Over a prerecorded mix of throbbing percussive beats, Frank Waln rapped to the lunch crowd about how people perceive him.
“You’re a mascot, just a ghost now.
Just a thing I wear on my clothes now ...”
The verse referred to a first impression the Sicangu Lakota hip-hop artist made on a fellow student soon after he traveled from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to Chicago to attend college. Upon learning he was an Indian, she said: “I thought you were all dead now.”
In response, Mr. Waln issued a challenge that echoed across the huge open-air atrium on the upper floor of the Ford Foundation’s Manhattan headquarters, where other arts grantees were nibbling their chicken: “Call your cavalry, because I leave stereotypes as casualties.”
The Ford Foundation’s support of Mr. Waln, who has benefited from some of the $800,000 the foundation has given to the First Peoples Fund since 2010 to promote Indian self-expression, is a far cry from some of Ford’s earlier forays into art. In 1958, for example, the foundation led the creation of Lincoln Center when it provided $25-million for the design, construction, and operations.
Darren Walker, Ford’s president, has heard a lot of pushback from critics of Ford’s support for the arts. As a social-justice institution, they say, Ford’s largess would be better put to use combating poverty or improving health care.
Mr. Walker, a music and dance aficionado, won’t say if he’ll increase or cut arts spending. But arts projects can serve an important social-justice function, far removed from the “idealized, elitist notion of humanities” found at Lincoln Center, he says. Art in a social-justice context, he says, is better reflected in Mr. Waln’s voice.
“We shouldn’t have to ... justify the arts as a tool for community development or a tool for economic development,” Mr. Walker says. “Why can’t we live in a society and be a foundation that simply says, ‘We believe in beauty and believe everyone has a right to beauty’ and that be the end of it?”
Ford has been a steadfast supporter of the arts, says Carlton Turner, executive director of Alternate Roots, a group that promotes art in the South.
“So much of philanthropy gives to whichever way the wind is blowing at the moment,” he says. “Nobody has to make the case for health care or housing. The societal benefit of art is up for debate.”
Mr. Walker, who grew up in a shotgun house in a small Texas town, responds to the debate with a question: “Do regular folk, poor folk, have the right just to be able to think about beauty?”
Video: Mr. Walker Talks About Social Justice and Philanthropy
