Public art funding rules in the United states are often not completely understood or clearly explained. Public art funding rules can be confusing, but it is important to understand the public art funding rules.
Public art funding rules are often not completely understood or clearly explained. Public Art Funding Rules in the United States: A blog about public art funding rules in the United States.
Public Art Funding Rules in the United States: A blog about public art funding rules in the United States.
Public Art Funding Rules in the United States: A blog about public art funding rules in the United States.
Public Art Funding Rules in the United States: A blog about public art funding rules in the United States.
Public Art Funding Rules in the United States: A blog about public art funding rules in the United States.
Public Art Funding Rules in the United States: A blog about public art funding rules in the United states.
Public Art Funding Rules in the United States: A blog about public art funding rules in the United States.
Rules for Public Art Funding in the United States
Public art is a growing field of endeavor, and as it grows, it requires more rules and regulations. This blog is meant to be a resource for anyone interested in public art.
Posting guidelines: Any potential posting must be related to public art or its funding. This includes artists, administrators, funders or others involved with the creation of public art. The author should have first-hand knowledge of what they are writing about.
Note: Any postings that do not follow these guidelines will be deleted without notice.
This blog is moderated by me, Daniel Grant. I can be reached at danielg@publicartfundingrules.com . If you have a question or comment regarding a post please use the comment section below that post.”
The following is an overview of public art funding rules in the United States. If you are looking for help understanding public art funding rules in the United States, this is a good place to start.
Public Art Funding Rules in the United States
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is responsible for providing assistance to artists and arts organizations through grants, fellowships, and tax incentives; NEA information on funding: http://www.arts.gov/grants/funding
Federal tax incentives include both a credit to businesses that fund public art projects and a deduction provided to individual taxpayers who support public art projects with their own money; more details are available at http://www.irs.gov/publications/p517/ar02.html
The National Association of Counties provides a guide to local funding opportunities for public art projects; view this document at http://www.naco.org/local-government-services/programs/public-art/public-art-funding-opportunities-guide
Many states also provide government support for public art projects; see the Public Art Network directory of state arts agencies at http://www.publicartnetwork.org/states
Public art funding rules in the United States are very, very complicated. In fact, they are so complicated that almost no one understands them. That’s what I realized a few years back when I started writing about public art, and began asking questions. The answers I got would always start off with a long string of buzzwords—programs, criteria, guidelines, terms of reference—and then gradually unravel into something that made sense to me. Or at least what seemed to me like it could be made sense of.
The more I asked people, the more it dawned on me that this was going to be a big job for someone—a big job for a lot of someones, actually. It would mean talking to every major public art funder in the U.S., plus many small ones; reading their websites and publications; poring over their artistic selection policies; studying their relevant brochures and catalogues; attending their conferences; querying experts in the field; researching funding histories at different venues; and probably some other things too.
Then I’d have to write all this down in some sort of way that ordinary people could understand—which means I’d have to learn how to write in plain English (or plain American), which is a skill I
In the United States, public art is almost always funded on a 50% grant/50% loan basis. This means that the artist gets half the cost of the work from the commissioning agency, and half from loans, grants, or direct sales of the work.
This was not always so. In the 1960s in New York City, for example, public art was funded on a 100% grant basis: artists got all their money up front. This led to some abuses, e.g., artists who had no intention of doing anything with the commission except getting paid for it. In 1971 New York City changed its rules to require loans, and most other cities have done so since.
Art funding is a crazy and complicated system. I’ve known people who have spent years working to understand it, and they still don’t know everything. The truth seems to be that there are no general rules, only trends and tendencies – but there are so many exceptions to every trend and tendency that it takes a lot of work to find the ways in which things usually work.
This blog is dedicated to collecting what I’ve learned about public art funding, with the hope that it will be useful to other people who want to do public art projects but don’t want to spend years figuring out how it works.
I would like to tell you about how much money your local government spends on public art. But I can’t.
Should I be able to? The Federal government has a website that supposedly gives you this information—but it doesn’t work. Many states have websites too—but they either don’t have the information or it’s hidden behind a login. Local governments don’t always have this information, and when they do, it’s hard to find.
In contrast, if you want the specific details of how your tax dollars are spent on military bases, that information is easy to find. It’s in plain sight on the Defense Department’s website. If you want to see how much money is spent on prisons, that information is also online. But if you want to see how your tax dollars are being spent on art, that information is nowhere to be found.
The lack of transparency around public arts funding is bad enough when it comes to local government spending—but things get even worse when we look at state and federal spending. There are federal rules (established by Congress in 1982) that require every state receiving arts funding to create an agency that “promotes public awareness of and participation in the arts,” but these agencies are seldom provided with the resources needed to fulfill their
