The folk and traditional arts run deep in American culture and provide us with diverse and dynamic artforms that span back generations within families and communities. The National Endowment for the Arts has been committed to serving the folk and traditional arts since the agency’s founding in 1965. Not only does the agency believe that all people are endowed with a rich and unique culture, but our founding legislation also states that honoring and preserving our nation’s multicultural artistic heritage is vital to the health of our democracy.

In 2019, the Arts Endowment released a report, Living Traditions: A Portfolio Analysis of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk & Traditional Arts Program, which examines the agency’s folk and traditional arts portfolio. The report revealed that states and cities with strong folklife programs help to attract more federal arts dollars to their home regions. The report also identified significant gaps in the map of national arts funding for the folk and traditional arts, and highlighted the need to connect related organizations and individuals to promote and strengthen the folk and traditional arts field. Based on this data, we are pleased to announce two important expansions of Arts Endowment funding, which will enrich our commitment to the field of folk and traditional arts.

The Arts Endowment will make a $1,000,000 investment in a National Folklife Network to develop new folklife infrastructure in spaces where it does not currently exist. The National Folklife Network will be managed through a cooperative agreement to cultivate the development of seven pilot folklife programs—four in rural areas, and three in urban areas. The four rural regions are the Northern Plains, Southern Plains, Inter-mountain West, and Alaska, while the three urban folklife programs will be in cities on, or east of, the Mississippi River. Each location faces its own unique challenges, including weak infrastructure, a diffuse population, and deeply ingrained poverty.

The initiative, the largest in the organization’s history, will support the creation of
new monuments, as well as the relocation or rethinking of existing ones.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the
United States, has pledged to spend $250 million over five years to help reimagine
the country’s approach to monuments and memorials, in an effort to better reflect
the nation’s diversity and highlight buried or marginalized stories.
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The Monuments Project, the largest initiative in the foundation’s 50-year history,
will support the creation of new monuments, as well as the relocation or rethinking
of existing ones.

And it defines “monument” broadly to include not just memorials, statues and
markers but also “storytelling spaces,” as the foundation puts it, like museums and
art installations.

“The beauty of monuments as a rubric is, it’s really a way of asking, ‘How do we say
who we are? How do we teach our history in public places?’” Elizabeth Alexander,
the foundation’s president, said.

​“So much teaching happens without us going into a classroom, and without us realizing we’re being taught,” she continued. “We want to ask how we can help think about how to give form to the beautiful and extraordinary and powerful multiplicity of American stories.”

The New York-based Helen Frankenthaler Foundation announced today that it was disbursing $1.5m in grants to cultural organisations this autumn, many of them deriving from a $5m Covid-19 relief effort announced last spring.

Those coronavirus-related grants will go to small art museums and toward direct support to artists. The remainder of the $1.5m involves new two-year grants that promote equity in and access to the arts, including digital initiatives and professional opportunities for college students and recent graduates.

Among the small museums receiving funding are the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Guild Hall, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Montclair Art Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Other Covid relief will involve $50,000 grants for the organisations Artist Relief and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants Covid-19 Fund.

The new two-year grants include $500,000 for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s online initiative offering access to its collections; $500,000 for the Digital Curation Initiative’s parallel online collection access effort; $150,000 for ArtsConnection’s Teen Reviewers and Critics Program, which fosters creativity among students in underserved communities; and $60,000 for ArtTable’s expanded fellowship program.

Other two-year grants route $100,000 to the roving House of SpeakEasy Bookmobile, which offers art books and programming to writers and artists in deprived New York communities; $112,00 to the Studio Institute for intern programmes for students of diverse backgrounds; and $350,00 to the Studio Museum in Harlem’s plan to bolster its educational website offerings.
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“Support for cultural institutions is ever more critical in the face of these current crises,” says Elizabeth Smith, executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, whose core mission is to bring Frankenthaler’s art to a wider audience. She adds: “Our ongoing commitment to research and education provided a new pathway forward to help promote equity and accessibility within the arts.”