Building Trust, Sustaining Art

Arts organizations rooted in communities of color often operate at the intersection of artistic ambition and structural disadvantages such as a lack of funding from governments and philanthropies. Despite these disadvantages, they produce extraordinary work with significant cultural and civic value. 

With the goal of supporting early career scholars and building out the evidence base within the field, Wallace approached the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to establish a fellowship to help build a better understanding of the practices and the effects of such organizations. The fellowship, called the Arts Research for Communities of Color Fellowship, matched scholars with organizations participating in Wallace's Thriving Communities cohort of the Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative. Fellows and their partner organizations worked together to address key questions of importance to the organizations, with many focused on organizational history and culture. Fellows produced evidence-based resources for the organizations with which they were paired as well as academic scholarship for the field. 

This report analyzes cross-cutting themes in the fellows' work. It presents an overview of the organizations’ contributions to cultural innovation and identifies a set of adaptive strategies that shape how arts organizations rooted in communities of color sustain their work—and, in turn, contribute to cultural vitality and community connection.

Cultural Innovation, Adaptive Strategies, and Common Challenges 

The report identifies a series of common challenges faced by organizations across the cohort, pointing towards tensions unique to—or faced disproportionately by—arts organizations rooted in communities of color. They include:

• Navigating histories of disinvestment and mistrust in communities where cultural and governmental institutions have often been absent, ephemeral, or extractive;
• Challenging narrow definitions of artistic value that often assume that community-centered art is beyond the realm of “professional” artistic practice;
• Negotiating conflicting definitions of cultural excellence, including those of the organizations' communities, their funders, and art institutions that have historically privileged predominately white, European aesthetics;
• Sustaining labor-intensive practices with limited resources while avoiding staff burnout; and
• Balancing local, national, and international work, staying true to place-based communities while building relationships with broader cultural and diasporic networks.

Much of what makes these organization’s work possible—relationship maintenance, care, education, and coalition building—remains invisible within conventional funding frameworks. 

The report identifies seven core strategies that organizations have deployed to respond to such structural constraints. These strategies often help strengthen community accountability and expand artistic possibility within the field. They include:

• Trust-building strategies and practices that keep organizations rooted in and responsive to the communities they serve;
• Building legitimacy by reforming dominant narratives that devalue the arts of those communities;
• Archiving and documentation to preserve cultural memory, strengthen organizational capacity, and demonstrate organizations' importance to their communities;
• Collective responsibility and intentional investment in labor, care, and sustainability practices;
• Dynamic management and governance approaches that maintain community-rooted values while developing systems that support scale and accountability;
• Collaboration, fluidity, and solidarity to strengthen relationships across people, organizations, and movements; and
• Placemaking and capital investment practices that help communities feel stable, connected, and supported in the long-term.

The report identifies opportunities for institutional support and further research that could contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how such organizations evolve, sustain themselves, and shape the broader arts ecosystem. Proposed efforts include longitudinal research on trust and accountability; deeper inquiry into how concepts of artistic excellence are defined; and funding structures that allow for learning, adjustment, and flexibility.