Community

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will host a webinar on evaluation as a tool to support creative placemaking, the first in a series of webinars on evaluating arts programs. The webinar includes speakers from the NEA and also from GO Collaborative, a design and planning firm focused on creative placemaking, community engagement, and master planning and Metris Arts Consulting, a planning, research, and evaluation firm focused on revealing arts impacts and helping communities equitably improve cultural vitality.

Virtual Gallery

Of the enormous permanent collections owned by major museums, only a very, very small portion of artworks get to see the light of day at any given time. Many institutions have sought to change that through technology, whether by opening online archives or building more experimental projects to display work involving AI. Then there’s SFMOMA, which launched an SMS service that responds to the words, phrases, and emojis you text it with a context-appropriate piece of art from its 34,678 works.

This report makes the case that industrial design is an underutilized catalyst for growth for small and medium-sized U.S. manufacturers and a key ingredient in the future success of these firms. Derived from an intensive literature search and more than 40 interviews with people from the industrial design and manufacturing fields, the report explores why industrial design has become an influential factor in manufacturing, why it is underutilized in small and medium-sized firms, and how it is being used in innovative partnerships across manufacturing disciplines.

NEA funds projects in every state, investing in large and small communities, urban and rural, coastal and land-locked. To extend our impact, 40 percent of all NEA grantmaking funds go directly to state arts agencies (SAAs) and regional arts organizations (RAOs). States must match the NEA funding they receive, significantly increasing the available amount they have to distribute to exceptional nonprofit arts organizations and programs throughout their state.

A recent article from Edutopia shares how a place-based education experiment – part of a school district turnaround strategy – enables students to attend a school doubling as a museum. The Grand Rapids Public Museum School, launched through the 2016 XQ: The Super Schools Project, seeks to enhance learning opportunities, while also increasing museum visitation.

The NEA recently announced 1,195 grants totaling $84.06 million for its second funding round in FY 2017. The NEA is the only funder in the U.S. that awards grants supporting the arts across all 50 states, as well as every U.S. jurisdiction, to help organizations provide programs increasing and supporting access to the arts to thousands of individuals.

The Arts Education Partnership (AEP) is pleased to announce the launch of its new Success Stories initiative supporting the efforts of its partner organizations in advancing arts education as a critical component of a complete education. This new initiative builds on AEP’s strong history of connecting the field to research, policy and practice and is grounded in The Arts Leading the Way to Student Success: A 2020 Action Agenda for Advancing the Arts in Education’s four priority areas.

Arts education remains a huge issue in the arts and education philanthropy fields. Despite significant progress in raising awareness around the benefits of arts education, not everyone—particularly the politicians that control the purse strings—seem to agree.