GIA Blog

I am furious. Is it too much to ask the greatest nation on earth to encourage learning in the arts and make it accessible to every child throughout their K-12 public education, taught by arts specialists and respected by decision-makers as a means to a creative life, workforce and engaged learner? Here’s the string of events that started the firestorm in my head last week:

Louisa McCune-Elmore has been named as the new executive director of the organization. McCune-Elmore joins the Kirkpatrick Foundation after a thirteen-year tenure as editor in chief at Oklahoma Today magazine, where she garnered numerous awards and national recognition. She graduated from San Francisco State University in 1992. Her career, largely as a journalist and editor, has included work with such publications as Harper’s Magazine, George, Worth, and American Benefactor, a magazine dedicated to philanthropy.

For his newest blog post, Barry Hessenius talks with GIA Board Member Kristen Madsen, Senior Vice President of the GRAMMY Foundation and MusiCares Foundation, about the business of music.

As a bonus, Barry posted a video of Kristen's speech from earlier this year on Hip Hop and the power of vocabulary.

Looking to lay some groundwork for the technology track at the Grantmakers in the Arts 2011 Conference in San Francisco? Rhizome, a nonprofit affiliate of the New Museum, is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.

The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announced its 2011 grants today. The Fund will underwrite 40 new projects this year spanning all disciplines of performing arts practices. A panel of peers selected the grantees from more than 800 submissions.

Grantmakers in the Arts is pleased to announce expanded web services to members, including a members-only web portal, launched in January 2011, offering access to an online directory of members and member organizations. Additional features include a simple and effective set of collaborative tools allowing members the ability to create online user groups for managing specific projects, as well as the ongoing activities of GIA member groups.

From her own blog, Beth Kanter reports from this week's Center for Effective Philanthropy conference where she participated in a panel discussion about social media, foundations, and grantees.

For her latest post to GIA's 2011 Talk Back blog, Alexis McGill Johnson addresses anxiety as an outcome of personal racial and cultural bias. She provides a link to web-based set of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) designed to ascertain levels of racial, age, and other bias. I took the race-related test and not only was I intrigued by the results, I had to consider the potential impossibility of a truly bias-free test.

A new report from the Alliance of Artists Communities examines the current landscape of support for dance through residency programs, identifies some of the barriers and challenges to participation, and offers a call to action for residency programs, funders, and others to develop greater resources in support of dancemakers. More than 600 dancemakers contributed to this research, as well as 200 artist residency programs. The Alliance's Dance Project is supported wholly by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Library of Congress has made a vast collection of historical sound recordings available on the Internet. The National Jukebox includes recordings from the Library's Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation as well as other contributing libraries and archives. The online collection already includes more than 10,000 recordings produced between 1901 and 1925. But content will be added regularly.