American artists are still emerging from a bumptious cycle of structural downs and ups and institutional changes. Since the watershed of the culture wars in the early 1990s, diverse publics and legislative bodies have questioned artists’ purposes and contributions. Supporters — patrons, funders, friends — have scrambled to help them survive. In ways that may be a great blessing, an older, constraining preoccupation with artistic excellence and peer-judged grants has eroded. More inclusive notions of who artists are and of their many missions are taking root.
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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.
As arts philanthropy evolves in the twenty-first century, one constant remains at the center — the artist. And longtime funder, advocate, and activist Ted Berger has devoted his professional career as well as an equally busy retirement to making artists a central focus of his life.
We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. Uncontrolled and unorganized information is no longer a resource in an information society, instead it becomes the enemy.
— John Naisbitt, Megatrends: 10 New Directions Transforming Our Lives (1982)
— John Naisbitt, Megatrends: 10 New Directions Transforming Our Lives (1982)
The Jerome Foundation, St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France, are now operating under a single governance and integrated management structure.
Grantmakers in the Arts began work on capitalization in 2010. Ever since then we’ve debated not using the word “capitalization,” but it has prevailed. In our work, the term is synonymous with financial health and the resources needed to meet an organization’s mission. In 2010, GIA published recommendations for grantmakers regarding actions they could take that would improve the undercapitalized nature of the nonprofit arts sector.
As a writer who often ponders music and its many audiences, I spend a lot of time thinking about how some artists thrive, while others don’t, in places far from their first home. As listeners, members of an audience, we hear something that feels real, powerful, to us, and we feel connected to the experience of someone who may seem not much like us. From this experience we have a single urgent response: how can we share this with the world? You’ve got to hear this…
A new level of debate about equity began when the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) released its report Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy, by Holly Sidford, at the October 2011 GIA conference in San Francisco.
