If there is in society a collective consciousness, then art is its imagination. Imagination is different from fantasy, which conjures up desires divorced from reality; imagination is creative problem solving that assesses what is available and re-creates it into something new, better, or self-satisfying. Detroit has been short on many things over the past fifty years — economic prosperity, functioning city services, racial justice, validation — but it is astonishingly long on imagination and creative problem solving.
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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.
In 2015, Americans for the Arts partnered with the National Endowment for the Arts to conduct the Local Arts Agency Census, the most comprehensive survey of the local arts agency field ever conducted. Its purpose was to illuminate the ever-adapting role these organizations play in ensuring the arts have a vital presence in every community.
What Is a Local Arts Agency?
I was lucky as a young artist, with the ink still drying on my BFA, to learn about working in the public art field through a Minneapolis-based CETA program in 1977. CETA (Comprehensive Employment Training Act) was a federal jobs program that included several arts initiatives around the country. As gallery director of City Art Productions — the name of the one-year program initiated by Melisande Charles at the Minneapolis Arts Commission — I got to organize exhibits of CETA artists at libraries, plazas, government centers, and parks throughout the city.
Despite New York City’s status as the dance capital of the United States, rising real estate prices are challenging the city’s ability to serve as a creative incubator, with space — an essential resource for making dance — in waning supply. Choreographers and dancers need to work in a large open area with a sprung floor, but as real estate values climb, long-standing dance studios are being bought by developers and converted into residential or commercial spaces.
“As this has never been done before, we have no idea what we’re doing today,” Joanna Haigood half-joked at the launch of Paseo, less a walking tour than a movable, danceable feast, a peripatetic block party that, for one delightful hour, would twist through the South Bronx neighborhoods of Hunts Point and Longwood.
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.
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 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.