Edirin Oputu from Temple News interviewed Linda Earle, associate graduate director in the Art History Department for the arts management MA at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Oputu summarized, “We spoke with her about how organizations and artists can push for greater equity, how the arts scene is developing and what needs to be done to bring about institutional change.”
As the war stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marches on, we are seeing the cultural connections and outputs of both nations being deeply affected. From the sanctions applied globally to Russian artists across the board—many willfully stepping out of positions and events in solidarity against this war—to the violence and destruction suffered by Ukrainians that has halted their lives. One such institution in the city of Mariupol, Ukraine was the Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre, the target of bombings this past week.
The Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre was operating as a bomb shelter for civilians in the area of Mariupol after a Russian siege of the city when, amidst intense shelling of the city, it was bombed and reduced to rubble on March 16th. Satellite images showed the Russian word for “children” painted across the ground on either end of the building in an effort to warn of the innocents in the bomb shelter below and deter bombers. Ukrainian officials are calling the act a war crime.
For almost one and a half centuries, Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre had operated. An inspiring vision of classical architecture, its most recent form had stood since the 1960s, and the institution was given academic status in 2007. The company had been in the midst of a busy season of several shows and concerts across its multiple stages before the bombing took place.
With this war a current certainty, it is painful to see both the tragic, unnecessary violence perpetrated against innocents as well as the inherent destruction of cultural identity and sanctity of home that comes from the thoughtlessness of warfare. While there were thankfully no casualties in the bombing of Donetsk Regional Drama Theatre, the same sadly cannot be said for countless other attacks. When it comes to such barbarism, there is only loss.
“Everyone in philanthropy can potentially play a role in supporting transformative racial justice work,” remarks Lori Villarosa, founder and executive director, Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE) in a piece for PEAK Grantmaking blog. “But to unlock that potential, each person needs to apply racial equity and racial justice lenses to all aspects of their work. And grants professionals can be a driving force by both shifting practice and ensuring that the organization is impactfully looking at its work through both lenses.”
Villarosa defines the frequently conflated terms: racial equity and racial justice grantmaking, and then she examines the current racial equity and racial justice landscape.
Robin D. G. Kelley shares “Back to the Future: Complex Movements Make Revolution,” an essay from memory on a conversation with 2022 Knight Arts + Tech Fellows Complex Movements in Shift Space 2.0, a publication exploring new media landscapes. Kelley recollects, “Radical philosopher Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015) was the catalyst for Complex Movements, which took its name in 2010 after listening to her invoke quantum theory to explain new directions in organizing.”
“They do not measure their work in terms of winning or losing “campaigns’ but in struggling ‘to be in right relationship with change,'” writes Kelley. “[Sage Crump] cautions against having any illusions about the difficult work ahead, and at the same time insists that we cannot afford to be disillusioned, which can happen when we focus solely on resisting state violence and oppression at the expense of our internal struggle to find new ways to be together.”
“Grants management professionals are strategically positioned to influence a funder’s racial equity and racial justice funding. But in three decades of working in and with foundations, I have consistently seen a pattern where people serving in these roles are excluded from these conversations as a matter of institutional habit,” writes Lori Villarosa, founder and executive director, Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (PRE), in PEAK Grantmaking Journal, issue 19. “As a result, there is a lack of understanding across the field about how the work of grants management directly relates to advancing racial equity and justice.”
“Long-standing tensions driven by unequal power dynamics have shaped debates over how racial equity and racial justice are defined and who does the defining, and there has often been little shared understanding of these terms across the philanthropic field,” Villarosa continues. “In our work with foundations and movement leaders, we at PRE have seen these tension points manifested within hundreds of foundations. But through our work, we also have the benefit of lessons from movement leaders and change agents, and these have inspired some recommendations that we think will help grants management professionals strengthen their own roles in advancing racial justice work.”
Media Impact Funders (MIF) share a glimpse of their time at Sundance Film Festival with a Film Funders Follow-up. In this conversation with Vincent Stehle, MIF executive director, Sonya Childress and Sahar Driver, Color Congress, and Denae Peters, Perspective Fund, participants discuss a new field-building organization called the Color Congress. The organization, seeded through a pooled fund by the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and Perspective Fund, aims to support transformational, mutually supportive work among people of color-led and serving organizations in the nonfiction and documentary field.
The Upstart Co-Lab Member Community has invested nearly $8 million in funds and startups, and Upstart plans to launch a $100 million impact investment portfolio for the Inclusive Creative Economy. The Upstart Co-Lab 2021 Impact Report details the impact framework, which tracks the impact of investments in the creative economy across five dimensions.
Access to capital for BIPOC and women entrepreneurs: Funds and companies that are led by diverse managers and founders, respectively; as well as investments in funds that are backing diverse founders.
Quality Jobs: Jobs that provide a living wage, basic benefits, career-building opportunities, wealth-building opportunities, and a fair and engaging workplace.
Vibrant communities: Activities that strengthen economic development, encourage civic engagement, build resiliency, and contribute to quality of life.
Sustainable creative lives: Ownership models, earnings opportunities, and pathways to wealth building that support a “creative middle class.”
An inclusive creative economy: Economic activity anchored in Openness & Experimentation, Diversity & Inclusion, and Tradition & Innovation that benefits artists, designers and all members of the community.
In a new report, “Studying Early Pandemic Data: Did Giving Sustain the Arts?,” SMU DataArts shares analysis on the impact of giving to the arts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Daniel Fonner, associate director for Research writes the pandemic “has turned the arts and culture sector upside down in many ways.”
“With wide-scale closures beginning in March 2020, organizations saw steep drops in earned revenue from ticket and admissions sales loss but found some relief from government funding programs and adjusted grant terms that allowed for some restriction removal or reallocation of funds to general operating needs.” This research asks how these revenue model shifts played out and if they were enough for organizations in the sector to meet their needs to at least break even financially?
While the world over has been especially keen on the recent release of Inventing Anna—the exploits of real-life con artist Anna Delvey—almost simultaneously, Netflix has released a stunning and emotional delve into The Andy Warhol Diaries. Following the published journals of the same name notated and edited by Pat Hackett, this short docuseries dives into some of the integral essences of the pop-art icon evidenced in the words of his diaries. His queer love, his fear, his fragility, and his humanity—all from the mouth of an AI.
Clip from ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’ intro featuring Jon Gould and Warhol’s ‘Body Builder Flexing’.
Directed by Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times) and produced by Ryan Murphy (The Normal Heart, American Horror Story), The Andy Warhol Diaries travels along the course of Warhol’s life with lively and unflinching examination from industry experts and personal connections—Warhol museum curators, staff from Interview magazine, family and friends of lovers, and the wealth of artists connected to him. Rossi makes the absolutely surreal and thematically perfect choice of having an artificial voice replicating software deliver the words of Warhol in an approximation of his voice. Not only does it add a dread and doldrum that echoes the artist, but it echoes a spoken desire of Warhol that rears its head regularly in the series:
“Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?”
Design-wise the docuseries speaks to the aesthetics and interests of Warhol in an engaging and lively way. With a vibrant, pink swirl of shifting portrait images (of himself and close companions such as legendary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat) set to ‘Nature Boy’ performed by Nat King Cole, a mystique and feeling of a strange exploration is established in the intro. Utilizing Super 8 footage—both archival and freshly taken—as well as purposefully vague reenactments of the moments detailed throughout the diaries, there is endless momentum and interest in the visual journey. Between the original orchestrations by Canadian composer Owen Pallet and existent song choices, the sonic journey is equally immaculate; from the neo-disco of Hercules and Love Affair to Colin Stetson’s dizzying ‘Among the Sef’, each audible detail resonates with the emotion of the current moment.
Super 8 still of Jeffrey Deitch.
The famously evasive and guarded creator is laid bare in this analysis of the words he spoke for years to assistant and editor Pat Hackett. If the idea is true that Andy Warhol’s greatest work of art was Andy Warhol, this docuseries aims to reveal a wealth of still-wet paint on the other side of the canvas. While the art, history, and context of the man are of course on display here, there is certainly a stronger focus on the emotionality of a person who clearly wished he had none. Twin brothers of each of Warhol’s lovers, Jed Johnson and Jon Gould, give emotional accounts of their brothers’ care for the man. Former Interview editor Bob Colacello clearly struggles at times remembering the fraught life of his departed friend.
A focus is also certainly placed on the artist’s queer identity and queer love, both discussed openly and painfully self-hidden within The Andy Warhol Diaries originally. It’s certainly no secret that LGBTQ+ culture and connection were at the heart of everything Warhol did, but his personal expression of identity reveals so much behind his actions and works. A series of Paramount Films logos may seem like merely another use of re-contextualizing commercial iconography, but when one dwells on Warhol’s relationship with then Paramount executive Jon Gould—who was deeply closeted to the point of demanding Warhol remove him from his diaries—it becomes a very clear expression of desire and loneliness from the man who said there is nothing to be read into from his works.
The Big C by Andy Warhol.
With the last chapter moving towards the death of Andy Warhol, his final series is given great weight and consideration—The Last Supper. This series, depicting The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci in countless variations, was the artist’s final commission, produced at the height of physical weakness and paranoia for the AIDs epidemic ripping through his community. And while there is so much that can be unpacked about his view of the world, of his own role as an influential man of fame, and about the faith he had always held onto, Jessica Beck—curator for The Andy Warhol Museum—truly digs into heart-tugging layers of the most striking of the series, The Big C. The titular “The Big C” seen on the canvas, a well-known colloquialism for cancer, was discovered by Beck to be from a newspaper article about AIDs—then known as “the gay cancer”.
Curator of The Andy Warhol Museum Jessica Beck in front of The Big C.
“There’s this idea that somehow he failed AIDs in a way, and I thought to myself ‘No one has ever given Warhol credit to respond to this crisis in a way in the work.”
As The Andy Warhol Diaries shows us, Warhol was a man dominated by fear. From bullying as a young, queer immigrant, from his position as an older man in a young crowd, from critical derision of his work, from loneliness, and from the incidents that proved the mortality of himself and his loved ones. And tragically, his fear is ultimately what killed him, in a triggered avoidance of hospitals for his serious medical issues. This docuseries endeavours to show as many sides of Warhol as possible, and is unafraid to highlight the negative, fallible, human aspects of the legend. In doing so, it shows the bleeding heart that beat beneath the man who wanted to be a machine.
The Barr Foundation (Barr) seeks consultant partners to support the newly launched cohort, Powering Cultural Futures (PCF), a new six-year initiative that provides funding, technical assistance, peer networking, and other supports to a diverse cohort of 15 BIPOC-rooted organizations in Massachusetts.
Details for the roles of a team of consultants to lead initiative activities in the first year, which are:
Organizational Development Consultant will guide each organization in the PCF cohort through a collaborative self-assessment and prioritization process, resulting in a set of customized capacity-building recommendations, as well as plan and implement 2-3 trainings on organizational development topics for the entire cohort. The initial contract period for this role will be one year (May 2022 – April 2023).
Cohort Convener will facilitate a group process for the cohort to establish shared expectations and values; engage in trust building; and identify needs and peer resource assets across the cohort for the purposes of peer learning. The initial contract period for this role will be for one year (May 2022 – April 2023).
Program Manager will oversee initiative operations, consultant deadlines, and internal communications; co-design a learning agenda with the cohort; and other tasks to be determined that support the cohort, Barr, and the consultant team. The initial contract period for this role will be for 18 months (May 2022 – October 2023).
Full proposals are due to Giles Li, Senior Program Officer at gli@barrfoundation.org by Thursday, March 24, 2022.