Grantmakers in the Arts

In its 80 year history, Guggenheim Museum has named Ashley James as its first black curator to work at the museum full-time, ArtNews reported.

A couple of days ago, men and women marched 26 miles through New Orleans, dressed as participants from a slave rebellion that happened there two centuries ago, as The Guardian and The New York Times reported. The re-enactment, led by New York artist Dread Scott, retraced the route of one of the largest -and overlooked- slave rebellions in US history: the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which 500 enslaved people of African descent marched toward New Orleans from the surrounding sugar plantations.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded recently $750,000 to the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law to support its work in investigating and archiving acts of racial terror in the South between 1930 and the 1970s, explains the announcement.

An article in Stanford Social Innovation Review tells the story of a 1970s partnership between wealthy white liberals and black activists "to improve race relations and the living standards of urban black citizens in Boston."

In a recent post, Melissa A. Berman, Renee Karibi-Whyte, and Olga Tarasov of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, state that "trust in philanthropy is eroding."

A new Artist in Residence Program was announced by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) and the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH), the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) reported in a blog post.

Ben Hecht, president & CEO of Living Cities, a collective of 19 of the world’s wealthiest philanthropic and financial institutions, writes in The Chronicle of Philanthropy of their journey "to embed racial equity in our culture, which means becoming more accountable to the communities we serve and addressing the root causes of inequality."

"All funders across the philanthropic spectrum should work to ensure that the projects we fund are made accessible to people with disabilities," states in a recent post Rachel Pardoe, program officer for Older Adults and People with Disabilities at The New York Community Trust.