Darren Walker is the visionary President of the Ford Foundation, an independent non-profit 13 billion dollar international social justice institution. A true catalyst for positive change, in this episode Walker sat down with us for a feature interview. He discussed his personal journey, the future of arts leadership, and how social justice, empathy, and radical thinking must guide the way.
Darren Walker is the visionary President of the Ford Foundation, an independent non-profit 13 billion dollar international social justice institution. A true catalyst for positive change, in this episode Walker sat down with us for a feature interview. He discussed his personal journey, the future of arts leadership, and how social justice, empathy, and radical thinking must guide the way.
Host: Ilter Ibrahimof (Fall for Dance North, Canada)
Provocateur: Darren Walker (The Ford Foundation, United States)
Producer, Sound Designer, Composer: Johnny Spence
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Download Season 1, Episode 2, transcript at this link: https://bit.ly/3dnaoi2
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TRANSCRIPT BEGINS
[theme music]
0:06
Ilter Ibrahimof
You're listening to Meditations On, the new podcast from ISPA. I'm your host, Ilter Ibrahimof.
0:15
Darren Walker
Arts leaders are in the business of teaching us about empathy. And from empathy we have the ability to see the humanity in others.
0:30
Ilter Ibrahimof
Darren Walker is the visionary President of the Ford Foundation, an independent non-profit 13 billion dollar international social justice institution. This year, under his leadership, the Ford Foundation issued a 1 billion dollar social bond in U.S capital markets for proceeds to stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of the Covid19 pandemic. That includes an 85 million dollar investment into new granting programs to support Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous arts organizations. A true catalyst for positive change, Walker sat down with us for a feature interview. He discussed his personal journey, the future of arts leadership, and how social justice, empathy, and radical thinking must guide the way. These are his meditations.
1:31
Darren Walker
What motivates me every day to do the work that we do at the Ford Foundation is a simple idea. The idea that every person on the planet deserves to live with dignity. And that everyone ought to be able to dream. And that every person deserves beauty in their life. And so I am lucky because at the Ford Foundation I get to bring together my avocation, my love of the arts, and a vocation, a career, of working in philanthropy and working at a foundation that cares deeply about growing inequality in the world, racial injustice, patriarchy, and the pernicious consequences of patriarchy, and the work that we do supports the artists, the individuals, the scholars, the grassroots leaders, the institutions who are working to advance justice in a world where the very idea of justice is increasingly contested. At the Ford Foundation we're in the business of hope and there's never been a time when hope is needed more than today. So I feel inordinately lucky and fortunate to be able to serve at the Ford Foundation today.
3:19
[ambient music]
3:22
We do three things at the Ford Foundation. We invest in individuals, in leaders, we invest in ideas, and we invest in institutions. I call it the three "I"s. So those individuals, those leaders, are essential because without leaders, without the people who have the courage to step up and step forward with big ideas and mobilize and rally people behind those ideas, it's hard to sustain those ideas. And we depend on the creativity from those leaders. And so leadership is critical and it's one of the reasons why the Ford Foundation has always supported leadership programs. It's one of the reasons artists have always been a part of our leadership programs. It's one of the reasons why the first trustee who was appointed after I became president was an artist. Because I wanted to signal that as we were pivoting our work to focus more on justice that the artist is the pathway to more justice. That arts leaders are in the business of teaching us about empathy. And from empathy we have the ability to see the humanity in others. When I look around and see some leaders today use the kinds of words to describe other human beings, other places, in such dehumanizing, degrading ways, I know something about those leaders. I know they have never witnessed the beauty of a Teresita Fernández painting, they have never read the poems of Langston Hughes or Elizabeth Alexander. Those people have been deprived and suffer from a poverty. A poverty of their own spirit. Because this is what the arts does. It nurtures the spirit.
6:02
I remember the first time I experienced the arts as a truly emotional experience. I was a sophomore at the University of Texas in Austin Texas in 1980 and I had the opportunity to see the Dance Theater of Harlem. I witnessed first Arthur Mitchell come on to stage. Mr. Mitchell was something I had never experienced before. This grand, elegant, gay black man, talking about the arts, and dance, and Balanchine, and his belief that Black dancers could do Balanchine better. And watching Dance Theater of Harlem was an experience I can't even fully put to words. Because it was seeing a stage of Blackness, and beauty, and elegance, and excellence. Watching them dance, it was a transformational experience for me. And for the first time I understood how you can be literally brought to tears from the emotional experience of relating to what has just proceeded on the stage. And that has happened to me time and again. The first time I saw Revelations, an Ailey performance of Revelations, it was the same thing. I mean, it was an out-of-body experience.
8:12
[ambient music]
So I remember. And that's what I'm always looking for. I'm always looking for the next time I'm going to be brought to tears by a performance. Whether it be in a theater watching great dance or whether it be in a museum seeing my first Kehinde Wiley painting of Wanda Crichlow, the Duchess of Archaeon, an elegant, Black, royal woman from Brooklyn and how she was represented in all of her dignity in that great painting. So I love the arts, I'm nourished by the arts, I can't imagine life without the arts.
9:12
For a lot of arts organizations, the role of the arts has been to narrate for us who we are. So in the United States, in the West, is to narrate our identity. And our identity is deeply rooted in a perspective of Western culture, a Eurocentric perspective. And, with the reality of a white hegemony that has manifested in colonialism, and anti-Blackness, to be completely candid. And I think arts leaders going forward will need to be more diverse, will need to engage with the very communities whose artistic product is being presented, and sometimes exploited. And engage in ways that require more humility and better listening. We're reminded of the historical hold that the narrative has on us, right. And that narrative of telling America, telling Europe, telling Africa, who we are. And I think that is a contested idea now. So for arts leaders it does require some introspection, and it requires moving beyond some of the performative statements of Black Lives Matter and the inauthentic ways in which some have engaged, to really internalizing the rhetoric of behavior change coming from that internalization of the rhetoric and the words.
11:10
And some of the specific interventions will include looking at governance. Who constitutes the boards of arts organizations? If we look today, the boards generally are not very diverse. And I understand that part of the reason is because we've got to raise money and the most visible money is white money, okay. And that is a reality that we have to acknowledge. But money is not the only asset that is needed at the board table. If you value the perspective of the artist, if you value the perspective of the community, boards will look different. That's going to require a behavior change on the part of boards and board leadership.
12:07
The next intervention needs to be at the management level. We have an ecosystem and a pipeline of talent development that depends on intergenerational relationships. And artists of color, leaders in the arts field of color, up-and-coming prospective leaders of color, are often not in those networks, those intergenerational networks. And, unless intentional efforts are made to include them, it won't happen. Because the accreted behaviors and norms and cultural practices in the arts community will not generate naturally this outcome. I think we're going to need to experiment on different configurations of arts organizations, even if you call it that. Maybe it's not organizations, maybe these are informal networks. Maybe these are not even 501c3s. I don't know. Should we look at the relationship between the commercial and the not-for-profit. Because we have created this firewall that commercial is the unsavory part of it, whereas, you know, those of us in the not-for-profit sector we are doing God's work or something. I mean I think we create these binaries that will absolutely need to be disrupted.
13:51
So, I think we just need to disrupt our thinking to suspend our attachment to the kind of legacy thinking, legacy analysis, legacy approaches, and be open. And particularly be open to listening, to listening to artists on the ground, artists who are most proximate to the challenges and the issues we want to work on. And the Ford Foundation's role, I believe, in this moment, is to be a better advocate for the kind of transformation we need to see in the arts towards equity. So that we do not reflexively cut the programs that serve the most vulnerable first. What we are doing is prioritizing, through a lens of racial equity, the organizations we fund. And, within organizations that are large, those programs that serve the most vulnerable.
15:00
The second thing we can do, is to hopefully advocate within philanthropy, to raise awareness of the necessity of funding through this lens of racial equity. Of funding through the lens of prioritizing organizations representing communities led by people of color.
15:24
And, the final thing we can do, is to support those organizations and communities who are demanding more public support for the arts. Without a commitment from the public, and without public policy that lifts up, elevates, and names the critical nature of the arts in a democracy, we will not be a democracy. And so, the private sector, while we have a critical role to play, it is our democratic institutions who should speak first and most loudly about the necessity, the centrality, of investing in the arts as a path towards a more effective, and successful, and vibrant democracy.
16:28
[ambient music]
16:45
One of the real challenges for arts leaders today is the tension between the legacy heritage of an arts organization and the importance of innovation. What I see in legacy arts organizations, and legacy organizations generally, is too much focus on preservation and not enough on innovation. And that tension is real. And arts leaders are caught in that tension because often resources are tied to those legacy directors, and trustees, and patrons. And those legacy ideas are pushing up against what are new, fresh, vibrant ideas, that are represented by more disruption. Things that aren't necessarily a normal way of doing business. And so, that tension has to be navigated. I think one way of managing it is to bring it all together and to demonstrate, through the kinds of winds that come from doing something that is non-normative, something that is radical, or disruptive, and showing its potential. One of the things I've noticed is that these new, radical, unconventional ideas get manifested and get a lot more attention in the media. And boards like their organizations to get attention. And so there are ways in which you can think about leveraging these new, disruptive, unconventional thinkers, in ways that inure to the benefit of the organization in terms of its brand and its public positioning.
18:36
[ambient music]
I think arts leaders are going to need to be even more disruptive in the future. I think we need radical thinking. We need people who are willing to embrace the uncomfortable truths of our history. In the history of the way the arts, and arts institutions have practiced, certain cultural norms that have been harmful to people of color, that have excluded communities, and have, in many ways, made it more difficult now to engage successfully. Because we have these histories of exclusion that we now must overcome. But I believe that arts leaders are evolving. We're starting to see a new generation emerge. A generation who are not saddled necessarily with all of the baggage. And we're starting to see, for the first time I believe, the emergence of artists of color who are coming into their own. Arts leaders of color of different backgrounds. Including disability, which is another important dimension here we must acknowledge. And that gives me hope.
20:16
Ilter Ibrahimof
[theme music]
Meditations On is presented by ISPA. This episode was produced by Johnny Spence and hosted by me Ilter Ibrahimof. Our theme song and all additional music is by Johnny Spence. The Executive Producer is David Baile. Special thanks to Darren Walker. This episode was sponsored by Theater Projects. They know how to create performance spaces that come alive. Learn more about their work at theatreprojects.com
TRANSCRIPT ENDS