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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Jesse Rosen, League of American Orchestras, 2011

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

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

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

Let’s take a closer look.

Vision One: Diversity

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Gia Kourlas, New York Times, 2015

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

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

Vision Two: Prosperity

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

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

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

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

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

Negro Ensemble Company National Tour, 1968 (source)

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

Vision Three: Redistribution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vision Four: Self-Determination

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

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

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

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

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

“Protest” by flickr user S Pakhrin

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

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

Fault Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural Equity in a Healthy Arts Ecosystem

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Museum Mile” by flickr user MichelinStar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red — photo by flickr user André Hofmeister

Income from streaming services eclipsed CD sales for the first time in 2014, and the fatcats have taken notice. This month, Apple, which spent $3 billion to acquire Beats last year, announced it is developing its own subscription streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify. The service will be available online and through its soon-to-be-revamped iOS music app. In an interesting move, Apple has appointed Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame) instead of an engineer as the front man in the development process. The company also has plans to overhaul iTunes Radio (look out, Pandora), introducing regional market targeting and other personalized services. With more than 800 million customer accounts, Apple has the potential to become a market leader in short order. (Spotify, by comparison, has only 15 million paying subscribers internationally; Pandora fewer than 3 million.) And it’s not just big tech who wants in on the action. On March 30, Jay Z announced the launch of his own streaming service, Tidal, having bought Tidal’s parent company earlier this month. Jay Z’s main objective seems to be fair play for musicians, and indeed, the company will primarily be artist-owned (though at present, that seems only to include celebrity musicians in Jay Z’s tax bracket.) The platform – which will be available in 31 countries – will, like Apple, offer only paid subscriptions. For its part, Spotify isn’t standing still. In January, Sony announced that Spotify would replace Music Unlimited as the music streaming outlet for its PlayStation Network. That platform, available in 41 countries (which triples Sony’s live streaming reach), went live on March 30.

Streaming services aren’t the only mechanism by which tech giants are trying to elbow into the music business. In March, Google formally launched YouTube for Artists, a set of online tools aimed at helping musicians generate more revenue from their music, and ostensibly plan better tours through in-depth access to viewer information on a city level. YouTube also revamped its Music Awards this month, putting the artist front and center. And commercial theater is now in play as well, with Amazon’s announcement that it is expanding a its service which sells theater tickets to London’s West End shows. The service — which previously sold only discounted tickets and special offers — will be direct competition for current ticket venues, including numerous websites and London kiosks, and could be a first step towards taking on Telecharge and Ticketmaster in the United States.

Middle East Museums in the Hot Seat: Museums and cultural heritage sites were all over the news from the Arab world this month — though sadly not for welcome reasons. On March 18, gunmen attacked the National Bardo Museum in downtown Tunis, killing two Tunisians and 20 foreign visitors, and wounding at least 50 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack – Tunisia’s deadliest since 2002 – shaking a country that prides itself on having emerged as the most successful post-Arab Spring democracy. On March 29, Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid announced that Khaled Chaieb, a prime suspect in the attack, had been killed, and the museum reopened to the public on March 30. (In response to the attack, the NYPD stepped up its presence at major museums in New York.) Thankfully, there was no sign of damage to the National Bardo Museum itself or its collection, though it wouldn’t have come as a surprise if there had been. In recent months, Islamic State militants have taken to destroying ancient antiquities deemed blasphemous. Following February’s much-publicized destruction of replica statues and original artifacts at the Mosul Museum, they destroyed three cultural heritage sites: the ancient archaeological site of Dur-Sharrukin (present day Khorsabad), the 3,000-year old Nimrud, and 2,000-year old Hatra. The latter two are UNESCO world heritage sites. Meanwhile, in Yemen, the ongoing conflict between Al Qaeda and the Yemeni army has also robbed the country of its cultural heritage, though in this case, the perpetrators are looters. The silver lining in that tragedy? Some looted museums have become shelters for displaced Yemenis, and, in the absence of functioning cultural institutions, Yemen’s remaining artists have becoming increasingly resourceful, continuing to gather and show work – albeit underground.

Got to Give It Up for Good: The copyright battle that has gripped the music industry for more than a year was settled when an LA jury decreed that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had committed copyright infringement, pilfering elements of Marvin Gaye’s 1977 song “Got to Give It Up” for their track “Blurred Lines” without permission. The decision is believed to be one of the largest damages awards in a music copyright case, with Thicke and Williams ordered to pay $7.3 million to the Gaye estate. The song, which broke records for its No. 1 run, and this lawsuit—which was actually brought preemptively by Thicke and Williams in August 2013—has prompted fierce debate about the difference between homage and plagiarism. What this means for the future of copyright and creativity remains to be seen, though Thicke and Williams are not optimistic. In a joint statement released after the verdict, they noted that “while [they] respect the judicial process, [they] are extremely disappointed in the ruling…which sets a horrible precedent for music and creativity going forward.”

GIA Takes a Stand for Racial Equity: Culminating several years of activism by key leaders associated with the organization, the Grantmakers in the Arts board of directors has released a statement of purpose detailing its commitment to racial equity in arts philanthropy. The statement confirms GIA’s commitment to addressing structural inequities and increasing philanthropic and governmental support for ALAANA (African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American) artists, arts organizations, children, and adults. The twelve actions proposed to support this new focus include advocating for collecting data on the demographics of arts organizations’ boards, employees, and constituents; requiring all of GIA’s board and staff to attend anti-racism training; ensuring representation by ALAANA individuals at annual conferences and among GIA’s own board and staff; and providing unspecified support “for individual members and collective groups of funders who are seeking to achieve greater racial equity in arts philanthropy in their own communities.” While most of these activities were already underway, this is the first time GIA has committed so publicly to being an anti-racist organization.

China Stakes Its Claim on the Arts: In 2015, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest economy, and in March, Beijing confirmed its ascendance in the arts with two important firsts. With the value of art traded in 2014 reaching an all-time high at an estimated €51 billion, China edged out the United States as the world’s largest market for modern art. On the other end of the spectrum, China pulled in $650 million in February box office revenue, beating out the United States for the first time. What’s more, where the global box office rose by just 1% in 2014 – and fell by 5% in the US – in China, revenue increased by 34%. A recent report from Ernst & Young predicts that China will be the world’s biggest film industry by 2020, and at least one partner is taking note, choosing to collaborate rather than compete: Hollywood.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After eight months as interim president, Julie Stasch was formally appointed president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
• Victoria Rogers, former New World Symphony executive vice president, has been appointed the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s new vice president for arts, replacing Dennis Scholl.
• Felicia Shaw, former director of arts and the creative economy at the San Diego Foundation, has been named executive director of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission.
• Tad Smith, former CEO of Madison Square Garden, joined Sotheby’s as its new CEO on March 31.
• Sphinx Organization founder and University of Michigan alum Aaron Dworkin will return to his alma mater as dean of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
• Francene Blythe will join the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation as its new director of programs.
• Paul Brohan has been named deputy director of programs at the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
• The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (based at the University of Pennsylvania) seeks a Research Director. Posted February 13; no closing date.
• The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at the Stanford Graduate School of Education seeks a Policy Analyst. Posted March 13; no closing date.
• The Boston Globe is hiring a Features Writer for its Living/Arts Department. Posted March 20; no closing date.
• The Foundation Center in New York seeks a Data Scientist. Posted March 24; no closing date.
• AMS Planning & Research Corp. is hiring a Senior Analyst. No closing date.
• The Wichita Falls (TX) Alliance for Arts and Culture, newly state-incorporated, seeks an Executive Director. Posted March 30; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The Wallace Foundation released two reports in March which look at building arts audiences. The first is a case study of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s efforts to increase the under-25 audience for ballet. The second analyzes the Seattle Opera’s four-year-long experiment with technology.
• Another pair of reports released in March look into audience demographics. The first, a market research report commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony, looks at orchestra audiences for this mid-sized ensemble. The second, commissioned by the Broadway League, looks at Broadway audiences more generally.
• “Insights and Lessons: Community Arts and College Arts,” a new report commissioned by the Kresge Foundation, offers recommendations for art-based civic dialogue & community revitalization based on the results of two pilot initiatives by the foundation.
• “Corporate Social Responsibility & the Arts,” a new report from Americans for the Arts, provides insights into how corporations engage with arts and culture as they work to achieve their CSR/CCI goals.
• Two recent reports — “Supporting Grantee Capacity: Strengthening Effectiveness Together,” from GrantCraft, a service of the Foundation Center, and “Strengthening Nonprofit Capacity” from GEOfunders — offer insights and guidance for developing nonprofit capacity.
• Several studies have recently attempted to quantify the impact of the arts on the body. According to research published in Economic Inquiry, video game playing has been shown to improve cognitive skills, and a small-scale study from the Athens Medical School in Athens shows compelling evidence that listening to music has a positive impact on cardiovascular health.
• A new study analyzes the practice habits of top performing pianists in an effort to distill which strategies lead to success.
• A landmark report released by from the American Music Therapy Association looks at music therapy with a focus on both active duty service members and veterans.
• A new report from the Writers Guild of America shows a decline in number of women and minorities who make up TV staff writers.
• A recent report commissioned by UK’s Labour party calls on the next government to treat culture as a priority sector, and offers specific recommendations for how to do so.

Brooklyn Museum – by Flickr user Wally Gobetz, Creative Commons license

Following in the footsteps of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Haven, in 2015, New York City will begin issuing municipal identification cards to undocumented immigrants, with an arts-oriented twist. Much like those seen in other cities, New York’s program will allow access to critical services, such as opening a bank account, visiting a medical clinic, and renting an apartment. Based in the idea that the cultural treasures of the Big Apple ought to be available to all, the ID card will also provide free or discounted memberships at 33 of New York’s leading institutions, including the Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA PS1. The cards will be available to any city resident over the age of 14, and thus offer a way for anyone who feels they cannot afford arts and culture — not simply undocumented residents — to participate.

Grantmakers in the Arts Claims a Major Lobbying Success: At the end of August, the Obama Administration announced a $250 million “preschool development” grant competition, part of its efforts to improve preschool access for children below the poverty line. Grantmakers in the Arts’s Arts Education Funders Coalition (AEFC) helped ensure that program participants will receive the same arts exposure as students in the Head Start program. With the arts included as a key “approach to learning,” arts agencies have an opportunity to help design their states’ proposals, work with preschools to select curricula, and augment program offerings at preschools looking to meet the grant’s requirements.

Symphonies and Labor: Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Locked Out: Atlanta Symphony Orchestra musicians have been locked out for over a month in a labor dispute, with healthcare benefits and the size of the orchestra itself at stake. An earlier, three-week lockout in 2012, fundraising difficulties, and low government support compared to other cities compound the problems, with the current season canceled through at least November 8. Four weeks into the lockout, CEO and President Stanley Romanstein resigned. Terry Neal, board member and former executive at Coca-Cola, will take the helm until a permanent replacement is found.

Corcoran Gallery of Art Merges with National Gallery and George Washington University: A D.C. judge recently approved the merger of the Corcoran Gallery of Art with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University (GWU), which will effectively dissolve the Corcoran in a $2 billion deal. Once the oldest privately-supported art museum in the United States, the Corcoran has long struggled against mounting debts, tens of millions in renovations, and a shrinking endowment, and most recently, a lawsuit against the merger. As a result of the merger, approximately 150 staff will likely face layoffs, the National Gallery will absorb most of the Corcoran’s collections, and GWU will take over its College of Arts and Design, offering jobs to all of its full-time faculty.

New Research on Wellbeing & the Arts: The U.K’s All-Party Parlimentary Group for Wellbeing Economics has come out with a major new report on the intersection of arts funding and the wellbeing of the general public. The result of a year-long inquiry and titled “Wellbeing in Four Policy Areas,” the report contains two major findings: first, active participation in the arts has a much greater impact on overall wellbeing than serving as a passive audience member; and second, arts participation has a much larger effect on disadvantaged communities than wealthier, resource-rich areas. The effect on policymaking in the U.K. could be quite notable, as the the report asks arts funders to evaluate the wellbeing impacts of grants to organizations and employ this data to justify government spending.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• The James Irvine Foundation announced Don Howard as the new president and CEO.
• Jim McDonald was named the deputy director and director of programs at Grantmakers in the Arts.
• San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley has announced that he will retire after a 44-year career in opera in 2016.
• Artist Trust has hired Shannon Roach Halberstadt as its new executive director.
• Mayor Martin J. Walsh has named Julie Burros as the new chief of arts and culture for the city of Boston. Burros was formerly head of cultural planning for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
• The National Endowment for the Arts is looking for a program analyst. Salary: $89-138K, posted September 23, closes October 7.
• The Cleveland Metropolitan School District seeks an arts policy-focused plan manager and partnership manager. Posted August 28, no closing date.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy is in the market for a research manager in its Cambridge, MA office. Posted August 27, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The NEA has launched its “Exploring Our Town” site, a set of online case studies highlighting its signature creative placemaking program.
• More evidence for the power of young brains on art: a new study in the Journal of Neuroscience provides the first direct evidence that long-term engagement in community music programs enhance the neural processing of speech in at-risk children.
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund released its 2014 State of the Arts & Culture Sector brochure: even as organizations continue to expand and innovate with programs, many remain financially unstable.
• The James Irvine Foundation continues its interest in improving arts participation with a Helicon Collaborative report on the characteristics of organizations that successfully engage diverse audiences.
• Portland’s Regional Arts and Culture Council proves that engaging diverse audiences isn’t just a California thing with its own report.
• In a progress report, Grantmakers in the Arts investigates how funders are using capitalization principles to strengthen cultural organizations’ fiscal health.

Metropolitan Opera House – Photo by Flickr user Zio Paolino, Creative Commons license

Never fear, Wagner lovers: the largest opera company in the US will open its season on time. Faced with what it called an unsustainable financial strain, management had threatened a lockout this fall if labor representatives refused to accept drastic pay cuts. In the end, General Manager Peter Gelb was able to secure the first pay cuts for the Met’s unionized employees in decades, but the cuts were by no means as deep as initially proposed. Singers and orchestra members agreed to a 3.5% pay cut, effective immediately, and an additional 3.5% cut in six months’ time. That’s a far cry from the 17% reduction that Gelb had previously sought, and will be partially offset by a 3% raise in the fourth year of the union’s contract.

From the standpoint of the larger nonprofit arts field, the most significant part of the deal is a clause that allows an independent financial analyst to monitor the financial management of the organization on behalf of the employees. Experts claim this highly unusual provision could have ripple effects throughout the industry. This agreement came about when the unions, faced with the drastic cuts proposed by Gelb, developed a list of alternative cost-saving measures. While the management didn’t adopt those proposals outright, it agreed to let the employees have a say in how the overall savings are achieved.

California turns to tax breaks to reassert film industry dominance
Just as North Carolina decides to follow the examples of Michigan and New Mexico by scaling back its support of the motion picture industry, California is doubling down (actually, tripling down) on its incentives in an attempt to keep Hollywood productions in Hollywood. Governor Brown and the state Legislature have expanded California’s tax credit program from $100 million to $330 million per year. While the ability of film tax incentives to increase employment and stimulate the economy remains highly questionable (as previously discussed here at Createquity), California lawmakers have described the expanded tax program as a demonstration of their commitment to the film industry. California may indeed be in a somewhat different position than most other states in that a lot of film industry professionals are based in and around Los Angeles and would presumably prefer to work closer to home if the production costs, which can be significantly reduced by tax incentives, are roughly on par with other states.

International cultural agencies shake things up
The Australia Council for the Arts has announced what it’s billing as the most sweeping overhaul of its grant programs in 40 years in order to make them more inclusive and reduce the administrative burden on applicants. Each of the newly created funding categories will be open to artists of all areas of practice and applicants will be able to choose which discipline’s peer panel they want to assess their application. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Council England has rebalanced its portfolio of funded organizations to direct more funding to organizations outside of London at the expense of such venerable institutions as the English National Opera. Nevertheless, critics say the plan to devote 53% of the Arts Council’s budget to regions outside of London (up from 49%) doesn’t go far enough. Finally, the French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, has resigned in protest of austerity measures that led to cuts in her Ministries budget. She will be replaced by Korean-born Fleur Pellerin.

New foundation to support American classical composers
The Chicago music critic Lawrence A. Johnson has launched a nonprofit foundation that will provide grants to ensembles and presenters that perform American classical music and commission new works by American composers. The American Music Project is still in the early stages of fundraising, but it’s already commissioned its first new work and is set to start awarding grants for the 2015-16 season. Johnson hopes to have raised $500,000 by next spring and eventually establish a standing endowment of $1 million. There’s no word yet on the size of the grants that will be doled for performances of rarely heard American works or how many organizations will be supported each year. While some might question the need for another nonprofit dedicated to classical music, Mike Scutari argues that the American Music Project will fill a gap in current support mechanisms with its focus on increasing the breadth of the American repertoire featured in concert halls around the country.

Corbett Foundation closing
Cincinnati’s Corbett Foundation, which has provided more than $70 million to arts and education nonprofits in Ohio and Kentucky since 1955, is finally closing its doors. The dissolution of the foundation has been planned for years; indeed, it was never intended to persist beyond the founders’ lifetimes. Explaining why it took until now to wrap things up after Patricia Corbett’s death in 2008, Executive Director Karen McKim said in effect that rising markets had foiled plans to spend down the foundation’s funds despite best efforts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• The Pittsburgh Foundation has announced its new president & CEO, Maxwell King.
• The National Association of Media Arts and Culture has a new executive director, Wendy Levy.
• The Center for Cultural Innovation’s board chair Angie Kim has been appointed interim leader as the organization’s search for its next President & CEO continues.
• Oregon Cultural Trust has hired Brian Rogers as executive director.
• Grantmakesr in the Arts has chosen Jim McDonald to be its new deputy director and director of programs, replacing the retiring Tommer Peterson.
• ArtWorks, an art therapy service provider in New York & New Jersey, is looking for an executive director. Posted August 15, no closing date.
• National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers seeks a project director; work virtually. Salary: $30-35k for 20 hrs/wk.
• McLean Project for the Arts (DC area) is in the market for an executive director. Salary: $55-70k. Posted August 6, no closing date.
• The Boston Globe is seeking an arts reporter. Posted August 21, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Research on the effects of video games is booming; much is unknown, but apparently Grand Theft Auto promotes bad behavior in real life and playing Voldemort makes you evil. But it’s not just video games: watching reality TV can make you a worse person, too.
• Rhetoric about a “universal language” aside, it turns out that about 3% of people just don’t like music at all, and they’re amazingly not monsters.
• A new study finds that true stories aren’t any more emotionally resonant than fictional ones, despite expectations to the contrary.
• Hollywood still lags behind in diversity. According to a new study, whites had 74% of the movie roles despite making up only 64% of the population.
• A Kennedy Center evaluation found that 4th- and 5th-graders in arts integrated classes displayed more creativity and better problem-solving skills than peers.
• A college-aged mathematician has put together a linear regression model predicting the length of Broadway show runs.

crown – Photo by Flickr user Jason Train, Creative Commons license

Both the NEA and the NEH have new official leaders this month: Jane Chu, head of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, will be the 11^th chair of the NEA; William “Bro” Adams, formerly president of Colby College, will be the 10^th chair of the NEH. Respected internal acting chairs had been manning the ships since Rocco Landesman’s resignation from the NEA at the end of 2012 and Jim Leach’s resignation from the NEH in April 2013. The new appointees are just in time for the Congressional debate over the President’s budget, which requested essentially flat funding for the cultural agencies.

In her previous job, Chu oversaw the mid-recession capital campaign that built the Kauffman Center, a major performance venue that is now home to the Kansas City Ballet, Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. She has a background as a grantmaker, with a PhD in philanthropic studies and a previous post as the vice president of community investment for the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. A former member of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, she may also be well equipped to reach across the aisle – or at least to continue making the case for the economic impact of the arts.

Adams, a Vietnam veteran and intellectual historian, has led arts and humanities initiatives at several colleges, including the Great Works in Western Culture Program at Stanford and a major expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art. His long and varied resume of experience in academic administration marks a shift from Leach, who had been a Congressman for thirty years at the time of his appointment. We hope he will continue his tradition of open forums entitled, “Yo, Bro.”

Glimmers of hope in state and local arts budgets: For the first time in many years, public arts funding is increasing in notable areas of the country. The Florida state budget now officially includes $56.4 million for the state’s Division of Cultural Affairs, vaulting the Sunshine State past New York to take the prize of most generous state arts council overall – even if you exclude the $12.4 million in line-item funding from that total. Not to be outdone, New York City’s 2014-15 budget includes a $23 million boost for arts education, to be directed toward arts specialist positions, facilities, and partnerships with cultural institutions. On the opposite coast, the California Arts Council received a $5 million boost from the state, bringing its total appropriation to about $9 million. Paltry as it may seem compared to Florida’s investment and California’s size, that $5 million is the first significant increase the CAC has received since it was gutted by more than 90% more than a decade ago. Michigan allocated an additional $2 million for the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley gave arts advocates reason to cheer by refraining from vetoing funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission for the first time since 2011.

Debate over equity in arts funding adds to Bay Area arts turmoil: In what may be a harbinger of feuds in other parts of the country, arts advocates in the City by the Bay clashed with one another over funding for arts organizations serving communities of color. A recent report from the Budget Analyst’s Office claims the bulk of funding distributed by San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts/Hotel Tax Fund goes to organizations serving primarily white audiences. Amid calls to address the disparity by boosting funds to the Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants, which target underserved and culturally specific communities, sharp words flew between sub-groups of arts advocates, some of whom felt the Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts were being pitted against each other. The budget for Cultural Equity Grants is now poised to receive $119,000 previously allocated to Grants for the Arts, with further action by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors expected in July. This is all on top of the recent shutdown of the San Jose Repertory Theater after 34 years and the dramatic shrinking of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts announced last month.

The Detroit Institute of Arts continues on its escape path from the city’s bankruptcy proceedings: The Detroit City Council unanimously approved the museum’s plan to privatize as a charitable trust. The so-called “grand bargain” would ransom the DIA from the bargaining table in exchange for more than $800 million in public and private funds to be paid to the city’s pensioners over 20 years. Foundation money currently accounts for more than $350m of that, including major gifts from Ford ($125 million) and Kresge ($100 million). The museum itself is required to raise $100m of the money; they’re about 70% of the way there, thanks to recent donations from the Big Three automakers ($26 million total) and from Mellon and Getty ($10 million and $3 million, respectively). Even if the funds are raised, the deal must still win the approval of pensioners and the presiding judge – which is not guaranteed, as some creditors are calling for part or all of the museum’s collection to be in play to settle the city’s debts.

Creative hubs compete to offer tax credits for film and TV production: A large majority of states offer tax incentives for film and TV production, but the last several weeks have seen several governments advance the arms race. New Jersey’s state Senate passed a bill that would raise the annual cap for film tax credits from $10 million to $50 million; Austin’s City Council approved reimbursement of up to 0.75% of production companies’ wages; and, not to be outdone, the California state assembly passed a “Film and Television Jobs Retention and Promotion” Act that would add an undefined amount to the current $100 million annual kitty. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers may clarify their tax credit rules to better attract feature films and TV series specifically; the shopping network QVC has received more than $26 million under the program since 2008. Meanwhile, Boston is kickin’ it old-school: the state legislature is considering incentives to lure live theater headed to Broadway or Off-Broadway to Beantown and the rest of Massachusetts. As we noted in January, the ultimate benefit of incentives like these to citizens is not always clear.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• After seven months, Los Angeles has a new arts czar: Danielle Brazell is Mayor Eric Garcetti’s nominee to head the Department of Cultural Affairs. Brazell, who has spent the last eight years corralling the region’s arts advocates as executive director of Arts for LA, will take up the reins in August.
• Los Angeles also added a high-profile art education leader to its ranks: Rory Pullens, head of Washington, DC’s Duke Ellington School for the Arts, will take over Los Angeles Unified School Districts’ arts education branch in July.
• After fourteen years as Deputy Director and Director of Programs, Grantmakers in the Arts’ Tommer Petersen will retire at the end of 2014. GIA has announced a national search for his replacement.
• Simon Greer has left the Nathan Cummings Foundation following a two-and-a-half year stint as president and CEO. Greer noted he and the Board were “increasingly unaligned around the hard choices that are inevitably part of implementation.”‘
• Sad news: Rebecca Blunk, former Executive Director of the New England Foundation for the Arts, passed away on June 22 at the age of 60.
• The San Francisco Arts Commission is hiring a Senior Program Officer for Community Investments. Deadline: 6/16. Salary: $73-89k.
• Artist Trust (based in Seattle) is looking for a new Executive Director. Deadline: 7/3. Salary: $85-95k.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Three new studies examine the link between arts participation and individuals’ sense of life-satisfaction.
• A University of Messina psychologist has linked creative capacity to hormones. Examining a small sample of visual artists, she found evidence of high prenatal testosterone rates among both males and females. A 1999 study of musicians suggested a similar correlation.
• Music education has been linked to increases in mathematical ability – might it help students with reading as well? Unfortunately, it may not do as much for your kid’s skill with the oboe as Malcolm Gladwell believes: a new study finds a strong genetic component to musical talent.
• Last year we outlined best- and worst-case scenarios for the impact of MOOCs on public education. Now, research on the use of educational technology in affluent vs. non-affluent communities suggests the worst-case scenario may be winning, as children from mid- and high-income families benefit more from fancy gadgets and internet access than their low-income peers.
• The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies offers a snapshot of how its members handle fellowships for individual artists.
• Arts Midwest has released a report on its leadership and strategy development program, ArtsLab, including case studies of eight grantees.
• Researchers affiliated with the Cultural Policy Center are preparing a book on the impact of major cultural facilities projects and the mistakes that can drive unwise investment by cities. The book expands on the authors’ previously-released study.

In her previous job, Chu oversaw the mid-recession capital campaign that built the Kauffman Center, a major performance venue that is now home to the Kansas City Ballet, Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. She has a background as a grantmaker, with a PhD in philanthropic studies and a previous post as the vice president of community investment for the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. A former member of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, she may also be well equipped to reach across the aisle – or at least to continue making the case for the economic impact of the arts.

Adams, a Vietnam veteran and intellectual historian, has led arts and humanities initiatives at several colleges, including the Great Works in Western Culture Program at Stanford and a major expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art. His long and varied resume of experience in academic administration marks a shift from Leach, who had been a Congressman for thirty years at the time of his appointment. We hope he will continue his tradition of open forums entitled, “Yo, Bro.”

Glimmers of hope in state and local arts budgets: For the first time in many years, public arts funding is increasing in notable areas of the country. The Florida state budget now officially includes $56.4 million for the state’s Division of Cultural Affairs, vaulting the Sunshine State past New York to take the prize of most generous state arts council overall – even if you exclude the $12.4 million in line-item funding from that total. Not to be outdone, New York City’s 2014-15 budget includes a $23 million boost for arts education, to be directed toward arts specialist positions, facilities, and partnerships with cultural institutions. On the opposite coast, the California Arts Council received a $5 million boost from the state, bringing its total appropriation to about $9 million. Paltry as it may seem compared to Florida’s investment and California’s size, that $5 million is the first significant increase the CAC has received since it was gutted by more than 90% more than a decade ago. Michigan allocated an additional $2 million for the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley gave arts advocates reason to cheer by refraining from vetoing funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission for the first time since 2011.

Debate over equity in arts funding adds to Bay Area arts turmoil: In what may be a harbinger of feuds in other parts of the country, arts advocates in the City by the Bay clashed with one another over funding for arts organizations serving communities of color. A recent report from the Budget Analyst’s Office claims the bulk of funding distributed by San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts/Hotel Tax Fund goes to organizations serving primarily white audiences. Amid calls to address the disparity by boosting funds to the Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants, which target underserved and culturally specific communities, sharp words flew between sub-groups of arts advocates, some of whom felt the Arts Commission and Grants for the Arts were being pitted against each other. The budget for Cultural Equity Grants is now poised to receive $119,000 previously allocated to Grants for the Arts, with further action by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors expected in July. This is all on top of the recent shutdown of the San Jose Repertory Theater after 34 years and the dramatic shrinking of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts announced last month.

The Detroit Institute of Arts continues on its escape path from the city’s bankruptcy proceedings: The Detroit City Council unanimously approved the museum’s plan to privatize as a charitable trust. The so-called “grand bargain” would ransom the DIA from the bargaining table in exchange for more than $800m in public and private funds to be paid to the city’s pensioners over 20 years. Foundation money currently accounts for more than $350m of that, including major gifts from Ford ($125m) and Kresge ($100m). The museum itself is required to raise $100m of the money; they’re about 70% of the way there, thanks to recent donations from the Big Three automakers ($26m total) and from Mellon and Getty ($10m and $3m). Even if the funds are raised, the deal must still win the approval of pensioners and the presiding judge – which is not guaranteed, as some creditors are calling for part or all of the museum’s collection to be in play to settle the city’s debts.

Creative hubs compete to offer tax credits for film and TV production: A large majority of states offer tax incentives for film and TV production, but the last several weeks have seen several governments advance the arms race. New Jersey’s state Senate passed a bill that would raise the annual cap for film tax credits from $10m to $50m; Austin’s City Council approved reimbursement of up to 0.75% of production companies’ wages; and, not to be outdone, the California state assembly passed a “Film and Television Jobs Retention and Promotion” Act that would add an undefined amount to the current $100 annual kitty. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers may clarify their tax credit rules to better attract feature films and TV series specifically; the shopping network QVC has received more than $26m under the program since 2008. Meanwhile, Boston is kickin’ it old-school: the state legislature is considering incentives to lure live theater headed to Broadway or Off-Broadway to Beantown and the rest of Massachusetts. As we noted in January, the ultimate benefit of incentives like these to citizens is not always clear.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• After seven months, Los Angeles has a new arts czar: Danielle Brazell is Mayor Eric Garcetti’s nominee to head the Department of Cultural Affairs. Brazell, who has spent the last eight years corralling the region’s arts advocates as executive director of Arts for LA, will take up the reins in August.
• Los Angeles also added a high-profile art education leader to its ranks: Rory Pullens, head of Washington, DC’s Duke Ellington School for the Arts, will take over Los Angeles Unified School Districts’ arts education branch in July.
• After fourteen years as Deputy Director and Director of Programs, Grantmakers in the Arts’ Tommer Petersen will retire at the end of 2014. GIA has announced a national search for his replacement.
• Simon Greer has left the Nathan Cummings Foundation following a two-and-a-half year stint as president and CEO. Greer noted he and the Board were “increasingly unaligned around the hard choices that are inevitably part of implementation.”‘
• Sad news: Rebecca Blunk, former Executive Director of the New England Foundation for the Arts, passed away on June 22 at the age of 60.
• The San Francisco Arts Commission is hiring a Senior Program Officer for Community Investments. Deadline: 6/16. Salary: $73-89k.
• Artist Trust (based in Seattle) is looking for a new Executive Director. Deadline: 7/3. Salary: $85-95k.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Three new studies examine the link between arts participation and individuals’ sense of life-satisfaction.
• A University of Messina psychologist has linked creative capacity to hormones. Examining a small sample of visual artists, she found evidence of high prenatal testosterone rates among both males and females. A 1999 study of musicians suggested a similar correlation.
• Music education has been linked to increases in mathematical ability – might it help students with reading as well? Unfortunately, it may not do as much for your kid’s skill with the oboe as Malcolm Gladwell believes: a new study finds a strong genetic component to musical talent.
• Last year we outlined best- and worst-case scenarios for the impact of MOOCs on public education. Now, research on the use of educational technology in affluent vs. non-affluent communities suggests the worst-case scenario may be winning, as children from mid- and high-income families benefit more from fancy gadgets and internet access than their low-income peers.
• The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies offers a snapshot of how its members handle fellowships for individual artists.
• Arts Midwest has released a report on its leadership and strategy development program, ArtsLab, including case studies of eight grantees.
• Researchers affiliated with the Cultural Policy Center are preparing a book on the impact of major cultural facilities projects and the mistakes that can drive unwise investment by cities. The book expands on the authors’ previously-released study.

The lobby of the Willard Hotel is rumored to be the birthplace of the term “lobbying.”
Photo by Ellen Meiselman

In March of 2012, Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) launched the Arts Education Funders Coalition. The goal of the Coalition is “to research and identify federal policy opportunities that promote equitable access to arts education in all public schools.” It consists of about 135 individuals from 115 organizations within GIA’s membership and is led by a small advisory committee of prominent voices in arts advocacy, education, and philanthropy.

This is new territory for GIA. The organization’s president and CEO, Janet Brown, acknowledged in a recent conversation that public policy can be uncomfortable, risky, and “very difficult to get funders to invest in.” Successes are few, far between, and at the mercy of our volatile political process. But when a critical mass of arts education funders felt funding nonprofit programs was no longer a sufficient strategy to achieve their aspirations to further arts education in public schools, they decided to attempt to affect policy directly, and GIA took on the challenge.

Setting the stage

When attempting to influence public policy, an organization must first decide where and how to target its efforts. Will the focus be on the federal, state, or local level? Should a law be enacted, tweaked, or repealed? With the Arts Education Funders Coalition, GIA decided to focus on the federal level and work toward adding pro-arts language to existing education legislation.

In announcing the formation of the Coalition, Janet Brown explained:

Why is GIA involving itself in federal policy, you might ask. It’s because that’s where decisions are made in education in America. Although we’d love to believe that education policies are determined locally, the reality is federal policy drives the actions made by state departments of education and local superintendents and school boards. Our obsession with testing to determine learning is evidence of this. Equity issues are best dealt with at the federal level where the governmental “carrot” is meant to level the playing field.

Despite its national aspirations, the Funders Coalition hasn’t garnered much attention to date from the arts sector. According to Janet Brown, “[The Arts Education Funders Coalition is] not a very visible project because it’s a different kind of advocacy than American for the Arts (AFTA).” AFTA, the lead advocacy organization for our sector, mobilizes email campaigns and organizes Arts Advocacy Day, which brings hundreds of people to Washington each year in an overt attempt to draw the attention of policymakers to issues concerning the arts community, among other advocacy efforts. (The organizations are talking to each other: AFTA’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Arts Education, Narric Rome, is on the advisory committee of the GIA Arts Education Funders Coalition.) GIA is taking a quieter approach, banking in part on the assumption that a pro-arts education agenda would have more clout coming from a group of people who have skin in the public education game:

As a group of funders who have contributed millions of dollars to the public education system or to the nonprofit arts sector to compensate for lack of arts education in public schools, Coalition members and other funders have a stake in developing effective policy that will secure the place of arts education in twenty-first century education.

To lead the effort, GIA hired a Washington, DC firm specializing in education policy, the Penn Hill Group, to help develop an agenda and do the on-the-ground lobbying. Executive vice president Alex Nock has been presenting the Funders Coalition’s progress as part of GIA’s web conference series.

The Funders Coalition’s agenda takes on many aspects of federal education policy, including juvenile justice, research, Head Start, teacher evaluation, and the cornerstone of federal education legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, formerly known as No Child Left Behind). It describes the arts-positive change the Funders Coalition would like to see in each area, including:

• “that any school improvement structure adopted in ESEA reauthorization… include arts education as a strategy in the overall plan to turn around a low-performing school,”
• “that arts education be integrated into the Head Start standards and partnerships be encouraged between Head Start providers and community arts organizations,” and
• “that the [Investing in Innovation] program adopt an absolute priority for arts education that requires the Department of Education to fund quality applications with an arts education focus.”

The agenda is multifaceted, but GIA’s focus is on language. According to Janet Brown, the Coalition faced a choice at its outset. It could propose new, stand-alone legislation to advance arts education, or lobby to change existing laws. After considering the contentious political climate, relatively low priority of education policy on the congressional to-do list, and extreme amount of time and effort brand new legislation would require, GIA and the Penn Hill Group deemed the latter option more realistic.

The story so far

We’re just weeks away from the Coalition’s second birthday. What progress has it made?

On November 18,2013, GIA sent an email to members of the Funders Coalition with good news: “Through work with Members of Congress and their staff, [we were] able to ensure that arts education would play a prominent role in the preschool programs funded under [a proposed] bill should it pass Congress over the next year.” Time will tell how “prominent” that role actually is, but the announcement suggests an encouraging victory for what is a relatively new effort.

Pre-K may have been low-hanging fruit for the Funders Coalition. Without standardized testing and other competitors for the class time that older students face, Pre-K curricula naturally have more room for the arts. But according to Brown, the inclusion of arts-friendly language in the bill was not inevitable. “If we had not been there the language would not have been included,” Brown said. “Bills are written based on the knowledge of the staff who are writing them.” If that’s the case, it’s a good thing the Penn Hill Group and GIA are there to educate them.

The Coalition has also succeeded in getting more specific language included in Senator Tom Harkin’s bill to reauthorize ESEA, which will hopefully be brought to the Senate floor for consideration in March or June. ESEA has been waiting for reauthorization since 2007, and Alyson Klein for EdWeek accurately called its chances back in June: “Everyone knows that the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is ultimately headed absolutely nowhere [in 2013], thanks to partisan divisions.” The language included in Senator Harkin’s bill is a win for the Funders Coalition, but the success of the bill is difficult to forecast given Congress’s recent track record of inaction when it comes to ESEA.

The next act

The Funders Coalition’s effort raises familiar but tricky questions about arts education advocacy:

• Is legislative language without designated funding enough to make real change? New York City’s arts education legislation is a great example of the folly of language that isn’t backed by specific, dedicated funding. In 2007, $67.5 million previously earmarked for arts education was released to the discretion of school principals. Accountability measures were put in place to theoretically ensure that students received the arts education prescribed by law, but many arts advocates would argue that the state of arts education in New York City schools has declined as a result of the change. The conventional wisdom is that if decision makers don’t have to spend money on a non-tested subject, they likely won’t, focusing resources instead on subjects in which the school is held accountable for its performance. To ensure the delivery of arts education in schools, policy needs to mandate what is to be provided to students, allocate dedicated funding, and establish a mechanism to ensure compliance. How much will be budgeted, for example, for the arts if they are to play a prominent role in preschool programs across the country? Will the appropriated funding be enough for full-time arts teachers in every school or simply materials with which general classroom teachers can incorporate arts projects? Language will help, but it’s not everything. Funding is a very important piece of the puzzle. Which begs the question…

• Does it make more sense to work at the federal or state/local level? Federal policies set priorities which states are encouraged to adopt via competitive funding programs and other means of reward and punishment. All states receiving Race to the Top grants, for example, must develop comprehensive teacher evaluation systems as a condition of funding. Nevertheless, education is constitutionally assigned as a state concern and the bulk of education funding – over 90% – comes from state and local sources. Therefore, state and local officials have the most control over how education funds are spent. If you grant the premise that money is a key, if not the key, ingredient in successful reform, the states could be the best place to advocate for arts education.

For now, it’s too early to tell what answers we might glean from GIA’s experience, and whether its quieter strategy will pay off. It could be that potential victories for the Funders Coalition really do influence state priorities and lead to expanded arts education opportunities in schools. At the very least, as the Funders Coalition continues its work we should know more about the potential for funders to be advocates. There are many valuable lessons to be learned as this effort continues.

I basically retired from conference blogging two years ago, but the opportunity to bring together our hot-off-the-presses editorial team in one place and try out a new medium for us (video) was enough to drag me out of the attic for this go-round. Once you’ve attended any conference for several years in a row, it’s easy to get jaded and start to care more about reconnecting with old friends and making new ones than about the session content. This phenomenon probably reached its peak for me during last year’s conference in, of all places, Miami Beach, where I arrived to discover a hot tub in my room and one of my coworkers got randomly upgraded to a swim-up bungalow. Kind of hard to concentrate on PowerPoint slides in that kind of environment; I remember hanging around the pool with colleagues right after presenting one afternoon, wearing my nametag over a full suit and tie and feeling like a very sweaty idiot. I figured I wouldn’t have quite the same sorts of distractions to contend with in Philly, but still, it was another year of GIA and what promised to be another year of what have become some very familiar conversations.

Many conferences have formal “tracks” corresponding to industries, sectors, topic areas, and so forth, so that if you identify with one of those tracks you can easily navigate your way through the content that is most relevant to you. The GIA Conference essentially has implicit tracks that pop up every year: arts and social justice/cultural equity, arts education, technology, support for individual artists, creative placemaking, and so forth. I’m more invested in some of these topics than others, and it had become my practice at GIA and other conferences to gravitate towards those topics and engage with the kinds of people who get invited to speak on them. Nothing wrong with that, except that over time I found myself learning less and less from these sessions; I was already pretty on top of whatever conversations were going on and had met most of the people there were to meet. I’ve now been to not just GIA but also the Americans for the Arts Convention five times each, and my most positive experience at each conference was my first, in 2009 – when I was new to this corner of the field and everything was fresh.

So this year, I decided to switch it up a bit and deliberately attend some sessions that were outside of my comfort zone. The first of these was the Arts Education pre-conference, which you can hear about in our first video blog if you haven’t watched it yet. I’m going to focus here on two sessions during the main conference that blew my mind for two very different reasons, neither of which I had a chance to talk about much during our in-the-moment recaps.

On Monday, I attended “Invisible » Visible: New Native Voices on the Forefront of Change,” organized by Reuben Roqueni of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. That morning, GIA had unveiled its much-ballyhooed IDEA LAB, a series of TEDx-style short presentations, and the initial round of mini-keynotes were all delivered by artists or curators. While some of these talks were compelling, most of them ended up being about the artist’s individual work or the importance of art in general without much connection to grantmaking practice or the broader themes of the conference, and felt like tangents as a result. I came to this artist-centric session bracing myself for more of the same, but I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Rulan Tangen of Dancing Earth started things off with a full-group movement and sound exercise which managed to transcend the awkwardness of our windowless hotel room setting. Poet Natalie Diaz followed with two riveting readings from her work, and media artist Cristóbal Martinez demonstrated two of his creations (one live and one via slides). The difference with this session is that not only was the artistic content engaging in its own right, it led seamlessly into a fascinating discussion about how to support, respect, and engage creatively with indigenous communities around the globe. Tangen’s participatory dance workshop helped to bring us closer to the subject matter, Diaz’s poetry laid bare the tensions between ancient traditions and modern realities that make up her daily reality, and Martinez told us of a remarkable installation in a Sydney art gallery that involved cutting out part of the floor to allow voices from the earth to echo through the space. Each of these artistic explorations, in their own way, showed a different side of the clash between Eurocentric and Native worldviews, of the power imbalances inherent in that clash, and of the halting and uncertain efforts to call to account and heal the rift. Because philanthropy itself is at the center of not only the clash but the healing, the artistic connection was not just a feel-good reminder of why we’re all here, but intimately woven in to the conversation itself.

The distance between that session and Tuesday morning’s “Alternate Funding Tools: Program-Related Investments” shows the range of GIA at its best. Deena Epstein and Robert Jacquay of Cleveland’s George Gund Foundation offered a down-to-earth, relentlessly practical, and admirably candid take on their own experiences offering lesser-used tools such as low-interest loans, equity investments, and more to arts groups in their community. The topic wasn’t uncharted territory only for me: session organizer Regina Smith from the Kresge Foundation kicked things off by asking who in the room had direct experience with PRIs; only a couple of hands went up. After a brief review of the history of PRIs, Jacquay described the Gund Foundation’s work with this tool. About 3.5% of the foundation’s investment corpus is held in this asset class, with examples of investments in the arts including a low-interest loan to the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art to help the institution secure a New Markets Tax Credit for a new building, using an equipment purchase as leverage with the landlord of an organization that was at risk of losing its lease, and (my favorite) depositing $25,000 in a local credit union that gives loans to working musicians. Epstein and Jacquay reported that despite a perception of PRIs as risky and unfamiliar on the part of some institutions, their experience has been that the due diligence process is “not a huge mystery.”

The theme of this year’s GIA Conference was “The NEW Creative Community,” and conference organizers made a concerted effort to deliver new thinking to its attendees both in the plenaries and the choice of breakout sessions. That effort wasn’t 100% successful in an absolute sense, as emcee Ben Cameron pointed out on the second day of IDEA LAB – when you try to make room for the new, a lot of times what you get is old ideas in new clothes. But attendees can nevertheless make room for the new in a relative and personal sense by taking a risk and giving unfamiliar topics a chance. I’m following up my GIA experience this week by attending the American Evaluation Association Conference in Washington, DC. This is my first time at this event and it is providing a rush of stimulation due to its dramatic differences from GIA and any other conference I attend regularly: over 3000 attendees from all over the world (I shared an eight-person table on Monday with people from Germany, Brazil and Indonesia), 1000 sessions (sometimes more than 50! at a time), dozens of workshops, and very little arts content. I’m getting a lot out of the experience because I’m stretching myself to learn things I don’t already know. So if you think you’ve seen and heard it all, take it from one who has learned his lesson and consider how you too can make room for the new.

Wouldn’t you know it? Of the nearly ten pages of notes I wrote over those three days, almost half are about public education.

So much for that break.

I did go to a few sessions specific to education: an update on GIA’s Arts Education Funders Coalition’s advocacy efforts, for example, and a session about the Hive Learning Network‘s support for digital learning. Most, however, didn’t explicitly have much to do with K-12 classrooms. One described a multi-city performance festival. Another shared lessons learned from one foundation’s attempt to coax a bit of “ridiculousness” from its grantees. They were fascinating in their own right, but as I listened I kept writing vague questions to myself about “evolution,” “innovation,” and “the system.” Something was nagging at me, and I didn’t know what it was.

Then Ethan Zuckerman made my head explode.

Mr. Zuckerman’s keynote on day two of the conference was the perfect cerebral counterbalance to the soul-stirring meditations provided by Quiara Alegria Hudes and Nikky Finney on days one and three. (Kudos to GIA for lining up not one, not two, but three exemplary plenary speakers for this gathering.) He talked about how digital media is changing our interactions with one another, changing what it means to be an engaged and globally-minded citizen, and changing how we access and filter the information and opinions that shape our understanding of the world. The upcoming generations of “digital natives,” he said, are raised with a “pointillist” worldview. They seek and expect constant participation and engagement in the causes they think affect their social circles. They want immediate impact. They risk falling into an echo chamber of ideas that support their existing conception of the world. They are suspicious of institutions. They engage via social connections, not broad issues. To them, “the idea that [their] job as a 20-something is to read the newspaper every day and every two years elect someone to represent [them] is bullshit.”

I don’t have a Facebook account but I don’t live in a cave. The idea that the Internet and social media are changing how we consume information isn’t new to me. However, Zuckerman hammered home both the speed and uncertainty with which the world is shifting beneath our feet. We can’t yet judge whether these changes are for good or ill, but must be flexible in our understanding of what things like “citizenry” and “creativity” mean. Creativity, according to Zuckerman, isn’t just about creation. It’s about settling into a space between concepts, actively seeking divergent points of view, drawing connections between people and disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with one another, indulging in an “import-export business” of ideas, and resisting the temptation to lapse into homophily.

For the rest of the conference, everything I heard and discussed was about “the space between.” I went to an off-site session at Drexel University, where fashion majors work alongside engineering majors to create wearable pieces of circuitry, and students in a music and technology engineering lab stay up to the wee hours figuring out how to program robots to play drums for a tongue-in-cheek video rendition of  “Come Together.” As one of the presenters quipped, showing us a visual map of men and women with “hybrid competencies” working between disciplines, “the tree of knowledge has been cut down and replaced by a network.”

It was pretty darn cool.

It was also clarified my vague musings about “evolution” and “the system.” In arts education we seek “systemic change,” trying to determine the structures we must put in place so all students have equal access to studying visual art, dance, etc. Those structures are based on our own understanding of the artistic disciplines and our experiences with “the system.” In light of what Zuckerman described, however, they seem, well, rigid. To give one example, our advocacy efforts often make clear that “the arts” refer to four specific disciplines – visual art, dance, drama, and music. (With the advent of new national core arts standards, a fifth discipline, media arts, is getting its due, though the fact the word “digital” is missing may be testament to just how far our efforts lag behind student experience.) We do this because our field is a “big tent” and we want to be sure no one is left out (unless, like both our plenary speakers on days one and three, you happen to work in the literary arts). So we are careful to call those four-or-five disciplines out as separate-but-equal, and maintain that students should have high-quality learning experiences in each.

Those decisions make sense to us. But do they make sense to our students? Do they align with their “pointillist” worldview?  Will they be relevant in 2020? Will they be relevant in 2016? How on earth do we craft policies that have the “teeth” to get to issues of equity, but not the rigidity that will render them obsolete? How do we take a “systemic” view to support students with a “pointillist” lens? What if a “pointillist” generation doesn’t want or care about four-or-five separate artistic disciplines? What if our desire for policies and definitions that reflect how we think about our work are getting in our way of supporting what they need?

Uncomfortable thoughts, but not unwelcome. I came to Philadelphia thinking I would lend a newcomer’s perspective on foreign topics. I left with those foreign topics challenging my longstanding perspective. The “space between” is interesting indeed.

A Voice from the Other Side of the Grant

Two remarkable artists gave plenary talks that not only moved and inspired everyone I spoke to in the audience but also demonstrated the speakers’ facility with the written and spoken word. Each is the kind of artist any of us would be proud to have supported, the kind we have in mind when we think about artistic excellence. And, in the course of retelling her own development as a writer, each offered important lessons for how to think about grant program design.

Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of Water by the Spoonful and In the Heights, grew up “in the barrio” in Philadelphia; among her family, she was “the one who got out,” though not the only artist: a cousin was inspired by her success to write his first novel from prison. He has just finished his third. That inspiring success was enabled – or at least facilitated – by three critical grants, one received when Hudes was a sophomore at Yale, one when she was a graduate student in playwriting at Brown, and one when she had achieved enough commercial success with In the Heights to face the hard choice between signing up to write for the screen and re-devoting herself to less remunerative but more personal writing. In each case, as she put it, it was the length (one to two years), quantity (enough to allow her to quit the jobs she held to pay the rent), and quality (no strings attached) of the grant that made it transformative. At least in this case, it seems that the best thing a grantmaker could do was spot a potential talent, give her the gift of time, and get out of her way.

These grants worked differently from each other in an important way, it seems to me. The first freed a young artist who had thrown herself into theater at college from the need to work over a summer, offering what may have been her first chance to get lost in a single project; the second gave force to the eternal promise of the MFA as an uninterrupted opportunity to focus on craft, to experiment, and to produce. Both awards encouraged an early-career artist in important ways: they were bellows to a spark that, for all anyone could know in advance, might have sputtered out rather than catching.

The third grant, by contrast, emboldened an artist in full command of her powers to turn down a lucrative screenwriting gig – “my agent fumed,” Hudes gleefully recalled – to pursue a project with much less commercial promise that she couldn’t quite get out of her head. The result was the Pulitzer-winning Water by the Spoonful, the second play in what is now a trilogy. This third grant was a different kind of gamble: by this point, we could be pretty sure Hudes was going to make something wonderful (television and film are both vibrant media, after all), but the grantmaker presumably believed she would make something more wonderful without financial pressure.

It’s hard to know what might have happened without any one – or even all three – of these philanthropic interventions. Hudes clearly has immense inner resources to complement her immense talent: she had made it to Yale before the first of the grants she mentioned, and from the lectern she conveyed such mastery and conviction that it was hard to imagine her not creating art and amazing audiences. If cultural philanthropy did not exist, perhaps Hudes would have made the time and mental space to make equally acclaimed work. Or perhaps she would have followed so many of her classmates into business or medicine or law and put her art on hold, for a few years or a lifetime. Ultimately, we can only celebrate what did happen, and take Hudes seriously when she says that the support she received – long-term, sufficient, and unqualified – was crucial for her.

Considering How We Give

We can also think hard about what Hudes’s example tells us about how we select grantees. Of course we do our best to assess talent, but is there a way to know in advance who has the grit to persevere in a life dedicated to art, which can be hard even with grant support? Is there a way to identify the established artist who has a new, brilliant idea that won’t attract commercial support, that she can only pursue with philanthropic dollars? How can we nurture the excellent art that otherwise might not happen?

Expertise and judgment must be the answer, and, thanks to IRS rules, it is almost always the expertise and judgment of panels that determine which individual artists and arts organizations receive grants. I moderated what seemed to be one of the more tactical of the breakout sessions, in which Createquity’s own Ian David Moss and Ed Harsh of New Music USA presented on ways of “Rethinking the Grant Panel.” Diane Ragsdale has an excellent summary of the presentations in her final post from the conference, so I will only say here that there seemed to be a hunger to discuss the specific changes that some funders are making to their panels. Some of the questions that we could only touch on (or didn’t even have time to) in the one-hour session include:

• How can we use technology effectively to expand grant panels to fairly evaluate the work of a growing number of artists?
• What kinds of expertise are most important on grant panels? Should a jazz pianist’s proposal be evaluated only by other jazz pianists?
• At what stage and by whom should different criteria (artistic excellence, project potential, financial sustainability, etc.) be evaluated?
• How can we balance the advantages of a model that requires consensus among judges (e.g., fairness, direct comparison of applicants) with the advantages of a model that gives weight to the passionate advocacy judges may feel for an especially strong applicant?
• What should be the role of deliberation, face-to-face or otherwise, in selecting grantees?
• From a technical perspective, should we account for “easy” and “hard” graders among panelists?
• Who wins and who loses when we adopt new techniques like dispersed panels or applications that emphasize public presentation through a website?
• What promising innovations is no one trying yet?

We plan to continue the conversation about these and other questions; leave a comment if you’d like to be a part of it.

We actually know surprisingly little about how private arts funders give to individual artists. Grantmakers in the Arts publishes an annual report on the state of giving to arts organizations that, despite the imperfections of the data, is an excellent guide to the field. GIA is now a year into a similar project covering giving to individuals, which was the subject of a breakout session at the conference and a plenary discussion at the “Support for Individual Artists” preconference. GIA’s Tommer Peterson (the quiet heart of the conference) is leading work with Alan Brown and Claudia Bach to catalogue the various ways funders can support individual artists, from outright cash grants made directly to artists to the provision of a variety of in-kind services through a financial intermediary. Once a taxonomy is established by March 2014, the real work will begin, as data is collected from pilot sites to test the system before GIA establishes a national database. Within a few years, we may learn much more about the tools available to us as funders and how those tools are currently being used. In the meantime, GIA has collected articles on the topic and provides updates on what they’ve learned so far on their website.

Who Will Support the Sensitive Child?

And, of course, we can continue to learn from artists what makes the difference to them. I want to close by returning to the second artist who gave a plenary talk at this year’s conference, National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney. Finney opened with a quote from Willa Cather: “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” She spoke movingly about growing up as a “sensitive child” and the editorial attention of a high-school English teacher who helped her realize that her intense experience of the world was something to be treasured, mastered, and recorded. (Hudes spoke of similar attention, from a local street musician who give her a crucial cassette and an unforgiving Russian piano teacher.) Toward the end Finney posed a question that was also an exhortation (roughly transcribed): “Who looks for and seeks the sensitive child before she needs money to make her art? Call out her name to let her know she has been loved and cherished. Make her know that what she has witnessed – whatever it has been – greatly matters in this world.”

For those of us with our heads fully in the technical construction of grant panels by that final breakfast, Finney was, as she said artists must, “saying the hard thing beautifully.” This was a plea to consider the stage when an intervention – philanthropic or otherwise – can make the most difference in fostering excellent art: the stage when a child is learning how to confront and express the creative impulse within her, is accumulating unbeknownst to her the resources and materials that will fuel her art for years, and is making the choices that will one day turn her into a professional poet.

There is a clear message here for those who grant in arts education, but there is also an important lesson for those of us who support adult artists. It matters that we give; it matters to whom we give; and it also matters when in their development as artists we give. There is something special about support that comes early enough to turn the sensitive child into an artist – or that, later, comes at a moment when the artist must choose between art and another of life’s demands. As we strive to improve our grantmaking, how can we more effectively intervene with the right person at the right moment to make possible the commitment to a potential masterpiece – or to a lifetime of creating excellent art?