end of the year.
• DataArts president and CEO Beth Tuttle announced she will step down from her role October 6 to become president of the American Horticultural Society.
• The executive director of Alternate ROOTS, Carlton Turner, is likewise stepping down to lead the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production.
• The Montana Arts Council announced Tatiana Gant as its new executive director. Gant was previously executive director for the Illinois Arts Council.
• Kansas City’s Mid-America Arts Alliance has secured its interim director Todd Stein for the permanent position. Stein has filled the director role since Mary Kennedy’s retirement in August 2016.
• SueEllen Kroll has been named the Barr Foundation’s program officer for arts & creativity.
• Vanessa Camarena-Arredondo joins the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation as its new program officer.
• Louise Bernard, former director of exhibitions at the New York Public Library, has been named museum director for Chicago’s future Obama Presidential Center.
• American University is seeking Arts Management faculty for the 2017-18 academic year.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• The latest Arts & Economic Prosperity report is out from Americans for the Arts, estimating that arts-based nonprofits generated $166.3 billion in spending in 2015. (Read Createquity’s analysis of an earlier edition of Arts & Economic Prosperity here.)
• A new Creative Artists Agency study indicates diverse casts are good for box office revenues.
• According to a report by Themed Entertainment Association and an engineering firm called AECOM, which ranks public attractions worldwide, the National Museum of China in Beijing was the world’s most-visited museum in 2016.
• Neighborhood walkability is a factor contributing to the success of large arts organizations, according to a study published in Economic Development Quarterly. Renting gallery spaces in affordable neighborhoods widens the gap between smaller, independent organizations due to a lack of foot traffic, the study says.
• While New York and Los Angeles remain arts meccas in the U.S., arts and culture sectors in southern and western states are growing at a faster pace. A report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Grantmakers for Southern Progress looks at opportunities in which philanthropic investments may be used to preserve local culture and build wealth in marginalized communities.
• A Pew report says kids are going to the library, with millennials leading the way.
• Research conducted at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum analyzes differences in how adults and children view works of art.
• Studies in California and New York City have found focusing on academics in pre-K yields stronger students overall, with no significant social or emotional consequences. In response, New York Times writer Dana Goldstein argues that play-based learning enhances, rather than competes with, academic rigor.
• An analysis published by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences indicates a significant drop in humanities majors at four-year colleges, while the number of liberal arts degrees at community colleges has increased. Data from the United Kingdom’s Department of Education also indicates that graduates obtaining arts degrees go on to earn the least of any other major.
• High degrees of “donor governance,” in which donors have control over how their money is used, has been shown to shift organizational focus more toward programming, and may strengthen and stabilize nonprofit arts organizations.
• Charitable donations in the U.S. grew to $390 billion in 2016, according to a report by Giving USA. Data analysis showed the third straight year of record-breaking growth, though the 1.4% increase in giving last year reflects a slight slowdown of the recent upward trend.
• The 2016 Columbus Survey profiling more than 250 community foundations is now available as part of a new interactive platform.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy surveyed 150 program officers at foundations to gain better understanding of their critical role in foundations and non-profits.
• A study conducted by the Council on Foundations found persistent gaps in age, gender, race, and ethnicity throughout the philanthropic sector. And a report from the Building Movement Project and the Annie E. Casey Foundation indicates that people of color aspiring to jobs in nonprofit leadership face unique stressors and challenges, including being held to higher standards than white candidates with similar education.
• A study conducted by CUNY students taking an “Arts in NYC” course claims that 80.5% of artists represented by NYC’s top 45 galleries are white. Meanwhile, the Actors’ Equity Association reports that women and minority actors and stage managers have fewer available jobs and receive lower pay than their white male counterparts.
• A new Association of Art Museum Directors survey breaks down average salaries among museum employees, ranging from museum directors to security and volunteer management.
• According to paper published in the journal Human Relations, dual leadership can alleviate tension between artistic and economic goals in arts organizations, but the complexities that come with multiple directors can trickle down the organizational hierarchy.
• A report commissioned by the Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre blames a lack of professionalism among theater workers on poor work environments, low pay, and a “damaging culture of overwork.”
• Media strategist Tracey Friesen’s new book, Story Money Impact, compiles case studies and interview data to suggest best practices for using media to effect change and impact in the philanthropic sector.
• IFACCA wraps up the 2016 World Summit on Arts and Culture with a revised discussion paper on 21st century cultural leadership.
• A new report out of the UK, “Towards Cultural Democracy,” strategizes how to frame policies promoting increased public engagement with arts and culture.
• Researchers publishing in Cultural Trends caution against Arts Council England’s use of quality metrics in the granting processes.
• Netflix and Amazon are predicted to outperform U.K. cinema box offices by 2020, says the consulting firm PwC.
• A study analyzing the “long-tail effect” in smaller publishing companies indicates that e-commerce could be a beneficial way to extend the shelf-life of niche products.
• A report of a new study by Robert W. Crandall argues that net neutrality “isn’t as big a deal as you might think.” The claim is based on the finding that recent public-utility regulations on broadband services had effects that were short-lived and/or minimal.

“Variations on a windows theme,” near the Ford Foundation in New York City | Photo: O Palsson via Flikr (Creative Commons)

Among major foundations, impact investment is gathering new steam. The Ford Foundation announced it will commit up to $1 billion over the next ten years toward mission-related investments, the biggest commitment of its kind by a private foundation, in an effort to use part of its $12 billion endowment to impact social conditions. Initial investments will focus on poverty-reduction goals such as affordable housing and access to financial services in emerging markets. Ford is the highest-profile of a number of recent wins for impact investing advocates; in the last several months, the F.B. Heron Foundation achieved 100 percent of its mission goal for anti-poverty investments and is now committed to more “connective investing”; and the Nathan Cummings Foundation has brought in two new experts to guide its own impact investing. Though these developments are in alignment with data showing a steady rise in impact investing, it remains to be seen whether other big foundations will follow Ford’s lead. The arts have been relative latecomers to the impact investing party (perhaps because of slow returns on investments in the arts sector), but the heretofore lonely efforts of UpStart Co-Lab and Artspace have recently been joined by Fractured Atlas, whose CEO Adam Huttler recently announced a don’t-call-it-a-sabbatical to focus on the Exponential Creativity Fund, a $10–20 million venture capital initiative funding entrepreneurs who are using exponential technologies to enhance human creativity.

Culture UK extends arts participation to the small screen. The United Kingdom’s four arts councils – Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council of Wales, and Creative Scotland – have partnered with the BBC for a $4 million initiative to commission and broadcast arts events on the network and online. The partnership will also produce three live arts festivals per year, each based on a common theme. This year highlights poetry and opera, with a TV adaptation of the Brexit-themed “My Country; a Work in Progress” at the forefront, and works celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage planned for 2018. It may be a strategic move for Culture UK to focus on British themes while pushing equal representation across the four countries; the BBC faces new regulatory oversight from the UK government in response to complaints among pro-Brexit conservatives about the network’s alleged impartiality and commercial interests. Meanwhile arts organizations – who were predominantly opposed to Brexit last summer – laud Culture UK’s increased channels of access to arts participation for folks who may not otherwise have opportunities to take part.

European museums pressured to present nationalist versions of history. This spring, the highly anticipated opening of Poland’s Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk was closely followed by news that courts had given a green light to the right-wing government to take control of the museum, which culture minister Piotr Glinski claims will be merged with a not-yet-built museum focused on the Polish perspective of the war. Many see the merger, which included the ousting of director Pawel Machcewicz, as an attempt to shape the historical narrative to center on Polish citizens under the nationalist Law and Justice Party. Meanwhile in nearby Turkey, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan plans a museum dedicated to the failed 2016 coup that resulted in at least 240 deaths. The focus of the proposed $2.7 million museum: the “martyrs and warriors” who defended the attempted overthrow of Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian regime. The move coincides with Erdoğan’s recent (and contested) narrow victory in a national referendum granting the president new, sweeping constitutional powers.

Amazon grows its translation business. AmazonCrossing, an arm of the online behemoth, was responsible for 10 percent of English prose translations in 2016 – with an announced infusion of $10 million over five years – marking a spike in translation services since the initiative launched in 2010. Relying on the huge amazon.com database, the service targets titles that are most likely to appeal to general readers than those generated by smaller high-end publishers, helping to fill a niche that many find too expensive to pursue. Thus AmazonCrossing has sparked less criticism than did Amazon’s ventures in brick and mortar bookstores – and in other physical storefronts, further threatening already-weakened department stores and malls. On the flip side of that trend, vacant storefronts and lower rent might represent opportunities for arts organizations to infuse retail therapy with cultural activities above and beyond the mall cineplex.

Tax breaks to boost music and film industries move through the legislative process. A bill supporting Georgia’s music industry has sailed through the state’s legislature with bipartisan support and now awaits Governor Nathan Deal’s signature. The Georgia Music Investment Act aims to generate jobs, attract musicians to the state and keep them there by providing tax breaks for professionals recording albums and film scores, as well as bands who kick off tours in the state; it’s modeled after a similar bill credited with boosting Georgia’s now-booming film industry. In other states, a Montana bill awarding tax credits to filmmakers passed the state’s House of Representatives despite doubts it would make it to the floor, and New York’s statewide Film Production Tax Credit program received a three-year extension, in an effort to ensure that the uptick in TV and movies produced in New York City and across the state continue. Yet for creators, the news is not all positive. Minimum spending limits and increased income tax rates may edge out local artists working on small budgets. And as Createquity reported in February, movie producers chasing incentives are straining Hollywood, with an increasing number of competing locales drawing production out of the U.S. altogether.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS:

• Rene Rodriguez – the Miami Herald’s last remaining full-time film critic, having covered the genre for the paper since 1995 – recently moved to the paper’s real estate beat.
• Creative placemaking industry leader Jason Schupbach departs the National Endowment for the Arts to head the Design School at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
• The Utah Division of Arts & Museums has named a new director, Victoria Panella Bourns, who for 12 years directed arts programming at the Salt Lake County Zoo.
• Australia’s International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies (IFACCA) is seeking a new executive director to replace Sarah Gardner, who has filled the seat since the agency’s founding in 2001.
• The William Penn Foundation is in search of a program director for Creative Communities, responsible for leading a grantmaking team focused on arts and cultural organizations, arts education, and public spaces in the city of Philadelphia.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE:

• The Art Newspaper’s annual surveys revealed a marked shift toward contemporary art at U.S. museums in recent years, with 44 percent of exhibits emphasizing work produced since 1970, rather than historic shows. And a newly published analysis of every piece of art acquired by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art categorizes the collection by type, size, country of origin and year acquired. The data came out about the same time the Met announced it was releasing 375,000 images of its artwork for free, unrestricted use under a Creative Commons Zero license.
• Modeled after the carbon footprint, a new project assesses urban spaces to give cities a “creative footprint” as a measure of cultural impact.
• A series of studies by Columbia University indicate that maintaining intercultural romantic relationships can boost creativity. And frequent readers make the best lovers, say the users of the My Bae dating app. Academic research supports the claim, stating reading improves brain function, empathy and reductions in depression and dementia.
• Social dance has a stronger anti-aging effects on cognition than walking or light stretching, according to research out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a randomized controlled trial, participants in a social dance intervention were the only group that did not experience loss of white matter after six months, despite no apparent cognitive impairment.
• Data from the League of American Orchestras confirms homogeneity among board members and organizational leadership, but notes that orchestras with smaller budgets tend to be more diverse.
• Researchers Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom say that economic unfairness resulting from inequity bothers people more than inequality itself.
• Artfinder, an online website that sells artwork by independent artists, claims its sales are at a 50/50 balance comparing men and women, while men still dominate sales of high-end art at auction. In the U.S., men also continue to outnumber women in media, though the gender gap is narrowing.
• Evidence suggests a voting bias in Euro-zone song competitions, with voters gravitating toward culturally similar contestants. The same appears to be true for national TV music competitions within a particular country.
• Research indicates that for cultural institutions, dedicated mobile apps may not be worth the investment in terms of visitor usage and satisfaction.
• A case study on non-profit organization The Princess of Asturias Foundation illustrates how nonprofits can efficient despite functioning outside the market.
• Updated data from the Arts & Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA), a collaboration of the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, tracks U.S. arts and culture jobs by state. Meanwhile, Nesta in the U.K. analyzed job postings to identify the skill needs for creative jobs.
• The NEA also summarized research based on the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). The Nation’s Report Card indicates that 63 percent of 8th graders took music classes, and 42 percent took art in schools in 2016, but out-of-school arts activities have trended downward since 2008. Across the pond, a report titled “Every Child: equality and diversity in arts and culture with, by and for children and young people” provides insight about arts participation and the diversity profile of arts and culture in Britain.
• A paper from Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research indicates that 42 percent of operating expenses at arts organizations are allocated to personnel, with wages growing faster than the pace of inflation between 2011 and 2015. The authors make no claim, however, as to whether or not artists are making a living wage.
• Golden oldies from even numbered decades (1940s, ’60s, and ’80s) are more likely to be favorites among young listeners, according to psychologists at Cornell University.
• If you had any doubts, Nielsen figures confirm that music streaming is still on the rise, up 35.2 percent compared to the first quarter in 2016. The same goes for podcasts, with a 4 percent increase in listeners since just last year, according to an annual report from Edison Research and Triton Digital. Despite the rapidly climbing use of digital technology, data indicates that more young Brits are visiting libraries, though it can’t say whether it’s for books or free wifi for music and podcast streaming.

Artist at Work – photo by flickr user Graeme Rattray

As part of its 50th anniversary, the National Endowment for the Arts has launched Creativity Connects, a threefold leadership initiative designed to show “how the arts contribute to the nation’s creative ecosystem, investigate the ways in which the support systems for the artists are changing, and explore how the arts can connect with other sectors that want and utilize creativity.”  As part of Creativity Connects, the Center for Cultural Innovation and Helicon Collaborative are working on an infrastructure report that will examine the changes artists have experienced in the last decade and how to strengthen the landscape of support. The initiative will also produce an interactive digital graphic that maps how the arts intersects with other industries. Finally, the NEA has set up a pilot grant program to support partnerships with organizations from outside the arts. Creativity Connects is likely to be the major contribution of Jane Chu’s term as Chairman as the nation prepares for a change of administrations next year. To get involved, join the conversation at creativz.us, a new online platform to house the initiative that is currently making a push to ask what artists in the United States need to sustain and strengthen their careers. (If you’re feeling in the survey-taking or -distributing mood, the Mellon Foundation also has a survey out seeking “a better understanding of the current health and well-being among artists living and working in the United States.”)

New directions for the Barr Foundation. In May 2014, Jim Canales, former president and CEO of The James Irvine Foundation in California, moved East to join Boston’s Barr Foundation as its first ever president. Canales was tasked with developing a new strategic direction of the foundation, which was established in 1987 by Amos and Barbara Hostetter and is the largest funder in Boston, having given out some $710 million to date. Earlier this year, the foundation announced its new strategy, which doesn’t look like much of a departure on the surface: Barr remains committed to its three core issue areas—education, arts, and climate change, and plans to continue its concentration on the Boston area. At the edges, however, the signs of a funder that has vastly increased the scope of its ambition are apparent. With a fast-growing endowment and staff, Barr plans to increase its regional funding presence throughout Massachusetts and even make targeted grants nationally. Under the leadership of San San Wong, the foundation’s renamed Arts & Creativity program has been given a sharper focus, that of “elevating the arts and enabling creative expression to engage and inspire a dynamic, thriving Commonwealth.“  The foundation plans to pursue this goal through three strategies: advancing the field’s capacity to adapt, take risks, and engage changing audiences in new ways; fostering opportunities to connect the arts to other disciplines and sectors; and activating public support for the arts. The Barr Foundation is at the forefront of an exciting period of growth for the arts in Boston, what with Mayor Walsh’s Boston Creates, the Barr Klarman Arts Capacity Building Initiative, ArtPlace America initiatives and a new artist-in-residence program announced this month which will embed local artists inside city departments to promote creative thinking about municipal government.

Cannes and Ford Foundation tackle inequity. The Cannes Film Market, the business counterpart of the Cannes Film Festival launched in 1959, and the Ford Foundation’s five-year old JustFilms, a film financing, social awareness and education program, announced a two-year partnership this month to boost the profile, market networking and distribution of social justice documentary features at Cannes. The partnership will play out in several ways. First, Cannes Film Market’s “Doc Corner” will be significantly scaled up for the upcoming May 2016 festival, and both parties will increase their efforts to bring docu filmmakers, especially those from the world’s global south, to Cannes. Second, for the first time ever, Cannes Film Festival marquee events will focus on the docu-feature sector. For Cannes, this partnership is yet another example of the festival’s diversifying its offerings. For Ford, which announced last year that it would direct all of its resources to curbing global inequity, the partnership is a significant step towards this goal, and a logical next step for JustFilms, which has already supported some 80 films since its inception.

A Bechdel Test for race? In the years since Alison Bechdel coined the Bechdel-Wallace test in a 1985 comic strip from her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, “The Test” has become a yardstick for measuring gender equality in a work of fiction. For a work to pass, it must 1) have at least two women in it, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something other than a man. (Some add that the female characters need be named.) Although some argue that the test is too simple to accurately assess gender parity, its widespread adoption is important. Having a quantitative metric for narrative diversity has proven useful, especially when so many works fail the test. This month, Manohla Dargis, chief film critic for The New York Times, took the Bechdel test one step further, proposing what she calls the “DuVernay test,” in honor of Ava DuVernay, the celebrated director of Selma. The racial analogue to the Bechdel test, the DuVernay test seeks to offer a simple, widely-applicable metric for examining the way we treat characters of color in film and media. While the proposal might need some further definition (Dargis’s metric of “fully realized lives” is quite a bit harder to implement in practice than Bechdel’s simple checklist), the idea has been well received, including by DuVernay herself. Though it has yet to be applied extensively, at least one channel is set up to pass with flying colors: the All Nations Network—a cable channel featuring TV programming created for and by native peoples–is set to launch soon in the United States.

And the nominee (for Librarian of Congress) is…President Obama nominated Carla Hayden to be the next  Librarian of Congress this month. If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Hayden would be the 14th Librarian of Congress in the institution’s 214-year history. She would also be the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position, milestones that Obama has called “long overdue.” Hayden, who has led the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore since 1993, would also be just the third professional librarian to serve in the position. Hayden would succeed James Billington, who was appointed by President Reagan and served as Librarian of Congress for nearly three decades. Billington stepped down from his post on January 1 of this year amid criticism of library mismanagement and “digital neglect”. In response, last year President Obama signed into a law a ten year term limit for Librarians of Congress–though there is the option for renewal. The next Librarian of Congress will assume some serious responsibility, such as modernizing the Library’s digital infrastructure, and in her position overseeing the Copyright Office, could significantly shift the copyright conversation.

MUSICAL  CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Channing Dungey has been named president of ABC Entertainment Group, becoming the first African American to lead a major broadcast network.
• Betsy Fader, a leader in the philanthropic and social enterprise sectors, has been named Vice President of Programs at the Surdna Foundation.
• Dan Cardinali, currently president of Communities in Schools, has been appointed CEO of Independent Sector, a coalition of charities and foundations.
• In a surprise cabinet reshuffle, Audrey Azoulay, currently President François Hollande’s cultural advisor, has replaced Fleur Pellerin as France’s culture minister.
• Kelly Lee has been appointed Philadelphia’s Chief Cultural Officer, joining an office that was re-established by Mayor Michael Nutter in 2008.
• After working at Creative Time for eight years, Katie Hollander has been promoted to Executive Director.
• Lisa Lucas has been named executive director of the National Book Foundation.
• Two long-serving vice presidents were promoted at Slover Linett this month. Sarah Lee has been named president, taking over from the firm’s founder, Cheryl Slover-Linett, and Chloe Chittick Patton has been named chief operating officer, a newly created position.
• Malcolm White, who was executive director of the Mississippi Arts Commission from 2005-2012, will return as executive director this year after three years as the state’s tourism chief.
• Gimlet Media is hiring an Associate Producer, Family History Show. Posted February 16; no closing date.
• Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is hiring a Center Specialist in the visual arts. Posted February 24; no closing date.
• DataArts (formerly the Cultural Data Project) is hiring a Senior Research Advisor. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• In light of this month’s contested Academy Awards, two new studies shed some light on the issue of diversity in the film industry. While a review from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University found a significant rise in the number of women featured as protagonists in films in 2015, a wide-ranging study from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism gave a failing diversity grade to every movie studio and most TV makers.
• Several reports out this month looked at philanthropic trends. One study looked at 24 countries and found there is no significant correlation between charitable giving, levels of taxation & government spending within a given country. Another report from the Atlas of Giving found that US charitable giving increased 4.6% in 2015, and is expected to grow 2.6% in 2016. A third suggested that US nonprofits missed out on some $6.5 billion due to mobile incompatibility in 2015. Related, a report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy finds that grantees think information about the substance of a foundation’s work is more important than disclosures about its finances or governance.
• “Art Under Threat,” released this month by Freemuse, shows that wordlwide attacks on artistic freedom almost doubled in 2015, and that most attacks were either politically or religiously motivated.
• Research out of Johns Hopkins University suggests that it’s not how much your practice, but how you practice that makes all the difference.
• The National Endowment for the Arts brought seventy experts together to talk about the role of the arts in healthy aging.
• The US and Britain released several studies looking at the economic impact of the arts. One study conducted a detailed empirical examination of the connection between arts organizations and key measures of neighborhood diversity and economic advantage or disadvantage in NYC. Britain commissioned a study of the arts’ contributions to the national GDP.  And looking ahead, beginning on 2016, the US Dept of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis will being to “produce statistics showing the role of arts and culture in the economies of all 50 states.” Related, a report out of Australia finds that producers struggle to find affordable venues as the Sydney’s expensive theaters remain underutilized, and a report from England found that London organizations receive almost twice as much arts funding as the rest of England combined, despite accounting for just a third of the country’s cultural offering.
• Researcher Orian Brook looked at the extent to which living near a cultural venue influences whether or not one attends, and found that indeed, proximity was very strongly positively associated with the likelihood of attendance.
• How happy is your state? A report released this month by the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index ranks wellbeing in the USA by state.

In the past fifteen years, the number of nonprofit theater companies in the United States has doubled while audiences and funding have shrunk. Neither the field nor the next generation of artists is served by this unexamined multiplication…There has been tremendous collective buy-in to what has become a fossilized model.

—Rebecca Novick, theater director and arts consultant

Then hear out Voice 2:

We communities of color are still trying to understand the mainstream nonprofit culture, with all its unwritten rules and regulations. We are trying to be better nonprofit players. We have to, because the game is not going to change any time soon, and those communities who don’t know the rules or who don’t practice enough are left behind… We have no choice.

—Vu Le, executive director of Rainier Valley Corps

Stop and reflect on Voice 3:

I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with our sector’s be-all-and-end-all focus on the needs of the nonprofit arts… The sector has grown bigger without getting richer.

—Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

See if you agree with Voice 4:

Funding organizations really do roll their eyes these days, when yet another nonprofit, pops up with its hands out. Reality: no one is gonna pay your tab.

—Misha Penton, opera singer, theater artist, and artistic director of Divergence Vocal Theater

Opinions about the nonprofit arts model—the fundamental legal and business structure in which arts nonprofits in the United States work—are as numerous and varied as 501(c)(3)s themselves. But one thing all of these quotes take for granted is the existence of the model itself. While that system may seem “fossilized” to some, the truth is that most arts nonprofits today are younger than most of our parents. The boom of arts nonprofits has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and it came about thanks in large part to a handful of individuals who intentionally put it into motion.

Graphic by Shawn Lent and Katherine Ingersoll for Createquity. See endnotes for additional detail on sourcing.

The story of the nonprofit model is part of the broader heritage of nonprofits, and follows a similar trajectory. A combination of intentional interventions and societal factors led to a massive expansion of the nonprofit sector in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, both in terms of size and portion of overall economic activity. Nonprofit expenses and assets actually outpaced the economy between 1994 and 2004 primarily thanks to the growth of hospitals, health organizations and private colleges. In 2012, there was 1 nonprofit for every 175 Americans.

Despite such a boom, life inside the current arts ecosystem is not all it could be. Createquity’s mission is to identify the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them, but a crucial barrier to executing on that premise is the sector’s limited capacity to create change. While the 501(c)(3) arts model offers infrastructure that, in theory, combines artistic aspiration with public accountability, the decentralization and limited scope of government policy make large-scale, systemic change in the sector difficult to accomplish. Yet Createquity’s long-range goal is to do exactly that, or at the very least to catalyze it.

One of the things that I pray for is that people with power will get good sense, and that people with good sense will get power…

—Dixie Carter as Julia Sugarbaker

To accurately predict how change can happen in the arts ecosystem, it would help to understand how change has already taken place in our arts 501(c)(3) genealogy. Specifically, we want to know whether individuals or organizations can truly and intentionally marshal change, or if a cloudy mix of circumstances is responsible for where we are today. Has transformation in the arts sector historically been calculated and choreographed, or organic and inadvertent?

It turns out that a narrow time period starting in the mid-1950s and ending in the late 1970s presents clear examples of deliberate and broad action, precipitating one of the most extensive changes in the arts ecosystem: the spread and embrace of the nonprofit model as a mechanism for cultivating and promoting the arts and culture within the United States.

But first, some time travel is in order.

THE ARTS ECOSYSTEM’S EARLY DAYS

The modern tax code, including the arts 501(c)(3) status we know today, was established in 1954, but its roots stretch back much farther. Several of our nation’s first theaters and museums were built before the American Revolution, but voluntary associations in this colonial period (as well as in the freshly independent years following the war) were limited by the strong role of the church and emboldened by the lack of federal authority over them. The landmark 1819 Supreme Court decision of Trustees of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward further constrained the government’s power to intervene in private charitable organizations and set protection for incorporated endowments, including the few for arts institutions.

From the Met to the Hull House, arts participation in 19th century America was shaped by class division. Urban wealthy elites, their formal governing sway slipping away in a democratic society, established private organizations to advance the greater good—and to preserve their class status. In the wake of civil war and the arrival of nearly 12 million immigrants, Americans formed mutual aid societies and unions, but also private schools, libraries, social clubs, and a scattering of non-commercial museums and symphony orchestras.

Donations from wealthy individuals were the most important source of support, and policymakers in the late 1800s introduced the country’s first statutory references and implementation of tax exemption for charitable organizations. In 1889, a certain Mr. Andrew Carnegie published “Wealth,” an essay pressing other tycoons to join him in donating considerable percentages of their fortunes for the good of society, including the arts and humanities. Years later, historians would credit Carnegie with conceptualizing what is now the modern philanthropic foundation.

“The Immigrants,” by Luis Sanguino in Battery Park – photo by flickr user k31thw

Even so, through the rip-roaring early part of the 20th century, the dominant vehicle for performing arts enterprises, from jazz clubs to theater ensembles, was the commercial sole proprietorship. As the socioeconomic gap became a socioeconomic crater, philanthropic support for arts nonprofits remained limited and highly localized. Coming out of the Great Depression and WWII, national foundations like Carnegie’s were primarily setting their sights on educational goals.

All the while, countless early arts pioneers, renegades, and boat rockers had the ambition to innovate on the local level, and many eventually saw the fruits of their efforts spread to varying degrees. But it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that the stage was set for sweeping transformation for the arts at the national level.

A MAN ON A MISSION

There are people who more than others constantly see themselves between past and future, …both in their own lives and in the history of mankind. And I’m one of those persons.

—W. McNeil Lowry

In the early 1950s, an executive named William McPeak participated in a study group for the Ford Foundation, which was exploring potential new structures and priorities as it prepared to become the largest foundation in the world. McPeak was pushing Ford to include the humanities in its vision for the future. One of his confidants during that struggle was W. McNeil “Mac” Lowry, a civilian journalist with the Washington bureau of Cox Newspapers who had been McPeak’s colleague at the Office of Wartime Information. Ford ultimately decided against funding the humanities when it expanded its scope from serving Detroit to focusing on social justice nationally and internationally, moving its office to New York City, but McPeak was hired as Ford’s Associate Director in 1953 and he brought Lowry on board as his assistant.

Two years into his tenure, Lowry was promoted to Program Director for Education and started suggesting ad hoc humanities grants under this education arm. They were small and few, and they were accepted. He also began writing policy papers and advocating internally for the creation of a large, full-fledged arts and humanities funding arm. This proposal was bold and unprecedented for any foundation at the time. With persistence and McPeak’s partnership, a mere four years after joining the foundation, Lowry was named director of its newly minted Division of Humanities and the Arts.

Lowry aimed to leverage Ford’s dollars and influence toward a grand vision of a robust arts field across the United States, but he started with a more tangible and comprehensible project: an inventory of the field conducted through interviews with artists and arts stakeholders, which would subsequently inform the decision on the part of Ford’s trustees whether to make the program permanent.

ripple effect – photo by flickr user Judy van der Velden

Lowry knew that his audience didn’t initially take his project very seriously. But as his assistant Marcia Thompson put it, it quickly became clear that the trustees “were not only entertained but were enormously interested in the field.” Lowry later said of his thinking,

It was not any secret to me what the little start of that program in 1957 might mean on a national basis… It’s just, you couldn’t divulge it because it was still dream and plan… This work is… a little bit like casting a stone in a puddle, but precisely which stone and precisely which puddle and for precisely which effect [is] the real creative part of it.

He and Thompson began by giving themselves the task of creating a directory with the names and contact information of every art critic and artist they could find around the country. Long before digital spreadsheets or the Internet, this was a hefty self-assignment. A former journalist with a history of telling it like it is, Lowry was willing to question loyalties and cliques. For example, he worked to extend professional arts opportunities outside major metropolitan areas even though several Ford trustees with connections to prominent New York institutions pushed back. He, along with associate director Edward F. D’Arms, traveled the country to speak with artists and stakeholders at over 175 arts companies. Lowry’s was a personal approach which gave him strong buy-in and trust from people who were actually engaged in arts work; he preferred direct correspondence with prospective grantees, including the likes of James Baldwin and Tom Stoppard. Lowry synthesized this mountain of data with more formal knowledge from economics and policy to begin to design the functions of Ford’s arts program.

Columbus, Ohio’s State Capitol from the Air (1957) – photo by flickr user Sent from the Past

Choosing to start with theater as his first arts discipline, Lowry used his new directory to send out a wide call for proposals, looking for groups (many of which were either sole proprietorships or amateur projects at the time) that seemed ready for the next step in professionalization. The focus was on smaller organizations outside the big cities because he did not want to see “money that could go to artists and artistic directors or to their outlets put in bricks and mortar.” With an investment of $9 million in 1961, the Ford Foundation had gathered steam for what would become the regional theater movement. After seven years of commercial operation, Zelda Fichandler transformed DC’s Arena Stage into one of the country’s first nonprofit theaters, primarily to receive a grant from the Ford Foundation.

One of Lowry’s primary aims was to increase the amount of professional performing arts activity in the country, but he wanted to be inclusive whenever possible. He had intended to fund a black theater when he launched the program in 1957 but was unable to locate a promising black artistic director able to get a new theater up and running. A couple years after Martin Luther King Jr. inspired the country with his dream of integration, a playwright named Douglas Turner Ward wrote an editorial in the New York Times about the need for a black theater, supporting disenfranchised artists, managers, writers, and designers. Lowry read the article and contacted Ward immediately. Shortly after, with a Ford grant of $434,000 ($3.3 million in 2016 dollars), Ward, producer/actor Robert Hooks and theater manager Gerald Krone would establish the Negro Ensemble Theatre Company in 1965.

Lowry got artists out of their comfort zones and towards professionalization, and was well aware of the consequences of him doing so. As he describes it,

[artistic producers] had to think about ‘where does this move us to the next phase?’…They took on costly activities that they had ignored before…. So they were stretched. And some of them were even shrewd enough to say in advance of a grant, ‘You’re going to stretch me, aren’t you?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m sorry, that’s an inevitable consequence of this.’”

Under his direction, arts grants now required matching dollars for the first time and arts grantees were pushed to improve their marketing practices. For example, he directly supported Danny Newman, the press agent at Chicago Lyric Opera, to evangelize the subscription model to performing arts organizations across the country.

Lowry’s legacy also stretched entire segments of the performing arts. During his tenure, Ford invested $19.5 million to help build 17 resident professional theaters between 1962 and 1976, and was the first American foundation to fund dance on a large scale ($22.5 million from 1957-1973). Ford’s largest arts investment over this time was the Symphony Orchestra Program ($80.2 million). Lowry retired from his position as Vice President at Ford in 1974, and passed away in 1993.

Mac Lowry could easily be labeled one of the nonprofit arts sector’s most significant figures of all time. No exaggeration. Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, described Lowry as “the single most influential patron of the performing arts that the American democratic system has produced.” By changing the financial incentives for artists, he directly helped to create an entire field of professional, nonprofit performing arts institutions. Thanks to Lowry, Ford became not only the first foundation to fund arts institutions on a large scale (making $249.8 million worth of arts grants 1957-1973, or nearly $2 billion in today’s dollars), but also the largest nongovernmental funder of the nonprofit performing arts.

In this position, the Ford Foundation was able to exert considerable influence on the sector. Bill Ivey notes that “the ‘Ford model’ remains the gold standard shaping intervention in America’s arts system.” Decades later, Ford is 5th on a list of the top 25 arts funders, which underscores how the number of foundations interested in the arts has grown over time, and the strength of Lowry’s legacy in philanthropy.

At the Ford Foundation, Lowry had been given wide latitude to try new things, with a significant amount of money. His success had always been boosted by internal support from McPeak, but in 1966 Ford welcomed one of its more liberal presidents, McGeorge Bundy, who came to Ford from the Johnson administration and his “Great Society” programs. Under Bundy’s leadership, Ford was an instigator of public-private philanthropy and Lowry was able to connect to the subsidy argument of federal support for the arts. Lowry later reflected that “a pervasive effect of the Ford program was the enlightenment that began to spread not only about the importance of nonprofit artistic enterprises, but more precisely their justification for subsidy.”

Lowry and his colleagues were able to ride a wave of public support and concern while acknowledging and working with, not against, broader political agendas. To Createquity, this insight seems critical to understanding why monumental change could take place when it did, and it raises the question of how such transformation could be possible in our current polarized political climate.

THREE ARTS PRESIDENTS AND A NANCY

With standoffs with Vladimir Putin and strikes at orchestras, theaters and beyond dominating modern newsfeeds, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary POTUS declaring the arts as a diplomatic weapon against Russia or sending the Secretary of Labor to personally mediate a dispute between a major arts institution and its workers. Yet in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that is exactly what happened.

As Lowry’s influence at Ford evolved, so did the operative role of the federal government in the arts. President Eisenhower, a Republican, advocated in his 1955 State of the Union address for the establishment of a Federal Advisory Commission on the Arts. This was cultural cold war: as one artistic director put it, “Eisenhower spoke of a lack of achievement in the cultural sphere: Who did we have to export in terms of ballet, opera and theatre companies? How could we compete with Russia, which had such a rich cultural spectrum of performing arts?”

Bolshoi Ballet Theatre in Moscow – photo by flickr user appaIoosa

Although Eisenhower was all talk and little action on the arts and no formal advisory body was created during his two terms, he did have one major accomplishment: the passing of the National Cultural Center Act of Congress in 1958, which would set the stage for the founding of a certain, prominent national performing arts center on the Potomac River thirteen years later.

Two years later, John F. Kennedy won the election with a party platform that included a brief mention of “a federal advisory agency to assist in the evaluation, development, and expansion of cultural resources.” Although he didn’t have a cultural agenda, the Kennedy Administration would be the one to finally elevate cultural policy to a national priority.

During his first year as President, Kennedy had the White House taking direct action in the arts. When the American Federation of Musicians Local 802 led a strike against The Metropolitan Opera during his first year in office, Kennedy sent Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to arbitrate the salary dispute that had halted the current production season. While serving as the mediator in his office, Goldberg suggested that government funds be used to help settle the Met’s $840,000 debt (that would be more than $6.6 million federal dollars today used to bail out a private arts institution); it’s a safe bet today’s Congress would not get behind that.

Possibly influenced by Jacqueline Kennedy’s love for the arts, President Kennedy expanded his public support, saying, “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose . . . and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.” In contrast to Eisenhower’s cold war logic, Kennedy’s policy vision would position arts and culture as sources of national hope and solidarity, continuing to push toward both a national center and a federal agency for arts and culture.

President Kennedy was active in the arts right up until his shocking murder in Dallas. In 1963 alone, he emphasized the importance of national recognition of the arts in a speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College; established the Advisory Council on the Arts (not appointed until after his death); and commissioned a report by August Heckscher, director of the Twentieth Century Fund and his special consultant for the arts, on the relationship between the arts and the Federal government.

Together, these resources laid the foundation for the ultimate achievement in linking federal government to arts and culture, the signing of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson chose Roger Lacey Stevens, a Broadway producer who had led the fundraising efforts for the National Cultural Center (later renamed The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), as the NEA’s first Chairman and Special Assistant on the Arts.

NEH Chairman William Adams tours the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library exhibits – photo by the LBJ Foundation on flickr

Following Stevens’s brief inaugural tenure as NEA Chairman, Nancy Hanks (not the mother of the 16th President of the United States, for whom she is descended and named), was selected to head the search for his successor. After several prominent figures had turned the position down, Hanks herself was appointed by President Nixon in 1969; according to Stevens, “they were looking for some women for jobs.” She was a Southern Republican and a Duke University graduate who began her career as a DC receptionist and later gained White House experience as assistant to Nelson A. Rockefeller and his arts programs. Afterward, while on staff at The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hanks published the influential report, The Performing Arts: Problems & Prospects (1965). By the end of the 1960s, she had both been named president of the Associated Council on the Arts (ACA) and diagnosed with cancer. She chose to remain unmarried and without children; she would later be deemed the mother of a million artists.

Amidst the burgeoning feminist movement, Hanks took the reins of a then-nascent NEA with grander aims for the agency. In her first six weeks at the helm of the NEA, she personally spoke to 200 Congressmen to advocate for her proposal to double the budget and to secure future appropriations for the nation’s bicentennial, which was more than six years ahead. Hanks was a sagacious power; her office became a lobbying machine.

She battled her cancer quietly while strongarming Congress, protecting NEA political territory, and preempting controversies for the agency. In 1970, when the NEA budget faced the ax, Hanks and her assistant individually cornered over 100 Congressmen and succeeded in swaying their votes. Julia Butler Hansen, a Democrat from Washington State and chairwoman of the House appropriations subcommittee during that term, said she needed to see letters from constituents to be convinced, so Hanks somehow got a form letter onto every theater seat in the country and, within a few weeks, had thousands of them into Hansen’s mailbox. When artists won prestigious prizes, Hanks would send out letters to the Representatives of their home states, reminding them that “good artists do not just happen.”

Hanks put a large emphasis on grants to institutions, which helped to make arts funding a bipartisan issue since many wealthy board members of symphonies and museums were Republicans like her. The concept of public subsidy for the arts was sold as a cure for the “cost disease” endemic to nonprofit arts organizations. Revenue and private donations alone could not support the sector, she believed; the income gap must be filled.

With an art-for-all-Americans ethos, Hanks supported a plentitude of smaller nonprofit arts organizations in newly funded areas such as crafts. Additionally, Hanks played an instrumental role in establishing the Arts Council of Americas to unite the more than 50 community arts councils already in existence and in expanding the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies in order to have a well-funded state council in every state and territory in the U.S. Much of the NEA’s funding was designated to run through these state councils.

Later in her tenure Hanks authorized the NEA Challenge Grants, which demanded matching contributions to leverage investment from the private sector. This was a strategy similar to those of the Ford Foundation in the 1960s and the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty.

Before Hanks, the NEA was more of a figurehead organization with a modest budget; by 1976, it was the largest institutional funder of the arts in the country. In brief, she was the savviest operator in the NEA’s history. She served two terms as the NEA chair until her resignation in 1977, and she died of her cancer six years later at age 55. A mere three weeks after her passing, President Reagan (whose economic policies were threatening the existence of the NEA and NEH at the time) signed a law renaming NEA and NEH’s erstwhile home, the Old Post Office, in Washington, D.C. the Nancy Hanks Center.

Go to Theatre Week, 1922 – photo by Washington State Library

HOW LOWRY AND HANKS CHANGED THE ARTS NONPROFIT SECTOR FOREVER

Neither Lowry nor Hanks saw themselves as artists (Hanks said her only art form was “needlepoint typewriter covers”; others said that it clearly persuasion), yet both were passionate in building towards a new arts vision for America, supporting and connecting artists nationwide. They were willing to defy the expectations and design of their jobs in order to create financial and structural support for artists. Both traveled the country for the cause; Lowry to discover promising artistic directors, and Hanks to advocate on their behalf.

Their combined legacy was to establish the current shape of the nonprofit arts sector and its mechanisms of funding. Importantly, both the Ford Foundation and the federal government brought vast new resources to the arts funding table, and directed those resources almost exclusively to nonprofit arts organizations. In doing so, not only did Lowry and Hanks catalyze the arts 501(c)(3) boom, they created the common practice of matching grants, the growth and coordination of local arts agencies, the use of grant panels, the rise of grantwriter-as-paid-employee in arts institution, and more. The influence of each can be seen in the geographic spread of infrastructure to support the arts across the country — regional theaters, dance companies, and symphony orchestras in Lowry’s case, and arts councils in Hanks’s.

They engineered the initial professionalization of the field. Publications and conferences, like those of the Theatre Communications Group which Lowry first convened, declared and disseminated best practices. The effect of these deliberate acts was characteristic of the organizational ecology concept of “legitimation”: as a particular type of organization becomes more accepted, it is established more and more frequently. By the mid-1970s, the nonprofit was set as the expected and dominant legal structure for new arts organizations.

We approached this research wanting to learn how change happens; we didn’t intend to dwell on whether the change has been good or bad. That said, there are several aspects of the arts ecosystem in America today that seem to have been shaped by from the transformation fostered by Lowry, Hanks, Kennedy, and others in the middle of the 20th century.

There is more, more, more

The timing of the boom differed by discipline, but all disciplines saw sustained growth when they began to embrace the nonprofit structure. Overall, despite government funding cuts, Reaganomics and the culture wars, the leveling of private funding, and periodic recessions since the 1980-90s, the number of arts nonprofit organizations has shown continued, though slowing, growth.

What does that growth tell us about the number of people being served by these organizations, or about the amount of art available in general? We know that as the nonprofit arts sector grows it employs more individuals; however, it is unclear whether more artists are getting paid to make art, or if there are more opportunities for artists to work as administrators, or whether more money is going to hire arts managers and educators.

Did the increase in the number of arts organizations contribute to higher levels of arts attendance? Several reports show increased activity in certain disciplines during the 1960-1980s, but it is unclear whether the number of arts products/activities actually increased, or if it was just that more arts experiences were made professional or formal in ways that allowed them to be counted.

What we do know is that as the growth of the sector appears to have yielded more opportunities and inclination for people to experience the arts. For example, there have been rising rates of spending on arts experiences in relation to total leisure spending, which can be attributed to the fact that increased institutional grant support opened up new markets.

Opportunities for (nonprofit) arts participation are available across the country

Before Lowry and Hanks, almost all professional performing arts companies were in New York City and other metropolitan hubs on the East Coast, but the geographic spread of institutional funding starting in the 1960s has supplied arts, especially performing arts, outside of major metropolises into towns where the arts are not as commercially viable. During Hanks’s tenure, NEA grants found their way into all 50 states and six U.S. territories. Analysis by the NEA performed in both 1982 and 1992 on the division between nonprofit and commercial performing arts companies showed that nonprofit organizations represented higher percentages of the sector in areas that were not centers for commercial performance.

American art is now much more than Eurocentric symphonies, museums and theaters

The notion that we should remove barriers to access of the arts is now widely accepted and seems to be a legacy of Hanks’s ethos. During the 1970s-1990s, the boomers worked to democratize the arts: careers, patronage and participation. The sector’s expansion started in the professional performing arts but then grew to support a broader range of genres and disciplines, and it’s likely that this has made a stronger mix of cultural products available to society today. Although Lowry’s early efforts were focused on professional theater, music, and dance, once the funding infrastructure was in place and the category of nonprofit arts was established, the momentum provided by the new structures and incentives fostered demands to support other artistic disciplines, and, later, the inclusion of a broader range of artistic endeavors.

“Heard” by Nick Cave, Grand Central Terminal, March 2013 – photo by flickr user j-No

The U.S. arts ecosystem is still striving for equity

Although more resources are available to support cultural activity since before the nonprofit arts sector boom, the nonprofit system seems to have benefited European cultural traditions more than others, and white artists more than artists of color. It has legitimately been observed that arts genres that have been accepted as high culture for longer periods have adopted the nonprofit form in greater numbers, whereas cultural forms that have more recently come to be seen as important have been more likely to be commercial. In 1979, only 4% of NEA grant funds were going to black arts organizations, almost exclusively through its Expansion Arts initiative. In 1994, Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, was appalled to realize that “for 135 years after the founding of the federal art collections in 1829, no work by a black American was represented in the nation’s holdings.”

It seems that movement toward true equity in the nonprofit arts sector has been weak, slow, incomplete, or put in the hands of large institutions as part a community engagement trickle-down scenario. Issues of equity in funding, leadership and audiences by race, gender, disability, etc. have manifested differently in different disciplines, but important questions linger on whether the growth of the nonprofit sector has brought with it a growth of inequality.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

The story of Lowry and Hanks is the story of the establishment. They were two individuals who, welcomed into institutions of wealth, power, and (white privilege), adroitly navigated those spaces in a mission to do good across the arts sector. Yet as more and more arts nonprofits sprung up over generations, the metrics they established spread like a gospel of the arts, not recognizing the full array of cultural expression people were already employing. It seems safe to assume that white cultural traditions were more robustly promoted and supported by Lowry, Hanks and their allies, which is why it is important to note other schismatics who were integral to further developing and supporting the arts, to problematizing the relationship between nonprofit and commercial artmaking, to diversifying access and opportunity in the field, to utilizing technology, and to increasing popularity and new audiences for the arts. Influencers and moments of change like these will be explored in upcoming Createquity features.

Many of the sector’s successes, as well as its intractable issues, stem from the dominance of the nonprofit arts model which was driven by those formative actions in the 1950s-1960s. Lowry and his peers deliberately sought to create a healthier arts ecosystem by strengthening and professionalizing arts institutions. Yet the question is worth asking whether most institutions, thus professionalized, tend to prioritize their own preservation. Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem asserts that “To the extent that any element within the infrastructure is unwilling or unable to put the goal of improving people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways first, it’s acting as a drag on the system’s capacity to change for the better. We see this problem manifesting in a number of ways, including the reluctance of cultural institutions to prioritize the interests of the ecosystem as a whole ahead of their own prosperity…” Will future changemakers be the ones who, like Lowry, are able to prioritize the entire arts ecosystem over their own institutions?

This is just the first of many articles on the capacity to create change in the arts ecosystem. We invite you to get involved in this journey by joining us for a #CreatequityAsks Twitter chat on how change happens on March 17th from 7:30-8:30pm Eastern.

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Graphic: The Boom in U.S. Nonprofits / The U.S. Arts Nonprofit Growth Spurt

Reliable longitudinal data on the size of the nonprofit arts sector is difficult to come by for this period. In his 1984 essay, “The Nonprofit Instrument and the Influence of the Marketplace,” Paul DiMaggio turns to founding dates of nonprofits arts organizations to demonstrate this early boom in the sector. He points out that of the 165 theatres in TGC’s Theatre Profiles IV, 87 percent were founded after 1960. He cites data in an article by Leila Sussman which examines the dance companies listed in a 1979 issue of Dance Annual and finds that 89 percent had been founded in the preceding 10 years. DiMaggio also cites a survey of New York State arts organizations, undertaken by the National Research Center for the Arts in 1975, wherein 54 percent of theatres, 58 percent of musical groups, 91 percent of dance companies, 90 percent of visual arts organizations, and 84 percent of local arts agencies had been founded in the 1960s and 70s (this data is not included in our graphic above). He also cites statistics from “national sample of art museums” that says that more than a third of them did not exists before 1960. Our data on operas and folk arts organizations is taken from other sources. In a 1993 book, James Heilbrun provides statistics on organizations in a number of disciplines. He cites data about “All Opera” companies from Central Opera Service, with 648 operas listed in 1970, and 1285 listed in 1990. Information about folk arts organizations comes from an NEA report published in 1996 about nonprofit folk arts orgs. Of 23 organizations included in the report, 19 had been founded since the 1960s.

1. Throughout the early periods of the American arts ecosystem, numerous individuals and groups had great influence, including:

• James Smithson and his $500,000 bequest to the United States of America to found the Smithsonian Institution.
• John Jay, a lawyer who rallied elites to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which would grow to have the largest endowment of any American cultural institution.
• The sociedades mutualistas formed by Mexican Americans starting in the 1870s, in which traditional arts were prominent activities much like the mutual aid societies established by African, Asian, and European Americans.
• Jane Addams, the first American woman and second woman ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, who launched a social settlement in Chicago where the arts were infused into the pursuit of social reform and wellbeing.
• Actors Equity Association (AEA), a social club turned labor union, founded “…not [as] a revolutionary body with anarchistic tendencies. / rather, a clearing house for a freer exchange of thought between artist and manager…” (Actors Equity Magazine 1915).
• Alain LeRoy Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, who by bringing together artists with publicity and patronage such as that of businessman Julius Rosenwald, is part of a cohort to spearhead the Harlem Renaissance, a movement for black self-determination and cultural affirmation.
• The creators of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board and Act of 1935 protecting Native American cultural products and heritage.
• The nation’s first local arts councils such as the Quincy, Illinois Society of Fine Arts and the Winston-Salem Arts Council, a case of the arts utilized by the local Junior League as a distraction from racial issues in the South.

2. Looking at the rate of consumer spending on performing arts experiences (a somewhat problematic proxy for arts engagement, but one of the only ones available for some earlier period) sheds some light on how Americans’ participation rates have changed over time. In their landmark 1966 book Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, economists Baumol and Bowen point out that even though it was popular in the press at the time to describe a cultural boom, the actual rate of spending on performing arts activities fell 25% between 1929 and 1963 when corrected for population growth, inflation, and economic growth, while spending on other cultural goods like sound recordings and sports grew during that time. A 2001 book by Heilbrun, The Economics of Arts and Culture, takes a similar tactic, looking at consumer spending on the performing arts as a percentage of total disposable income, effectively controlling for rises in the latter. There is evidence that the “cultural boom” that Baumol and Bowen had not found evidence for in the early 60s, was taking place from 1975 and 1990. In that period, the percentage of disposable income spent on the performing arts experienced a turn-around and began to rise. Heilbrun says, “After reaching a low of less than 7 cents per $100 of DPI [Disposable personal income] in the mid-1970s, consumer spending on the performing arts rose to 9.1 cents per $100 in 1980 and 13.4 cents in 1990… between 1975 and 1990 consumer expenditure on the performing arts increased almost exactly twice as fast as DPI.” (21) In fact, it rose even faster than the percentage of spending on motion pictures and sporting events. Heilbrun posits that this is a result of the subsidies made available in the 1950s and 1960s through the nonprofit ecosystem. These funds enabled to the creation (or expansion) of nonprofit arts institutions outside of major cities, where large numbers of arts organizations were not supportable by consumer spending (or even local wealthy patrons) alone. The new participation opportunities these groups offered met “latent demand” in these new geographic areas. Heilbrun does note that rising ticket prices are likely also a part of this overall increase in spending, especially after 1985.

3. Researchers sometimes examine the division between nonprofit and commercial activity in the arts as a way to isolate the effects of nonprofit status. In both 1982 and 1992 the NEA performed such an analysis on performing arts organizations. Within the list of states with higher rates of commercial performing arts activities, it’s easy to recognize the influence of industries which do not depend on reaching local audiences, like the music and film industries in Nashville Los Angeles. Even commercial hubs which do provide person experiences like Las Vegas and New York, are made possibly and marketed toward large numbers of tourists. These numbers demonstrate that the nonprofit infrastructure has been an important factor when it comes to providing live artistic experiences in areas without a large influx of travelers.

4. In his 2006 study “The Intersectoral Division of Labor in the Arts,” Paul DiMaggio looks at the division of nonprofit and commercial arts by discipline, using data from the US Economic Census from 1997. One striking divide is between disciplines that have been historically considered more prestigious like museums and orchestras (almost entirely nonprofit), and disciplines that are more recently recognized for their artistic merits like jazz and ethnic dance (more predominantly commercial). While one could make the argument that jazz and ethnic dance are inherently more commercially viable, it seems more likely that they are in fact, inherently more difficult to find subsidy for within the nonprofit infrastructure. Dimaggio does note that the creation of the NEA and other state and local government funding sources did help to expand the narrowness of the early funding efforts in the 1960s, though the predominance of high culture in the nonprofit sphere remains.

5. The vibrant yet flawed nonprofit arts ecology we have today exists thanks to individuals and groups who have challenged, spread, diversified, and redefined the sector in the last half century. Some of these agents of change include:

• Claudine Brown, Assistant Secretary for Education and Access for the Smithsonian Institution, former director of the National African American Museum Project and the arts and culture program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and former instructor to many of today’s “managers at art, history, natural history, science and children’s museums throughout the country.”
• Judith Jamison, who alongside others brought financial stability to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater through increased funding, novel corporate agreements, and a 50th anniversary campaign that grew the endowment to $50 million, carrying forward Ailey’s visionary company which “changed forever the perception of American dance.”
• The politically motivated, important artists of the Black Arts Movement (1965-1975).
• John Goberman, creator and executive producer of Live from Lincoln Center. “We have discovered that television, far from undermining live performances, whets the viewer’s appetite for more” (NEA Annual Report 1980).
• The Apollo, which switched to nonprofit status in 1991.
• Karen Finley, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck aka the “NEA Four” who filed suit when their NEA grants were vetoed in 1990, even after passing peer-review panels. The case caused the NEA to eliminate grants to individual artists in 1994.
• Asian Women’s Giving Circle, the first and largest giving circle in the nation led by Asian American women, promoting grassroots philanthropy.
• Claire Lomax Esq., CEO of the Lomax Family Foundation, one of the nation’s leaders in black philanthropy.
• Franny Armstrong who in 2004 was one of the first artists to use an online donation system for her work, a feature film entitled The Age of Stupid.
• Dr. Robert Gumbiner who left the Museum of Latin American Art with a $25 million endowment upon his death in 2009.

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GIF Animation Photo Credit

LC-USZC4-6410: American Revolution. Evacuation of Boston by the British, by National Museum of the U.S. Navy https://flic.kr/p/sxjuD6

Confederate Possession in Civil War America by Victoria Wynn https://flic.kr/p/vVPyXJ

“U.S. Is Voted Dry.” by Thomas Cizauskas https://flic.kr/p/Cfa2Cd

Dance to the Duke by StudioMONDO https://flic.kr/p/pv3Ddh

Harlem club map from 1930s detail by Rik Panganiban https://flic.kr/p/8toWkh

Fairfax Bomber Factory worker on B-25 by Sms_S https://flic.kr/p/DJDzc5

1950s wood panel on a Ford Country Squire by Mr. Gray https://flic.kr/p/DumSR5

“Brooklyn Graffiti / Dumbo Arts Center: Art Under the Bridge Festival 2009” by See-ming Lee

Title: Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era

Author(s): John Kreidler

Publisher: The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society (republished in Grantmakers in the Arts Reader)

Year: 1996

URL: http://www.giarts.org/article/leverage-lost

Topics: Nonprofit sector, arts philanthropy, arts sector history

Methods: Historical analysis and review

What it says: In Leverage Lost, John Kreidler examines the history of the nonprofit arts sector and distinguishes between three eras: the Pre-Ford Industrial Revolution (to 1957), the Ford Era (1957 – 1990), and the Post-Ford Era (1990 – publication of the article in 1996). The first stage is characterized by individual proprietorships as the dominant model for arts creation and growth in public participation in arts. Kreidler ties this growth to several large scale changes taking place in American society, including the rise of public education, increasing prosperity, demographic shifts towards a larger and more urban population, increased leisure time, and changes in societal values towards greater public expressiveness. Kreidler also notes that arts production in this era and the next was enabled by the willingness of artists to work for less compensation than professionals in other sectors. Towards the end of this period, new technologies like film and television increased the competition faced by live performance groups and high art organizations began to adopt the nonprofit model, primarily funded by a mix of ticket revenues and donations from individuals.

Kreidler’s analysis of the period from 1957 to 1990 focuses on the arts grantmaking strategy of the Ford Foundation, led by vice president W. McNeil Lowry. The Ford Foundations’s entry into arts grantmaking took place against the backdrop of the cold war, and the growing sentiment that America needed cultural products of higher quality to complement its economic and political might. Ford made investments designed to revitalize major arts institutions, enhance arts schools, establish and advance regional nonprofit arts organizations, and create national arts service organizations. The Foundation used a strategy of matching grants and time-limited funds designed to leverage additional arts funding from other sources. Kriedler identifies Ford’s strategy, and its subsequent adoption by other institutional funders around the country, as the main catalyst of the massive growth of the non-profit arts sector in this era. The article also notes that staff from the Ford Foundation also played in a role in advocacy for the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts, which uses similar leverage strategies in its own grantmaking to this day.

In Kreidler’s view, The Post-Ford Era (1990 to publication of Leverage Lost in 1996) is characterized by rising labor costs within the sector and an inevitable end to the growth of institutional arts funding. Kreidler attributes the decline in cheap labor to the increasing salary needs of arts professionals as they age, as well as higher earnings expectations of younger workers.These reversals, accompanied by apparently decreasing demand for the services of nonprofit arts organizations, lead Kreidler to ask whether the nonprofit arts model is viable for the long term. He predicts an eventual decline in available funding and subsequent numbers of arts nonprofits, with small and medium sized organizations hit hardest.

What I think about it: A piece of well-informed commentary rather than a rigorous research study, Kreidler’s article puts the current system of nonprofit arts funding into needed historical context, reminding us how recently it was developed, and that the conditions that led to its rapid growth are not necessarily permanent. Kreidler constructs his historical narrative around the importance of a single actor, the Ford Foundation, which is compellingly articulated if not conclusively proven.

His description of trends in the current era seem to be based mostly on personal experience and observation, and are also deeply specific to the particular moment the article was written. Many of the major reversals in factors like leisure time, prosperity, and societal values he touches upon have not come to pass to the extent that he predicts. None of this detracts from the value of providing historical context for the sector, or from Kreidler’s main point that the strategies and conditions that successfully jump started the growth of nonprofit arts movement will not necessarily be sustained indefinitely.

What it all means: Kreider’s historical analysis and his discussion of the nonprofit arts sectors as a dynamic system make this a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the future of the arts in America. While not all of his commentary on trends in the mid-90s remains relevant, the major questions he raises about the future of the nonprofit model and the ability of the funding community, or any central actor, to exert leverage on the scale of the Ford Foundation in the 1950s remain central to health of the arts ecosystem.

Seward Johnson, “A Reason to Smile,” installed at Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ. (Photo by Flickr user Wally Gobetz)

On November 13, gunmen opened fire on approximately 1,500 unsuspecting audience members at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at Paris’s historic Le Bataclan music hall, killing 89. The Bataclan was the deadliest site in a cluster of coordinated terrorist attacks throughout the city that evening for which ISIS claimed responsibility. While U2 frontman Bono described the Bataclan massacre as “the first direct hit on music in this so-called war on terror,” the scale and locations of these attacks only solidified an unsettling new direction in terrorism: concert halls, stadiums, cafes, museums, and other cultural institutions (not just local or politically symbolic international sites) have all been targets this year. Indeed, ISIS’s statement of responsibility indicated that the attack sites were carefully chosen as symbols of “abominations and perversion.”

Leaders have responded by bolstering both physical and financial security for cultural venues. In addition to new safety measures, French cultural minister Fleur Pellerin established a “solidarity fund” of approximately $6 million to protect music groups from “expected declines in business and other financial hardships.” President François Hollande revealed a proposal for France’s museums to temporarily house Syrian cultural objects “at risk” of ISIS looting. Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has pledged 1 billion euros to spend equally on culture and security, which has raised concerns among Italy’s business leaders that a corporate tax cut could be postponed as a result. How to protect concert halls and stadiums, and who will ultimately pay, have likewise come up in New York City: Ray Waddell, a senior editor at Billboard, suggested that more metal detectors and bag checks may mean higher ticket prices.

While questions remain about how best to allocate resources, protecting culture now seems especially urgent in “fighting back against a group that is notorious for destroying cultural symbols and objects it deems idolatrous.”

STEM education just got a little STEAMier: In what arts education advocates considered a “huge win,” the joint House-Senate Conference Committee unanimously accepted a bipartisan amendment to the rewrite of the nation’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) (aka “No Child Left Behind”) that will integrate the arts into STEM education. Introduced by Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), the amendment sets the stage for new K-12 education policy by acknowledging that arts integration can “improve attainment of STEM-related skills” (science, technology, engineering and math). Last week, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that reauthorizes ESEA and includes additional language about the importance of the arts to a “well-rounded education.” ESSA’s more flexible math/reading test requirements and emphasis on state-level decision-making may also be friendly to arts education strategies, according to a detailed analysis by the National Art Education Association. This victory for arts ed advocates comes just after the Arts Education Partnership launched a five-year Action Agenda for Advancing the Arts in Education. It similarly emphasizes the importance of arts integration especially in underperforming and impoverished schools, and recommends incorporating the arts into training for teachers and academic leaders.

A new day in Canada: In a November letter to Minister of Culture Melanie Joly, new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demonstrated his intentions to make good on campaign promises to double the Canada Arts Council budget, provide $150M to CBC/Radio Canada, reinvest in Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board, and provide increased support for indigenous culture and youth initiatives. This is welcome news to arts groups after nine years of arts funding cuts under former conservative PM Stephen Harper. According to the Globe and Mail, Joly’s youth and relative inexperience in government will hopefully be an asset rather than liability in achieving this ambitious agenda while also redefining the ministry with “symbols of progressiveness.” Trudeau also gained popularity with social scientists when he announced in early November the reinstatement of a mandatory national census, which serves as the bedrock of all government data collection.

Ford Foundation’s new inequality-focused agenda will include the arts: In June we reported on Ford’s announcement that the foundation will shift its entire focus to fighting inequality. Three months later, president Darren Walker has revealed more detail on the specifics of the new strategy, which will involve consolidating 35 program areas into 15. While detailed arts funding guidelines have yet to be announced, Ford’s website lists a reframed creativity and free expression program encompassing “social justice storytelling” and “21st century arts infrastructure.” Walker’s “New Gospel of Wealth” essay suggests that the foundation’s ultimate goal is a reformed capitalist system, and creative expression is considered a piece of the puzzle. Ford will privilege initiatives for broader structural change over those providing direct assistance to the poor; discontinued programs include direct cash transfers in Latin America and microfinance, as well as causes like LGBT rights that have gained philanthropic support from other sources in recent years.While Ford’s program to construct new art spaces will also be cut, the foundation will increase its general operating support–with a new BUILD initiative to specifically strengthen the operations of social justice-oriented institutions and partnerships.

Cleveland arts organizations light up on election day as cigarette tax for the arts is renewed: An overwhelming majority of voters passed Issue 8, which will renew Cuyahoga County’s 10-year, 30-cent-a-pack tax on cigarettes to support arts and culture. The original approval of this tax in 2006 turned a region with scant arts funding into “one of the most highly ranked metro areas in the country in local public support for the arts.” More than 300 large and small arts organizations have depended on the $125 million in cigarette tax proceeds distributed since 2008 for both general operating support and special projects. The campaign to renew the levy was propelled by an Arts and Culture Action Committee that raised over $1 million for advertising, but the renewal faced very little visible opposition.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Prince Charitable Trusts welcomes Carolynn Brunette, who will head its Washington, D.C. office as Managing Director and also co-direct the Rhode Island program, beginning on January 1. Carolyn succeeds retiring Managing Director Kristin Pauly, who has been with Prince Charitable Trusts since 1998.
• New Orleans Arts Council CEO Kim Cook announced her departure at the end of 2015; Acting Director Nick Stillman will oversee the organization in the interim. Cook is moving to the Bay Area to serve as Burning Man’s Director of Art & Civic Engagement, a newly created position.
• Longtime theater critic Steven Leigh Morris will assume the role of LA Stage Alliance’s new executive director.
• UC Davis Law professor and international human rights scholar Karima Bennoune has been appointed special rapporteur on cultural rights to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
• The nonprofit sector mourned the sudden November 17 death of Rick Cohen, nonprofit advocate and national correspondent for Nonprofit Quarterly. Cohen previously led the led the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog, and was known for focusing on the needs of low-income and underrepresented populations.
• CERF+, a national nonprofit that “provides a safety net to artists through readiness, education and relief programs,” seeks a Director of Programs. Deadline 12/18.
• The Newark Arts Council seeks a new Executive Director. Deadline January 1.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The new book Making Culture Count: The Politics of Cultural Measurement, part of Australia-based publisher Palgrave Macmillan’s New Directions in Cultural Policy series, explores diverse approaches to cultural measurement and their political implications.
• Nesta, a UK-based foundation, presents a potentially fresh approach for measuring the intrinsic benefits of the arts–including asking people how much they would need to be paid to compensate for the removal of cultural institutions.
• An initial report on spillover effects of public investment in arts and culture in Europe reviews existing evidence and recommends a future “holistic research agenda” for the European Union.
• In the United States, the Nonprofit Finance Fund published an arts-specific analysis of its annual State of the Sector Survey, encompassing data from over 900 arts, culture and humanities organizations. Trends include decreased debt (but ongoing challenges with sustainability), and an emphasis on expanded programming and audience-building, as well as more focus on outcomes measurement.
• The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s new assessment of the nonprofit arts sector spanning 11 U.S. metropolitan areas (using Cultural Data Project data) found that increased earned income is driving many organizations’ recession recovery, but they also face decreased contributed income among other fiscal challenges.
• A Theater Communications Group study indicates that U.S. nonprofit theaters still face shrinking attendance despite increased revenue; offering more family-friendly programming may help. Early exposure to theater could benefit young people in various ways; the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders published findings from a randomized control trial that suggest theater training may boost skills in kids with autism.
• A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia offers a closer look at the pros and cons of gentrification in the City of Brotherly Love, with implications for national urban policy.
• The arts management workforce still does not match the diversity of the general population. Meanwhile, a survey of UK arts professionals suggests a “stark gender pay gap.”
• A Los Angeles County Arts Commission report analyzes the importance of volunteers to arts organizations – and of volunteer management.
• With Adele’s new album enjoying record-breaking sales last month despite not being available for streaming, researchers continue to debate the impact of digital music distribution. The NEA responded to a methodological debate that broke out earlier this year between the New York Times Magazine and The Future of Music Coalition by looking at what two alternative datasets might tell us about the viability of making a living as an artist in the digital age. Meanwhile, an analysis of two years of Spotify data from the Bureau of Economic Research suggests that music streaming “brings virtually no financial gain to the industry, but it also prevents losses.”
• Several reports explored the “dark side of creativity,” with growing evidence that creative people may be more dishonest and prone to depression and an exaggerated sense of entitlement.
• Finally, will there be more to be thankful for than usual this year? A Charities Aid Foundation study found that charitable giving is up around the world, including an increase from young people and men.

“Day #244 The Colour of Money” — photo by flickr user Martin Weller

Next time you hear someone complaining yet again about hard times for the arts, you might want to point out that Giving USA Foundation and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy reported in June that charitable giving is up for a fifth consecutive year. In 2014, contributions increased more than 7%, and were up across all four categories tracked: living individuals, foundations, bequests, and corporations. Not only that, giving in the arts increased by 9.2%, the biggest jump of any sector. Overall, 4.8%–roughly $17.2 billion–of the $358.38 billion in charitable donations given in 2014 was directed towards arts and culture, placing seventh out of ten cause areas. (Religion, the perennial winner, pulled in $114.9 billion, though its share continues to drop.) Total gifts last year–driven by mega-gifts given by tech entrepreneurs–surpassed the peak last seen before the Great Recession.

Supreme Court Upholds the Affordable Care Act: We would be remiss to pass by June without acknowledging the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in favor of allowing the federal government to provide tax subsidies to help individuals buy health insurance. This is the second time the Affordable Care Act has come before the Supreme Court, and the second time that Chief Justice Roberts–a Republican–sided with his liberal colleagues on the bench. In 2012, his controlling opinion was belabored; in 2015, affirmative, establishing an expansive precedent that will make future challenges difficult. Had the Supreme Court not upheld the subsidies, residents of the 34 states which refused to set up exchanges of their own (and thus use exchanges managed by the federal government) would have lost their subsidies, affecting at least six and half, and as many as nine million, Americans. Much has been written about the benefit of the Affordable Care Act to independent artists, and we can only imagine that the loss of subsidies in states without their own exchanges would have been a disaster for this community.

Ford Foundation Focuses on Inequality: In the first major overhaul of its grant making priorities since 2007, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker announced that the foundation will direct all its resources to curbing global inequality. Although the foundation is committed to asking hard questions of its grantees, its view of inequality is broad, encompassing wealth, race, ethnicity, and gender as well as issues of access to technology and the arts. Crucially, Mr. Walker has also pledged to double the foundation’s general operating support to 40% of its grant-making budget, which will no doubt be welcome news to grantees the world over. As the second largest private foundation in the United States, one with a rich history of supporting the arts, Ford’s choices will have deep and far-reaching impact. Still, given the foundation’s pre-existing focus on social justice, it remains to be seen whether this new focus will result in significant changes in the way the foundation functions or simply new branding for the work it’s already doing.

Apple Unveils its Music Streaming Platform: Apple is the latest to jump on the increasingly crowded music streaming bandwagon. In June, it unveiled Apple Music, its own music streaming platform spearheaded by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame. There’s nothing particularly innovative about Apple’s platform, though a few features may ultimately set it apart: Netflix-level hyper-customization, hyper-vigilant personalization, Beats 1 radio with shows by Dr. Dre, Elton John, Pharrell Williams, Drake, Q-Tip, St. Vincent, Ellie Goulding, Jaden Smith and others, and an emphasis on the artist-centric social network (as opposed to the friend-centric one, embraced by Spotify and others.) There’s also no free version, only a $9.99/month subscription, but Apple has a marketplace advantage: the app is packaged into every iOS download, and it integrates neatly with iTunes, which at last count had some 800 millions user accounts. The roll out was overshadowed, however, by a letter posted by New York’s attorney general mere hours after the reveal, announcing that the streaming music business, Apple included, is under antitrust investigation.What everyone’s really talking about, however, is Taylor Swift, and how she–along with others–managed to pressure Apple into paying royalties for music played during the app’s three-month trial period. If only authors had a similarly powerful superstar who could pressure Amazon into paying royalties on the number of Kindle books downloaded, rather than on the number of pages read (currently applied only to self-published books, but the backlash has been quick).

Canada Council to Simplify Grant Programs: In a major restructuring, the Canada Council announced in June that it would streamline its grant making programs, reducing 147 separate programs–each with its own guidelines, deadlines and reporting–to a mere six. The new format will kick in in 2017, when the council turns 60. With this restructuring, the council hopes to eliminate administrative redundancies and increase organizational capacity, which would allow it to expand and refine the peer-review evaluation system and offer more application dates, making it easier for artists and organizations to apply on a cycle that makes sense of their work.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After serving nearly three decades as the 13th Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington will step down from his post in January – opening up some new possibilities for copyright policy.
• Elspeth Revere is leaving her post of Vice President for Media, Culture and Special Initiatives for the MacArthur Foundation after 24 years with the foundation.
• Ben Cameron, currently Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Foundation, was named president of the Jerome and Camargo Foundations.
• Eileen Wiseman has been appointed Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Tow Foundation.
• Angelique Power has been promoted to Program Director, Culture for the Joyce Foundation.
• Jaime Cortez joined the Barr Foundation from the San Francisco Arts Commission as a program officer for Arts & Culture.
• Eric Jolly, current president of the Science Museum of Minnesota, has been tapped to become the head of Minnesota Philanthropy Partners.
• DanceUSAorg seeks a Director of Information Services. Deadline July 8.
• The National Endowment for the Arts seeks a Media Arts Director. Posted June 15; deadline July 14.
• Zellerbach Family Foundation is hiring a Program Executive, Promoting Culture. Posted June 15; no closing date.
• Irvine Foundation is hiring a Senior Program Fellow, Arts. Posted June 16; no closing date.
• Fractured Atlas is hiring for a newly created position: Director of Programs. Posted June 18; no closing date.
• Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation seeks a Program Associate. Posted June 19; no closing date.
• The Pricing Institute seeks an experienced arts marketing professional. Posted June 28; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A study commissioned by the James Irvine Foundation in San Francisco, The Cultural Lives of Californians: Insights from the California Survey of Arts & Cultural Participation, takes a broad view of arts participation in California, revealing trends and statistics that are more favorable than recent NEA studies on the same topic.
• EmcArts released in-depth case study documenting the successes of Latino New South, one of its Innovation Labs for the Arts, featuring a collaboration between Levine Museum of New South, the Atlanta History Center, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.
• The Center for an Urban Future released a report, a decade after their initial study, charting changes in New York’s cultural landscape.
• The Center for the Future of Museums has drafted a self-assessment tool for internal practices related to social justice within museums.
• A new guide published by the Wallace Foundation looks at benefits of audience research, and offers suggestions for carrying out effective research.
• A groundbreaking study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience sheds light on the cognitive costs of poverty.
• A new Canadian study finds that despite increased access to musical genres, musical tastes still mirror class lines.
• A paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Research finds positive outcomes for families who use media such as TV “as a tool—to laugh together, to become informed, to connect, to spark discussion.”
• A new survey of executives reveals tips and tricks for influencing decisions at the executive level.
• A recent survey conducted by the Writers’ Union of Canada finds that despite the explosion in e-publishing, salaries for writers have dropped 27% for men, and more for women.
• Two reports of note from the UK this month. The first, A review of the Social Impacts of Culture and Sport, finds that ‘evidence gaps’ are in fact holding back policy development. The second reveals that arts engagement across England as a whole has been static since 2005/06.

UMKC Innovation Center Artist Inc. Programming, is seeking an Associate Director Program/Project Operations. This position is the chief administrator of the suite of Artist INC.programs and is responsible for the program’s consistent achievement of its mission and financial objectives. Artist INC programs are delivered through a collaborative partnership of the Charlotte Street Foundation, ArtsKC-Regional Arts Council, and the UMKC Innovation Center. The Director position and program offices are housed in the UMKC Innovation Center. Artist INC programs include the original Artist INC Live eight-week seminar that focuses on professional development and business training for emerging and mid-career artists; two speakers’ series that connect artists with national and local experts in arts entrepreneurship; the Artist INC website where artists can find the resources they need to shape their careers and grow their businesses; Artist INC Online, a web version of the live training seminar that significantly broadens geographic access to the groundbreaking program; Artist INC’s official blog PushingTheFlywheel, a digital resource destination for the local artist community; Artist INC II, an advanced project-based seminar available to all Artist INC Live alumni; One-On-One Strategic Planning sessions with Artist Peer Facilitators; and Artist INC Community Trainings that provide hands on training and support to communities in the Mid-America Arts Alliance six-state region so they may offer their own community’s sessions of Artist INC Live.

Deadline: May 27. This job is based in Kansas City, MO and compensation starts at $52,700.

Senior Consultant and Associate Consultant (two positions), TRG Arts

TRG Arts is a results-driven consulting firm that helps arts and entertainment organizations achieve increased, sustained revenue and loyal patronage. Our firm counsels some 1,200 client organizations – orchestras, arts centers, museums, festivals, Broadway presenters, opera, dance, and theatre companies – across North America, and now extending abroad to Australia and the UK. Informed by data, TRG consultants and analysts guide growth to achieve results. TRG’s ongoing study of patron transactions and behavior informs understanding of arts and entertainment consumers—who they are and how they invest their time and money. TRG applies that knowledge to each client situation, using data to craft strategy and find the most actionable means for each client to optimize revenue, and increase and sustain loyal participation.

No deadline, but the Senior Consultant position was posted a while ago.

Manager, Program Support (Education, Creativity and Free Expression), Ford Foundation

The Manager, Program Support is a composed and effective project manager, decision-maker, and implementer who functions as a key partner in the Office of the Vice President (OVP). The primary responsibility of this position is to initiate, develop, and manage strategic and tactical activities that optimize and support the work flow of the Vice President. The ideal candidate will possess the ability and confidence to initiate and move forward projects and related work independently on behalf of the Vice President, partnering with program and non-program directors, peer groups and colleagues across the foundation to identify and implement action items that maintain effective operations.

No deadline. Basically you would be working for the person at Ford who oversees all of its arts funding, among other things.

• A federal judge recently ruled that Pandora must continue to pay ASCAP, which represents song writers and publishers, a 1.85% composition royalty. It was a (not entirely clean) victory for Pandora, which was arguing against a rise to 3%. The Future of Music Coalition has a good primer on the issue. (Note that the royalty paid to record companies for sound recordings is much higher – above 50%, in some cases – and it is this larger royalty that Pandora cited last week in increasing the cost of their premium service.)
• FMC similarly offers a concise but thorough summary of the Congressional testimony debating the “notice and takedown” copyright enforcement system for hosting sites like YouTube.
• Amtrak’s writers’ residency is getting some amusing pushback from conservatives that points to some deeper issues regarding its role as a national service.
• Advocacy for publicly-funded arts agencies has a new platform: Stand for the Arts, an online initiative funded by Ovation TV, champions the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Americans for the Arts’s Arts Action Fund.
• Is that the pitter-patter of li’l artist feet in the distance? A female musician predicts Obamacare will prompt a “creative professionals baby boom,” and offers ideas for how the music community can better support it.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Vice President of Paul G. Allen Family Foundation Susan Coliton resigned last week after 15 years with the foundation.
• Judi Jennings, executive director of Kentucky Foundation for Women, is set to retire June 30, also after 15 years of service. Barry Hessenius has an exit interview with Judy.
• The Bay Area’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced the promotions of Shelley Trott and Katie Fahey to Director of Arts Strategy and Ventures and Associate Program Officer for the Arts, respectively.
• The beleaguered Minnesota Orchestra faces continued challenges following the end of a 16-month player lockout: President and CEO Michael Henson announced he is stepping down, prompting the resignation of eight board members and speculation regarding the possible return of the orchestra’s former music director Osmo Vanska.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Ford Foundation now has an artist on its board of trustees: Lourdes Lopez, artistic director of the Miami City Ballet and strong arts education proponent.
• More family foundations – nearly a quarter – are choosing to spend down their assets during the donor’s lifetime.

IN THE FIELD

• In a decision that has perplexed many, the San Diego Opera announced that this season will be its last after nearly fifty years of performances. Subsequent to the announcement, the organization gave itself a two-week reprieve in a last-ditch attempt to raise money.
• Big Brother is watching the opera: Lincoln Center, Alvin Ailey, the Public Theater, and five other NYC arts stalwarts have joined Audience 360, a new alliance that will share ticketing and customer information across the group. As many as forty institutions are expected to join when Audience 360, one of more than twenty such big-data organizations across the country, is launched in June. The information is expected to be useful for government advocacy in addition to marketing.
• The BBC has hired National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone as part of a new push to infuse arts programming across the media organization “like never before.” The new initiatives will include filming live arts events and a miniseries following young orchestra musicians, among others.
• Netflix’s CEO has come out in favor of a strong form of net neutrality after a deal with Comcast cleared up customers’ performance issues. Meanwhile, Apple and Comcast are exploring a TV streaming partnership with sterling connectivity, which would fulfill Apple’s hopes of playing in the TV space.
• The full story of how the reclusive Cornelius Gurlitt wound up with a 1,280-piece trove of Nazi-looted art – which he is now returning to the original owners.
• Bookstores in Manhattan may be a dying breed; bookstores in Brooklyn are thriving.
• Have a great idea for a creative placemaking project but no time to get off the ground? Take advantage of National Arts Strategies’ Creative Community Fellows Program, which includes a week-long retreat with fellow cultural “entrepreneurs,” a distance learning track, and an opportunity to pitch to funders and/or create crowdfunding campaigns. Applications are due May 7.

BIG IDEAS

• As Netflix-style aggregation of content spreads from music and movies to books, magazines, and newspapers, “almost all the value in media has come from bundling.” Consumers like it because it offers centralized curation and lower transaction costs than hunting-and-gathering individual items; providers like it because it can give them more data. (Whether it’s good for creators, of course, depends in large part on how the proceeds are split with the provider.) But don’t get too excited – it turns out that existing legal agreements may prevent Netflix itself – or anyone else – from offering anything approaching a comprehensive slate of films before 2020.
• Meanwhile, total revenue for recorded music has fallen each year of the millennium; at $8 billion a year, it is now less than half of its (inflation-adjusted) 1999 peak. Venture capitalist David Pakman argues that the only way to reverse this trend is to lower the price of streaming services to $3-4 per month, bringing the annual cost closer to more consumers’ historical willingness to pay.
• The Wu-Tang Clan’s new double album will be released in an edition of one, which will tour museums before being sold for millions of dollars.

RESEARCH CORNER

• To what degree do family and peer groups influence our perceptions of the label “artist”? Researchers parsing data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project found a sizable chunk of people creating artistic works do not self-identify as professional artists. Those with artists in their families, or those who attended arts-focused schools, were more likely to use the label. Can’t help but wonder about the degree to which socioeconomic status plays a role in this…
• …since a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data paints a portrait of the artist as a model of downward mobility. Creative types tend to grow up in relatively affluent households and to make less money than their parents, to a much greater extent than those in other careers. Let’s hope some things are more important than money, since art schools are the most expensive in the country after taking financial aid packages into account.
• The Arts Education Partnership’s database of statewide arts education policies has been updated and renamed as ArtScan. It includes a state-to-state comparison feature as well as information about past efforts to survey the status of arts education in each state.
• The Hewlett and Irvine Foundations have released an external assessment of their Next Generation Arts Leadership program, which they have renewed for another three years, to inspire other regions facing a potential arts leadership deficit. (The full report and executive summary are online.)
• The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture is out with a nationwide survey of media arts organizations – the “first-ever, comprehensive data set documenting the media arts field.” With nearly a quarter of respondents self-identifying as local cable TV operators, television still reigns as the primary focus of these organizations’ work.
• Two weeks ago we noted the ever-rising cost of sales in the international and antique art markets as a possible sign of an emerging “winner take all” economy. Others think it’s an insidious sign of something more akin to insider trading.
• March Madness = time to reflect on whether economic impact arguments for the arts really make any sense.