An Open Invitation to Arts Funders
Bridgit Antoinette Evans, Pop Culture Collaborative
Saartjie Baartman's remains were rematriated to South Africa due in large part to the outpouring of creative storytelling and protests by artists around the world. Image courtesy of author.
I had a big problem.
It was the Fall of 2000, and I was preparing to produce The Venus Project, a series of international theater and media productions inspired by Pulitzer Prize–winner Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Venus. The project would launch in South Africa, the birthplace of Saartjie Baartman, an Indigenous Khoisan woman trafficked from Capetown to London in 1810 and displayed in a Piccadilly Circus “freak show” as the Venus Hottentot. She was later sold to a scientist in Paris, who poked and prodded her body to advance eugenic theories of White superiority, and after her death at the age of 26—just five years after her arrival in Europe—donated her genitalia and other dissected body parts to the Musée de l’Homme, where they sat on public display until 1976.
Following the public outcry of artists, including Parks and prize-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander (now president of Mellon Foundation), activists, and politicians like Nelson Mandela, the museum finally released Saartjie’s remains to be rematriated to her homeland in the Eastern Cape in a ceremony broadcast live on CNN across the African continent. The Venus Project was a culture change strategy designed by an international team of artists to build support for movements to end human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.
Like so many artists, I had a big vision and years of planning, but limited experience with arts funding. Still, I was optimistic, so I did what many artist-producers did in the early 2000s: I mailed dozens of letters to foundations based on Foundation Center profiles indicating their interest in supporting the arts or social justice.
I think you know where this story is going.
Within weeks, I began to receive a deluge of what I call ”Thank You, But” letters.
“Thank you but we don’t fund individual artists.”
“Thank you but we don’t fund political art.”
“Thank you but we fund social justice, not art.”
This deluge of rejection sent me into a prolonged funk. Eventually, I got back to the work, ultimately refocusing my strategy on two groups of allies: high-profile artist-activists and women of color arts funders. Tony-winner Andre DeShield’s (Hades Town) was my first donor, followed by Jada Pinkett Smith and George C. Wolf, who donated a venue at the Public Theater for a benefit reading of the play in which I performed alongside Joe Morton, Tim Robbins, and Kathleen Chalfant. Second, I sought out guidance from the growing ecosystem of BIPOC arts funders, many of whom were Black women already beginning to disrupt patterns of inequity in arts philanthropy. Linda Walton, then the director of the Arts International Fund seeded by the Doris Duke Foundation, awarded my first grant; Maurine Knighton, then director of 651 Arts, helped me access vital support for African artists on our team; and Emilya Cachapero’s team at Theater Communications Group (TCG) later supported the Central European leg of The Venus Project. Due to their leadership, vision, and support, The Venus Project debuted in Johannesburg and Capetown, South Africa, in 2002, and over the next decade, engaged communities in the U.S., UK, France, and Croatia.
A New Artistic Home
Still, those “Thank You, But” letters have never lost their sting. They conveyed to me—a Black, queer, disabled woman and independent artist with a passion for social justice—that the American theater was not my home.
In a 2011 report, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) found that wealthy, largely White-led cultural institutions received the lion’s share of arts funding, with just 10% of arts funding benefiting marginalized communities, and only 4% supporting art for social justice. (Notably, a follow-up report published by the Helicon Collaborative six years later found that the inequities in funding were getting worse, not better for communities of color, insights that GIA’s members translated into action as they advanced racial equity in the arts and philanthropy.) Failure to fund BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+, and disabled artists not only undermines representation and economic opportunity; it also suppresses our ability to bring our creativity and leadership to critical movements for justice that directly affect our well-being and survival.
Eventually, I found belonging in the burgeoning culture change field, a close cousin to the art for social justice field in which artists, narrative and cultural strategists, researchers, and movement organizers were testing ways to make art and media that addresses narrative harm and builds narrative power for social justice. Instead of playwrights, directors, and actors, my collaborators were visionary leaders like human trafficking expert Rachel Lloyd and labor organizer Ai-jen Poo. Here, I began to envision how philanthropy, the arts and entertainment sectors, and social justice movements could join forces to accelerate the pace of societal change.
From Artist to Arts Funder
Today, I advance this vision as the CEO of the Pop Culture Collaborative, a philanthropic fund that has organized more than $50 million dollars to support the BIPOC-led pop culture narrative change field of artists, cultural strategists, researchers, and movement leaders working together to build the yearning in millions of people for the America we are capable of becoming: a just and pluralist nation where everyone belongs, inherently, and is treated as such.
During the six years of the Collaborative’s operations, our team has experimented with a range of strategies to support the leadership and innovation of intersectional BIPOC artists, especially those who also identify as women, queer, trans, gender expansive, and/or disabled. In our early years, we listened to artists and heard their desire for support to address inequities in the arts and entertainment industries. We supported writer-producers Emil Pinnock (Unleashing Giants) and Sameer Gardezi (Break the Room Media) to test new television writers rooms models that dismantled the exclusivity of traditional writers rooms, welcoming activists and artists with direct lived experience of systemic racism, Islamophobia, mass incarceration, and other injustices. We supported the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity, founded by a collective of BIPOC writers in Hollywood, to conduct research revealing the ugly truth of how the television industry systemically blocks BIPOC writers from building careers in Hollywood.
Lameece Issaq, playwright, actor, and founding artistic director of the Obie Award-winning Noor Theatre in New York City, works with stage director Mikael Tara Garver and actor-producer Chiké Okonkwo to explore major cultural shifts in which artists have seeded pluralist ideas and narratives. Photo courtesy of author.
Next, we launched our Artists Advancing Cultural Change strategy, through which we resourced BIPOC-led cultural organizations and teams to host cohorts of artists to develop artistic projects in close community and thought partnership with other artists. Noor Theatre hosted three annual cohorts of Middle Eastern playwrights who developed work for television, film, and Broadway theater; while Open Television, an artist incubator in Chicago, created a fellowship program and online learning platform for BIPOC queer and gender expansive film, television, and digital storytellers.
Image courtesy of author.
In 2020, we launched Becoming America, a multimillion dollar fund that has supported more than 80 creators to work in coordinated narrative networks to develop, produce, and distribute art and other creative content that ignites public yearning for our pluralist future. Collectively, these grantees reached 100 million people across the country during a tumultuous year marked by a pandemic, racial justice uprisings, and a contentious election.
Lessons from Our Journey
As we’ve evolved our grantmaking strategies to resource artists, five big ideas have emerged:
Robust and flexible funding for individual artists matters. The lion’s share of arts funding is structured as trickle-down support: large institutions are funded to develop, produce, or present artistic work, while freelance artists receive support in the form of salaried or consulting jobs, commissioning fees, production contracts, or artist residencies—a system that places this funding behind a decision-making firewall controlled by primarily White boards and staff at foundations and cultural institutions. The Pop Culture Collaborative offers direct funding to organizations and creative projects led by BIPOC artists, irrespective of their affiliation with major institutions. Our grants tend to be larger than most funding for individual artists and independent projects, ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 per grantee. We also offer core support grants for artists, which enables them to flexibly allocate funds for their creative projects as well as life expenses. This approach requires that we normalize fiscal sponsorship in our grantee community, staff, and board.
Open access matters, too. The Pop Culture Collaborative maintains idea submission portals on our website for artists who wish to share information about their projects with us. More important, every member of our grantmaking staff receives and reviews all submissions, creating an active rapport between our organization and a broad ecosystem of artists across the U.S. In fact, a majority of the 80+ artist-led projects we have funded have come as a result of submissions to our various online portals.
Increasingly, artists yearn to contribute to narrative change for justice. Many artists—particularly those historically excluded from the American story—feel a yearning to contribute to narrative change efforts that advance social justice. As arts funders, we can more directly respond to this yearning by funding artists to develop narrative change expertise and connect with movement leaders to develop art that galvanizes audiences around justice issues.
Big change requires big groups. No one artist or organization can achieve the depth and scale of narrative and cultural change we need on their own. In addition to funding individual art projects, the Collaborative supports grantees to hone their craft and build narrative power in close community with their peers. Grantees like Harness, Storyline Partners, Center for Cultural Power, and The Opportunity Agenda organize convenings and networks that enable artists to meet new collaborators, imagine new projects, engage in thought partnership, and connect with funders who invest in artist-led narrative change strategies.
By working together, artists can achieve narrative immersion. Through the Becoming America Fund, the Collaborative has innovated and tested a narrative systems approach in which artists and other content creators work together to develop and produce artistic projects that are wildly unique in their form and content, while also sharing some narrative priorities. Becoming America grantees are able to access the creative advice and collaboration of dozens of other network members as they develop, produce, and distribute their work. And as their work makes its way into the world, their stories create a surround sound experience for audiences—a “call and response” as shared narratives create a chorus across the films, televisions shows, digital videos and series, podcasts, songs and music videos, books, essays, murals, and other content that millions of people engage with.
Writer-Director Ava DuVernay welcomes over 100 artists, activists, cultural strategists, and funders to the ARRAY creative campus in Los Angeles for EntertainChange 2018, a field-wide gathering designed to spark relationships, seed collaborations, and build bridges between arts ecosystems and social justice movements. Photo courtesy of author.
In a formal evaluation we conducted with Engage R&D in 2022, artists in the Becoming America narrative network placed a high value on this network experience, including support that enabled them to produce their individual work while also building relationships and collectively creating narrative immersion.
The Pop Culture Collaborative was founded by a group of primarily BIPOC women in philanthropy—including Maurine Knighton, the early champion who helped make The Venus Project possible 20+ years ago. Margaret Morton, another Black woman leader in arts philanthropy at Ford Foundation, is now one of the Collaborative’s largest funders. These funders understand that BIPOC leadership has always been a catalytic force that has spurred social progress in the arts, social justice, and philanthropic sectors and in American culture. They also recognize how critical it is to resource artists to work together to achieve narrative transformation.
We look forward to working with you and within the GIA community in pursuit of this vision.
More than 100 arts and social justice funders gather at the ARRAY creative campus for EntertainChange: Philanthropy (2019), a first of its kind convening of the Collaborative's learning community for grantmakers investing in the pop culture narrative change field. Photo courtesy of author.
ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE
As a Black woman, artist, and trans rights activist, Shea Diamond elicits joyous pride in our fluid selves though dance hits such as “I Am America,” and holds our collective need to mourn, heal, and reconnect with ballads such as “Seen It All.” Her songs reflect the power that pop culture has to expand public imagination, and that’s why we are so honored that Shea agreed to be featured as our Becoming America 2022 cover artist.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bridgit Antoinette Evans is CEO at Pop Culture Collaborative. She is widely recognized as one of the foremost thought leaders in the culture change strategy field. A professional artist and strategist, she has dedicated her career to the relentless investigation of the potential of artists to drive cultural change in society. Fifteen years of work at the intersection of pop culture storytelling and social change has evolved into a vision for a new, hybrid culture change field in which creative and social justice leaders work together to create and popularize stories that shape the narratives, values, beliefs, and behaviors that define American culture. In 2016, Bridgit was a Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellow, piloting Culture Changes Us, a coordinated learning system designed to accelerate the social justice sectors’ understanding and use of culture change strategy. For Unbound Philanthropy and Ford Foundation, she has led multi-year culture change research and strategy design projects aimed at unearthing breakthrough narrative and engagement strategies for the immigrant rights and gender justice movements.
In 2008, Bridgit founded Fuel | We Power Change, a culture change strategy studio in New York City, as the home for her collaborations with leading social change innovators. Through this work she designed long-term culture change strategies for social movements that used transportive story experiences, often in the pop culture realm, to shift the thoughts and feelings of mass audiences. Strategy design commissions include the NYCLU/ACLU Policing Project, Make It Work campaign; National Domestic Workers Alliance’s #BeTheHelp strategy featuring Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Cicely Tyson, Amy Poehler, and other artists; Breakthrough’s #ImHere for Immigrant Women strategy; GEMS’ Girls Are Not for Sale strategy featuring Beyonce, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Sinead O’Connor, Mary J Blige, and more; and Save Darfur’s “Live for Darfur” campaign chaired by Don Cheadle and Djimon Hounsou. Drawing insights from these commissions, Bridgit has traveled by invitation to the UK, France, Austria, Croatia, Brazil, South Africa, and throughout the U.S. to present talks, lectures, and workshops for some of the world’s most innovative movement leaders and artists. She often points to her roots as a professional Off Broadway actor and devised theater producer as the source of her deep passion for culture change strategy. She received her MFA from Columbia University and BA from Stanford University.
Fifteen years of work at the intersection of pop culture storytelling and social change has evolved into a vision for a new, hybrid culture change field in which creative and social justice leaders work together to create and popularize stories that shape the narratives, values, beliefs, and behaviors that define American culture.
