• Article

    How can we use technology to connect people to the arts? Knight seeks ideas

    Published February 15, 2018 by

    Sometimes it is hard to find the poetry in technology. Though most people use technology as part of their daily life, the coldness of machines makes it easy to overlook the richness of human culture that flows through their circuits. Yet culture can move quickly, aided by our devices, whether it’s a virtual museum tour, a live-streamed concert or crowdsourced poetry. And we’re only at the beginning of this curve. Technology offers a myriad of opportunities for art, expanding how it challenges us, triggers reflection, awakens empathy and connects us to our communities. Innovations have the potential to provide arts organizations with new ways to connect with audiences and create deeply engaging experiences that inform and delight.But how do we ensure that arts organizations, and artists themselves, take advantage of these opportunities, instead of lagging behind their audiences in the adoption of technology? Today, Knight Foundation is opening a call for ideas focused on this issue. It centers around a question:How might cultural institutions use technology to connect people to the arts?
  • Article

    Meet Akron’s 2017 Knight Arts Challenge winners

    Published November 14, 2017 by

    Tonight, we’re excited to announce the winning ideas in the 2017 Knight Arts Challenge Akron: 17 projects receiving a combined $743,000 to further Akron’s growth as a center for arts and culture in northeast Ohio. This cohort of winning ideas, the challenge’s third, brings world-class talent and cutting-edge projects to the city, while celebrating the creators and artists working locally.
  • Article

    29 Knight Arts Challenge winners flipping Detroit’s script

    Published October 25, 2017 by

    Detroit is a city characterized by transformation, but also reclamation. Through sheer creativity and grit, Detroiters flip the script on the city’s narrative and its physical spaces, building on the region’s cultural legacy while moving people to see Detroit with a fresh lens. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ideas proposed by the  29 winners of this year’s Knight Arts Challenge.
  • Article

    St. Paul’s first Youth Poet Laureate gets personal in new book

    Published August 29, 2017 by

    Watching clips of Donte Collins reading poetry online, the first thing that stands out is the straightforward beauty of the words, the carefully observed imagery and perfectly chosen descriptors that immerse the audience immediately in Collins’s world. The second thing that grabs the attention is the confidence and nuance of Collins’s stage presence. The poet generates a captivating aura that befits a long-time veteran of literary performance, and is well beyond what some people might expect of a reader young enough to claim the title of St. Paul Youth Poet Laureate.
  • Article

    A musical bridge between Miami and Havana

    Published August 14, 2017 by

    Miamians turned out in force for “Mozart in Havana,” the South Florida debut of Havana Lyceum Orchestra, under the baton of José Antonio Mendéz Padrón and appearing with its champion pianist Simone Dinnerstein in a refreshing, meaningful performance at Miami Beach’s New World Center.
  • Article

    When your phone is the stage: new play takes place entirely via text message

    Published July 12, 2017 by

    Every morning during the usually merry month of May, I received a text message from a mysterious source asking me to draw a card. After exchanging pleasantries, this entity, named The End, would provide me with a password to enter a web portal. There, I’d find a link to a video of a New Orleans funeral, say, or to a portrait gallery of adults recreating decades-old photographs taken during their youth. Primed to muse on the special people, places and things in my life, I was ready to pursue a quest.
  • Article

    Arts groups help Detroit explore how the summer of 67 changed the city forever

    Published June 26, 2017 by

    Detroit.July 23, 1967.Twelfth Street and Clairmount.3:15 a.m.Police raid a speakeasy.An uprising breaks out.Rioting. Looting. Anger. Frustration. Fear.Forty-three dead; 1,189 injured.Five days.A city forever changed.Changed in the way you’ve heard – accelerated flight from the city, abandonment by a generation of Detroiters – but also in ways you may not. That night indelibly marked Detroit’s future as the city’s narrative cleaved in half.For some, a riot occurred. “Black power militants promoting a revolution,” as one man told the Detroit Historical Society in an oral history collected for the “Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward” exhibit.