Today, Knight Foundation is announcing the 41 finalists in the 2010 Knight Arts Challenge, a contest to bring South Florida together through the arts. Check out their exciting ideas, which include nurturing new writers, enriching the local music scene and introducing young minds to the arts.

This year’s finalists were clearly inspired by the winners in rounds one and two, and stepped it up a notch to offer a great depth of quality and creativity.

We'’ll announce the winners in the fall. Find out more about the contest and the impact of our previous winners at www.KnightArts.org
- Dennis Scholl

Dennis Scholl

Great news for the national arts scene: Dennis Scholl, Knight Foundation’s Miami program director and a longtime arts advocate and philanthropist, will head up Knight’s new national cultural arts efforts. Dennis was just named vice president/arts for Knight Foundation. He’ll work with arts leaders in different communities around the country where the Knight brothers owned newspapers – from Detroit, Akron, Charlotte and Philadelphia to Macon, Miami, San Jose and St. Paul – to promote the arts and find innovative cultural programs that enrich people’s lives. He has already has helped transform the South Florida arts scene with Miami’s Knight Arts Challenge, $40 million initiative that aims to unite the region through the arts (finalists will be named in May in the contest’s third round).

With one of the top contemporary art collections in the US and experience leading local and national philanthropic efforts in the visual arts, Dennis’s passion and energy for the arts makes him particularly well-suited for his new post at Knight. He has also ventured into the role of creator as writer and co-producer of a short film, Sunday’s Best, which was just shown at the Aspen Shortsfest 2010. Besides his broad involvement in the arts, Dennis co-founded Betts & Scholl, an international wine venture, and has practiced law, worked as a CPA and restored Art Deco properties on South Beach. We at Knight are looking forward to continuing to transform communities with Dennis’s leadership.

Gepsie Metellus, director of Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, and Dennis Scholl, Miami Program Director for Knight Foundation, answer questions at Sant La.

Representatives from six organizations receiving grants spoke at Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center in Miami. (April 7, 2010)

After a massive earthquake devastated Haiti in January, the impact of the event quickly rippled to South Florida. Here, Haitian families were hurting. They searched for loved ones, scrambled to send money to survivors and welcomed some into their Miami homes. Local service agencies, already stretched, offered assistance, including food, clothing and counseling.

Because the Haitian community is such an integral part of South Florida, Knight Foundation explored what it could do to help. After meeting with local Haitian leaders, Knight decided on a proactive strategy that addresses both long and short-term needs. We hope that the plan, announced today, will not only help South Forida Haitians help family members, but give them a stronger voice in issues and ultimately help them to rebuild Haiti.

For example, in just one part of the plan, Knight Foundation is funding a census outreach campaign. This is what we mean by a long-term investment. We hope the campaign, conducted by Sant La/The Haitian Neighborhood Center, will help ensure an accurate count and – ultimately - appropriate levels of federal funding and representation that will strengthen the community.

This morning, the leaders of five South Florida nonprofits gathered to talk about the local challenges in the wake of the earthquake.

For context: Knight Foundation promotes informed, engaged communities. To engage with critical issues, a community needs strength and resources. This is why we make these grants to the South Florida Haitian community.

Read more about the plan.

Living just 90 miles apart, the lives of a dozen young Cuban women and men, six in Havana and six in Miami, are being chronicled in an online documentary project, Havana-Miami.

In an article in the Miami Herald, Ilan Ziv, executive producer of the project, says:

The idea behind Havana-Miami is to use human experiences that are very similar to help connect audiences and overcome their political alienation ... The stories from Havana are very similar to the Miami stories: People trying to survive and dreaming about their future. When you explore the huge cultural and human connection that exists between Miami and Havana, the commonality of people's experiences outweighs their political differences.

The project is being produced by University of Miami School of Communication graduate students Mark Shumow and Mark Mocahbee, with the help of undergraduate students who are filming the Miami participants and a Cuban film making team in Havana. The project is funded by Arte, a French-German TV network, and in association with the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami.

This three-month web series is comprised of six short (2-minute long) video updates each week and will be completed in May. Viewers can watch the web series as it unfolds  at http://www.havana-miami.tv. A stand-alone documentary will be produced upon completion of the series.

Over the next five years, Teach for America will more than triple its number of teachers in Miami-Dade county with the help of a $6 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. By 2014, some 350 Teach for America educators will reach more than 25,000 students in Miami-Dade public schools.

Teach For America is the national corps of recent college graduates who commit to teaching at public schools for two years and become livelong leaders in education. Today, 7,300 corps members and 17,000 alumni are working for fundamental change to ensure educational excellence and equity.

Kimberly Williams, a Teach For America corps educator at Miami Central Senior High School, and her 11th grade student Kettysha Collydmore shared their stories Thursday night to an audience of Miami-Dade corps educators:

Dennis Scholl, Miami Program Director for Knight Foundation, believes that Teach for America is the right program to create systemic change in Miami's education system.

"The achievement gap in this community's schools is a massive gap. But the good news is it's fixable – and Teach for America knows how to do it," Scholl said Thursday night. "Today, [Teach For America educators] are changing the culture of our schools, classroom by classroom. Tomorrow, we expect [them] to stick around as alumni and be the educators and advocates Miami-Dade needs to continue to move this community forward."

A feeder pattern for teacher placement has been developed to help ensure students success is maintained over time. Teachers will move from elementary schools to middle schools and from middle schools to high schools so that students have the opportunity to be a part of Teach For America for more than one year.

Read the Miami Herald for a story and an editorial on Teach For America. To learn more and donate, visit http://teachforamerica.org/.

In 2000, Knight Foundation began investing $19 million towards revitalizing Overtown, a once-vibrant area in Miami that had been hit hard in recent decades. Seven years later, the Foundation took an unusual step. As well as conducting its own grant impact assessments, Knight hired a reporter to investigate how the Foundation's investments performed and produce a public report, without pulling any punches.

The resulting report by Andre Oliver is a sobering picture of the challenges met in trying to transform the community. And the report itself is still making an impact. Most recently, a column in the Miami Herald this week about the continued setbacks in Overtown cited the report in its analysis:

In 2000, the Miami-based Knight Foundation made a major effort to transform Overtown with a $19 million commitment to 32 national and community organizations.

Two years ago, the foundation published an analysis of its effort, showing mixed results.

Among the main obstacles, according to the report: a lack of a common vision in the community and a void in community leadership and collaboration.

"The role of the city and the county in Overtown's development remains critical, but has been challenging,'' the report stated.

The Overtown report is part of a series of reporter's analyses funded by Knight. Each of them encapsulates valuable lessons about how our grants play out in the communities they affect. And they offer a candid picture of both our setbacks and our successes. If you want to get a sense of what Knight considers when making a grant, this might be a good place to start.

This post was written as a collaborative project by Knight's 2009 summer interns.

On Tuesday, June 23 Knight Foundation staff members and summer interns attended a performance of FUERZABRUTA at the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Centeras guests of Dennis Scholl, the Communities Program Director for Miami. 

FUERZABRUTA is an interactive visual spectacle that packs six to eight hundred people into a dark room for an hour. Eight cast members manipulate the dynamic set pieces with their bodies and engage the audience with disposable props and pumping music. A giant treadmill and a plastic pool suspended over the heads of the audience make up most of the set. 

It’s easy to get swept up in the sensory show; audience members touch, throw, dance and move from place to place like the actors do. In a recent performance, one audience member got carried away and was kicked out for repeatedly punching the plastic pool.

The show has been touring for three years, debuting in Argentina and traveling across the U.S. as well as to countries like the U.K., Brazil and Mexico. One cast member noted contrasting energies between audiences in New York and in Miami. Another performer said that in Argentina the show is considered more a theatre piece than a work of conceptual art. Apparently the experience changes from city to city and from night to night, but everyone agrees the real party happens on the weekends.

In just a few months, architect Frank Gehry’s latest creation will dominate Miami’s artistic scene as the New World Symphony’s arts “laboratory,” where the musical and the visual will be combined into one dynamic arts experience.

In December 2007 the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation granted New World Symphony a Knight New Media Endowment of five million dollars. The money will be used for media innovations in the arts such as online broadcasting of performances, a digital music library, and integration of video art and music in the symphony’s new building.

The building seeks to allow a performance space for NWS while incorporating animated art and new media technology into the concert experience. Working with video artist Tal Rosner, who listens to musical pieces, sketches his reactions, and develops them into video graphics, NWS has already begun integrating the music world with novel video artwork. In Rosner’s interpretation of both Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky’s works, changes in tempo, dynamic, and tone are all expressed visually in mutable combinations of color and line projected onto a screen behind the musicians.

Gehry’s design will take that music-video combination to the next level by permitting both art forms to exist throughout the hall rather than confining them to the traditional stage and back-drop. Acoustic sails all around and above the hall help to completely envelop listeners sitting in any section, and the experience is enhanced with two extra platforms for musicians situated in the middle of the seating areas. The design eliminates the division between audience and performer. In one large space, the music, the art, and the active listening and watching mingle to form an altogether new artistic experience.

It is impossible to predict the response to this kind of artistic collaboration. The new environment might overwhelm the senses; art purists may reject what could be viewed as a muddying of both media.

On the other hand, detecting change in an animated image alongside change in the music might help visual learners engage with the works. With shows as short as twenty minutes, or “journeys” as long as two to three hours, art will be available to anyone, at any concentration, in either musical or visual form. It is an opportunity for the arts in Miami to soar to a new level of accessibility.

Just a few months ago, the space was totally vacant. The several stories of performance space seem to have shot up in a matter of moments. More exciting than its seemingly quick arrival, however, is of course the building’s promised mission to challenge and change the Miami art world.

For more information, visit New World Symphony’s new campus online.

Marc Fest is Vice President of Communications at Knight Foundation.

Knight Foundation's president and CEO, Alberto Ibargüen, gave a commencement speech at Miami Dade College today. Here is what someone tweeted about it:

• Alberto Ibarguen: do not be passive; Miami is still being made. What happens here can determine the shape of our nation.
• Alberto Ibarguen: learn to treasure solitude and get over loneliness.
• Alberto Ibarguen: the importance of Miami is our connection to the rest of the hemisphere.

You can read the whole speech here.

Please join us at Knight in welcoming a new colleague and congratulating two of our own for a lifetime achievement award and a new elected position.

Welcome to Dennis Scholl, the new Miami Program Director for Knight.

From the press release,

Scholl will work with local leaders to identify opportunities for investing in innovative ideas and programs. His efforts will include leading the Knight Arts Challenge, a $40 million initiative to unite South Florida through the arts.

An art collector for more than 30 years, Scholl has lead local and national philanthropic efforts in the visual arts. He served as founding chair of the Guggenheim Photography Committee, of the Tate Modern American Acquisitions Committee and of the Miami Art Museum Collectors Council. He has also served on the boards of the Aspen Art Museum, the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and the alternative art space Locust Projects, of which he was chair.

Congratulations to Damian Thorman, National Program Director for Knight Foundation on his election as Vice Chair of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

Congratulations to Susan Patterson, Charlotte Program Director for Knight Foundation, on receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Hornets Nest Girl Scout Council's 4th annual Women of Distinction Award Luncheon. Here she is with her mother, who was her first Girl Scout leader.