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marketing efforts, mount new plays, broaden the ethnic makeup of their
management, experiment with color-blind casting, increase community
outreach activity and sponsor a variety of other programs designed to
integrate the theaters into their communities," and also to encourage
"dynamic interactions between artists and communities ... to develop
new audiences ... landl to address the interests of children and families."
These are all benevolent social goa ls, but they are also all peripheral to
the true work of most theaters. What the foundation fails
to
"expand"
or "broaden" or "sponsor" is an artistic goal. As a result, the great pre–
ponderance of Wallace funds each year goes
to
increasing "the African–
American audience"; or "doubling the number of Asian Americans in the
overall audience"; or "increasing the number of Latino theatregoers to
forty percent of the audience"; or deepening "the involvement of ...
Latino immigrants, emerging Latino business and professional leaders"; or
attracting "new theater audiences from ... Hispanic conccrt-goers and
African-American concert-goers"; or diversifying "through the addition
of actors of color ... with the input of its new African-American artis–
tic associate"; or including "greater promotion within the African–
American community"; or developing "new audiences from New York
City's Asian-American communities," and so on (I quote a few typical
citations from recent grants). Only one award last year went to an insti–
tution proposing a project with any artistic dimensions, and that one
was designed to broaden the base of childrens' audiences.
Similarly, the Rockefeller Foundation, once among the most en–
lightened supporters of artists and artistic institutions in America, now
disburses about fifteen million dollars annually, mostly
to
scholarship but
also to arts projects indistinguishable from its Equal Opportunity and
Social Science Research grant recipients. Rockefeller's Arts and
Humanities Division describes its mission as encouraging scholars and
artists "whose work can advance international and intercultural under–
standing in the United States ... extending international and intercul–
tural scholarship and increasing artistic experimentation across cultures."
It should be noted that "international and intercultural understanding"
no longer includes any understanding of Europe. To judge by the grants,
the phrase refers almost exclusively
to
African, Asian, and, especially,
Hispanic countries and cultures. (Only eight out of eighty-seven grants
could be construed as escaping these categories.)
As a result, Rockefeller's three granting categories advance such no–
ble objectives as "Extending International and Intercultural Scholarship,"
"Fortifying Institutions of the Civil Society," and "Increasing Artistic
Experimentation Across Cultures," while the grants go almost over–
whelmingly to African-American, Native-American, Asian, and Latino
