A Message From Our Founders
At Minnesota Street Project, our mission has always been to create affordable and inclusive spaces for art and artists in San Francisco. We recognize that we can only do so by embracing people from all backgrounds, races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, gender identities, and physical abilities. This is core to our organization, and it is core to our personal beliefs. As an organization and as individuals, we stand firmly in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. We sincerely hope that this moment of national attention to long-standing and deeply rooted racial injustice will be a catalyst for real and sustained change. We are committed to being part of that change.
As we work on reopening the Project after the San Francisco shelter-in-place orders, we are announcing that the Minnesota Street Project Foundation has initiated two grantmaking programs. We intend these programs to contribute to the broadening of BIPOC participation in the arts and art education. The first program, the California Black Voices Project, will award at least five grants of $10,000 each to Black artists, curators, and collectives to create new exhibits to be shown at 1275 Minnesota and in the Minnesota Street Project Adjacent virtual venue. The second program, Grants for Bay Area Arts Equity, will award at least $50,000 in grants of up to $10,000 each to Bay Area visual arts organizations serving BIPOC and other underserved communities for programs building sustainable capacity.
These grants are just the beginning. While we and our entire team and community have maintained a strong philosophical commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we recognize that we can and should do more. In addition to developing more grantmaking programs through the Foundation, our team has begun a Project-wide evaluation of our hiring practices, advancement strategies, physical-space allocation policies, and outreach programs to determine what more we can do to increase diversity and representation in the art world. We are eager to share updates as we develop our plans.
If you have comments or ideas for what more we can do to support the Movement, please reach out to us at founders@minnesotastreetproject.com.
Deborah and Andy Rappaport
Founders, Minnesota Street Project
June 2020