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The GIA Library is an information hub that includes articles, research reports, and other materials covering a wide variety of topics relevant to the arts and arts funding. These resources are made available free to members and non-members of GIA. Users can search by keyword or browse by category for materials to use in research and self-directed learning. Current arts philanthropy news items are available separately in our news feed - News from the Field.

Handmaking America

Bill Ivey. 2012, 192 pages, Counterpoint.

In his new book we learn about many of the things Bill Ivey doesn’t like:

  • banner ads
  • smart phones
  • the $6 billion yoga industry
  • politicians who hide behind polling
  • cable news
  • $4,000 mountain bikes
  • TV in general; cooking shows in particular

And we learn about some of the things Bill Ivey does like:

  • Leica cameras

How Can the Arts Become Central?

In the past two years, several prominent foundations at national, regional, and local levels have appointed new presidents. Such leadership transitions are likely to increase in the years ahead in keeping with the larger generational shift in the nonprofit sector. Very few of the new foundation leaders are likely to come from the arts sector, and many will have had little direct experience with our field.

Culture and Community Revitalization: A Collaboration

Between 2006 and 2008, the Social Impact of the Arts Project, a research group at the University of Pennsylvania (SIAP), collaborated with The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a community development financial institution, on an investigation of the creative sector's potential contribution to neighborhood economic and community development.

The Arts & Education Weekend

Arts and education grantmakers at an historic gathering in Santa Fe in October of 2007 agreed on the need to forge a new vision for public education in the United States and to collectively explore how the arts can help shape and realize that vision.

Convened by Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education, more than 100 foundation representatives met formally for the first time under the aegis of their two affinity organizations to debate and discuss the role of the arts in education.

Culture and Class

As we were recruiting writers for this issue of the Reader, we learned that John Rockwell was retiring from his position as arts critic for The New York Times. It was all too tempting to ask Rockwell to reflect on the arts as he has chronicled them through his career. His response was to address the relationship between culture and class—both in history and in the present—raising questions about patronage and access, and the differences across classes in the kinds of art that are supported and accepted.

Imprints

As conference co-chairs, neither of whom has lived in New Mexico, we were told that the story of art in New Mexico is a story of place, that the region—its landscape, its convergence of cultures, its sacred spaces—defines what and how art is made. We turned to a number of New Mexico artists and writers to give us their inside views of this remarkable region. Among them is Chrissie Orr, a transplant from Scotland, who makes work informed and formed by New Mexico's physical environment.

Giving by Design

Typically when businesses decide to support the arts they do so through a grant-giving mechanism or through a program that places employees as volunteers and consultants in arts organizations. But, I've noticed a different kind of interaction between the profit-making and not-for-profit art worlds in recent years. Some business people have set up foundations dedicated to improving the ethical and cultural context in which their own professions practice.

Ann Markusen and Amanda Johnson: Artists' Centers

2006, 114 pages. Published by the University of Minnesota, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, Project on Regional and Industrial Economics (PRIE). Funded by the McKnight Foundation and the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota.

We Are (Not Really) the World

We live in a world of "widespread hostility toward the United States and its policies."1 This antipathy is not limited to the countries and peoples that are directly affected by the U.S. "war on terror" and its attendant pol-icies, but includes many of our former allies and fellow democracies. A friend who just returned from a year in Spain reports that she spent a significant amount of time and energy convincing people she met there that the U.S.

Every Dress Has Its Own Song

As Tia Oros Peters so eloquently states in her essay that follows, there is no particular word for art in the thousands of Indigenous languages of the world. While there are hundreds of Native American languages, the same holds true; Native Americans do not and cannot separate the importance of art and culture from everyday life. It is one goal of GIA's Indigenous People's Network to bring this important way of life to the fore of grantmakers' thinking.