On Shaping A Diverse Recovery
I write a weekly column for the website AudienceOutlookMonitor.com which collects audience surveys taken by arts groups from around the world and analyzes the results and tracks the data over time since this spring. Here are some columns over the last few months.
July 24, 2020
By Frank Rizzo for AudienceOutlookMonitor.com
Here we are in late July, in what would have been a traditionally quiet time for many arts and cultural organizations. (Of course, not the ones with full summer schedules.)
But this year the stillness is especially unsettling with so much uncertainty about the coming months and new year ahead.
So perhaps this week a breather is needed along with some deep reflection on rebuilding better arts and cultural institutions that speak to a more diverse and dynamic world — and certainly a different one from the time they were first established.
Governments and foundations are reexamining their relationship to the arts and culture, at least via its funding. As England prepares its nearly $2 billion arts assistance package, governmental leaders are publicly insisting “significant diversity deficits” in the arts around race, gender, class and disability must be tackled as part of the recovery package.
Government, at least on that side of the Atlantic, is taking issues of systemic racism seriously when it comes to public funding. A taskforce in Wales has been set up with plans to improve diversity in the arts sector there. “It will focus on areas including accountability, research and ambassadors, in addition to creating a diversity council, a diverse board bank and setting up secondments for people of color in the arts.”
In the U.S. there is still not governmental financial support to the arts at the level that the U.K., Germany and other countries are creating. Neither is there the governmental mandate for the creation of more equitable institutions in its giving process.
But foundations are moving in that direction and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest supporter of the arts and humanities in the U.S., announced a fundamental reset in focusing its grant-making program entirely through the lens of social justice, following Ford Foundation’s mission shift several years ago.
No names were mentioned of institutions that didn’t align with the new vision, reported artnet.com, “but museums that are stuck in the traditional canon of Western art, with a myopic focus on white male artists, likely won’t…