This L.A. Collaborative Is Strengthening the Local Arts Scene and Challenging Funding Norms
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members of The Los Angeles Visual Arts Coalition (LAVA). Photo Credit: Ruthie Brownfield, LAVA
It’s hard to be a small arts organization in a big city — and it can be even tougher to get noticed by funders often focused on large, established institutions. The Los Angeles Visual Arts Coalition (LAVA) has taken it upon itself to show philanthropy how to support tiny arts orgs. The results are impressive, and instructive for both philanthropy and other small nonprofits looking to create more sustainable trajectories.
Founded in 2020 by the leaders of a few small and medium-sized arts organizations facing new challenges due to the COVID-19 lockdown, LAVA has grown to include nearly three-dozen groups spread across as many neighborhoods in the rangy sprawl of L.A. LAVA members range from fledgling organizations with annual budgets of about $50,000 to the more established Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), which has an annual budget of $3 million. Since its founding, LAVA has raised more than $2.6 million for these relatively small, avant-garde groups, including from major funders like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation’s Metabolic Studio and Teiger Foundation. Other funders include the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation, the Krupp Family Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and L.A. art collector and patron Betsy Greenberg.
This April, LAVA announced that it will provide $50,000 in unrestricted grants to each member — and have enough left over to hire its own full-time staff member.
LAVA is one of a handful of new artist- and curator-led cooperatives that sprung up to fortify themselves during the pandemic, but have since gone on to redraw the contours of how their communities fund the arts.
“To use a ridiculous metaphor, it’s like the cartoon where all the tiny creatures in the forest climb on top of each other to form a bear. It brings attention to a group that, as individuals, might have been too small to be seen,” said Teiger Foundation Executive Director Larissa Harris. “What’s amazing to me about LAVA is that they are still at it, three years later.”
LAVA and groups like it are forging new ways for smaller arts institutions — and other types of nonprofits — to build strength through collaboration. Instead of competing with each other for funding and following the lead of wealthy donors and institutions, these groups are setting a collective agenda of their own. In doing so, they also present an opportunity for funders to extend their reach and evolve beyond elite, top-down models of giving.
The fine art of collective action
LAVA began as an informal, urgent conversation among a handful of arts leaders, including Laura Hyatt, executive director of the community- and place-based arts organization Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Anne Ellegood, executive director of the ICA LA, and Megan Steinman, then-director of the Underground Museum. They all had the same question: How could their organizations survive a COVID shutdown, were it to last? This was a concern of just about every arts institution around this time, leading to any number of adaptations and innovations, from online exhibitions to collectives like LAVA.
The LA group met over Zoom to share information about survival strategies, such as applying for the California Community Foundation’s LA Arts Recovery Fund and securing money for PPE. Other small arts organizations joined the conversation. They were aware of a couple of similar coalitions in New York and Pennsylvania that formed early in the pandemic. But what started as a coping mechanism and support system in LA grew into a forward-thinking investigation of other ways to harness the power of collaboration.
“We saw this as an opportunity to rethink what we were doing and come up with a much larger format and structure of sustainability for the nonprofit arts sector in Los Angeles,” said LAND’s Laura Hyatt.
Rather than compete, they would collaborate. Rather than working in an atmosphere of scarcity, they would pull together for the benefit of all. And they would offer funders a chance to embrace a new funding model, and in the process, greatly expand their own reach in L.A.
Small but mighty
The coalition grew, and now includes established institutions such as ICA LA, LAND and Craft Contemporary, as well as newer ones like Crenshaw Dairy Mart, GYOPO and JOAN. In 2022, LAVA collectively presented more than 100 exhibitions and 1,240 public programs to more than 350,000 visitors in 34 neighborhoods.
Such figures demonstrate that, collectively, small arts groups expose a lot of people to a lot of art. This was the case LAVA decided to make to funders back in 2020 and 2021 when it was getting off the ground. “The budget for all of these small arts organizations together is comparable to that of one large museum, but our reach is so much larger,” said Hyatt.
It’s common for wealthy donors, in particular, to support giant institutions by default, either incorrectly assuming that only a large organization can absorb a large donation or preferring to cut one large check instead of spreading funding across a dozen smaller organizations. These legacy institutions also bring funders name recognition, prestige and seasoned fundraising teams. Collaboratives like LAVA seek to change the equation by opening new pathways for funders looking to make an impact on the local arts scene.
LAVA began holding convenings for arts funders and LAVA’s own board members, pitching them on the model of organizations advocating for and supporting each other. Merely holding these convenings — rather than waiting around for the next funding cycle — felt transformative to members, Hyatt said. “It became, ‘Here’s how you can partner with us in our work,’ instead of funders just coming with their RFPs.”
This was a natural pitch, in some ways, for Teiger Foundation, which has funded three similar arts collaboratives in New York. As we’ve written before, David Teiger, a management consultant and avid art collector, launched the foundation in 2008 to support ambitious, challenging and controversial curatorial projects that might not otherwise come to life. What this has come to look like in practice is a focus on supporting individual curators and the visual arts ecosystem more generally — goals that LAVA fulfills. In addition to the unique work they curate and present to the public, alternative arts venues are important talent incubators that benefit entire communities, often ones far from a city’s flagship arts institution. Curators who have worked at major art museums sometimes go to smaller ones to develop leadership skills and have a chance to direct from their own curatorial visions. “They are places for experimentation and essential to the vibrancy of the whole sector. That’s why we track them so closely,” said Teiger’s Larissa Harris.
Still, funders had questions for this start-up collab. What happens if one of the member organizations fails? Why should they fund the collaborative if they already fund some of the groups individually? This feedback was helpful, said Hyatt, who credits the Mellon Foundation, in particular, with inspiring LAVA to refine its vision.
“They got it. They saw this as an opportunity to establish a new model and paradigm for nonprofits to work together. But it existed outside of their funding structures,” Hyatt said. “Having to think about what and how they would fund forced us to get more specific about our priorities as a sector.”
During the course of a year or so of these types of convenings, LAVA established its three funding priorities: economic recovery and sustainability, a goal that this month’s $50,000 grants will help meet; capacity building, as in creating a $250,000 annual fund to hire shared consultants, HR professionals and other infrastructure; and providing healthcare for the various groups’ 250-or-so total employees, which LAVA is currently focused on.
A big future for little arts orgs
Today, LAVA members continue to meet monthly, hold each other accountable to their individual goals, and share resources. LAVA continues to review applications from potential new members twice yearly.
Hyatt said that other groups interested in forming a similar type of collective need to have a high level of trust and communication. “There’s a real spirit of generosity among these directors,” she said, noting that it’s an intergenerational group, mostly women, ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s.
“There used to be a very protective mindset over ‘your’ donors, a false sense of competition. This is doing away with that and replacing it with the idea that we need to support each other. At the heart of LAVA is the shared feeling that by elevating the value of mutual aid and deep collaboration, we can work together to create a transformative, radically transparent, and intergenerational economic model that benefits us all.”
