Friday, April 18, 2008
The Miami Herald

1,600 Make Pitch for Arts Grants

The Knight Foundation was flooded by proposals for art project grants. Now the judging begins.

BY DANIEL CHANG

The challenge: Come up with some big, innovative ideas for art projects that can unite South Florida's diverse communities under an umbrella of culture.

More than 1,600 artists and organizations took up the challenge issued by the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which announced in February an open call for proposals to be funded through the Knight Arts Partnership.

The Knight Foundation initiative provides $20 million in endowments for three South Florida arts institutions and another $20 million to finance ideas from artists and cultural groups for projects in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

VARIETY

Most of the ideas, which had to be submitted by Tuesday, came from individual artists, who pitched projects ranging from billboard exhibits to underwater art installations, said Lorenzo Lebrija, Knight Foundation program director for South Florida.

Now comes the hard part: picking the best ideas from the bunch.

"We're going to invite the best ones to submit proposals," Lebrija said.

Proposals will be reviewed by Lebrija and his colleagues. Winners will be selected by Knight Foundation's board of trustees and announced in the fall.

Lebrija said Knight Foundation aims to fund an unspecified number of projects -- which must find matching grants -- at a rate of $4 million a year for each of the next five years.

Open calls for ideas will be issued each year through 2012.

More information is available at KnightArts.org.

EFFECTIVE METHOD

Lebrija said he's fairly certain the open call process provoked a collective participation -- and a wide range of ideas -- that wouldn't have been possible through the traditional grant application procedure.

"We're really getting good at this idea of finding," Lebrija said. "In a way, it's kind of our MO [modus operandi] now as a foundation, where we accept we don't have all the answers and people have some really good ideas."