Conference Proceedings: Plenary Sessions

Download a MP3 file of this keynote. (8.65 MB)

Van Jones is founder and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC), a national organization that challenges the criminalization, incarceration, and abuse of low-income people, the young, and people of color.

EBC has pioneered methods of promoting the human rights agenda by serving as incubator for Freedom Fighter Music, a label that harnesses urban music and youth culture to tackle human rights issues, and partnering with urban media companies.

Bill Ivey is the director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, and director of the Center's Arts Industries Policy Forum. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Arts & Culture, and is chair of the federally-chartered National Recording Preservation Foundation, which is affiliated with the Library of Congress.

Literary artist Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her ethnic heritage, the cultural diversity of her Texas home, and experiences traveling in Asia and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. Her books include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Fuel (poems), Never in a Hurry (a collection of essays), and Habibi (a novel for young readers).

Charles Johnson – novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose balance of philosophy and folklore has been praised since the publication of his first novel in 1974 – gained prominence when his novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award in 1990. Like his other works of fiction, Middle Passage embodies Johnson's controversial version of black literature, defined in his Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 as "a fiction of increasing artistic and intellectual growth, one that enables us as a people – as a culture – to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration."

Lucy Bernholz, Ph.D., is founder and president of Blueprint R & D, a strategy consulting firm specializing in program research and design for philanthropic foundations. She has worked as a program officer and consultant to foundations for 11 years. As a community foundation program officer she was responsible for grant programs in the arts and humanities, community development, education, environment, health, historic preservation, and human services.

Melanie Beene will guide (and perhaps goad) us as we explore the sometimes competing interests raised through GIA's 2003 Field Inquiry. Where are the edges that distinguish our interests one from another? What are the lines that draw us together? How can GIA best use its resources on behalf of arts grantmakers so you, in turn, can strengthen the place of arts and culture in our communities? Between January and June 2003, GIA conducted a members survey and listened to members and other arts grantmakers in sixteen cities.

Kenneth Prewitt was recently appointed Dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research in New York City, following a highly publicized stint as the director of the United States Census Bureau for the 2000 Census.

In light of current events of 9/11, the Monday plenary was expanded following the keynote, to include a moderated discussion about the changes in the larger social and economic landscape, which have already had an impact on reshaping the needs of the arts and culture community and its funding.

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   After September 11 (288Kb)

The press announcement of Pepón Osorio's selection as a 1999 MacArthur Fellow described him as “an installation artist [who] creates thematically charged work, rich in allegorical references, that combines Latino popular culture and traditional aesthetic sensibilities to explore culture and community dynamics.” His work is typically embellished with common objects (chucherias) which contribute to a vision that both celebrates and transcends popular culture.