The following notes accompany our feature article Making Sense of Cultural Equity, published on August 31, 2016:

(1) (Some) cultural equity pioneers

Our goal with this article is not to present a detailed history of the movement for cultural equity. Still, there are many artists, activists and arts institutions who have contributed significantly to this movement, and whom we would be remiss not to acknowledge. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather a handful of pioneers and pioneering institutions whose work we have followed in our research, and to whom we owe a great deal: 

• Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded in 1958
• Independent African American museums, established in the 1950s and 1960s, including the African American Museum in Cleveland (1953), the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago (1961), the Museum of African American History in Boston (1963), Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit (1965), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (1968).
• Free Southern Theatre, founded in 1963
• El Teatro Campesino, founded in 1965
• Douglas Turner Ward, who along with producer/actor Robert Hooks, and theater manager Gerald Krone established the Negro Ensemble Theatre Company in 1965
• Katherine Dunham, a successful choreographer, who established a formal training program for other black dancers in 1967
• Dance Theatre of Harlem, founded in 1969
• El Museo del Barrio, launched by New York’s Puerto Rican community in 1969 with funding from the New York State Board of Education
• AB Spellman, a poet and activist, who became the director of the NEA’s Expansion Arts Program in 1975
• The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, founded by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega in 1976
• The Asian American Arts Alliance, born out of the Basement Workshop in 1983
• The Association of American Cultures, established in 1985 to advocate for cultural equity issues
• The National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, founded in 1989 to foster the development and advancement of Latino arts in the United States
• The Godzilla Network, established by Asian American artists and curators in NY in 1990, which challenged the Whitney about representation of Asian artists
• Joan Myers Brown, founder of Philadanco, who established the International Association of Blacks in Dance in 1991
• The Sphinx Organization, launched in 1997 in Detroit to create opportunities for black and Latino classical musicians
• The Silk Road Rising project, which was created in 2002 to advance the creation of, and expand access to, the works of Asian American and Middle Eastern American artists
• The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, created in 2007 with initial funding from the Ford Foundation

(2) Equity is not just an nonprofit arts concern

The mandate to make institutions more reflective of a rapidly changing country is one that transcends the federal tax code. The for-profit entertainment industry, too, has been forced to confront the status quo in recent years, what with #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsStillSoWhite, #StarringJohnCho, the gender pay inequality debacle, studies showing minorities and women lagging behind in all film and TV categories (with particularly low numbers of LGBT and Latino players), studies bemoaning the dearth of women on screen and behind the camera, and studies revealing a lack of diversity in the publishing industry, and in Hollywood writers’ rooms.

(3) What we mean when we say ‘mainstream’ and ‘of color’:

Language can be a source of great confusion in conversations about cultural equity, and many commonly-used terms are highly contested. In this article, we employ several key concepts that can benefit from further elaboration. Please consider the following definitions as you read:

Mainstream institutions: In the course of our reading, we came across the term “mainstream” institutions or organizations with some frequency. Although rarely defined explicitly, we infer that this term typically denotes nonprofit organizations that 1) were founded by white people; 2) do not have a focus on an art form or an audience connected with a specific community of color or other oppressed community; 3) receive funding from foundation and government sources; and 4) have some professional staff.

Target community: We generally understand mainstream institutions’ target community to include all people in a local geographic area.

Institutions of color: We use this term to describe cultural institutions founded and led by artists of color that successfully pursue growth and long-term financial solvency through the following strategies: recruitment of a board with fundraising skills and/or connections to wealth; recruitment of new individual donors; and cultivation of new sources of institutional funding, particularly from private foundations.

“Of color”: We consider this descriptor synonymous, at least in the United States context, with the Grantmakers in the Arts-preferred term ALAANA. ALAANA stands for African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American people and communities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following sources were particularly central to our research for this article. We recommend them for further reading:

Matlon, M. P., Van Haastrecht, I., & Wittig Mengüç, K. (2014). Figuring the Plural: Needs and Supports of Canadian and US Ethnocultural Arts Organizations. Chicago, IL: Plural. Retrieved from http://www.pluralculture.org/programs-services/figuring-the-plural-book/

Mauldin, B., Laramee Kidd, S., & Ruskin, J. (2016). LA County Arts Commission Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative: Literature Review. Retrieved from http://www.lacountyarts.org/UserFiles/File/CEII_LitRev_Final.pdf

Moreno Vega, M. (1993). Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity. Trenton, N.J: Africa World Press.

Sidford, H. (2011). Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change. National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Retrieved from http://www.ncrp.org/files/publications/Fusing_Arts_Culture_Social_Change.pdf

Full Bibliography

American Alliance for Museums. (2014, February 26). Diversity and Inclusion Policy. Retrieved from: http://aam-us.org/about-us/strategic-plan/diversity-and-inclusion-policy

Americans for the Arts. (2016, May 23). Statement on Cultural Equity. Retrieved from http://www.americansforthearts.org/about-americans-for-the-arts/statement-on-cultural-equity

August Wilson Center for African American Culture. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2016 from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Wilson_Center_for_African_American_Culture

Boehm, M. (2015, October 12). Study sends ‘wake-up call’ about black and Latino arts groups’ meager funding. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-diversity-arts-study-devos-black-latino-groups-funding-20151009-story.html

Brutus, W. (2016, January 13). In Conversation with Oogeewoogee, Dr. Marta Moreno Vega Talks about Funding Diversity in the Arts. [Blog post]. Retrived from http://www.cccadi.org/cccadi-blog/2016/1/13/in-conversation-with-oogeewoogee-dr-marta-moreno-vega-talks-about-funding-diversity-in-the-arts

Bryan, B. (2008). DIVERSITY IN PHILANTHROPY A Comprehensive Bibliography of Resources Related to Diversity Within the Philanthropic and Nonprofit Sectors. Foundation Center. Retrieved from http://foundationcenter.org/getstarted/topical/diversity_in_phil.pdf

Campbell, M. S. (1998). A New Mission for the NEA. TDR: The Drama Review, 42(4), 5–9.

Chang, Jeff. (2015, October 26). Future Aesthetics. Arts in a Changing America. Retrieved from: https://artsinachangingamerica.org/nyc-launch-highlight-the-call/

City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Budget and Legislative Analyst. (October 10, 2014). Policy Analysis Report Re: Grants for the Arts Historical Funding. Retrieved from: http://www.sfbos.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=48407

Cuyler, A. (2015). An Exploratory Study of Demographic Diversity in the Arts Management Workforce. Grantmakers in the Arts. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from http://www.giarts.org/article/exploratory-study-demographic-diversity-arts-management-workforce

DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. (2015). Diversity In The Arts: The Past, Present, and Future of African American and Latino Museums, Dance Companies, and Theater Companies. Retrieved from http://www.devosinstitute.umd.edu/What-We-Do/News-and-Announcements/Announcements/Announcements/Diversity%20in%20the%20Arts%20paper

Dowling, K., Piccini, L. M., & Schofield, M. (2014, February). The Show Must Go On! American Theater in the Great Depression: Impact on African American Theatre. Retrieved from https://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/the-show/african-american-theatre-impac

Erickson, B. (March 8, 2016). From the executive director: Inclusion—what is it good for? Backstage: The TBA Blog. Retrieved from: http://www.theatrebayarea.org/blogpost/1071499/241120/From-the-Executive-Director-Inclusion-What-Is-It-Good-For

Farrell, B., Medvedeva, M., Cultural Policy Center, & NORC and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. (2010). Demographic transformation and the future of museums. Retrieved from http://www.aam-us.org/docs/center-for-the-future-of-museums/demotransaam2010.pdf

Garfias, R. (1991). Cultural diversity and the arts in America. In Public money and the muse, ed. Stephen Benedict. New York: Norton.

Grams, D. & Farrell, B. (2008). Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Grantmakers in the Arts. (2011, December 6-16). Online Forum on Equity in Arts Funding. Retrieved from http://blogs.giarts.org/equity-forum/

Grantmakers in the Arts. (2015, January 20). Racial Equity in Arts Philanthropy: Statement of Purpose. Grantmakers in the Arts.  Retrieved from http://www.giarts.org/racial-equity-arts-philanthropy-statement-purpose

Gordon, A., & Newfield, C. (1996). Mapping multiculturalism. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press

Haft, J. (2015). Article: Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity Through Critical Analysis. Retrieved from https://roadside.org/asset/article-voices-battlefront-achieving-cultural-equity-through-critical-analysis

Hartmann, D., & Gerteis, J. (2005). Dealing with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms. Sociological Theory, 23(2), 218–240.

Historical racial and ethnic demographics of the United States. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2016 from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States

History (continued). (n.d.). Asian American Arts Alliance. Retrieved March 13, 2016, from http://aaartsalliance.org/page/history-continued

Horowitz, E. (2016, February 26). When will minorities be the majority? The Boston Globe. Retrieved from: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/02/26/when-will-minorities-majority/9v5m1Jj8hdGcXvpXtbQT5I/story.html

Jensen, R. (1995). The Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian’s Map. Journal of Social History, 29, 17–37.

Jewesbury, D. D., Singh, J., & Tuck, S. (2009). Cultural Diversity: Language and Meanings. The Arts Council of Ireland. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.ie/uploadedFiles/Main_Site/Content/Artforms_and_Practices/Arts_Participation_pages/Cultural_Diversity_language_meanings.pdf

Koch, C. (1998). The NEA and NEH Funding Crisis. Public Talk: Online Journal of Discourse Leadership, (2). Retrieved from http://www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptkoch.html

Kourlas, G. (2015, October 30). Push for Diversity in Ballet Turns to Training the Next Generation. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/arts/dance/push-for-diversity-in-ballet-turns-to-training-the-next-generation.html

LA County Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://ceii-artsforla.nationbuilder.com/

Lee, F. R. (2008, July 24). A Coalition Wants a New Kind of Equity in Arts Financing. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/arts/24group.html

London, T. (2013). An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art. Theatre Communications Group.

Lowry, W. M. (1991). How many muses?  Government funding for the multicultural. Journal of Arts Management & Law, 21(3), 264.

MacNamara, M. (2015, June 1). San Francisco funnels $7 million to the arts. San Francisco Classical Voice. Retrieved from  https://www.sfcv.org/music-news/san-francisco-funnels-7-million-to-the-arts

Moore, M. (1990). The politics of multiculture. Journal of Arts Management and Law, 20(1), 5–15.

National Endowment for the Arts. (2000). The National Endowment for the Arts: 1965-2000: A brief chronology of federal support for the arts. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEAChronWeb.pdf

National Endowment for the Arts. (2015). A Decade of Arts Engagement: findings from the survey of public participation in the arts, 2002–2012. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2012-sppa-jan2015-rev.pdf

National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Retrieved August 29, 2016 from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_African_American_History_and_Culture

Pankratz, D. B. (1993). Multiculturalism and public arts policy.. Bergin & Garvey,.

Pogrebin, R. (2016, January 28). New York Arts Organizations Lack the Diversity of Their City. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/arts/new-york-arts-organizations-lack-the-diversity-of-their-city.html

Pieper, K. M., Choueiti, M, & Stacy L. Smith, S. L. (n.d). Race & Ethnicity in Independent Films: Prevalence of Underrepresented Directors and the Barriers They Face. National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved from https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-Art-Works-Sundance.pdf

Ragsdale, D. Instead of more data perhaps we should discuss why we keep ignoring the data we have? (2011, November 26). Jumper Blog. Retrieved from: http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2011/11/instead-of-more-data-perhaps-we-should-discuss-why-we-keep-ignoring-the-data-we-have/

Ragsdale, D. (2011). Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy. RSA Journal, 157(5545), 37–39.

Ragsdale, D. The times may be a-changin’ but (no surprise) arts philanthropy ain’t. (2011, October 24). Jumper Blog. Retrieved : http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2011/10/the-times-may-be-a-changin-but-no-surprise-arts-philanthropy-aint/

Ravitch, D. (1990). Multiculturalism: E pluribus plures. American Scholar, 59(3), 337. The Denver Post. Retrieved from: http://www.denverpost.com/2015/08/30/colorado-arts-groups-take-sides-in-a-battle-over-millions-in-funding/

Regrets of a Former Arts Funder | Blue Avocado. (n.d.). Retrieved April 20, 2016, from http://www.blueavocado.org/content/regrets-former-arts-funder

Rinaldi, R. M. (2015, August 30). Colorado arts groups take sides in a battle over millions in funding.

Savage, E. (2016, February 9). A Call To Action. Arts in a Changing America.  http://artsinachangingamerica.org/2016/02/09/a-call-to-action/

Torres, F. J., McGuirk, J,. Torres, E., Turner, C., & Brown, C. (2012). Advancing Equity in Arts and Cultural Grantmaking. Grantmakers in the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.giarts.org/article/advancing-equity-arts-and-cultural-grantmaking

Voss, Z. G., Louie, A., Drew, Z., & Teyolia, M. R. (2016, January). Does “Strong and Effective” Look Different for Culturally Specific Arts Organizations? National Center for Arts Research. Retrieved from http://www.smu.edu/~/media/Site/Meadows/NCAR/NCARWhitePaper01-12

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.

Grand Rapids LipDub – photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.

Under its former director, the San Francisco Arts Commission failed to properly track spending and had a fearful workplace, according to a city controller’s audit released Tuesday.

The report lays bare financial and management problems that festered in the $10 million city agency under Luis Cancel, former director of cultural affairs. Appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Cancel resigned this summer when he came under fire for clocking in from Brazil and mistreating staff.

[…]

Among other conclusions, auditors found that the Arts Commission was spending money that violated the city’s reimbursement policies – money held in accounts by Intersection for the Arts, the commission’s nonprofit fiscal sponsor.

(Wait, did I just read that right? The San Francisco Arts Commission, an agency of city government, was using one of its own grantees as a fiscal sponsor? Nothing against Intersection, which does great work, but…huh?!)

Anyway, things just get more bizarre from there. According to the audit in question:

Surveyed employees consistently reported that they did not feel that they could report misconduct or a human resources issue without retaliation. Over one-third (35 percent) of respondents indicated that they felt that staff could not report misconduct without fear of retribution. One response stated, “I certainly don’t feel safe or comfortable lodging a complaint,” while another stated, “historically, we’ve all been terrified of retribution (since 2008) because we all witnessed it in action.”

[…]

Employees reported little to no relationship between the duties they perform and those in their official job classification descriptions. A large majority (62 percent) of respondents indicated that job classification specifications often do not match the employee’s responsibilities and workload. For instance, one response identified a case in which a person hired as an intern continued to work for SFAC for over three years, taking on responsibilities that far exceeded those of an intern, with no change in classification or compensation to reflect the increased responsibilities.

Yikes! So when I tell you that there’s a huge uproar in the San Francisco artist community about the San Francisco Arts Commission, you gotta figure it’s about the gross financial and employee mismanagement of the previous administration, right? Think again.

Among the [audit’s] 12 recommendations, two, dealing with the Cultural Equity Grants (CEG) program, are the most controversial. They say that the program should:

• Cease funding and administering four of its eight initiatives, on the grounds that the program’s enabling legislation authorizes only the “Cultural Equity Initiatives Program (CEI), a Program for Commissions to Individual Artists (IAC), the Project Grants to Small and Mid-size organizations (OPG), and the Facilities Fund (CRSP). The other four are recommended for elimination because they are not cited by name in the city Administrative Code: Native American Arts & Cultural Traditions (NAACT), Innovations in Strengthening the Arts (ISA), Arts & Communities: Innovative Partnerships (ACIP), Arts for Neighborhood Vitality grant categories (ANV)
• Ensure that no recipient receives more than one grant at a time, on the grounds that 14 of the 172 grant recipients received multiple grants in FY 2010-11. The guidelines say no recipient may receive more than one grant for the same project, but the Controller finds “some risk that the same recipient may use multiple grants for one project” sufficient grounds to limit eligibility further. Over the last five years, the Galeria de la Raza, a long-lived and highly respected, Latino visual arts organization deeply rooted in San Francisco’s Mission District, received 12 grants totalling just under $237,000, an average of $47,000 a year.

That’s from an article last week by Arlene Goldbard, a Bay Area blogger and longtime champion of the community arts. Her lengthy and excellent post goes on to defend with great passion the CEG program, which despite its small size has been an important national model in reaching immigrant and other underserved communities through arts funding. To Arlene and others in the California arts community who have been contributing their opinions on the anonymous pop-up blog Cultural Equity Matters, the Controller’s audit, which was ostensibly intended as a means of helping SFAC clean up its act, is only making things worse. Artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña goes so far as to call the report a “racist” attack on community arts funding, and even Goldbard criticizes the report for seeming “to have been written by a computer—or human beings impersonating a computer’s pristine disinterest in human events” and “respond[ing] with bureaucratic solutions that would be identical for any city agency, whether it regulated a fleet of trucks or cleaned the streets.”

I’m not in the middle of this thing, and I can’t speak to the motivations of those who instigated the inquiry. From a disinterested vantage point, though, my sense is that some of the criticism being leveled against the Controller’s audit is unfair. Sure, it’s bureaucratic; but look, these people are accountants. That’s like criticizing the San Francisco Mime Troupe for not properly considering the upsides of corporate personhood. On first glance it does seem strange that CEG is singled out, but given that it’s SFAC’s only major competitive grant program it’s perhaps not that surprising. I do think there’s a legitimate argument to be made about whether the audit should have sought to micromanage program operations at all, but once you get into considering specific financial transactions I can understand how it would be hard to know where to draw the line. In any case, the good news is that nowhere in the audit do the authors make a normative statement that CEG as a whole should get less funding, or that the specific organizations receiving multiple grants from CEG did anything wrong; it’s pretty focused on some narrow technical and legal concerns about how the program is operated and administered.

After initially saying that she supported the report’s recommendations (including eliminating those four “illegal” grant categories), interim director JD Beltran has sought to quiet the storm, publicly standing behind CEG and promising that no funds will be cut from the program (emphasis in the original):

The SFAC’s responses to the audit indicated that all programs will be made legally compliant.  It is most important to note, however, that our responses in no way indicated that any funding to the community through our grant programs would cease or decrease.…The report does not suggest or dictate agency policy, it simply recognizes shortcomings in certain agency fiscal, administrative, and staffing practices, and its findings also observed issues in the Cultural Equity Grants Program.

The SFAC remains steadfast in its mission, policies, and full support of its highly valued programs, and especially its groundbreaking Cultural Equity Grant Program.

So at this point, it looks like CEG is likely not in any real danger; that’s the good news. The bad news (although it may ultimately be for the best) is that this whole debacle has laid bare some things about cultural funding in San Francisco that are not, well, so equitable. The Cultural Equity Grants program gave out less than $2.4 million to 172 recipients in the most recent fiscal year, according to the report, or a bit under $14,000 per organization. By contrast, according to Goldbard, the San Francisco Symphony and Opera each received over $600,000 in government funds in the last fiscal year alone through San Francisco’s other city arts program, Grants for the Arts. On top of this, SFAC has an annual contract with the Symphony to “produce a concert series that is intended to appeal to youth, families, and the diverse demographics of the City.” It turns out that in FY11, the size of this contract ($2 million) makes up nearly a quarter of the Commission’s annual budget, and represents almost as much money as that spent on the entire Cultural Equity Grants program!

The dustup with the Arts Commission takes place at a time when cultural equity has been occupying, if you will, a large chunk of the national conversation about the arts, ever since the publication of Holly Sidford’s report Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change. Grantmakers in the Arts even has a whole blog salon going on about it right now. I’m not suggesting that the concerts that the City of San Francisco produces with the San Francisco Symphony are unworthy of public funding, or that $2 million is not a reasonable amount to pay for the Symphony’s services; I have no reason to make such presumptions. But it does seem to me a perfect example of how large-budget, historic cultural institutions have privileges of access at their disposal that few arts organizations founded within our lifetimes (including, therefore, hardly any organizations founded by or primarily serving racial and ethnic minorities) could ever dream of. Sure, Galeria de la Raza got 12 grants in 5 years from SFAC. But most of those grants had to be won with the approval of a panel of fellow citizens, with panel discussion taking place in public (CEG has one of the most radically transparent review processes in the country; see page 11 of the pdf). The San Francisco Symphony, to my knowledge, does not have its contract up for public review by a panel of citizen peers every year. It just gets the money.

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue with such things. The SFS offers world-class artistic programming. Of course the city should be honored, grateful even, to be able to offer that programming for free to its citizens, especially people who are less likely to take in the orchestra’s regular subscription series. But here’s the thing: the Symphony is able to offer that world-class programming in large part because it offers its artists and administrators a lot of money to come from around the world to San Francisco. And it’s able to offer people that kind of money in large part because, like the marquee orchestra in every city, it has friends in high places.

I’ll end with this rant from Maria X. Martinez, posted on the aforementioned Cultural Equity Matters blog:

[T]his report points out 2 small grants (we are talking very small) that do not use peer review…really? In my 15 years of civil service, I have only seen one department employ an open peer review: the SF Arts Commission. Hundreds of millions of dollars in grants are awarded by CCSF without one peer at the table, and we put a light on the tiny-by-comparison small grants within the Cultural Equity Endowment Fund? How many peers were at the table when deciding to bail out and guarantee to keep the Asian [Art] Museum afloat with a $99 million loan this year? […]

Would not our brain trust…be better spent by auditing WHY La Galeria, for example, has to spend their extremely limited, precious time and energy to apply for 12 small grants over the course of 5 years (not to mention the overhead for SFAC to award and administer those same small [12] grants)? This study chooses, rather to focus on a very small percent of organizations for a very small amount of money who are awarded by their peers (!) because they are deserving.

Oh dear, we must get our priorities straight.

[UPDATE: The San Francisco Arts Commission staff has released a statement in support of the Cultural Equity Grants program.]

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In many ways I have Grantmakers in the Arts to thank for this blog reaching the people it does today. That’s because, in what can only be called a stroke of dumb luck, GIA Deputy Director Tommer Peterson invited me to be the organization’s first official conference blogger in 2009, which subsequently resulted in bringing Createquity to the attention of many funders who would not have otherwise discovered it. I did not hold any such honor this year, but I’ve decided to write up my thoughts anyway because I’ve since come to realize what an incredible privilege it is that I am allowed to represent Fractured Atlas at this annual gathering of funders that is otherwise closed to non-grantmakers, and I feel a sense of duty to share what I learn and observe with the rest of the field for whom such access is out of reach.

My first experience at this year’s GIA conference, subtitled “Navigating the Velocity of Change,” was the Art & Technology Preconference, which I believe (please correct me if I am wrong) is a first for GIA. Fittingly held in the heart of Silicon Valley at San Jose’s $382 million Richard Meier-designed City Hall, the preconference was the highlight of the trip for me. I was blown away by Joaquin Alvarado‘s wide-ranging opening keynote, which explored issues as diverse as the open-source ethos, participatory web projects (Popcorn, a tool to integrate text, video, and other media from anywhere on the web, and Universal Subtitles, a crowdsourcing platform for translation into foreign languages, were particularly attention-grabbing), and evolving trends in the demographics of tech-savviness. Alvarado is Senior Vice President for Digital Innovation at American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, and he shared the details of an intriguing model of knowledge-sharing for journalists he is working on called the Public Insight Network, as well as a “balance the budget” game his team created that has garnered some 6,000 comments from all sides of the political spectrum. Through his talk, I learned that the #1 generator of data on the planet is the United States government; that a $35 tablet computer has been released in India; that the free and open internet is fast becoming a thing of the past; that internet service providers have more unionized workers than anyone in technology; that the fastest growing segment of video gamers is women over the age of 60; that the library is where 20% of Americans get their broadband; and that there were more votes in American Idol last year than there were votes in all democratic societies combined. Whew! We also had a funny moment when we realized that no one in the room had played fantasy football, causing Alvarado to quip (referring to those in attendance), “This is not America!”

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Another standout session from the Technology Preconference was “Supporting the Ecology of Awesomeness,” led by Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences co-founder Tim Hwang. I’ve written here before about the Awesome Foundation, which is a kind of giving circle model for the 21st century sprung from the minds of irrepressible techies. Every Awesome Foundation chapter (of which there are now 29 around the world) is run by ten board members, who pool $100 each every month and award one grant to…well, pretty much anything that seems really cool. (The inaugural Awesome Foundation grant was for a giant hammock in a Boston park that could hold up to 20 people at a time.) Prospective grantees need only fill out a 10-minute online grant application, and the model is so lightweight that many chapters don’t even have bank accounts. (The 10-member limit is also interesting; Hwang moved from Boston to San Francisco and was only able to join the local Awesome Foundation board because there happened to be someone leaving the very month he moved.)

Hwang and his mates have created an infectious language around what they have created that is full of self-deprecating irony. Calling the concept “micro-funding for micro-geniuses,” Hwang noted the “Virtuous Cycle of Awesomeness” that takes place as a result of the funding opportunity receiving more attention. Each board member occupies a “Chair” that is named after the original board member to occupy that spot – so, someone could be the “3rd David Fisher Chair” of the Boston chapter, for example. When it came time to finally incorporate the Awesome Foundation as a centralized nonprofit, it wasn’t called the Awesome Foundation – it’s called the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies! They’re even planning on publishing a journal.

I love the Awesome Foundation’s low barriers to entry (it’s particularly impressive and important that they don’t arbitrarily restrict the pool of potential recipients by legal status or force them into categories that may or may not fit what they do), the lightweight and portable nature of the model, and most especially, the sense of pure fun that Awesome Foundation trustees bring to the practice of philanthropy. At the same time, the model has its downsides, and I hesitate to leap to too many conclusions regarding its applicability to the rest of our field. There’s an inherent lack of scalability within a particular locality, given the limit of ten trustees (and $12,000 total annual giving) per city. Tim mentioned that several chapters were exploring the possibility of starting another chapter in the same city, but there was no information provided on how, if at all, those chapters would coordinate to prevent duplicate applications, much less grants. Hwang and company believe that accountability is a barrier to innovation, but the absence of strong central coordination means that data collection is, understandably, haphazard, and sometimes the main organization doesn’t even know what all the other chapters are up to. Finally, although I personally love and relate to the word “awesome” and the language and ethos around it, I sometimes wonder if that’s because it resonates with certain aspects of my background – white, male, young, educated, tech-savvy – and whether it would feel a little or a lot exclusionary to people who don’t fit one or more of those descriptions. Hwang reports that the Awesome Foundation boards are gradually diversifying with the growth of the chapter network (the average age of the Florida chapter trustees apparently is far higher than that for the rest of the country), but it’s still kind of hard for me to imagine some of the attendees of the Art & Social Justice preconference being down with the Awesome Foundation. (I would love to be proven wrong on this, by the way.)

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My experience at the main GIA conference was more mixed. A number of the sessions I was most interested in were scheduled against each other, and I was sorry not to have been able to attend several that seemed to get quite a bit of buzz, including the announcement of the NEA/Knight Foundation’s first-ever Arts Journalism Awards, the unveiling of the Irvine Foundation’s new grantmaking strategy; and the release of Holly Sidford’s controversial report on equity in arts funding for the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy. Fortunately, those sessions were covered in depth by “official” GIA bloggers at the links above.

Three sessions I found particularly interesting were Manuel Pastor’s Monday keynote on changing demographics, an offsite session focusing on the evaluation of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, and a “video game salon” organized by Ron Ragin of the Hewlett Foundation and Marian Godfrey of the Pew Charitable Trusts. (Disclosure for those who don’t know: Ron has been my close colleague for the past several years in helping Fractured Atlas build Archipelago and the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map.)

Manuel Pastor is a remarkably engaging speaker. Clearly accustomed to the lecture format, he delivered a tour-de-force presentation on the changing demographics of California and the nation at large. Given the work I’ve been doing around California cultural geography for the past couple of years, many of his revelations (for example, that California is already a majority-minority state and that the US as a whole is headed there by 2042) were familiar to me, but even so I learned that the demographic picture is more complex than often painted. For example, people often think that the explosion in growth is primarily coming from Latino immigrants, and that used to be the case. But immigration is no longer what’s driving growth. Developing nation economies are doing better, and birth rates in those countries are going down. In the meantime, the percentage of foreign-born individuals in California is going down, and Los Angeles was the only metropolitan area in the top 100 to experience a decrease in the number of Hispanic children under the age of 18 in the past decade. Meanwhile, the share of recent immigrants to California that from Mexico was just 1 in 3, although many of the other top countries of origin were in Central America and the Caribbean. I also learned that many Hispanics insist on calling themselves their own race, even though the Census doesn’t classify them that way – in every Census since the question was first asked, approximately half of all Latinos have marked “Other” for race.

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Although I missed Holly Sidford’s session presenting her report on equity in grant funding, I did catch her and the Helicon Collaborative team at “Cultural Equity Grantmaking: How Far Have We Come? What’s Next?” The San Francisco Arts Commission, whose Cultural Equity Grants program was the subject of the titular study, has gone through some tough times recently and as a result the evaluation is apparently suspended from public release for the moment. But we got treated to a preview of the results, which let us know that (shocker alert!) a grant program amounting to $2 per citizen per year and representing only 4% of city funding for the arts has not succeeded in achieving cultural equity. But that’s not to say it hasn’t made a difference. Funded groups reported that the grants helped leverage other funding, enabled risk-taking projects, and deepened artistic relationships. Perhaps more significantly, fully a third of the city’s Grants for the Arts funding now goes to “culturally diverse” sources, although it’s hard to know how much of this increase was influenced by the existence of the Cultural Equity Grants program and how much was due to other factors.

The discussion following the presentation posed some important and intriguing questions. Although everyone seemed to be in agreement that organizations representing non-European cultures should get a bigger piece of the funding pie as a basic tenet of fairness, the picture of what that would actually look like in practice seemed less clear. Many of the largest investments in traditional SOB (symphony, opera, ballet)-type organizations have gone to bricks-and-mortar purposes like new buildings, expansions, renovations, etc., but several in the room commented that the building of massive institutions was not necessarily a priority for organizations that would be the beneficiaries of increased funding. Another interesting strand of conversation related to the question of whether having a separate, dedicated stream of funding for diverse programming, as in the case of San Francisco’s Cultural Equity Grants program, is helpful to the cause or only serves to justify the much larger investments made in the “regular” pool. Finally, as discussion continued regarding the needs of culturally-specific organizations, I kept hearing a lot of the same themes that I hear in discussion of the needs of small to medium-size organizations in general: more general operating support, capacity building, risk capital, etc. Recognizing that I still have more to learn from than to contribute to these conversations, I was nevertheless left wondering whether culturally-specific organizations are really so specific, once you get past the content of their programming and the composition of their audiences.

*

“Don’t Get Pwnd! | A Video-gaming Salon for Grantmakers“ was a great way to round out the conference, bringing things full circle from Joaquin Alvarado’s revelations about gaming three days earlier. The session was presented by Jonathan Blow, an independent game developer, and Alice Myatt, director of the media arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Blow spoke first, telling of the trials and tribulations of the indie game market. Once again, I found it remarkable how a creative industry that is outside of what we typically think of as “the arts” can sound so familiar in conversation. According to Blow, creatively speaking, this is the best time in history to make a game. It’s easier than ever before to find an audience through independent distribution, and one no longer need rely on the giant game companies as a bottleneck. Yet there are challenges: intense competition for people’s time means that everything in the game matters, because your audience could lose interest at any moment. And game developer conferences are extraordinarily expensive, sometimes as much as $2,000 per person in addition to travel and lodging, shutting out those with less financial wherewithal. Ring any bells? For her part, Myatt spoke of the recent round of grant applications in which the NEA opened up the process to video game developers for the first time. Of 360 electronic media proposals, 20% were gaming-related.

The session was a veritable coronation for video games as an art form, Roger Ebert’s notorious assertion to the contrary notwithstanding. More than once, the recent Supreme Court ruling declaring video games a constitutionally-protected form of expression was mentioned, along with the fact that the same recognition was granted to film 60 years ago and literature before that. Blow noted that while everyone in America watches movies, it’s not cool to admit to playing video games – yet. But that’s bound to change soon, now that video games are now bigger business than music and film combined. Myatt opined that games need to be put into the public media pot in order to stabilize society, but complained that she rarely sees her colleagues at the video game conferences she attends (such as Games for Change). Funders outside the arts are on the case, though: next year’s Council on Foundations conference will actually have a gaming track – including a video arcade at the conference!

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And that was that. My overall takeaway? It’s hard to generalize from my experience this year, and I am always conscious of the fact that the intellectual diet that I feed on at the conference is shaped by my own tastes. But in general, there seemed to be a real thirst for innovation that was just a bit more urgent than in previous years. The sessions that drew the most positive attention were, by and large, the boldest: the ones that dared to seriously question the status quo or chart forward a path that hasn’t been tried before. It’s as if, having been buffeted by the winds of change for three years now, funders have been convinced of the futility of fighting back. Perhaps, next year, we’ll see some folks getting out the sailboards, ready to ride this gust wherever it takes them.