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.”

One of the most famous American painters and illustrators, Norman Rockwell produced pithy artwork to promote democracy and civic engagement in his time. Now, a museum in Massachusetts dedicated to him asked artists to design "get out the vote" posters for 2020.

​The Unity Project debuted on Tuesday, National Voters Registration Day, on the Norman Rockwell Museum's website. It features six original pieces specially commissioned for the campaign from a diverse group of artists: Mai Ly Degnan, Rudy Gutierrez, Anita Kunz, Tim O'Brien, Whitney Sherman and Yuko Shimizu.

On the same page, voters can register for the 2020 election and share the artwork to promote the cause. Among those who were inspired to share the campaign on their social media profiles is 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who posted about the initiative on Instagram.

"This idea was sparked in conversation with patrons who said, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was an artist who could paint a poster like Rockwell did during World War II that would inspire everybody to vote?' And it led me to think -- we can do that," Norman Rockwell Museum Director Laurie Norton Moffatt told CNN.

​The project came together in a matter of six weeks, Norton Moffatt explained, and it was the first time the museum worked with illustrators to commission and publish artwork in a digital format.

"At a time when many of us feel life has closed in, during this pandemic, we found a way to burst those walls wide open and put the museum's work to good in the world by inspiring everyone to vote," Norton Moffatt said.

The posters will be exhibited online and at the museum until Election Day, and physical copies will enter the museum's permanent collection.

The Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and others are aiding national and regional groups at risk of shuttering because of the pandemic.

​Some of the nation’s most prominent philanthropists and foundations announced plans on Thursday to donate more than $156 million to help arts organizations run by people of color recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

The initiative, called America’s Cultural Treasures, includes national and regional components and was conceived by Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, and those who work for the foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program.

It is meant to bring greater resources and recognition to what the foundation described as “Black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous” organizations representing the heritage of people who “have been historically marginalized, underfunded and underrepresented in the narrative of American culture.”

News of the initiative was first reported by The Washington Post.

The national component includes $50 million from the Ford Foundation and additional money from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Abrams Foundation, the Alice L. Walton Foundation, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, and Tom and Lisa Blumenthal. It will provide $81 million in operational and general support funds to 20 organizations that are “significant national anchors for artistic and cultural diversity in America,” the Ford Foundation said.
 
 National grants will range from $1 million to $6 million each. Recipients include the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage; the Apollo Theater in New York City; the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles; and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.

The apologies keep coming.

After the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., allowed the police to use its property to stage a response to a protest over George Floyd’s death, its director asked the police to gather elsewhere and issued a public apology.

When the Getty was criticized for putting out “vague” social media posts calling “for equity and fairness” that failed to mention Mr. Floyd, who died in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25, its chief executive pledged to do better.

The language of contrition was similar from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art after it was criticized for responding to Mr. Floyd’s death with an Instagram post: an image of a work by the artist Glenn Ligon — who is black — without any statement from the institution.

“We can do better,” the apology said. The museum followed up with a second apology days later for having disabled comments in response to criticism of its initial post.

For decades, cultural organizations have generally opted out of politically heated debates, positioning themselves as neutral territory and preferring to let the artists they present do the opining. As civic institutions often supported by taxpayer dollars, they have historically
eschewed political allegiances.

But this time is different.

In the period of protests, many arts organizations have entered the fray. Some of their public messages have been commended as better than silence; others criticized as tone deaf and too little too late.
 
Such efforts to meaningfully contribute to the conversation are especially sensitive because many of the institutions are led by white executives who answer to boards largely made up of wealthy white trustees. That composition has long fueled suspicion that arts
organizations are inherently resistant to — or incapable of — real change.

“It’s not enough to issue these toothless statements,” tweeted Adrianne Russell, a writer, museums specialist and former employee at the Nelson-Atkins, “and that’s why I wish museums would just be quiet unless they’re going to tell the truth.”

When the Metropolitan Opera tweeted last week that there was “no place for racism in the arts,” several people commented on social media that the company had never performed an opera by a black composer. (Their first — Terence Blanchard's “Fire Shut Up in My
Bones” — was announced last year but has yet to be performed.)

“I do not think art museums have done enough,” Chris Anagnos, the executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said in a statement on the organization’s website. “We have dabbled around the edges of the work, but in our place of privilege we will never live up to the statement that ‘museums are for everyone’ unless we begin to confront, examine and dismantle the various structures that brought us to this point.”

Some responses have landed more successfully than others, namely the impassioned statement from Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian, who called on his professional cohort to step up.

In his statement, Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian, urged his colleagues in the museum world to do more to address racial injustice. Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

​“Will we join the struggle to seek justice and equality?” Mr. Bunch said. “Will we heed the call of courageous figures throughout history who spoke out against slavery, marched on for voting rights, and sat in for basic equality? Will we challenge the nation to live up to its founding ideals? In the memory of those taken from us and for the good of the
country, I hope that we do.”

:The Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) has passed a series of resolutions addressing how art museums may use the restricted funds held by some institutions. These resolutions were proposed in recognition of the extensive negative effects of the current crisis on the operations and balance sheets of many art museums—and the uncertain timing for a museum’s operations, fundraising, and revenue streams to return to normal.

The resolutions state that AAMD will refrain from censuring or sanctioning any museum—or censuring, suspending or expelling any museum director—that decides to use restricted endowment funds, trusts, or donations for general operating expenses. The resolution also addresses how a museum might use the proceeds from deaccessioned art to pay for expenses associated with the direct care of collections. The resolution does not change AAMD’s Professional Practices or any other rules currently in place, but instead effectively places a moratorium on punitive actions through April 10, 2022. AAMD also recognizes that it is not within the Association’s purview to approve the redirection of restricted funds. However, it hopes that these resolutions will serve as an endorsement to donors or the relevant legal authorities, encouraging them to permit the temporary use of these funds for unrestricted needs.

“This is a crisis without precedent in our lifetime, with global implications and with a timeline that unfolds as we live it,” said Brent Benjamin, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and The Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “On the one hand, there is no clear timeline for the pandemic concluding, for the economy to begin growing again, and for life to return to normal. Art museums, on the other hand, typically plan their exhibitions and activities months or years in advance, including anticipating both the costs and fundraising needs for each initiative. Since planning for the future with any accuracy is impossible, while earned revenue has stopped and the future of charitable giving is unknown, it was important for AAMD to take a step that could provide some additional financial support to art museums.”

​​Edouard Vuillard, Woman Sweeping at 346 Rue Saint-Honoré (1895). Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

An Ohio couple has donated more than 100 works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and other artists to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Valued at over $100 million, the gift from Joseph and Nancy Keithley, Clevelanders who have maintained a longstanding relationship with the museum, is the largest the institution has seen in more than 60 years. Ninety-seven of the newly donated works have been transferred to the museum outright, while 17 others are promised to enter the collection in the future.

For the museum’s director, William Griswold, the news came as something of a surprise.
“This was not a promised gift,” he tells Artnet News. “It’s something that all of us devoutly hoped might come to the museum, but quite frankly I didn’t think I’d see it during my tenure here. It was thrilling news when Joe and Nancy informed me last November that they wished to make this gift—and to make it right away.”

​Pierre Bonnard, Fruit and Fruit Dishes (c. 1930). Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.