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In the Fairhill-Hartranft neighborhood of north Philadelphia, angels line the exterior of adjoining rowhouses, part of the nonprofit Village of Arts and Humanities. Created in the early 1990s by the Village’s founders, the angels — painted mosaics with mirror-glass eyes and shimmering tiles — watch over what was once a dark and unsafe alley.

This fall, the Village opened the rowhouses, long vacant, as the Civic Power Studio, with high-end multimedia production space that includes three music studios and a photography and video studio. Teenagers and young adults gather there to wage a statewide campaign called Care, Not Control to abolish youth prisons in Pennsylvania and invest in communities instead. Art — including a record album and a graphics-infused social-media effort — drives their lobbying and communication strategies.

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Fairhill-Hartranft residents also come to the studio to work on a plan to reduce violent crime in the neighborhood without police. The effort has won a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. That the Village, a grassroots arts group and community organizer, won such a big grant from the nation’s top law-enforcement agency surprised executive director Aviva Kapust. “I really was just blown away,” she says.

All this represents a triumph for the Village, the neighborhood — and a high-profile philanthropic arts venture. In 2010, several of the country’s largest grant makers joined together under the name ArtPlace America. Over 10 years, ArtPlace — including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Ford, Knight, Kresge, Mellon, and Rockefeller foundations — sprinkled $150 million across America, funding hundreds of chiefly small grassroots groups and a kaleidoscope of projects.

At the start, ArtPlace leaders announced that their venture would prove the arts was an economic engine. Investing in arts and culture, said then-Ford president Luis Ubiñas, “can be the economic equivalent of bringing a manufacturing plant to a neighborhood.” By decade’s end, however, evidence of ArtPlace’s success had little to do with economics. An artist-in-residence with a small-town Minnesota government. A cleanup of hazardous waste in Ashland, Mass. The antiviolence program in the angel-adorned building in Philadelphia.

How did the economy-focused ArtPlace come to fund work seemingly unrelated to anything economic? The answer lies in the story of a big philanthropy effort tripped up in its early days by concerns about whether its work contributed to gentrification. ArtPlace also snagged on thorny questions about measuring success.

Ultimately, however, the venture gave arts and culture new grounds to argue that they are vital to communities and not some esoteric good. That argument is persuasive enough that grassroots community organizations are discovering new funding, sometimes at the expense of symphonies, ballets, theaters, and other mainstream arts groups.

A Showman’s Grand Plan

One day in July 2010, the chief executives of some of America’s biggest grant makers gathered around a conference table at the Ford Foundation in New York to hear from a big-name Broadway producer.

Rocco Landesman, whose box-office hits include the Producers, arrived and doused the room in his charisma, a larger-than-life figure with a fondness for horse racing, alligator-skin cowboy boots, and plain talk. A year earlier, newly elected President Barack Obama had named Landesman chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. The pick was unconventional — a for-profit theater impresario running the federal agency that supports arts nonprofits! — and Landesman signaled change would follow.

At the time, the NEA and the arts were in a defensive crouch. Attacks in the 1990s by Newt Gingrich-led Republicans had slashed the agency’s funding and perpetuated an image of the arts as frippery best funded through black-tie galas.

Bre Furlong, The Village

Landesman set out to counter that narrative. He dumped the NEA slogan “Great Art for a Great Nation” and adopted the muscular “Art Works,” shorthand for a broader message: that arts and culture had real-world value and were essential to good places to live. To prove that, he wanted to find a way to showcase their power, particularly as an economic force.

“Talking about how the arts affect people’s souls is all well and good,” Landesman says now. “But if you’re saying arts are a very important part of the economy and they can drive the economy in a recession, then everybody’s listening.”

To flesh out his idea, Landesman ordered research into how the arts have contributed to placemaking — the design of public spaces to deepen a city or neighborhood’s sense of place, strengthen the social fabric, and enhance its well-being. The resulting report pointed to examples of arts-centered revitalization that involved community theaters in Cleveland, mural arts in Philadelphia, and a craft festival in Asheville, N.C., among others.

Fortified by this research, the NEA launched Our Town, a program to fund “creative placemaking” in which the arts would be deployed to make communities stronger and more livable.

To the foundation chiefs gathered at Ford, Landesman proposed a parallel, philanthropy-funded venture. It was an unusual request. Foundations were still investing in a decades-old arts building boom, helping to erect museums, concert halls, and other venues. Creative placemaking would rely chiefly on public art and activities that were more ephemeral, like Philadelphia’s murals or Asheville’s festival.

Yet within minutes of Landesman’s first PowerPoint slide, the grant makers cut short his presentation. They didn’t need to be persuaded. Talk turned quickly to how much each could invest in the idea.

They arrived at such quick consensus because the idea was powerfully simple, its pitchman persuasive, says Kresge president Rip Rapson, who was at the meeting. The executives also were intrigued by Landesman’s pledge that federal agencies would take up creative placemaking, giving the grant makers a rare chance to work alongside top policy makers. “That was heady,” Rapson says.

Building a Brand

ArtPlace’s first executive director, Carol Coletta, had been head of CEOs for Cities, an urban leaders network. For creative placemaking to spread like wildfire, Coletta and Landesman believed, mayors would be the kindling.

Coletta used ArtPlace’s first two years of grants — which averaged about $330,000 — to brand creative placemaking. “We had to define it in alluring terms and give it some specificity,” she says.

The grants supported an array of projects, no two alike. Some went to brick-and-mortar projects. In East Harlem, a $1 million investment helped remake a vacant public school as affordable housing and studio space for 90 artists, along with room for arts nonprofits.

Many grants funded art installations and events aimed to bring life to underused spaces — abandoned homes and buildings, streets, alleys, parks, even brownfields. Chattooga County in the Appalachians of Georgia turned the dilapidated home and workplace of Baptist preacher and folk-artist hero Howard Finster into a roadside showcase of his work. In Seattle, the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience organized art and music events, a holiday “Shop-o-Rama” featuring artists’ trunk shows, and other cultural programs.

In Flint, Mich., ArtPlace helped journalist and urbanist Stephen Zacks start the nonprofit Flint Public Art Project with a $250,000 grant. “It was pretty substantial for an organization that didn’t exist,” Zacks says. His biggest project: a multiday festival on the grounds of a former Chevrolet manufacturing plant, with local, national, and international performers and artists.

Zacks hoped the festival, which ran from 2013 through 2017, demonstrated the value of a place deemed to have no value. Flint since has turned the area into a landscaped public commons, and Michigan officials recently announced a $26 million plan to make it a state park.

Gentrification Concerns

In its second year, ArtPlace released a set of “vibrancy indicators” by which it would measure project outcomes and fine-tune its grant making. These metrics related to factors such as employment, business development, and even cellphone use in areas where placemaking events and activities took place. Mayors wanted to measure results, Coletta says. ArtPlace grant makers did, too.

“There’s a lot of pressure from foundations to create metrics and to make them easy and universal,” says Jamie Bennett, who was Landesman’s chief of staff at the NEA. With ArtPlace, “you have some of the largest foundations in the U.S. who said, ‘We’ll give you some money, but you have to give us a measurement framework. And do it in one page, and give us the number so we can show that it grew from x to y.”

The indicators drew sharp questions and criticism from the arts world. What measurable change could result when most of the grants were for just a year? And how would ArtPlace determine whether it was arts strategies that had triggered the change?

The indicators also heightened concerns that creative placemaking as espoused by ArtPlace could drive gentrification. Many of the projects had roots in the controversial ideas of urban theorist Richard Florida. In bestselling books in the 2000s, Florida had urged cities to build arts districts with galleries, street festivals, and funky retailers to attract the “creative class” — scientists, engineers, professors, architects, artists, and other knowledge workers. Yet his strategies had increasingly been decried as a recipe for property speculation and gentrification, with condo-loving elites pushing out residents and hipster coffee shops blotting out authentic local culture.

In a much-cited essay, Roberto Bedoya, then the executive director of an arts council in Tucson, Ariz., captured anxieties that ArtPlace would introduce such displacement. Artists and city planners should practice “placekeeping” and aim to strengthen a neighborhood’s culture, not import a new one. We should be wary, Bedoya said, of efforts “in which the benchmark of success is a Whole Foods Market.”

A Pivot From Dollar Signs

Coletta, who describes herself as “a start-up queen,” says ArtPlace by 2013 had matured to the point that she felt ready to make a handoff. Also, there was tension with artists.

“For me, creative placemaking was not in service to art or artists; it was in service to communities and the places where people live and invest,” she says. “You can imagine that was probably not the most popular or obvious thing for someone running this important thing called ‘ArtPlace.’”

Coletta left in March 2013, a little more than two years after she arrived, and joined the Knight Foundation as a top executive. Bennett — Landesman’s chief of staff at the NEA and an arts veteran who had worked in New York’s cultural affairs division and with arts philanthropist Agnes Gund — became executive director.

In strategic-planning sessions, ArtPlace foundations concluded that their original focus was too narrow, Bennett says. Almost by force of habit, the venture had tried to prove the value of the arts solely in economic terms. “The nonprofit arts and culture sector had spent probably the previous 40 years saying, ‘Hey, in order to get the grown-ups to care about us, we have to have a dollar-sign conversation,’” he says.

ArtPlace now moved to demonstrate the influence of arts and culture in all community-development areas — not just economic development but also housing, transportation, education, the environment, health, public safety, and more. This broadened its target audience beyond mayors to include advocates and government officials working across a spectrum of issues. In short, ArtPlace aimed to show that the arts could be an ally in any element of community work and should be at the table any time decisions were being made.

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Newly funded ArtPlace projects began to explicitly attack social issues and inequities. A few even worked seemingly in opposition to Landesman’s economics-driven model. In Ashland, Mass., a visual artist who was worried about hazardous waste in the town’s groundwater created an experiential art display with street lights filtered with colors based on the density of contaminants flowing below. The display helped prompt a federal cleanup, but real-estate agents and business leaders initially worried that it amounted to economic suicide.

ArtPlace abandoned the “vibrancy indicators” as too blunt a tool to measure ArtPlace’s range of projects and something as new as creative placemaking. And it began to ask grant applicants more questions about how they would involve communities in the proposed work. Process — how a group knitted communities together and strengthened their leaders and other assets — took on more importance than a shiny new object at the end.

Kapust, the Village’s executive director, considered the group’s first ArtPlace proposal, for artist residencies, a “hail Mary.” It identified neither outcomes nor an end product. The organization would simply create opportunities for artists and residents to come together, consider the neighborhood’s strengths and challenges, and create solutions. Yet the Village got $280,000.

Photo Gallery: ArtPlace at Work

1/11

Aaron Dysart

Sauk County, Wis.: $100,000
The Wormfarm Institute, which aims to integrate agriculture and culture, created the Farm/Art DTour, a biennial event featuring a 50-mile drive through farmland in central Wisconsin with local food markets, farming demonstrations, roadside readings and performances, and large-scale artworks, such as Ruminant, a reclaimed harvesting combine with agriculturally themed stained-glass windows.

2/11

Michael Palma Mir

New York City: $350,000
Nonprofit housing developer Broadway Housing Communities added the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling to an affordable-housing complex built in the heart of the neighborhood where the Harlem Renaissance was born.

3/11

Andrew Pielage

Phoenix: $240,000
The Roosevelt Row Community Development Corporation put on “Feast on the Street,” a festival in its arts district that featured artists’ displays, food from more than 90 restaurants and food trucks, and a half-mile-long dining table. Funds also went to create artist studios from shipping containers.

4/11

Doug Strickland, Chattanooga Times Free Press, AP

Chattooga County, Ga.: $445,000
The county turned the dilapidated home and workplace of Baptist preacher and folk artist Howard Finster into a roadside showcase of his work, which included sculptures made from recycled materials.

5/11

Adrien Le Biavant

San Jose, Calif.: $600,000
Through light displays, the city aimed to enliven spaces and streets in ways that spoke of its tech-centric identity as the capital of Silicon Valley. In “Sensing You,” by artist Dan Corson, a highway underpass fills with light patterns in response to pedestrians’ motion and voices.

6/11

William Widmer, Redux

Jackson, Miss.: $475,000
The Cooperative Community of New West Jackson, a collective for a small neighborhood in a blighted part of the city, bought 65 vacant, often dilapidated houses that residents are remaking for community use. Projects include a graphic design studio, a cultural arts center, a community farm, and Airbnb rentals.

7/11

Michael Conti

Anchorage, Alaska: $3 million
The Cook Inlet Housing Authority, an affordable-housing group, turned a former church into a community center, cultural and arts space, and performance venue. (A contemporary circus even put on a show.) Cook Inlet was one of six community-development groups awarded ArtPlace’s largest grants to introduce the arts into their work — a pilot effort separate from its creative placemaking program.

8/11

Cheyenne River Youth Project

Eagle Butte, S.D.: $325,000
The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation opened a new arts institute that expanded youth programs to combine instruction in the traditional arts with classes in contemporary art, including media, performance art, and graffiti art.

9/11

Kevin J. Beaty, Denverite

Denver: $350,000
Re:Vision, a community-development group in the predominantly Hispanic Westwood neighborhood, built an agriculture hub with community gardens and space for local entrepreneurs to prepare and sell food. Local artist Santiago Jaramillo painted a mural for the campus’s central plaza, a venue for performances and gatherings.

10/11

Travis Coe

Ashfield, Mass.: $275,000
The Double Edge Theatre, an artist-owned community theater, converted underused and vacant buildings on its 100-acre farm, including a home transformed to house prop storage as well as the costume and design departments.

11/11

Courtesy of Naomi Fisher; Photo by Monica McGivern

Miami: $200,000
Miami-Dade’s parks and recreation division added art pieces and activities to the Underline, a 10-mile recreational trail and park being constructed under an elevated subway line. Among the artworks: “#Puzzled,” by Miami’s Naomi Fisher, which features ballet barres set across mirrored, anthropomorphically shaped puzzle pieces.

Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, two of the artists selected for residencies, worked with women returning to the neighborhood after time in prison to develop the People’s Paper Co-op. It partners the women with artists and civil-rights lawyers to design and advocate for changes in postincarceration re-entry programs. In free clinics with lawyers working to expunge their criminal records, participants shred the printout of those records and, using paper made from those tatters, write about how they imagine life without the albatross of that history.

New-media artists Michael Kuetemeyer and Anula Shetty collaborated with residents to create a documentary about trusted leaders in the neighborhood that has significant poverty and crime and few of the traditional markers of stability like banks, sit-down restaurants, or a post office. These individuals didn’t fit stereotypes; they included Denise Muhammad, known as “Ms. Nandi,” and her husband, Khalid. The two mentored generations of kids at a penny-candy store run out of their living room.

The Village gathered these leaders — their first time together — to identify the neighborhood’s most pressing challenges. These conversations pointed to a high rate of violent crime. The Muhammads and the others are now part of a committee leading the design and programming of the rowhouses refashioned as the Civic Power Studio — a transformation made possible in part by a second ArtPlace grant, for $500,000. Residents and artists are building on the strategies to reduce violent crime that the Muhammads and others already teach — strategies that do not involve law enforcement but focus on youth development, re-entering society after incarceration, and economic opportunities.

The statewide Care, Not Control campaign, which the Village leads with other groups, is now a coalition of more than 60 organizations and experts. Besides the music album, Fairhill-Hartranft young people are crafting a youth-justice curriculum for schools and after-school programs.

With all its work, the Village aims to build the community’s power to drive change. Art, Kapust says, can help residents conjure a different future when most everything in the neighborhood says they shouldn’t try. “This is the ultimate test. These are people living in a neighborhood where violent crime is 12 times higher than the national average,” she says. “Is there the space for them to imagine a world where that is not the case?”

DeAnna Cummings and her husband, Roger, were doing creative placemaking long before their Minneapolis nonprofit, Juxtaposition Arts, received a $500,000 ArtPlace grant in 2014. Sweethearts and artists in high school in the early 1990s, they started a greeting-card company together; Roger sold sketches and custom-designed denim clothes to classmates. In 1995, they joined with friend Peyton Russell to start Juxtaposition.

A social enterprise, the organization now trains and employs young people as apprentices working on projects in contemporary arts, graphic arts, and landscape and environmental design. The program also offers an apprenticeship in which students work in creative placemaking, community engagement, and urban planning.

ArtPlace’s 2014 grant helped to fund renovation of the environmental-design studio as well as construction of an industrial and wood shop. It also gave Juxtaposition, one of Minnesota’s two largest Black-led arts groups, a national platform.

The organization, one of the biggest youth employers in the state, has a new identity, says DeAnna Cummings. “A city councilman recently said to us, ‘You all actually aren’t an arts organization. You are a work-force training program, training kids up for jobs in the creative sector.’”

Juxtaposition’s budget has nearly doubled since its 2014 ArtPlace grant, to $2.1 million. It broke ground this fall on a new $12.9 million headquarters. Another sign of the new standing enjoyed by grassroots arts groups: Cummings was hired away from Juxtaposition last year to be arts program director at the McKnight Foundation, a founding ArtPlace grant maker.

Creative Placemaking’s Future

As ArtPlace moved to its end last year, hundreds of those involved gathered on Zoom. In videos, presentations, and roundtables, they talked about creative placemaking in the next decade and what the 2010s had taught them.

Fears remain about gentrification. In Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood — where ArtPlace made investments in an arts district and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit — nonprofits and city government are fighting to keep at bay gentrification foreshadowed by pricey new condominiums. Creative placemaking “can still be weaponized,” warns Carlton Turner, the director and lead artist at the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production and a 2016 ArtPlace grantee, though, he says, the venture helped illustrate how to invest in communities and strengthen them to stand against gentrification.

Over all, the Zoom meetings brimmed with optimism that creative placemaking would carry on into the next decade. In 2017, ArtPlace had ended its project grants to accelerate its research and gatherings that aimed to plant seeds of work that would continue after it closed and the funding stream dried up.

As a result, a few colleges and universities are developing creative-placemaking majors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is funding artists to promote Covid-19 vaccines. And organizations as diverse as the Urban Land Institute, the U.S. Water Alliance, and Transportation for America are pursuing creative placemaking.

Meanwhile, municipalities in places such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and St. Paul and Granite Falls, Minn., have embedded artists in government, often searching for fresh ideas to old problems. In Granite Falls, Dani Prados, the city’s inaugural artist-in-residence, recently responded to concerns about pedestrian safety by recruiting artists to make crosswalks more visible through colorful paint designs.

“There’s definitely a wider adoption by funders beyond the typical foundations,” says Andrew Zitcer, who leads the graduate program in urban strategy at Drexel University. State arts agencies in particular, he noted, are earmarking more funds for work related to community development.

The full funding landscape is unclear. Ford no longer dedicates funds to creative placemaking, having begun a shift in 2015 to move all its grant making to social-justice work and fighting inequality. Similarly, the Irvine Foundation has discontinued its arts program as part of a shift that year to focus exclusively on the economic advancement of California’s low-income workers. Both grant makers continue to fund grantees who decide on their own to pursue creative placemaking.

Other ArtPlace grant makers — including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Barr, Kresge, McKnight, and William Penn foundations — continue to earmark investments for arts-driven community development. Kresge is perhaps the biggest player in the field. In 2013, it ended its support of traditional arts and culture institutions, which backed the construction of museums, cultural centers, theaters, and the like, to do creative placemaking outside of ArtPlace.

Rapson, Kresge’s president, says the grant maker wanted to explore creative placemaking apart from ArtPlace’s early focus on economic development and in different ways than the Richard Florida model suggested. Importantly, Kresge helped the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which funds community-development nonprofits nationwide, launch a program to support arts-infused strategies.

Several Kresge board members objected to the new approach, according to Rapson. They argued that cities and towns needed anchor cultural institutions. “This is crazy,” he says they told him.

Kriston Jae Bethel, The New York Times, Redux

Rapson, however, argues that big arts institutions won’t suffer because they have a broad base of support, including corporate donors. “I think there has been a huge movement of money into community-based work and to creative placemaking,” Rapson says. “But I don’t think it has come at the cost of the majors.”

McKnight has expanded arts funding and shifted some of that support to grassroots groups and away from mainstream institutions. “Those kinds of organizations and institutions and artists have traditionally gotten the lion’s share of support from philanthropy,” says Cummings, the former Juxtaposition CEO who’s now McKnight’s arts program director. “And they’re not going to be able to get the same.”

Landesman, ArtPlace’s inspiring force, acknowledges that the 10-year run ended much differently than it began. He never imagined creative placemaking as a tool for public safety or environmental activists. “This is not the way I would have taken it,” he says with good cheer. “But organizations evolve.” ArtPlace, he adds, accomplished his overarching goal: to prove that the arts have a crucial role to play in society.

Landesman left the NEA at the end of 2012, returning to his offices off Times Square. His Our Town program continues and appears to have staying power. Maria Rosario Jackson, a creative-placemaking expert at Arizona State University, is President Biden’s nominee to lead the agency. Jackson doesn’t have a string of Broadway hits, but she will be the first NEA chair with a Ph.D. in urban planning. Her primary research area: how the arts contribute to community building.

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. See more about the grant and our gift-acceptance policy.