From: "Matthew Isaac Cohen" <matthew.cohen-AT-rhul.ac.uk>
To: <puptcrit-AT-lists.driftline.org>
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 08:48:06 +0100
Subject: Re: [Puptcrit] puptcrit Digest, Vol 17, Issue 39


Anyone know if any pupeteers were nominated for this?

Matthew

Matthew Isaac Cohen, PhD
Senior Lecturer
Department of Drama and Theatre
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
United Kingdom

http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=155800010
New Organization Will Fund Individual Artists


Four foundations have put up a total of $20 million to create a new charity
to support working artists, starting with a grant program that will be one
of the most generous in existence, the New York Times reports.

In addition to $15 million contributed by the Ford Foundation, the
Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmuson foundations have pledged a total of $5
million to create and seed the initial operations of United States Artists
(USA), which eventually hopes to become a conduit between artists and
individual donors and use gifts from individuals to build a permanent
endowment to support and expand its grant program. "I believe there are
individuals who would like to give to artists directly but worry they lack a
system to help identify talent," said Ford Foundation president and CEO
Susan V. Berresford. "This creates a mechanism through which people can do
that."

Through the organization's grant program, individual artists in a wide
variety of disciplines and at various stages in their career will receive
unrestricted awards of $50,000, with the first fifty awards to be announced
in December. At the moment, panels of artists, critics, scholars, and other
experts are reviewing the applications of three hundred artists nominated
anonymously. None of the nominees is a household name, according to the
group's executive director, Katharine DeShaw. "We want these awards to
demonstrate the diversity of American art and the artists who create it,"
DeShaw told the Times.

The organization's creation was spurred in part by a 2003 Urban Institute
study, Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for U.S.
Artists, which documented the plight of artists since the mid-1990s, when
the federal government de-funded many of the grants that the National
Endowment for the Arts had made to individual artists. State and local
funding and foundation support for individual artists had also declined,
trends that have only started to reverse in the past year or so.

News of the organization and its grant program was cheered by arts groups
and leaders. "The individual artist has been at the back of the line in
terms of support in American funding over the last decade," said Philip
Bither, performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, "so
any new system designed to get support directly into the working hands of
working artists is important."

Strom, Stephanie. "New Charity to Start Plan for $50,000 Artists' Grants."
New York Times 9/05/06.



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