Philanthropic practice

Grantmakers in the Arts began work on capitalization in 2010. Ever since then we’ve debated not using the word “capitalization,” but it has prevailed. In our work, the term is synonymous with financial health and the resources needed to meet an organization’s mission. In 2010, GIA published recommendations for grantmakers regarding actions they could take that would improve the undercapitalized nature of the nonprofit arts sector.

While the title of GIA’s 2012 Thought Leader Forum — Racial Equity in Arts and Culture Grantmaking — may have left something to be desired in the excitement department, the content of the discussions that took place was such that the two and a half days we spent together in June and two additional days we gathered in November revealed principles/approaches toward racial equity that I hope will have value to colleagues. The goals of the initial forum were as follows:

I am currently writing an essay for a university art gallery exhibition catalog about how the early nineteenth-century invention of photography marked a change in art and spiritual consciousness; and thus dwelling on the postindustrial trajectories of art and science. I have so many extra notions that I created this separate cloud of thought. Apologies if this musing seems too general. I present it here to excite dialogue and receive feedback through the GIA Reader.

Wonder

To my eye, nothing is quite as uplifting as the startling sculptures that erupt before you as you stroll through Socrates Sculpture Park, home to these stems of welded steel and stone, nestled among gritty iron foundries, masonry suppliers, and auto repair shops in Long Island City, Queens.

Kettering Foundation, 200 Commons Road, Dayton, OH, 45459, (937) 434-7300. http://kettering.org.

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An Online Conversation

A new level of debate about equity began when the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) released its report Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy, by Holly Sidford, at the October 2011 GIA conference in San Francisco.

Rocco Landesman spoke for the first time in the role of the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts at the 2009 GIA conference, Navigating the Art of Change. The Brooklyn convening was subtitled “The Recession Conference,” which Landesman, stating the obvious, translated as “the news is bad.” Nonetheless, he urged us to be optimistic. “Art is the most optimistic of activities.… There is grandeur in art. There is boldness. There is even, to use a very loaded word, the possibility for change, and we mortals need that.”