We’re excited to share big news for the South Florida arts community: Knight Foundation is committing $23 million in new funding for arts and culture.

Part of a two-pronged strategy, the funding will go to some of the region’s leading arts institutions, and to fund more grassroots projects by continuing the Knight Arts Challenge through 2015. RELATED LINK

“34 ideas win Knight Arts Challenge Miami” by Dennis Scholl KnightArts.org

“Making art general: @knightfdn celebrates the local cultural community” on Storify

Everywhere you go in South Florida, we want you to have an encounter with art. As Knight Foundation President Alberto  Ibargüen told the Miami Herald: “The point of all of this, as I never tire of saying, is we want to make art general in Miami. To do that, you want to support arts institutions that day in and day out offer opportunities for people in Miami to see and feel and participate and engage art… and then at the same time engaging anybody in Miami who has an idea.”

The institutions receiving funding are:

• Miami City Ballet ($5 million): to help the ballet increase its outreach and add new works to its repertoire, including new commissions.
• The Wolfsonian-FIU ($5 million): to engage the community by developing dynamic programming and expanding its digital reach.
• Cleveland Orchestra ($2 million): to expand its subscription season to four weekends of concerts and significantly increases its educational outreach programs to students.
• Arts education ($1 million):  To expand the horizons of the next generation of local artists by offering scholarships to DASH and New World students for cultural  field trips to New York City and Europe.
• Borscht Film Festival ($500,000): to help the festival expand its efforts and create more “only in Miami” stories.
• Miami International Film Festival ($500,000): to further the expansion of Ibero-American film through awards at this annual event.

We began to invest deeply in the arts in 2008, just as the arts scene was beginning to take shape. We’re increasing funding now to help take the cultural community to the next level.

We decided to renew the challenge after commissioning a study on the contest’s impact. It found that challenge funding has helped fuel the local art scene, and especially helped the smaller, entrepreneurial projects that makes Miami so unique.

You can read more about the new funding in the Herald and Artinfo.

Tomorrow night, we’ll be announcing the 2012 winners of the Knight Arts Challenge – look for them at 7 p.m. at KnightArts.org. About half are projects driven by small organizations and individuals – we’re looking forward to seeing their work, and the community, develop further.

By Dennis Scholl, vice president/Arts at Knight Foundation