We’re excited to share big news for the South Florida arts community: Knight Foundation is committing $23 million in new funding for arts and culture.
Part of a two-pronged strategy, the funding will go to some of the region’s leading arts institutions and to fund more grassroots projects by continuing the Knight Arts Challenge through 2015.
READ MORE
“34 ideas win Knight Arts Challenge Miami”
press release on Knightfoundation.org
“Making art general in South Florida: @knightfdn celebrates the local cultural community” by Elizabeth R. Miller on Knight Blog
Everywhere you go in South Florida, we want you to have an encounter with art. As Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen told the Miami Herald: “The point of all of this, as I never tire of saying, is we want to make art general in Miami. To do that, you want to support arts institutions that day in and day out offer opportunities for people in Miami to see and feel and participate and engage art… and then at the same time engaging anybody in Miami who has an idea.”
The institutions receiving funding are:
- Miami City Ballet ($5 million): to help the ballet increase its outreach and add new works to its repertoire, including new commissions.
- The Wolfsonian-FIU ($5 million): to engage the community by developing dynamic programming and expanding its digital reach.
- Cleveland Orchestra ($2 million): to expand its subscription season to four weekends of concerts and significantly increases its educational outreach programs to students.
- Arts education ($1 million): To expand the horizons of the next generation of local artists by offering scholarships to DASH and New World students for cultural field trips to New York City and Europe.
- Borscht Film Festival ($500,000): to help the festival expand its efforts and create more “only in Miami” stories.
- Miami International Film Festival ($500,000): to further the expansion of Ibero-American film through awards at this annual event.
We decided to renew the challenge after commissioning a study on the contest’s impact. It found that challenge funding has helped fuel the local art scene, and especially helped the smaller, entrepreneurial projects that makes Miami so unique.
You can read more about the new funding in the Herald and Artinfo.
Tomorrow night, we’ll be announcing the 2012 winners of the Knight Arts Challenge – look for them at 7 p.m. here at KnightArts.org. About half are projects driven by small organizations and individuals – we’re looking forward to seeing their work, and the community, develop further.
By Dennis Scholl, vice president/Arts at Knight Foundation
Cleveland Orchestra musician Robert Woolfrey working with students at The Barnyard neighborhood community center in Coconut Grove Village West, Miami Credit: Roger Mastroianni
Will their be a new initiative coming up to which we can apply? We are a non-profit artist cooperative working in partnership with the City of Lake Worth and the Lake Worth CRA (LULA) to build a facility that will become part of the economic engine (through our cultural input) in an economically depressed region. No such facility exists in a 200 mile radius of our location. We are a 501c3 and have been since 2005. We operate a successful cooperative gallery in Lake Worth featuring 30 local artists. We have over 100 additional artists waiting for the glass-blowing, kiln complex, 3-d studio space to be built. We have an ideal location. We have a promise of funding if we can secure other sources. Thank you. Joyce Brown- Flamingo Clay Studio- 215-205-9441- JClay6@aol.com