Germany’s new culture minister, Claudia Roth, has taken office pledging to continue her predecessor’s work in decolonising museums, to set up a central “green culture” desk, to boost funding for the arts and to rethink both the Humboldt Forum and a planned new 20th-century art museum in Berlin.

“In an interview in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Roth said… her attention is also focused on some larger institutions. The Humboldt Forum, which opened last year, has become a lightning rod for the discussion about colonial-era museum collections. ‘For me it is a matter close to my heart that we should think on all levels about how we can decolonise our thinking,’ Roth said in the Zeit interview.”

Read more here.

Philanthropist Laurie M. Tisch announced this week that 14 New York City-based organizations will receive grants in the Illumination Fund’s new Arts & Mental Health program, an expansion of its Arts in Health Initiative.

The Arts & Mental Health program is designed to increase access to mental health services for communities with long-standing health disparities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the announcement, “grants in the Arts & Mental Health program are targeted to use the arts as a vehicle to address mental health challenges and to fight stigma that is a barrier to seeking help.”

“After two long years, with so much tragic illness and death, data show that the COVID-19 pandemic has created a mental health pandemic in its wake, especially evident among communities already struggling to overcome other challenges,” said Laurie Tisch, founder and president of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund. “More people than ever are in need of mental health services and we want to make sure that our most vulnerable communities have access to programs that can help alleviate their suffering and build resilience.”

To learn more, read here.

“[Elizabeth] Alexander came to the organization with a specific mandate, she said, of ‘sharpening the focus—doing all the work, every penny, through a social justice lens.’ That meant asking what she called sharper questions,” writes Maximilíano Durón in ArtNews’ profile of Alexander’s leadership at the helm of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018. “What are the stories that we haven’t heard about? What are the cultural points of view that have not been centered? What are the units that have not been resourced or uplifted?”

Throughout the piece, Durón covers Alexander’s career and contributions to the cultural field as both an artist and a grantmaker, centering on her leadership as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has taken a bold direction in supporting racial equity and social justice. Since 2018, the foundation has led or partnered in helping sustain Puerto Rico’s cultural ecosystem, supporting Creatives Rebuild New York, to provide income and employment directly to artists as part of Covid relief, and put new emphasis on collaboration with the Ford Foundation – in 2020 establishing the Disability Futures Initiative, which will give $50,000 grants to disabled artists through 2025 and again in 2021 establishing the Latinx Art Visibility initiative, which is distributing $50,000 grants to 75 Latinx artists over five years and will also help support museums and academics in the field. As the world evolves, so too must grantmaking. Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation and often collaborator, remarks of the work of grantmakers of this time, “Every organization, if it’s going to be relevant and have impact, must evolve, continue to change, experiment, ideate.”

Read the full story here.

Artist Kevin Beasley was invited to create an artwork in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. “Instead, he bought land, cleared it, and began to plant a garden,” writes Siddhartha Mitter in the New York Times. “By now, many local faces were familiar to him; others were not, and he listened intently to their suggestions, and also to their doubts and cautions.”

Beasley’s project is both utilitarian – the garden is a resource that will provide free internet, a place to relax, and eventually fruits and vegetables – and generative. On this balance, Beasley remarks, “I could argue that it’s a sculpture, the entire thing…but that debate is less significant than what the thing is actually doing.” As a new arrival to New Orleans, Beasley centered relation rather than installation:

Until the triennial invited him to visit and start imagining a special project for its 2020 edition, he had never set foot in New Orleans. That was three years ago. By the time the triennial, postponed one year by the pandemic, opened last October, Beasley had gone completely off-script. He had taken the commission fee, more than doubled it with his own money, and invested in this land. Visiting monthly to immerse himself in the city’s culture, he had landed on a realization: To contribute anything at all would require raising the stakes. The key difference, said Calhoun, was that Beasley had invested. “He’s not making art that’s going to come for three months,” Calhoun said. “It’s important that he owns it.”

Read the full story here.

In a new report, “Creative Equity National Survey Culture: Race, Myth, Art = Justice,” a project of Creative Justice Initiative, was designed in 2018 to address the racist, discriminatory, and unjust policies that continue to victimize disenfranchised
communities. Developed in collaboration with a cadre of national cultural workers and organizational representatives from diverse racial and cultural communities, “the work focused on a series of planning and programming sessions that interrogated and examined false narratives and policies designed to silence cultural communities, artists, and community leaders.”

Read here.

“Eighteen months after an unprecedented movement for racial justice, many organizations are feeling frustration and disappointment. What now?” writes Benjamin Abtan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review as 2021 comes to a close. Abtan continues, “In many of these cases, racial equity fatigue stems from the distance between the high hopes for change felt in 2020 and the current situation.”

Throughout the piece, Abtan offers reflections and recommendations for the field in how to proceed acknowledging that “there is no quick fix, nor magical product with short-term, quantifiable results to convince a reluctant board or investor.”

Read the recommendations for how to overcome racial equity fatigue and make progress here.