« Back to Summer 2009

Pasadena Museum of California Art officials were thrilled when two employees who work at NASA's nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed curating a show featuring artistic representations of scientific data.

But as the cost of the exhibition, Data + Art: Science and Art in the Age of Information, became clear — there would be huge images projected onto walls and a live computerized display of actual national flight traffic, among other things — museum Executive Director Jenkins Shannon worried that she could not afford to do the show justice.

Then the museum received a hoped-for $30,000 grant from The James Irvine Foundation's new Creative Connections Fund.

"Without the support, we probably would have had to downsize or postpone the exhibition," Shannon said. Instead, the show turned out to be one of the Pasadena museum's most popular ever, drawing an estimated 6,500 people over an 11-week period.

It was just the sort of outcome that Irvine’s Arts program was hoping for last year when it launched the Creative Connections Fund, a vehicle for supporting small and midsize organizations involved in all arts disciplines. The fund offers grants up to $50,000, through an open, competitive application process.

Recently, Irvine announced the latest round of CCF grants totaling $934,000 to 24 organizations across the state, supporting a wide variety of art forms, including dance, theater, music and visual and media arts. Proposals for a second round of 2009 grants are being accepted through August 3, and grants for that round will be announced in the fall.

John McGuirk, Director of Irvine’s Arts program, said that the Foundation was very pleased with the results from the CCF's $1.8 million in grants in 2008, so much so that Irvine had increased the grant pool to $2 million this year, disbursed in two rounds.

"We were so thrilled with the number and quality of applications from 2008 that we allocated more resources in 2009 to this fund," McGuirk said. "In a time of diminishing resources, to put more money toward this fund demonstrates the traction that we think it's having."

The Creative Connections Fund was conceived as a complement to Irvine’s primary, invitation-only Arts grantmaking, which typically supports organizations with budgets greater than $2 million. Its goal is to support a broader range of small organizations with projects that involve a diversity of audiences, artistic mediums, venues and geographic locations.

Some examples of recent CCF-funded grantees give a sense of this diversity:

• In the Central Valley, Arte Americas, a Mexican cultural center based in Fresno, is using a $44,000 grant to develop visual arts programs aimed at a youth audience and to train youth volunteers.
• In East Oakland, the Eastside Arts Alliance received a $30,000 grant to promote intergenerational collaboration between hip-hop artists and older jazz instrumentalists, as part of the organization’s jazz performances and workshops.
• And in Sebastopol, Voice of Roma, a cultural organization that promotes understanding about Romani people, an ethnic group with South Asian origins, will use a $32,000 grant to conduct outreach in communities with sizeable Romani populations.

One significant change this year is that applicants have been asked to consider a recently released Irvine Foundation-sponsored report that challenges arts organizations and funders to adopt a more inclusive definition of arts and cultural engagement, and to embrace innovative outreach strategies.

The study, titled "Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions," relied on two surveys of more than 6,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley and Inland Empire that found a wide range of activity — in music, theater and drama, reading and writing, dance, and visual arts and crafts — happening outside the traditional infrastructure of nonprofit arts organizations and facilities.

"We are encouraging applicants to take a look to see where cultural participation is happening, where people are engaging in the arts," said Rick Noguchi, Arts Program Officer at Irvine.

The result is that the latest round of CCF grants includes more projects using venues and targeting audiences that do not fit the profile of traditional grant recipients, Noguchi said. One new grantee, the Merced County Arts Council, will partner with local businesses in downtown Merced to invite local artists to exhibit their work in nontraditional venues, such as vacant storefronts.

Irvine invites CCF proposals for projects in two categories:

• Artistic Creativity — These are projects that create new works, or offer a contemporary reinterpretation of classic works, and involve artists working in collaboration with a local nonprofit organization.
• Cultural Participation — These are projects in which community-based arts organizations focus on audience development — either by growing their current audience, engaging their audience in new ways or attracting a new demographic.

In the latter category, Noguchi notes that the Foundation is looking more closely at proposals to fund outreach and marketing strategies. Successful applicants have shown specifically how they were going to expand or deepen engagement with the arts in some measurable way, he said.

One example is the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Los Angeles, which received a $50,000 grant to help strengthen engagement with its target Latino audience, which is concentrated in Northeast Los Angeles, Wilmington, San Pedro and Pacoima.

The orchestra plays six concerts a season, free of charge, each with audiences of about 1,000 people. In addition, smaller groups of orchestra members do hundreds of performances in community centers and schools, reaching some 20,000 people. The organization also runs a string instrument education program for about 200 children a year.

The orchestra is using its Irvine grant to hire a part-time coordinator to set up a volunteer support network, Los Promotores de la Orquestra, that conducts outreach, hosts receptions and solicits support from local businesses.

"The funding is helping us make the arts accessible to those who don't usually get it,” said Sonia Marie De Leon de Vega, the orchestra's Executive and Artistic Director. And the payback, she said, is incalculable.

Vega told the story of a 19-year-old woman who wrote her a poetic note about how hearing the orchestra play had impacted her. "This is the first time I listened to this kind of music. Your music deeply touched my soul," Vega quoted. "Reading about your work, I am now inspired to go out and help my Latino community."

The grant to the Santa Cecilia Orchestra reflects the Foundation’s focus on supporting diversity in the arts, said McGuirk, Irvine’s Arts program director. The goal is to support projects aimed at a broad range of audiences, mediums, venues and geographic locations, as well as to make the arts accessible to people who might not usually have access to it.

"We want this to be inclusive and demonstrate the vibrancy of the arts throughout the state,” McGuirk said.