This is the first part of a two-part series on individual artist support written by Marc Zegans and published by GIA. Following-up to his GIA Reader article from 2017, Zegans offers his perspective on the cycle of creative growth that artists experience throughout their careers, and opportunities for grantmakers to re-examine how they develop and adjust their practices to meet nonlinear needs.
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March 2021, 121 pages. Grantmakers in the Arts, 522 Courtlandt Avenue, 1st Floor, Bronx, NY 10451.https://art.coop/.
Setting the Stage
With a population of over 2.3 million and one-in-four residents being foreign-born, Houston is the most ethnically diverse metro area in the nation. The city’s arts programs and cultural offerings are robust in number and breadth, and its vibrancy unfolds along the numerous bayous and highways. Most years see 11 to 16 million visitors traveling to the city for arts and cultural events. Houston’s nonprofit arts and culture sector, a $1.1 billion industry, employs more than 25,000 people.
Just societies cannot grow in toxic soil. To build regenerative communities, we should look to how life flourishes in the natural world, of which we are an inherent part.
Artist Distrust Open Letter, a group of artists, including three of the five AIA panelists, published an open letter capturing their experiences with the funder as being “inequitable, opaque, and unresponsive to community needs” with “long-held practices that have unjustly impacted Black, Indigenous, and otherwise racialized peoples.” Image courtesy of Artist Distrust.
Over the course of decades of working with nonprofits, particularly arts- and community-based organizations, we’ve seen an unfortunate pattern emerge. With the regularity of waves, many nonprofits move in and out of cycles of fiscal instability. The factors are familiar and well-known: drops in earned revenue for various reasons, often out of leaders’ control; shifts in the priorities of donors; turmoil in staffing and leadership; and restrictions placed on funds.
I am honored to have this opportunity to interview Gary Steuer, president and CEO of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. Gary is a respected colleague, a member of Grantmakers in the Arts’ board of directors, and co-chair of the GIA Denver Conference Planning Committee for the upcoming annual conference. I am pleased to note that Bonfils-Stanton has been embracing equity in their support of Denver’s nonprofit community, including its arts organizations.
Consider downloading RE-Tool so you can follow along as you read this article. Many of the topics in this article refer directly to RE-Tool, including specific page references.
As grantmakers, we often ask our applicants to amplify their impact through collaboration, but what happens when we turn this mandate on ourselves and join forces with other funders to magnify our giving?