Tag Archive: Creative Work Fund

  1. Inspired by Creative Work Fund Grants

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    With great enthusiasm we are amplifying the 30th year of Creative Work Fund grantmaking. This funder collaborative of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation supports projects that show us how the making of art together is a necessary act. Through the 470 collaborations funded over the last three decades, we see that when artists and organizations are in partnership, they strengthen the Bay Area. This year, CWF granted $882,000 to 17 collaborations of artists and organizations making new work in the Bay: visual art, theater, music composition, dance, artistic activism, social practice, and more. 

    Read the full grant announcement and review the list of grantees here. 

    With projects rooted in the power of history, visibility, and imagination, artists are breaking new ground. Projects will activate public space, using art as an ecstatic form of community organizing, reminding us that the future begins out in the open. And they show how artists model collective care, transformative healing, and joy. 

    A Creative Wellspring Within

    Our recent blog on building trust and busting silos shared the story of how Team CWF, a subset of Walter & Elise Haas Fund staff, uses inclusive practices to design, manage, and engage with each other and with community to realize this unique grantmaking. CWF is a place for staff to have deep interaction with the arts, to work directly with artists, and to walk through the abundant garden of creative aspiration that applicants share with us: showing us what is inspiring, what is timely, and what is possible. When we share our work in progress with our colleagues, the grantmaking methods we’ve developed to serve artists and organizations inspires new approaches. We take inspiration from CWF grantseekers and grantees to 

    • Take risks. 
    • Believe in the power of artists to lead and transform communities. 
    • Tell the story about how collaborations allow us to achieve things none of us could achieve on our own. 

    Creative Next Steps Ahead

    Team CWF is taking the pulse of artists, organizations, and community members to understand what is most valuable about this program and spending the rest of the year designing future grantmaking. We’ll weave in celebrations for the 2024 cohort, and for CWF’s 30th year. Sign up to receive CWF announcements and opportunities to connect to the work of CWF grantees. 

  2. CWF Now Accepting Letters of Inquiry for Projects Featuring Literary and Traditional Artists

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    The Creative Work Fund (CWF) is now inviting letters of inquiry from literary or traditional artists and nonprofit organizations looking to produce collaborative projects. If you’re interested in applying for one of these highly competitive $10,000 to $40,000 grants, we encourage you to attend one of our informational seminars or webinars (details below).

    Letters of inquiry are due by December 2, 2016. Of those that apply, approximately 50 will be invited to submit detailed proposals. Awarded grants will be announced August 1, 2017.

    We see these grants as paying artists to practice their disciplines and hone their skills as collaborators. Through creative working partnerships, local artists and nonprofits can achieve excellence, connect with members of the public who are new to their work, and draw attention to communities’ needs.

    The Creative Work Fund is a program of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund that is supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Since its inception in 1994, CWF has contributed more than $11 million to advance art-making by Northern California artists in a variety of disciplines. Grants are awarded to genuine, creative partnerships between artists and nonprofit organizations. Each year, CWF focuses on projects from different disciplines.

    Letters of inquiry for the December 2016 deadline must feature a lead artist with a strong track record as a literary artist or traditional artist and involve a collaboration between that artist and a nonprofit organization. The Creative Work Fund uses the following definitions in determining eligibility:

    • Literary artists write, publish, or perform poetry, spoken word poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. (Playwrights apply with performing artists, who will be invited in a future year.)
    • Traditional artists create in art forms learned as part of the cultural life of a group of people whose members have a common ethnic heritage, language, religion, occupation, or region. These expressions are deeply rooted in and reflect a community’s shared standards of beauty, values, or life experiences. Often they are learned orally or by emulation. Traditional artists may excel as individual artists, work as a group, or work collectively. They may produce works in a variety of forms — oral traditions, performances, crafts, multidisciplinary works, and others.

    The CWF grant program emphasizes the creation of new work — not distribution or productions of work already developed. To be eligible to apply, the principal collaborating artists and organizations must live or be and have been located in, for at least two years, the Northern California counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Monterey, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano or Sonoma.

    Seminars and Webinars

    The CWF offers several optional seminars and webinars for potential applicants. While these are not required, they are highly recommended, especially if the applicant is not familiar with the Fund. To attend a seminar, you should reserve a space online.

    Webinars
    Webinars are produced in conjunction with The Foundation Center. Please sign up online.

    • Monday, September 12, 2016, noon – 1 p.m.
    • Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 6 – 7 p.m.
    • Tuesday, October 25, 2016, 6 – 7 p.m.
    • Monday, October 31, 2016, noon – 1 p.m.

  3. Illuminating Philanthropy: Data, Art, and Transparency

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    When I enter the Walter & Elise Haas Fund’s offices most mornings, natural light streams in through a skylight to illuminate Spectra: A Counting — the Fund’s recently commissioned artwork by Taraneh Hemami. In this early light, through this piece of art, one can see a wash of color and the 320,000 glass segments from which it is composed.

    Spectra: A Counting is a curtain of beads. In this curtain, each individual bead represents $10,000 of the Fund’s grantmaking. Taken together, they visually encapsulate the past 30 years of Fund grantmaking. Spectra, in the language of art, reveals the complex story of a foundation responding to changing times while maintaining its core values.

    Taraneh-25 by Shadi YousefianInsightful evaluation of grantmaking requires both stories and data. When I approached Taraneh Hemami about becoming the sixth artist commissioned to create a work for our office’s large west wall, I was thinking of the power of her story-gathering projects. West Wall commissions are offered to select Creative Work Fund grantees (Hemami’s Creative Work Fund grant was awarded in 2000). For that project she collected stories, letters, and images from Iranians who had left their homeland for the United States. She etched their personal stories onto mirrored mosaic bricks. The work was exhibited in several venues and installed as a permanent piece, Hall of Reflections, in the Persian Center in Berkeley.

    The events of September 11, 2001 occurred just as Hemami was beginning to collect materials for that piece. She gathered most of its content over the following twelve months. Hall of Reflections was selected for the 2003 International Sharjah Biennial and that spring, as Hemami was in the United Arab Emirates installing the show, the Iraq war broke out. The United States-led coalition began bombing Baghdad as Hemami exhibited her etched and broken mirrors in one of their most dramatic forms: heaped as a mound of rubble.

    Taraneh-91 by Shadi YousefianHer West Wall proposal to the Walter & Elise Haas Fund was to tell a different kind of history — one based on the Fund’s grantmaking data. The philanthropy field is responding to the challenge of becoming more transparent about its processes and its effectiveness. The Fund specifically has been actively seeking ways to better share information about its grantmaking.

    This made her proposal even more intriguing. What might we learn when an artist like Taraneh Hemami used creative data visualization to aid us in increased transparency?

    The Walter & Elise Haas Fund is 64 years old, but its accessible data only ranges back 30 years (since 1984). Hemami compiled, analyzed, and shuffled that grant information. From the beginning, she sought to literally illuminate the data. Her first idea was to create a lightbox, with the data mapped in concentric circles, like rings in an old growth tree. The weight of that model made it impractical, however.

    Taraneh-100 by Shadi YousefianShe then turned to colored glass beads, chosen for their reflective beauty and because she often combines old and new art making techniques in her work. In Spectra, each strand of beads represents $400,000. Each section of the finished work represents a type of organization or grant. Because the Fund’s grantmaking has shifted over the decades, Hemami and the Fund’s staff had to combine some types of organizations and themes for Spectra or she would have run out of available colors and textures of beads.

    These facts about the content of the work gloss over the labor of making it. Spectra: A Counting required a deep commitment to craft. Painstakingly counting, threading, and knotting each strand took many hours of labor.

    Hemami notes, “I think the patterns and colors created from the data are similar to carpet mapping processes. The beading is very aligned with rosary beads and counting the beads over and over, similar to rituals of prayer.” She sees the reflective beauty of light and colors standing for hope.

    At a time when dashboards and pie charts abound, I propose that the Walter & Elise Haas Fund has the most beautiful data visualization in philanthropy. It reflects the Fund’s belief in transparency. And in art.

     

    Images by Shadi Yousefian

     

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