January 16, 2008, 11:29 am
By Nicole Lewis
Instead of getting wedding presents, a newly married couple asked friends and relatives to make donations to the Safe Darfur Coalition.
The organization encouraged them to write about their experience on its blog.
Jacob and Miriam Hodesh, a Savannah, Ga. couple, raised $20,000 for the organization.
“Some people didn’t understand why two white Jewish kids from the Midwest would suggest donations be made to their black African sisters and brothers many miles away,” writes the Hodeshes. “Our answer was that we are all brothers and sisters.”
Many charities are making it easy for couples to support charity as part of their wedding celebrations. To learn more, read The Chronicle’s article
October 11, 2007, 11:21 am
By Nicole Lewis
Arts fund raisers should have ready explanations for donors who want to know why culture groups need their gifts as much as social-service charities that serve the poor, writes Andrew Taylor on The Artful Manager.
Mr. Taylor is director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. He points to articles published in Good magazine and The New York Times, as well as commentary by former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich that question the validity of giving tax breaks for some types of philanthropy.
Mr. Reich, for example, in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, says donors to arts groups and universities should not be given the same tax breaks as donors to other causes. He suggests that donors to social-service groups should claim a full deduction for gifts, while donors to arts groups and universities should only get to…
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September 11, 2007, 12:11 pm
By Nicole Lewis
“It seems absurd, at this late date, to have to defend the obvious merits of tax deductions for charitable donations,” writes Lee Rosenbaum on Culturegrrl.
Ms. Rosenbaum, a freelance cultural reporter, takes umbrage at an article in The New York Times that decries charitable contributions for arts groups. Ms. Rosenbaum says the reporter, Stephanie Strom, “looks with favor” on social-service groups including the Salvation Army and America’s Second Harvest and she “casts cold prose on tax-deductible benefactions for cultural institutions, hospitals and stem cell research.”
While Ms. Rosenbaum acknowledges that it’s possible a majority of Americans would not favor “direct tax-dollar allocations” for some cultural groups, she argues that if such groups were denied tax-deductible status for gifts, organizations would lose their appeal for donors. The groups would then require more…
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August 7, 2007, 3:08 pm
By Nicole Lewis
While “smart” and a “team player,” Marc Steglitz, the newly appointed interim director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, is “no art professional,” writes Lee Rosenbaum, a cultural reporter, on Culture Grrl.
Mr. Steglitz, whom Ms. Rosenbaum calls a “capable number-cruncher,” is the chief operating officer at the museum. His appointment as interim director, which starts September 1, follows the “sudden resignation” of Lisa Dennison, a longtime Guggenheim insider who will join the auction house Sotheby’s in September as executive vice president.
The Guggenheim’s board has promised to make the permanent replacement of Ms. Dennison a high priority. Ms. Rosenbaum says that can’t happen “soon enough.”
July 31, 2007, 5:13 pm
By Nicole Lewis
Could an arts boom in Lansing, Mich., help drive the city’s economy now that auto giant Oldsmobile has left town?
Bridgette Redman, writing on Flyover, an Arts Journal blog, doesn’t think so. Ms. Redman is a freelance arts writer for the “Lansing State Journal” and a textbook editor.
“On the one hand, there is some pretty hard data that the arts do generate money,” she says. “On the other hand, there are very few artistic venues that could be called commercially successful.”
Ms. Redman mentions some “uneasy partnerships between businesses and arts organizations.”
One local arts group has a board comprised of business leaders who do have not been very involved in the arts, she says. The board and the artistic staff are at odds about the group’s mission, and the board is threatening closure.
“While I love the vision of a community that considers art one of its prime…
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July 17, 2007, 5:34 pm
By Nicole Lewis
Museums should be wary of participating in a new program run by the Association of American Museums, in Washington, in partnership with the U.S. State Department, writes Lee Rosenbaum, a freelance writer, on CultureGrrl.
“Should museums participate in a program that exploits their expertise to promote U.S. government foreign-policy objectives?” she says.
The program, Museums & Community Collaborations Abroad, will provide grants of $50,000 to $100,000 to three to five American museums in its first year. The money comes from the U.S. State Department.
The program is aimed at regions and communities that would benefit most from a better connection with, and understanding of, American people and culture, says Ms. Rosenbaum, quoting materials from the association about the program.
Ms. Rosenbaum criticizes the program’s request for proposals, which suggests “specific ‘project…
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June 19, 2007, 11:18 am
By Nicole Lewis
Arts groups large and small should start assessing and improving their impact on the environment, writes Andrew Taylor in The Artful Manager. Mr. Taylor is director of the Bolz Center for Arts Management at the University Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.
Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, in Vienna, Va., has already begun such a process, he writes, by creating a national advisory group to assess the organization’s “environmental footprint.”
The group, which has a large outdoor amphitheater as well as a smaller indoor space for performances, plans to take steps to turn the organization into “an environmental model and resource for artists and arts presenters around the country.”
Mr. Taylor also writes that the Live Earth concerts scheduled for July 7 in nine cities worldwide will follow a new set of “green event guidelines” designed to reduce the environmental…
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May 23, 2007, 6:49 pm
By Nicole Lewis
The Smithsonian American Art Museum lost out on a major gift when Peter Lunder and his wife, Paula, donated 500 objects worth more than $100-million to Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, writes Lee Rosenbaum, a cultural journalist, on the blog CultureGrrl.
The Lunders had previously given the Smithsonian money to endow the American Art Museum’s new conservation facility. But Colby should only really celebrate its good fortune if the Lunders’ gift has also come with the finances to pay for it, says Ms. Rosenbaum.
“Let’s hope he’s also endowed Colby’s museum, so we don’t later have another Fisk or Randolph Macon situation,” writes Ms. Rosenbaum.
Fisk University, in Nashville Tenn., is in the midst of trying to sell two artworks it received as gifts, including a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, in order to “stabilize its long-term financial situation,” Ms. Rosenbaum wrote.
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And this…
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May 8, 2007, 4:18 pm
By Nicole Lewis
Arts groups don’t stand a chance of recruiting the best and brightest workers because many organizations and their board members believe that spending money on programs is legitimate but spending it on salaries is not, writes an anonymous blogger from Asheville, N.C. on her Web site, Bookgirl.
“Corporate society assumes that good products and programs are the result of smart people who envision, plan, execute, and manage them effectively,” writes the blogger, who identifies herself as a book artist and marketing professional. “It recognizes that if its best people are not compensated appropriately they will leave or become disaffected (and thus less effective) or both,” she writes. “Why should these assumptions be different in a nonprofit environment?”
The author criticizes the notion that employees of arts groups should do their work for the love of their organizations and not a …
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April 26, 2007, 6:56 pm
By Nicole Lewis
It’s a “big deal” that the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, plans to charge admission to a new permanent butterfly exhibit at the Natural History Museum, writes Tyler Green in Modern Art Notes. Mr. Green is a freelance writer who lives in Washington.
Historically admission to all Smithsonian museums has been free, but The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the Smithsonian’s board of regents voted in January to charge $5 for the exhibit, with one day of the week set aside for free admission.
Mr. Green names five people or organizations he says should speak up and say charging a fee to visit any part of 19 museums that make up the Smithsonian is wrong. Among them: Americans for the Arts, a lobbying group in Washington.
“The primary arts lobby in DC hasn’t said a word. (It’s worth noting that the organization’s VP for “leadership alliances” is married to a senior…
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