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The 2020 GIA Virtual Convening kicked off today, the first day after a historic week that we are all still taking in and absorbing into our minds, hearts, and bodies. Fittingly, the convening’s keynote began with a performance by viBe Theater Experience, grounding us in the expression through words, music, and movement of Black girls, young women, and gender expansive youth. The keynote panel then moved into a conversation among Sage Crump, Ruha Benjamin and Salome Asega. I don’t need to point out how absolutely right, apropos, and profound it felt to hear Black women’s leadership, wisdom, and creativity at the forefront in this moment!

Coco Fusco writes in Hyperallergic that “equity won’t be achieved by a new biennial, another emerging artist of color survey, or a record auction sale by a Black artist.”

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) recently announced the launch of the LACE Lightning Fund, a new regional regranting fund. For its inaugural round, the Lightning Fund will provide emergency relief grants for independent visual artists based in Los Angeles County who are experiencing financial hardship due to the severe economic impacts of COVID-19 on artists’ livelihoods and practices, according to the announcement.

The world is in the midst of a historic moment with our changing our practices in order to function during the pandemic and embracing the movement for racial justice. This is a time of great opportunity, as long as we recognize and embrace it. At the start of April I shared a letter calling for us to build deep resilience in our field.

Six months into the pandemic, we are beginning to see evidence of how the grantmaking field is responding to this historic moment. I’m writing to reflect on the importance of capitalization and financing to our field.

This article was written prior to the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has served to illuminate how small arts organizations have shown up for their communities, despite facing their own existential crises and barriers to public relief opportunities. They have become sites of mutual aid, healing, and connection for communities suffering historic health inequities, economic insecurity, and structural racism.

In 2013, around a table at the San Francisco Tenants Union, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) was formed among community activists with the intention of documenting eviction and tech-led speculative displacement in San Francisco.¹ While the project founders imagined they’d only be creating one or two data visualization maps of evictions, the project has since grown in scale, methodology, and geography.

In the spirit of serving our nation’s artists, cultural workers, and arts and culture organizations — as well as the funders that seek to support them during emergencies in general and during the current coronavirus crisis in particular — NCAPER has articulated the guiding principles we have learned over the past fourteen years. Based on the combined experience of the members of NCAPER’s Steering Committee, these principles have evolved from responding to individual and large-scale emergencies in the arts and cultural sector every single day for over a decade.

For the second annual convening of Dance in the Desert, thirteen Arizona-based dancers and choreographers gathered to dive deeply into Latine choreographic practices and aesthetics, and examine what support would be needed to enrich dance in the American Southwest.

It started in Fall 2016, when Staten Island Arts — the local arts council for the fifth borough of New York City — was approached by Kerry McCarthy and Michele Kumi Baer of The New York Community Trust, Betsy Dubovsky and Laura Jean Watters of The Staten Island Foundation, and Karen Rosa of the Altman Foundation. This group of concerned funders had observed that Staten Island’s arts programming audiences weren’t racially diverse, and came to us seeking to partner on a program that would thoughtfully address the issue.