In Sunday’s (6/23) Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), Elizabeth Kramer reports on how the elimination of National Endowment for the Arts grants to individuals in 1995 has affected local artists and funding institutions: “A few organizations in the Louisville region have solidly committed themselves to financially supporting individual artists.… In Kentucky, government commitment comes with the Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowships, which the Kentucky Arts Council awards each year to a handful of artists.” Composer Jeremy Beck’s Al Smith Fellowship helped him produce a CD with the Pittsburgh chamber group IonSound Project.” Ruby Lerner, president and executive director of Creative Capital, “a New York-based organization founded in 1999 that grants money to individual artists in tandem with career development services,” said she has “seen a lot of changes in the grant-making world in the four decades she has worked in it, including public and private efforts to fill the gap the NEA left in 1995. Despite those efforts, she said, that gap is too big.”
Posted June 26, 2013
