Barr and Ford Foundations Together Commit $10 Million to Support BIPOC-Focused Arts in Massachusetts

Featured above: Boston artist Silvia Lopez Chavez's mural "JOY." Learn more about Silvia's work here.

Today, the Ford Foundation announced the “America’s Cultural Treasures” initiative – a historic $156 million investment to sustain excellence across the rich diversity of our nation’s cultural landscape. We applaud Ford, and especially its president, Darren Walker, for his visionary leadership and sustained commitment to the arts.

Ford’s announcement is two-fold, with both national and regional components. First, in partnership with several other funders, 20 Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous arts organizations will receive a total of $81 million. While Barr is not part of the national initiative, our co-founders, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, personally committed $10 million. You can read more here about the national grants announced today.

The second part of “America’s Cultural Treasures” is a $35 million commitment from Ford to seed grantmaking in 2021 across seven regions. Ford’s $5 million grants for each region will require a 1:1 match from local funders, so for each region, lead funding partners have also been identified. The seven regions (and funding partners) are: Chicago (John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Joyce Foundation, and Terra Foundation for American Art), Houston (Houston Endowment), Los Angeles (Getty Foundation, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation), Massachusetts (Barr), Minnesota (McKnight Foundation), Philadelphia (William Penn Foundation), and Pittsburgh (Heinz Endowment).

Each of the regional partners is committed to developing programs tailored to their unique context, assets, and challenges.

We are delighted to partner with Ford on this critically important work for Massachusetts, and Ford and Barr have each committed $5 million to this effort. Importantly, Barr’s $5 million commitment, authorized by our trustees last week, will be above and beyond our regular arts grantmaking, so this represents a significant expansion of Barr’s ongoing commitment to the arts.

The core pillars of the Massachusetts effort will be multi-year general operating support and capacity building efforts for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) arts organizations and artists in Massachusetts.

The core pillars of the Massachusetts effort will be multi-year general operating support and capacity building efforts for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) arts organizations and artists in the Commonwealth – to enable them to weather the COVID-19 pandemic, and to emerge from it even stronger. To do this work well is not simply a matter of making a set of one-time grants, but requires thoughtfulness and partnership, balanced with an understanding of the urgency of the current challenges organizations and artists are facing. We will develop our initial approach this fall and have more details to share in the coming months.

We look forward to building and deepening our partnership with BIPOC arts organizations and artists in the coming years.