Arts/Culture

Two of Detroit’s most notable nonprofit organizations are merging soon. The boards of the University Cultural Center Association and the New Center Council will vote Friday morning on the planned merger. The combined organization will be known as Midtown Detroit Inc., to be headed by long-time UCCA President Sue Mosey. The group will be based at UCCA’s current location at 3939 Woodward Ave., north of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Hall complex.

The Arts & Science Council knew it wouldn’t be easy to pull off its 25-year cultural master plan to build new museums and a performing arts center. That wasn’t even counting the worst thing that eventually did go wrong: the recession and banking crisis that struck just two years into the council’s $83-million fundraising campaign, imploding its biggest corporate supporter and freezing philanthropists’ checkbooks.

Yet today Charlotte’s business district boasts three new art museums, a performing-arts theater and a remodeled children’s science museum.

Effective activism is an art form, some say. With Clean Air Network, the Hong Kong environmental group, advocacy is art. If you’ve walked through the IFC mall’s atrium this week, you’ve probably seen the art exhibition by the nonprofit group, which is dedicated to raising awareness about pollution in Hong Kong. The show runs there through Sunday, and then moves to Hong Kong’s convention center on April 1 as part of the preview of Sotheby’s spring sale there.

A decade ago, museum Web sites were little more than online advertisements, displaying an institution’s hours, directions, admission prices and exhibitions. But evolving technology has created new opportunities.

Talk to anyone involved with museum technology and the conversation inevitably boils down to one universal word: engagement.

Billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein is making a second $10 million gift in less than six months to the Kennedy Center in Washington to help reach younger and more economically diverse audiences.

The gift announced Tuesday makes Rubenstein, of Bethesda, Md., the largest single donor in the center's history, with donations totaling $23 million.

Rubenstein became the center's chairman last year and is co-founder of The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.

The General Motors Foundation pulled annual arts funding to Detroit institutions in late 2008 in the wake of the collapse of the auto industry.

But with profits percolating, GM has gotten back in the game, making recent grants of about $125,000 to Michigan Opera Theatre, $75,000 to Mosaic Youth Theatre and $25,000 to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

The Art Institute of Chicago has received a $10 million gift from the Jaharis Family Foundation to renovate and expand galleries devoted to Greek, Roman and Byzantine art, as well as to support acquisitions and special exhibitions of that art. The museum described it as the largest gift it had ever received in support of the arts of the ancient Mediterranean and Byzantine worlds. 

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new role as conservator of the Watts Towers has brought an almost immediate payoff: a $500,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation, announced Wednesday, to help fund repair and preservation of the landmark folk-art masterpiece.

Before the grant came through, only $150,000 in city funding had been budgeted for the towers this year.

Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) and the Ford Foundation announced the winners of the Space for Change Planning and Pre-Development Grants, awarding up to $100,000 each to 12 nonprofit arts organizations in the early stages of developing exemplary cultural facilities. The grants provide organizations with the initial startup funds that are most needed—and the most difficult to obtain—to develop new space.

Blackbaud today announced that three of the leading arts and cultural membership associations; American Association of Museums (AAM), Association of Children’s Museums (ACM), and American Public Gardens Association (APGA), will partner with Blackbaud to make technology more accessible for their members.