artnet News – Today, among the many envelopes in New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s mailbox was one particularly notable letter: a request for $100 million in funding for cultural groups run by or for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and other people of color (POC).
The missive was sent by the small nonprofit Hue Arts NYC, and accompanies the organization’s first “Brown Paper” report about the state of POC arts groups in the city’s cultural ecosystem, also released today. Both documents paint a sobering picture for such outfits, which are often vital to their communities yet under-funded by the city.
Just 35 percent of the 41 entities surveyed for the report have an annual operating budget over $1 million. While that figure might speak to the relatively modest scope of Hue’s data set, it also reveals something about the intractable challenges of being a POC-led arts group in New York today. It’s not as if more money isn’t a goal for these organizations; more often than not, they say, it’s a question of resources and visibility. Seventy-three percent of reportees said that they lacked the staff to apply for grants and cultivate individual donor relationships.
Partly as a corrective to this low visibility, Hue has produced an accompanying interactive map and directory of some 400-plus POC arts and culture entities in New York. (Hue prefers the word “entities” over “organizations,” as it accounts for both nonprofits as well as cultural outfits that are for-profit, fiscally sponsored, and unincorporated.) Among those dotting the map are the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art in Brooklyn, El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, and the Bangladesh Institute of Performing Arts in Queens.
Read more in Artnet News.