Today, the Knight Foundation announced the second-year winners of its Knight Arts Challenge, a five-year, $40 million initiative to strengthen the South Florida arts community. This year, $3.7 million in matching grants will go to organizations around the region for a wide variety of arts-related programs.

Winning projects this year include:

• Bringing back a live orchestra for the Miami City Ballet’s 2010-2013 seasons.
• Creating an arts incubator in the Wynwood Arts District, allowing nonprofit arts programs to collaborate and share resources.
• Building new spaces for the arts at existing institutions such as the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the Wolfsonian.
• Launching an e-commerce site for locally-produced music and funding new community programming at Sweat Records, an independent music store in Little Haiti.
• Cultivating a new audience for opera with a 2,200-ticket giveaway.

Knight President and CEO Alberto Ibarügen said, “When art hits home, it needs no explanation. Art can move the individual and, when it’s a shared experience, can make the whole community better than it was, together.”

The 20 winners were chosen out of a slate of more than 1,500 applications.

You can read more about the contest – including the full list of winning projects – in the press release. For more information on the Knight Arts Challenge, check out KnightArts.org.