by Jake Goodman, Executive Director
At Opportunity Fund we value artistic expression and champion artistic freedom. We partner with small-to-midsize arts organizations to support the work that inspires their passion and the ideas they are most excited to bring to fruition. We liken artists to alchemists whose craft involves a skillful manipulation of materials: body, earth, language, shape, sound, color, time, texture, and tradition. We strive to be a partner artists trust with their most daring and cherished work.
We fund the arts for the same reasons that authoritarian leaders fear and suppress them: because we know their power. When rising to prominence these leaders move quickly to dominate the cultural landscape, employing artists willing to tell prideful nationalistic narratives and pushing out those who refuse to curtail their expression. Joseph Stalin in the U.S.S.R., Adolf Hitler in Germany, Mao Zedong in China, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile all imposed heavy restrictions on the arts. We now see Vladimir Putin in Russia and Donald Trump in the United States following this same playbook. They know a public that is free to express itself is one that is difficult to control.
We fund the arts because art brings us into relationship with the unknown. A force for connection, art helps us grow in empathy and makes plain what we cannot readily see. It builds the muscle of imagination and expands our conception of the possible. Art stands us before beauty, and ourselves.
Across the funding landscape there seems to be an impulse to ask what art does for us and to measure the worth of creativity. Perhaps this urge stems from a desire to rationalize allocating any funds to the arts when so many other urgent and material needs are present. While arts advocates have offered answers to these inquiries, from revenue generation to neurological benefits and public safety, these factors are not our motivation for funding the arts. We know that the value of art lies far beyond the quantifiable and we do not ask art to justify itself.
As arts funders we have three goals:
- Nurture the conditions that free artists to push the boundaries of their creative practices and fields, as they strive to develop their work over a period of time;
- Resource organizations to function as thriving culture houses for the production, presentation, and experience of art at the vanguard; and
- Activate people to develop their own passionate habits of art-chasing and art-going.
In our efforts to realize these goals, we remain vigilant of the tendency for funders to impose control and restrictions on artists, however well-meaning our intentions may be. If we truly wish to support artistic freedom and free expression, we cannot mandate that artists be justice workers, social commentators, or world-fixers, nor can we ask them to hide their political beliefs at the risk of offending their funders. We must not force artists to contort themselves to fit into ever-changing themes and initiatives.
As arts funders we have the power to steer the momentum of culture. We have historically wielded this power inequitably, systematically building white culture while leaving all other culture to sustain itself or wither in the shade. How much richer would our culture be if, for example, Black, Latine, or queer artists and arts organizations in Pittsburgh had received equitable investment since the industrial boom years? How much richer would American culture be if this had taken place nationally? We have long reflected on these questions and consider them in our practice of arts funding.
The Opportunity Fund team works to continually grow as partners to artists and arts organizations, and in doing so we reflect on our own lived experience as artists. We know every life is made richer by creating and engaging with art. It is our hope that when partnering with us, artists will feel supported. We hope they will see a future for themselves as artists and feel that what they do matters. We hope they will be inspired by the work of others and push or expand their own practices. As their ambition grows, their imagination of the possible will grow as well. It is our mission as funders to bring these possibilities within reach.
