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President's
report We’ve had a busy and incredibly exciting first few months of the year at Creative Capital, and there is quite a lot of news to share with our funders and colleagues. In the first part of this report on our activities during the six months since we made our first grants to 75 individual artists, I provide information about our basic operations. In the second part, I describe our work with our funded artists. The Creative Capital award is not just a grant,
and we are now learning what it means to "work with" projects
and artists, what it takes to nurture the creative process, and how
to create a fertile environment
where artists are supported in ways that encourage them to innovate and
push at the boundaries of convention. So far, this work has been truly
inspiring and an extraordinary privilege. Along with our program staff, I will be traveling quite a bit this summer,
and I hope to have the opportunity to speak with many of you in person
at conferences or meetings of local artists. If you have any questions
concerning this report, or if you would like more information about Creative
Capital, please contact me at 212-598-9900, ext. 225, or ruby@creative-capital.org.
Thank you for your interest in our work on behalf of individual artists
throughout the United States. Part I: Update on operations The grants process After notifying our 75 grant recipients in mid-December, we sent contracts to all grantees by February 1. We also made a commitment to sharing panel feedback with the 150 artists who made it to the second round but did not receive grants. We weren't sure how many people would want to take advantage of this offer; almost everyone did. Program/Services Director Alyson Pou did a wonderful job following up with people, and in several cases we were able to provide extensive advice and referrals to projects we weren't able to fund. This has been quite labor intensive, but has been widely appreciated: grant applicants are not often given the opportunity to learn, in a supportive, constructive manner, why a panel elected not to fund their projects. At one of the public meetings that we’ve been holding with artists throughout the country, an artist spoke about the positive experience of having been rejected by Creative Capital! We have hired Sean Elwood as our grants manager. Most recently, Sean was the curator and collection manager for the Seattle Arts Commission, and comes to us highly recommended by board member Ron Feldman. Sean and other staff members are now working on the guidelines and application for the 2000-01 grantmaking cycle. We will begin accepting applications for this round on Monday, September 11 and the postmark and e-mail deadline will be Tuesday, October 31. In this round, we will accept applications in visual arts and media. In 2001-02, we will accept applications in performance and emerging forms. We will be adding an experimental literature category to emerging forms and an experimental music category to performance. We will make no more than 12 to 15 grants in each of the two disciplines funded each year, and the average initial grant size will increase from $7,500 in 1999-2000 to about $13,300 in 2000-01. As grantees are also eligible to apply for supplemental financial support of up to $5000 to help meet strategic project-related needs, the average total first-year grant is currently about $12,500. Next year, this average grant will increase to about $18,300. Although, as noted, we will not be accepting applications in performance or emerging fields this year, we are trying to find a way to be responsive to extraordinary projects in those disciplines. It doesn't seem wise for Creative Capital, which is supposed to be entrepreneurial, to tell someone with a truly exciting idea that they will have to wait two years to receive support. We will conduct an assessment after the 2001-02 grantmaking round, which will determine how many of the approximately 100 projects funded in earlier rounds are still active and in need of support. As the result of this assessment, we may decide not to have a formal grant round in 2002-03, but rather to continue supporting the projects already funded. The contract process To our surprise, the contract process has been fascinating. Our attorney, Sue Bodine, and I worked all year to create an artist-friendly financial arrangement that honors the essence of the revolving fund experiment without turning us into a collection agency. I now feel very good about the "deal." However, we feel strongly that the contract needs to be a work-in-progress for the first few years at least, and we have been encouraging our grantees to create any addenda they need in order to feel comfortable with the document. To ensure that our grantees’ basic contract-related questions were answered, we contracted with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts to host a technical assistance meeting and conference call for our grantees. To avoid a conflict of interest, and to encourage artists to speak freely, we did not take part in either event. As a result of this technical assistance and artists' individual consultations with their attorneys, we have already made a few changes to everyone's contract. In general, the response to the contract has been good. The financial arrangement appears to be less of a problem than several other issues, such as our requiring that grantees have liability insurance, and the reporting requirements. In response, we're changing these requirements. As part of the contract process, Nancy Scerbo, our development director, created a helpful guide for our grantees on how to construct a project budget; we were concerned that too many artists were underbudgeting their projects by not compensating themselves adequately. This guide will be posted on our website as a skills-building resource. Reception for funded artists In February, we held a reception for grantees, funders, and board members at the Foundation's office. It was a lovely event — grantees came in from all over the country! — and we began to build the sense of community we hope to further at Skowhegan this summer. At the reception, we distributed a needs assessment survey to help us determine how we might best serve our grantees. We’ve been analyzing the surveys as they arrive: among other things, they reveal that most respondents are interested in working with Creative Capital to acquire project and career management skills in marketing, fundraising, publicity, website design, and other areas. Artists Retreat at Skowhegan We're all set for our August 17-20 retreat at the Skowhegan (Maine) School of Painting and Sculpture. This retreat is based on my experience with similar gatherings held by Alternate ROOTS. Over the years, the ROOTS annual meeting has fostered a sense of community among performing artists in the Southeast, been a catalyst for countless collaborations, and was the birthplace of important initiatives such as the American Festival Project. Our retreat is being coordinated by artist Elaine Tin Nyo and will feature skills-building workshops; discussions with resource people from the nonprofit and commercial sectors in each of our four disciplines; and presentations of artists’ work. If grantees find the retreat to be useful, we will try to make it an annual event. Outreach The program staff and I have been traveling extensively all year. We've attended major conferences and other events, served as panelists, and used every invitation we've received as an opportunity to hold public meetings to brief potential applicants about Creative Capital. Whenever possible, we also try to schedule meetings with local arts professionals and to see local artists' work. The travel has been very important in sending the message that Creative Capital is truly attempting to create a national program. At virtually every meeting, someone thanks us just for coming. In late May, Eileen and Peter Norton hosted a celebration of Creative Capital’s first year at their magnificent Santa Monica home. A dynamic cross-section of the southern California arts community — curators, filmmakers, funders, academics, and collectors, among others — attended, as did many of our California grantees. We made many new friends, and look forward to continuing our conversations with them during subsequent visits to the West Coast. I will be a keynote speaker at the NAAO Conference in New York in June, and along with staff members Alyson Pou, Ken Chu, and Esther Robinson will make a major West Coast trip in July. Our itinerary for this trip includes San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Portland, and Seattle.
Here’s a summary of our travels during the year to date: Ruby Lerner: Austin; Camden, South Carolina (keynote address at the South Carolina Arts Commission's biennial conference); Houston; Los Angeles/Santa Monica (for Creative Capital board meeting hosted by the James Irvine Foundation, and for the Nortons’ reception); Miami; Orlando; Palm Beach; Park City, Utah; Washington, D.C. (respondent to Marian Godfrey's keynote address at the ArtTable conference). Ken Chu: meetings in several cities in Arizona, Colorado, and Hawaii, plus Baltimore. Esther Robinson: Kansas City; Minneapolis/St. Paul; Park City, Utah. Fundraising and budget update We have received several major new grants in recent weeks, including:
We have been invited to submit major proposals to a number of other local and national foundations, and, assuming that all of our current funders renew, we are confident that we will reach our budget goal of $1,800,000 for fiscal year 2000, and perhaps even exceed it. A list of our current funders appears on page 10. Web-based services We’ve hired Adam Silverman, a wonderful young composer, to be our webmaster, and I hope that the updating and expansion of our website will now move forward more quickly. Our plans for the website are quite ambitious, and it has been difficult to find staffing at the rates we can afford — dot-coms can pay so much more. However, between Adam and our outside consultants, we seem to have a good team in place. We’ve also hired Athena Robles to be our communications officer. Her responsibilities will include working with Adam to keep our site up to date for the benefit of applicants, grantees, and the general public.
Part II: Working with artists How it’s working so far Working with artists: it’s dynamic, it’s thrilling, and it's time and labor intensive. We begin with a meeting. Alyson Pou and I have met with about one-third of the 75 artists to date, in person or by phone, and we hope to meet with everyone in person before the end of the year. We ask for a project update, but more importantly, we talk about critical "next steps." These vary enormously, of course, depending on whether the project is in development, in production, or ready for public presentation. We talk about audiences, and we ask the artist to think about how this project could help pave the way for the next project. In some cases, we've encouraged artists to slow down, to take more time, so that they can maximize the project's potential to reach audiences and to further their own careers. I have budgeted about $5,000 per project in supplemental financial support for this second phase of our work. The strategic use of these funds is also something we discuss in the meeting. This supplemental support can be used for activities that help to promote the project, or for the kinds of goods and services that help to stabilize an artist’s working environment and operating costs. For example, several artists need specialized computer equipment, and we're now collecting information on their needs to see if we can negotiate on their behalf for in-kind support or deeply discounted prices. Several artists need to hire part-time assistance for publicity or fundraising, or would benefit from working with experienced consultants. We have created a supplemental financial support application form so that our criteria for awarding this additional support are clear; this form will eventually be posted on our website to make it as simple as possible for artists to apply. I would like to be modest in reporting on these meetings, but the response from artists has been overwhelming; at the end of every meeting we’ve held so far, the artist has told us how helpful it has been, and how much our support means. One artist commented that it was so exciting to have someone "thinking with you." Despite our youth as an organization, we already have a wonderful story to share. One of the first artists we met with was Jyung Mee Park, who makes beautiful folded-paper sculptures. She is on sabbatical from the Maryland Art Institute, and has had work shown at the Corcoran. This spring, she had a piece in the Project Room at P.S.1 in New York. We encouraged her to take advantage of the fact that she would be in the Project Room during the well-attended Greater New York show, and she used her supplemental funding to create a press packet with high-quality photos of her work. She purchased a mailing list of curators and sent out packets around the country. She stopped by the office in late spring to tell us about all the wonderful things that have happened to her since becoming a Creative Capital grantee. She received a $10,000 award from the Korean-American Foundation, which will include an exhibition in Los Angeles. She has received a number of phone calls from interested curators, in this country and abroad, including an invitation from the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford to be in a show. She's had several important studio visits as well. Jyung Mee feels that Creative Capital grant, supplemental support, and advice were catalytic, as she had been feeling quite discouraged about her work prior to receiving our grant. We have also been able to make decisions quickly to help several other artists take advantage of time-sensitive opportunities. In these cases, I think of us as a rapid response team. In an earlier report, I mentioned that I’ve been thinking a lot about speed and deliberation. We're living in such a fast time, but I think there's great value in deliberation. I've been thinking that we should be deliberate in deciding whom we support, but once we make the commitment, we should be prepared to move quickly, with advice or money. We were able to do this with Chris Doyle's LEAP project, which enabled him to print several thousand subway car cards. This was always an integral part of the project's concept, but Chris wasn't certain that the New York City Transit Authority would donate the subway space. When the free space came through, he needed to tell the TA quickly whether he could print the cards. We were able to provide the supplemental support that made it happen — and we were able to make the decision in a matter of hours, because we had already taken the time to determine, through our evaluation and panel process, that we should make an initial commitment to this project. Chris's project was the subject of a feature in the City section of the Sunday New York Times, and he was interviewed on WNYC, National Public Radio’s local affiliate, on the opening day of his public presentation. To complete the process, we will now work with Chris and the event's producer, Creative Time, to encourage them to follow up with other public art entities and curators around the country, as one of Chris's goals is to do public projects in other communities. Capital — creatively We take our name seriously. I think we're already learning a lot about how providing different kinds of financial support to artists can allow different kinds of things to happen. We are finding that the supplemental support we're providing for strategic costs such as promotion, travel, equipment, consultancies, and staffing appears to be useful, encouraging strategic thinking about the best ways to maximize the project's impact. I'm sure this experience is shared by the foundations and other grantmaking agencies that have created programs to offer study and travel grants, or have targeted funds for project distribution, in addition to their direct support of projects. There haven't been many opportunities of late for artists to secure funding to cover costs that may appear to be ancillary to the direct costs of creating the work. Most of the artists we've met with so far are cognizant of, and articulate about, their needs in these areas. In addition to the initial grants and supplemental financial support that we now offer, this winter we will offer a second opportunity for project funding to our current grantees. These applications will be competitive. Applications will be reviewed by panel, which will assess both the potential impact of the work itself and the impact of well-timed funding upon this project. Grants will be larger and fewer than in the initial round, with some grants of up to $25,000; no more than 10 to 12 projects will be funded. If offering a second round of competitive funding seems useful, and we have the financial resources available, we will try to offer this type of funding every six months. Emerging issues As we begin to provide services to our grantees, we are thinking more and more about two issues: documentation and closure. We need to determine how best to document our process of working with artists, in the interest of sound "case management" and so that we can feed information to our colleagues. Creative Capital is a national experiment in arts philanthropy, and we believe that it is important for us to share our observations about what works — and what doesn’t work — in helping artists to fulfill project and career goals. While I'm not worrying about closure too much right now, I think that determining an exit strategy, knowing when a project is "finished" and the artist no longer an active grantee, could become a challenge. We certainly don't want to nurture a dependency relationship, so creating some kind of "alumni/ae" association might be useful in moving people off the active roster while allowing them to remain part of the Creative Capital community. We'll be looking to the grantees to help us figure this out.
Summary As we hear more and more about venture philanthropy, I have been thinking about the appropriate application of venture capital ideas to what we're trying to do. My understanding of what venture capitalists know about helping projects to succeed is that: 1) it is important to be prepared to make a longterm commitment; 2) capacity building is key; and 3) supportive involvement, through ongoing advice and technical assistance beyond the dollars, is an integral part of their commitment. While we know that for our projects "success" may take many forms, we believe that these strategies are applicable in creating the most hospitable climate for artistic exploration. When we met with one of our grantees, filmmaker Lewis Klahr, recently, he told us that he felt that we were trying to build an organization that mirrors the creative process. We like Lewis’s assessment, and believe that this will be our central challenge: to be as dynamic, as responsive, and as willing to take risks as the artists we support. Creative Capital’s work is made possible through the generous support of many foundations and individuals, including: The Andy Warhol Foundation; The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; The Peter Norton Family Foundation; The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation; The Rockefeller Foundation; The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation; The James Irvine Foundation; The Albert A. List Foundation; The Ford Foundation; The William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation; Agnes Gund & Daniel Shapiro; The Jerome Foundation; The Lewis B. & Dorothy Cullman Foundation; The Lily Auchincloss Foundation; The Booth Ferris Foundation; The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation; The Joe & Emily Lowe Foundation (1999); The Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts; an anonymous donor; Lyda Kuth; The Edward & Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust; Catharine & Jeffrey Soros; The Benton Foundation; The Broad Art Foundation;The Heathcote Art Foundation; The Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation; Penny & Mike Winton; The Daniel J. & Edith A. Ehrlich Foundation; The Harriet Meyer & Ulrich E. Meyer Family Philanthropic Fund; The Lucy & Isidore B. Adelman Foundation; The Peregrine Capital Management, Inc. Fund of The Minneapolis Foundation; Carla Emil & Rich Silverstein; The Silver Tie Fund (list current as of July 1, 2000). |