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From TED: “Famed for enormous black-and-white portraits that are pasted on surfaces ranging from the Louvre to the US-Mexico border wall, multimedia artist JR continues to tackle ambitious projects. In this powerfully moving talk, he shares how he made a giant mural on the courtyard floor of a maximum-security prison — with the help of guards and prisoners alike — and ended up with much more than a compelling image.”

Watch the full video here.

“We are at a historic crossroads — a social, environmental and economic reckoning hastened by COVID-19 and a global movement for racial equity. As arts and culture funders, we’ve seen how the landscape is shifting,” said co-authors Rocío Aranda-Alvarado and Lane Harwell. “Artists and storytellers are regrounding and reimagining themselves, reshaping arts infrastructure and systems that have never been equitable or sustainable, and working to realize the narrative possibilities to come.”

“Here are six trends we see that are shaping the future of the arts, and how funders can support and respond to them:

New voices in arts advocacy are rejecting the status quo
Technology is becoming integral to the future of the arts
The sector is building knowledge and strengthening commitments to disability arts
Artists and arts organizations are creating new funding models
Creatives are driving civic engagement and movement work
Artists are re-thinking the work of museums

“These trends — developed in a time of extreme change — reaffirm our belief in the power and promise of artists to help us process world events, imagine ways forward, and take meaningful action.”

Read the full article here.

From the Mellon Foundation, “How can the arts unify racially divided communities? Finding answers to that question was central to the founding mission of Asian Arts Initiative (AAI), a multidisciplinary arts center in Philadelphia that supports Asian American creatives and cultivates meaningful ways for them to connect with local communities through gallery exhibitions, performances, workshops, and other programming with a social purpose.”

“Like every other culturally specific, place-based arts organization, AAI is trying to learn from all that has happened. We’ve never fit into the typical curatorial model of having years to plan programming, but we’re realizing that maybe we don’t have to. As a smaller organization, we can get closer to the work faster,” said Asian Arts Initiative director Anne Ishii. “Big museums have lost time and postponed exhibitions. They’ve also had to figure out how to do social justice work that is so critical now. We lost some time too, but because what we do is already at the intersection of social justice, equity, and art, anyone we work with has a story that’s relevant to the moment.”

Read the full article here.