Only organizations with annual budgets of $250,000 or less, or independent performers, are eligible.
The Barr Foundation is contributing an additional $250,000 to the program, making for a total of $1.75 million to be distributed across three years.
Allyson Esposito, the Boston Foundation‘s director of arts and culture, says the new fund will support “new work, culturally specific work, and avant-garde and contemporary work.”
“There’s a need to give artists and small organizations some wiggle room to create new works, to experiment,” she added. Those artist grants will be divided into awards of up to $1,000 distributed throughout the year, and fellowship-style grants of up to $10,000 intended to support artists’ work broadly.
EdVesters, the Boston-based philanthropy centered on bolstering public education, was expected to announce $650,000 in new grants for its program known as Boston Public School Arts Expansion; the city school system will also begin a revamp of its arts-education policy, which dates to the early 1990s.
Though the prospect looms as a long-term goal, neither the Boston Creates report nor the newly announced programs call for any specific mechanism to create a dedicated revenue stream that would fund efforts like these into the future something that would potentially be of much greater import than any initiative unveiled this week.
“I am committed to finding a sustainable public funding stream for arts and culture. A cultural facilities study is underway, but Walsh also announced a pilot program to encourage Boston organizations to make existing spaces available to performers.
Initial participants are the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, which will make an auditorium available in evening hours; the AT&T flagship store, with a balcony space suitable for rehearsals; and the Plummers & Gasfitters Local 12 union hall in Dorchester.
Though AT&T is involved in the rehearsal space pilot program and Eastern Bank has pledged new money to the Boston Cultural Council, other corporate support or corporate dollars does not appear to be a key component of the newly announced efforts.
When asked if the city reached out to General Electric which was lured to its planned headquarters in the Seaport District with help from a package of city and state incentives including $20 million in property tax breaks to contribute funds or otherwise participate, Joyce Linehan, the mayor’s chief of policy, said only that the city is “approaching any corporation that wants to talk to us about this plan.”
“Once corporations start to see the incredible investment of the city and of the philanthropic world, and the mayor gets up to use the bully pulpit to say ‘This is something that’s very important to me,’ as he’s said all along, then corporations will begin to come along,” Linehan said in an interview at City Hall.
In-kind donations from area museums include a pledge from the Museum of Fine Arts to assist the city with maintenance and preservation of publicly owned art.
