For the Mellon Foundation’s 2020 annual report, the foundation’s president Elizabeth Alexander reflects on how Mellon moved through the past year’s challenges due “to the institutional analysis in which we already had been engaged, examining and reframing our mission and values within a new strategic direction and rigorously clarifying which problems we were trying to solve with our grantmaking.”
Image: Mellon Foundation website / Screenshot
U.S. Multi-State Deadline: Ongoing – As a means of fostering new interpretations of art and nature in urban spaces, the City of Shoreline Public Art Program encourages artists to propose temporary artworks…
For the month of July, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.
This is the text Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona submitted for this Spotlight:
In Southern Arizona, days are longer, as we just experienced the Summer Solstice while temperatures are reaching the highest marks of the season. Meanwhile, as the first monsoon rainfall descends, artists, collectives, cop-ops, and organizations are in the drawing-room and collaborative spaces, stirring up ideas on how to get back to work and back to interfacing in public spaces that unite neighbors and strangers in curated and ephemeral sites. Our service region is dressed in borders, geopolitical including the US/Mexico border, seven Native Sovereign Nations/Arizona cities and towns, and not to mention the gradient-like border of the Chiricahua and Sonoran deserts.
As stewards of local, regional, and national funding, in the service of arts workers and cultural production, the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona strives to deliver an effective, equitable, and accessible suite of services and economic incentives that reach the broadest constituency of artists and organizations in rural towns, suburban hubs, main street, metro arts districts, and tribal nations.
The Arts Foundation team is committed to equity work, leading to experimentation, amassing significant results in our recent grantmaking. We are proud to share that through Project Creosote, a relief effort to support artists, collectives, and arts organizations that demonstrate a commitment to enriching the community through arts and culture, we received 75% BIPOC applicants and funded 75% BIPOC applications.
Part of the strategy called for building community trust by implementing Spanish language outreach and application options with direct multichannel access to the Arts Foundation team via phone, text, WhatsApp, and social media messaging. During the application period, 200+ phone and messaging consultations took place, including 12 call-in applications in English and two call-in applications in Spanish. Additionally, the applicant pool was geographically diverse, with first-time grantees residing in four border communities and five Native Sovereign Nations.
As we turn a corner in our DEI work, we are more clear-eyed in strategizing methods to nurture this moment guided by our dynamic creative workforce, which is becoming more representative of who we are as Southern Arizona.
Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona joined Grantmakers in the Arts in 2011.
You can also visit Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona’s photo gallery on GIA’s Photo Credits page.
Image: Ammi Robles
Project Creosote grantee, BBDanceur artists performing original choreography at the Bination Arts Residency, Shared Spaces program, a binational event that took place on both sides of the US/Mexico border fence in Douglas, AZ and Agua Prieta, SON in 2018.
U.S. National Deadline: August 15, 2021 – The Art Center of the Bluegrass is currently accepting applications for our fall contemporary still life exhibition: The Object Seen, honoring both traditional realism as well…
International Deadline: July 15, 2021 – The Great Northern Art Explosion is an international public art exhibition and contest. 100 selected artists will display their artworks or a chance at $10,000 in prizes…
U.S. National Deadline: July 31, 2021 – The Magic Wand Pleasure as Art Competition is open to artists nationwide to design a one-of-a-kind art piece using inactive Magic Wands. Traveling exhibit. $10,000 plus…
International Deadline: October 10, 2021 – Artists are invited to apply for the 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize, an unrestricted $10,000 grant and studio visits with the jurors / progressive curators…
An article in Chalkbeat discusses efforts that have “attempted to ban critical race theory, the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism.”
Image: Wokandapix / Pixabay
As a nation, Canada has been coming to a necessary and long overdue reckoning with its history of violence against entire Indigenous generations. With the ongoing investigation of the country’s former residential schools—institutions that attempted to wipe out Indigenous culture with little regard for those they confined—there is yet another signal flare going off for the necessary acknowledgement of atrocities and meaningful, structural change. And although it’s a small step towards what is needed, the National Gallery of Canada has announced a new vision for the gallery with Indigenous representation at the forefront.
Announced on June 23rd, the National Gallery of Canada put for a statement on their new direction in conjunction with a new logo as well as a brand film that explores the significance of the concept that anchors this new endeavour. Anoksé—an Anishinaabemowin word meaning “everything is connected”—is the apparent core of the new vision for the gallery moving forward.
“Ankosé came to the Gallery during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the gallery stated in their announcement, “when we were striving to stay connected, with a lot of difficulty, through the visual arts. Ankosé reinvigorated the Gallery’s commitment to the communities it exists to serve. Social justice movements spurred by systemic racism have inspired us to commit further to decolonization within our institution, to create a welcoming and accessible environment for everyone, and to advocate for social equity through visual arts.”
This movement towards a structural change of identity for the Canadian institution apparently came about in conversation with Indigenous colleagues as well as Algonquin elders, gallery director and CEO Sasha Suda explains.
Albert Dumont, an Algonquin Elder; courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada.
“Everyone is connected to the art, to each other. One of the Gallery’s biggest priorities is expanding our invitation and our welcome to invite more voices and visitors… We are evolving beyond the hard geometry of the Western lens, to an inclusive circle where we will weave diverse perspectives into our shared story.”
The most obvious signifier of the shift in focus is the new logo presented by the gallery. Where there was once the sharp depiction of the gallery’s Great Hall in the red of the Canadian flag, now there is an ever-shifting circle, a veritable kaleidoscope that draws from the concept of Ankosé. Designed in collaboration with agency AREA/17, the living logo is inspired by the glass ceiling of the same Great Hall, but brings things in an open, welcoming direction, with its broad and bright palette representing the Northern Lights. It’s a gorgeously innovative approach to visuals for a gallery, and the unique impact it provides is keenly felt in watching the designs cycle through.
The Northern Lights inspired palette; courtesy of the National Gallery of Canada.
The National Gallery of Canada is an institution of its country—residing in the capital atop unceded land, there is a poignancy to their choice of making such foundational shifts to the longstanding model. Although many Canadian galleries have looked to include more Indigenous works over the years, this appears to be the first true altering of vision that has been seen from a major gallery with reparations and progress in mind. “Our brand is more than a logo and a new visual identity,” Suda states. “It is a line in the sand – the beginning of a momentous transformation that will reshape the Gallery’s core. The Gallery recognizes the limitless connections that exist beyond the frame, and we invite the world to expect nothing less from us.”
The Communicative Arts Academy, “a vital hub for a community largely excluded from Los Angeles’s cultural institutions,” is at the center of this New York Times Style Magazine article.