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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.
Last summer, Simon Schama invited me to be a judge of the PEN/Hemingway award; I accepted. All through the fall, I diligently plowed through the piles of novels that were sent me, looking for originality, passion, and poise; for vision, economy, coherence, resonance. I tried to give myself over to the books, to accept their many different ambitions, rather than relying on personal preferences for, say, complexity of tone or that lovely quality that Italo Calvino calls lightness.
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.
122 pages. Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), 1743 Wazee Street, Suite 300, Denver, CO 80202, 888-562-7232 or 303-629-1166, staff@westaf.org
Beginning in 1999, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched a global initiative to strengthen arts education. In 2003, Portuguese delegates to the United Nations called for a global conference to address this aim, resulting in the first-ever World Conference on Arts Education. The World Conference brought together 1,200 artists, educators, policy makers, and researchers from over ninety-seven countries in Lisbon, Portugal from March 6-9, 2006.
It was April 1968: I was out for lunch break with Jim and Mary, co-workers from the general accounting office where we worked in the University District. They were old hands in the office. I was new on staff and excited. This was my first real job out of high school after a string of just so-so jobs. There had been the eyeglass factory where I stood, eight hours a day for three months in a windowless basement knocking lead weights off newly polished eyeglass lenses with a mallet. A friend of my mother's had gotten me that job.
Such thing as flowers bathed by rain
Or patterns traced upon the sea
Or crocuses where snow has lain . . . .
The iridescence of a gem,
The moon's cool opalescent light,
Azaleas and the scent of them,
And honeysuckles in the night.
— African American poet Gwendolyn Bennett, “Sonnet II” 1