A coalition of philanthropic foundations will devote $125 million over three years to New York State’s arts economy as part of Creatives Rebuild New York, an initiative connected to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan to remedy the devastating financial impact of the pandemic. Funded mainly by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the support of the Ford and Stavros Niarchos Foundations, the program will provide as many as 2,400 artists with guaranteed monthly income and will endow 300 full-time salaried positions across small-to-midsize art organizations statewide.

“The artists whose work helps to sustain us have faced particularly devastating circumstances resulting from unemployment, underemployment, and a lack of predictable paid incomes,” said Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation. “It’s critical for the vibrancy of our cities that we recognize that making art is work, and artists are among our nation’s most dedicated and necessary drivers of our economy.”

The coronavirus has derailed New York’s cultural sector, which before 2020 had accounted for nearly half a million jobs and generated around $120 billion for the state. While many art institutions around the state have reopened in some form, many are working with decimated workforces and budgets. The performing arts industry has taken the hardest blow, with 50 percent of those jobs being lost statewide, 72 percent in New York City, whose arts and recreation sector suffered a 60 percent drop in employment between February and April of last year.

Following the May 6 formation of the City Artist Corps—a $25 million federally backed effort to put artists in New York City back to work—CRNY’s announcement is the latest of several initiatives in the country to experiment with universal basic income, increasingly considered as a viable solution to the virus’s uneven costs; San Francisco implemented a general income pilot program for artists last October.

“These funds will address the financial hardship and combat systemic inequities that have long plagued the sector,” said Emil J. Kang, the program director for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation. “This is particularly the case for those artists serving small-to-midsized organizations, often led by and serving BIPOC communities.” 
​
Helmed by arts administrator Sarah Calderon, most recently the managing director of ArtPlace America, CRNY will on July 1 name its advisory board, to include artists, policymakers, researchers, and nonprofit leaders. Additional funding details will be announced on August 31.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has added a bronze plaque recognizing Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Indigenous Lenape diaspora, on the facade of its Fifth Avenue building. The institution is also working on a land acknowledgement for the Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan.

The bronze plaque installed at the Met reads: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art is situated in Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape diaspora and historically a gathering and trading place for many diverse Native peoples, who continue to live and work on this island. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, and future—for their ongoing and fundamental relationships to the region.” 

Land acknowledgements are common at institutions in New Zealand and Australia, where presentations of Indigenous art form a key component of certain museums’ programming. But they are less frequent at institutions in the United States.

Few other New York museums have undertaken such a measure. On its website, the New Museum has posted a text that it is situated on “unceded Indigenous land, specifically the homeland of the Lenape peoples,” and in 2018, as part of a posting for a New Red Order performance, the Whitney Museum wrote a similar acknowledgement.

There are signs that the Met is working to alter how it presents Indigenous art. The Met recently unveiled the first major reinstallation of works in “Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection,” an ongoing presentation overseen by the museum’s first full-time curator of Native American art, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha).

Norby and Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American wing, wrote in an article on the Met’s website, “It’s critical for the Met to reckon thoughtfully with our institutional legacy and its ongoing impact on local lands and waters, as well as the lives of the original communities, to evolve into the cultural institution that we aspire and need to be for the region, the nation, and the world.”
​
Daniel H. Weiss, president and CEO of the Met, said in a statement, “This acknowledgement is an important part of the Met’s commitment to build and maintain respectful relationships with Indigenous communities. It is also a meaningful reminder to all who walk through the museum’s front doors of the history and legacy of the land on which the Met now sits and the ties to this area that Indigenous communities sustain.”

The longtime art collector and marketing executive Denise Gardner will become the
chairwoman of the Art Institute of Chicago in November, perhaps the country’s first
Black woman to hold that position on a major museum board.
​
“It’s hard to avoid the historical significance,” Gardner said in a telephone interview
on Monday. “That does add a sense of responsibility and pressure to succeed, and
that’s fine with me. I like to exceed expectations.”

Gardner, 66, will succeed Robert M. Levy — whose term ends in November — at the
helm of the Institute’s school as well as the museum.

Having served for 15 years as a trustee and for five in her current role as vice chair,
Gardner has championed Black artists as well as art accessibility and education for
underrepresented audiences. “The work is still unfinished,” Gardner said. “In this
role, I can help the museum accelerate its progress.”

The appointment comes at a time when cultural institutions are seeking to diversify
their staffs, boards and programming. Gardner is also on the steering committee of
the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, established last fall to help museums
bring on more Black trustees, artists and curators.

“A leader with her credentials is exactly what we need right now to take us into the
future,” James Rondeau, the museum’s director, said in a phone interview on
Monday. Given the Art Institute’s ongoing commitment to diversity, he added, “The experiences and the perspectives that she brings as a Black woman who is so
connected to the city of Chicago will only be an asset.”

Gardner — together with her husband, Gary — was the lead individual sponsor of
the museum’s 2018 exhibition, “Charles White: A Retrospective,” which traveled to
the Museum of Modern of Art. (The Gardners own three White works on paper.)

​Her collection focuses on Black and female artists, including Frank Bowling, Nick
Cave and Carrie Mae Weems. She was an early buyer of Amy Sherald, whose
popularity has surged since her official portrait of Michelle Obama, which hangs in
the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

The New York Botanical Garden, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the
Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, are among 225 beneficiaries of new grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities that were announced on Wednesday.

The grants, which total $24 million, will support projects at museums, libraries,
universities and historic sites in 45 states, as well as in Washington and Puerto Rico.
They will enable the excavation of a newly discovered ancient Egyptian brewery by
researchers from New York University, the implementation of a traveling exhibition
honoring Emmett Till’s legacy at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and
research for a biography of the congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis by
David Greenberg, a professor at Rutgers University.

Adam Wolfson, the endowment’s acting chairman, said in a statement that the new
projects “embody excellence, intellectual rigor and a dedication to the pursuit of
knowledge, even as our nation and the humanities community continue to face the
challenges of the pandemic.”

As part of a new grant program in archaeology and ethnography, seven of the
awards will support empirical field research, including the excavation of the ancient
city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico and the investigation of settlement and
migration patterns on the Micronesian islands of Pohnpei and Kosrae.

​In New York, 40 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $6.6
million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a digital, open-access
database of the endangered Uto-Aztecan language Wixárika, from west-central
Mexico, at the New York Botanical Garden; the expansion of the Freedom of
Information Archive, a digital resource of 4.6 million declassified documents, at
Columbia University; and the production of a 15-episode “Radio Diaries”
documentary podcast series, which uses archival audio recordings to tell forgotten
stories of 20th century America, like that of the last surviving Watergate burglar.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — People talk a lot about getting back to pre-Covid normal. But our traditional art museums can forget about that. After a year of intense racial justice reckoning, a paralyzing pandemic and crippling economic shortfalls, aging hidebound institutions are scrambling just to stay afloat. And the only way for them to do so is to change. Strategies for forward motion are needed. One is in play here at the Speed Art Museum, in the form of a quietly passionate show called "Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” which might, with profit, be studied by other institutions in survivalist mode.

Conventional encyclopedic museums like the Speed, the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky, are glacial machines. Their major exhibitions are usually years in the planning. Borrowing objects from other museums can be a red tape tangle. “Historical” shows, by definition, are usually confined to events and cultures of the past. “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” revises all of that. It speeds up exhibition production, focuses on the present, and in doing so reaches out to new audiences vital to the institutional future.

Combining works from the Speed’s permanent collection with loans in several cases directly from artists and galleries, the show was assembled and installed (beautifully) in a mere four months. And it was conceived as a direct response to a contemporary news event: the killing, by Louisville police, of Breonna Taylor, a Black 26-year-old medical worker, in March 2020. A posthumous painting of Taylor by the artist Amy Sherald
is the exhibition’s centerpiece, accompanied by photographs of local street protests sparked by her death and by the lenient treatment of the white officers involved.

The availability of the painting by Sherald, who is widely known for her earlier portrait of Michelle Obama, was the impetus for the show. Originally commissioned by Vanity Fair, it appeared on the cover of the magazine’s September 2020 issue. Sherald herself expressed interest in having the painting shown at the Speed, and in November the museum hired
Allison Glenn, an associate curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., who, with astonishing speed and acuity, built an exhibition around it in Louisville, comprised entirely of Black artists, with funding found to keep the admission free.
​
Accessibility, cultural and financial, are crucial features of the show. Until now, museums have generally ignored the country’s changing population demographics. The history that our big, general-interest art museums promote, through their preservation and display of objects, is primarily white history, with views of all other histories filtered through it. But that slanted perspective is no longer representative of audiences that museums will — speaking purely pragmatically — need to attract to survive.

​The Getty has partnered with the City of Los Angeles to rethink how the metropolis identifies and preserves local Black heritage landmarks.

The Los Angeles African American Historic Places Project, as the three-year initiative is called, will see the Getty’s Conservation Institute and the city’s Office of Historic Resources (OHR) work with communities and cultural institutions to celebrate sites that best represent Black life. 

The project is “ultimately about equity,” Conservation Institute director Tim Whalen said in a statement.

Currently, just over three percent of the city’s roughly 1,200 historic landmarks are tied to African American heritage, and part of the plan, Whalen said, is to examine preservation methods “for systemic bias.” 

“Historic preservation is about the acknowledgment and elevation of places and stories,” Whalen said, adding that the goal is to make sure “the stories and places of African Americans in Los Angeles are more present and complete.”

In addition to the designation of new landmark sites, the project will offer paid internships to young preservation professions and include a series of community programs.

While specific details about these and other projects are yet to be made public, the Conservation Institute and OHR have identified a handful of priorities for phase one, including developing plans to “manage, preserve, interpret, and celebrate the tangible and intangible heritage of historically Black neighborhoods.”

CHICAGO — On a recent afternoon outside the Art Institute of Chicago, there was no trace of the line that typically snakes down the museum’s granite steps and along Michigan Avenue as visitors wait to enter the grand home of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Every so often a passer-by paused on the desolate sidewalk to take a selfie with one of the bronze lions guarding the museum, but there was no reason to go further: The doors were locked.

In New York, a strikingly different tableau was playing out on Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the front doors was propped open to welcome a steady stream of visitors; teenagers sat in chatty clusters on the front steps; couples and families paused for temperature checks before entering the bustling lobby.

The contrasting scenes illustrate the diverging approaches that cities, states and individual institutions have taken toward museumgoing at this stage of the pandemic. Museums in New York City, which is now reporting a higher positivity rate than Chicago, have been allowed to operate without interruption at reduced capacities since they reopened in August — while Chicago’s museums were forced into hibernation for two months starting in mid-November, only recently getting the green light to reopen.
​
Museums are open in Phoenix, where, per capita, the average number of new cases in the surrounding county over the last week has been more than twice as high as in Washington, where the museums of the Smithsonian Institution remain closed.

In Paris, the Louvre is closed, while in Madrid, the Prado is open.
​The trend in the United States in recent weeks has tilted toward reopening. State and local officials have allowed museums in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Seattle and other cities to reopen again in some capacity, citing falling cases in their areas. The Art Institute of Chicago plans to reopen Feb. 11: officials are getting ready to remove the protective paper covering some of their Monets, calling furloughed employees back to work, and turning back on the lights that were extinguished to preserve the artwork.

As much as the new year is a time for new hopes and new resolutions, it also invites us to reflect. With the Smithsonian planning for the busy year ahead, I find myself looking back over my years at this institution, at the moments that have shaped my professional and personal life. Two decades have passed since my team raced to finish the exhibition “The American Presidency,” opening just ahead of the inauguration of President George W. Bush. This February marks the fourth Black History Month since the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for which I proudly served as founding director. And the year I’ve spent as Smithsonian Secretary has been one of striving and sprinting to respond to seismic shifts that have shaken the foundations of this country. Each of these experiences, fraught with challenges, has shown me how much we can accomplish when we come together for a common purpose.

The past 12 months, especially, have been a lesson in how the Smithsonian can serve our public. We can grow our digital capabilities to reach new audiences. We can work closely with teachers, students and families to provide invaluable educational support. We can marshal our expertise and our collections to facilitate productive conversations around the most divisive issues.

In moments of crisis, people turn to institutions they trust. This past year demonstrated how important it is to protect our institutions, and in turn, how those institutions must work to help their communities. The challenges of a pandemic spurred the Smithsonian to collaborate more closely than ever with museum colleagues across the globe, with school districts across the country, and with leaders in local communities. Time and time again, I have been humbled by the faith they put in us.

Among all the resources that we have at our disposal-—historic collections, groundbreaking research, deep scholarly expertise—perhaps our most precious is public trust. For many years, museums have ranked among the nation’s most trusted institutions. As confidence in other public-facing institutions falters, museums remain safe havens. The public counts on us to safeguard culture, heritage and knowledge.

I am inspired by staff members across the Institution who are helping our audiences endure hardship and pursue hope. Together with you, our readers, and the entire Smithsonian community, I look forward to a creative and fulfilling new year.