Reaffirming Our Commitment to Community-based Arts

The Nathan Cummings Foundation's arts program supports community-based and culturally specific arts organizations that are accessible to diverse audiences, including the poor, disadvantaged, and underserved. We support programs that promote understanding across cultures, empower communities in need, and respect and reflect diverse points of view. We are mindful that the arts community is currently in a state of crisis and transition because of the tenuous state of public arts funding; we have targeted small and mid-sized community-based and culturally specific arts institutions for support because they are particularly at risk.

The organizations that the Foundation funds inspire and develop young artists, provide employment for artists and arts administrators, and offer community members an opportunity to participate by volunteering and serving on boards and committees. They are also training grounds for a diverse group of cultural leaders. These organizations participate in empowering dialogue with community residents and other support organizations; and their engagement with their communities enables staff to educate audiences through responsive as well as reflexive programming. Community-based arts institutions build audiences, supply other arts institutions with advanced students, and, most importantly, they build grassroots constituencies that understand the importance of the arts in community life. The Foundation supports these organizations because they serve as feeder organizations for, and underpin the work of, larger institutions in the arts eco-system.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation has reaffirmed its commitment to community-based and culturally specific arts organizations in light of the financial losses they have sustained as a result of the downsizing of public arts agencies. There are strong indications that public funding for the arts may continue to diminish. Though President Clinton has proposed increases for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, members of Congress who oppose the Endowments continue to circulate position papers advocating that the government should not be engaged in funding the arts. The need for advocacy in this area remains a vital issue for the arts community.

The attack on the arts is also embodied in attacks on the nonprofit sector. Proposed changes in current tax laws and challenges to existing ones have resulted in a fiscal climate that is particularly unstable. In an article criticizing a tax break that led to the creation of family foundations, Monica Langley, a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, asked, "Is, for example, a foundation devoted to opera and classical music performing 'charitable' work?" Ms. Langley suggested that there may be cause for concern where a donor who has served on an opera council creates a charity to help rising stars. Detractors of the legislation believe that this is an indulgence that "hardly merits a governmental imprimatur in the form of a tax break."

While Langley questions the appropriateness of foundation funding of the arts, William Craig Rice, a Bradley Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has suggested that "the decline of the NEA will usher in an era of imaginative philanthropy." In a recent article in the Washington Post, Rice joins critics who, he says, "rightly snipe at the 'malling' of museums, where posters, gewgaws and nouvelle cuisine distract attention from paintings;" while simultaneously encouraging "the arts to embrace their own commercial potential." It is important that arts groups remain knowledgeable about changes in the tax law as they develop alternative sources of income.

During 1996, Nathan Cummings Foundation arts grantees provided innovative art experiences for at-risk youths. The Armory Center for the Arts, California Institute of the Arts, and the Philadelphia Dance Company provided youth with arts experiences facilitated by working artists. These programs encouraged self-expression, self-discovery, and mastery of an artistic medium.

Several programs placed students in work environments that encouraged them to use their creativity while learning about organizational practices and collaborative work efforts. The Community Television Network in Chicago trained students to develop programming for a public access television station. Young graphic artists learned to design with computers at the Brandywine Graphic Workshop in Philadelphia; and homeless and incarcerated students wrote and illustrated a newspaper, web page, and journals under the auspices of the Pacific News Service in San Francisco.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation also supported a substantial number of organizations that chose to maximize their resources by working collaboratively. In Brooklyn, 651, the Majestic Theater brought together smaller community-based organizations from ethnic-based communities and provided them with technical assistance and a venue for events. Additionally, the Ethnic Folk Arts Center and the Network of Cultural Centers of Color provided artists and arts programming to diverse underserved communities.

The Foundation enabled groups such as Galeria Studio 24 to expand their potential to develop earned income, and assisted numerous arts groups with the development and implementation of strategic and long-range plans. The arts program also continued to support initiatives to diversify the field through internships and fellowships administered by groups such as the College Art Association.

The arts program seeks to strengthen and stabilize community-based and culturally specific arts institutions. We recognize that such a goal can only be achieved through partnerships with other private and public funders; and we acknowledge the need for grantees to carefully assess their potential and administer programs that can be effective with the resources that are currently available. It is our hope that together we will invigorate these organizations, and support and sustain the people who bring quality art to communities throughout the country.

"America needs its artists to help it metabolize rapid changes in mores, in manners, in attitudes to gender, in the coming changes in our very appearance, the racial complexion of the nation.... America needs its artists to gratify the non-material spirit in this land of unprecedented material appetites and satisfactions.... At the end of a century of the most inhuman behavior, we need artists to help us understand our species.... In short, America needs its artists to help it obey that most ancient of humanist admonitions, to know thyself."