GIA Reader (2000-present)

The United States is in the advanced stages of neoliberal capitalism. Within the construct of neoliberal economics nothing is safe and everything is commoditized, even culture. Capitalism is so desperate for land to conquer that it’s reached our mental space, where the issue becomes the manufacture of consent. The struggle for social justice has become about the very meaning of things, of framing, understanding, and feeling. This is the last space that is sovereign: our bodies and our minds.

This article was written prior to the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has served to illuminate how small arts organizations have shown up for their communities, despite facing their own existential crises and barriers to public relief opportunities. They have become sites of mutual aid, healing, and connection for communities suffering historic health inequities, economic insecurity, and structural racism.

Reader’s Note: This research could not and did not imagine the state of the world in 2020. While the pandemic, the economic crisis and social unrest have brought into stark relief the inequities plaguing communities of low income, many of those circumstances are not new. They are structural. They are long-term. They are ingrained in a legacy of racist policies that have shaped how we invest (or fail to invest) in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.

In 2013, around a table at the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) was formed among community activists with the intention of documenting eviction and tech-led speculative displacement in San Francisco.¹ While the project founders imagined they’d only be creating one or two data visualization maps of evictions, the project has since grown in scale, methodology, and geography.

When the novel coronavirus pandemic hit, like most people — and especially in my role as co-chair of the GIA Racial Equity Committee, with colleague Randy Engstrom, director at the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture — we agreed we wanted to say something to address the loss of life, ways of life, and the devastation the arts community was experiencing.

The spring months at NDN Collective were a poignant demonstration of Indigenous mobilization. We’ve seen this before. Our people have been here before. We are the survivors of disease and pandemics, of biological warfare, now called to respond and mobilize once again for the health and wellness of our people and the planet. We are up for it.

In the spirit of serving our nation’s artists, cultural workers, and arts and culture organizations — as well as the funders that seek to support them during emergencies in general and during the current coronavirus crisis in particular — NCAPER has articulated the guiding principles we have learned over the past fourteen years. Based on the combined experience of the members of NCAPER’s Steering Committee, these principles have evolved from responding to individual and large-scale emergencies in the arts and cultural sector every single day for over a decade.

For the second annual convening of Dance in the Desert, thirteen Arizona-based dancers and choreographers gathered to dive deeply into Latinx choreographic practices and aesthetics, and examine what support would be needed to enrich dance in the American Southwest.

It started in Fall 2016, when Staten Island Arts — the local arts council for the fifth borough of New York City — was approached by Kerry McCarthy and Michele Kumi Baer of The New York Community Trust, Betsy Dubovsky and Laura Jean Watters of The Staten Island Foundation, and Karen Rosa of the Altman Foundation. This group of concerned funders had observed that Staten Island’s arts programming audiences weren’t racially diverse, and came to us seeking to partner on a program that would thoughtfully address the issue.