The Role of Philanthropy in the U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement

As the Ford Foundation marks 25 years of involvement on U.S. immigration issues, it is a good time to take stock of what has occurred and to examine more closely philanthropy's role in supporting the growth of a national immigrant rights movement. There are many reasons for the field's rapid growth, including extraordinary leadership by those who have headed the movement. But the support of numerous foundations and other donors has played a vital part in fueling the field's expansion. Contributions have come from all parts of the philanthropic community. Smaller foundations, for example, have played a significant role in strengthening the capacity of regional and local immigrant-serving organizations that are backbone of the movement.To help tell the story of philanthropy's contribution to the development of an immigrant rights field in United States, the Ford Foundation commissioned journalist Louis Freedberg, with assistance from Ted Wang, to write this report. It describes how Ford initially entered the field, the challenges the Foundation and its grantees faced in the early years, how funders have worked together to support an emerging but vibrant movement, and the lessons learned to help inform future efforts to support the field. The authors' observations are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Ford Foundation. They point out that the power of philanthropic grantmaking in this area has come from a combination of factors: committed long-term funders who have supported this field for many years; a willingness to fund a wide range of organizations that provide complementary activities; flexibility to adjust grantmaking to changing conditions; and an openness among funders to collaborate with each other and as well as with grantees to achieve a shared vision

Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience

The implications of the discovery of mirroring mechanisms and embodied simulation for empathetic responses to images in general, and to works of visual art in particular, have not yet been assessed. Here, we address this issue and we challenge the primacy of cognition in responses to art. We propose that a crucial element of esthetic response consists of the activation of embodied mechanisms encompassing the simulation of actions, emotions and corporeal sensation, and that these mechanisms are universal. This basic level of reaction to images is essential to understanding the effectiveness both of everyday images and of works of art. Historical, cultural and other contextual factors do not preclude the importance of considering the neural processes that arise in the empathetic understanding of visual artworks

Pathos at Oraibi: What Warburg Did Not See

On May 1, 1896 Aby Warburg saw the Hemis Kachina dance at Oraibi, the ancient and remote Hopi pueblo on Third Mesa in the was below Tuba City in Arizona. Though Shongopovi was settled a little earlier, twelfth-century Oraibi is probably the oldest continuously inhabited place in the United States. The date on which Warburg saw the dance is not often recorded in the voluminous literature on the lecture he gave on the Serpent Ritual some twenty- seven years later – and this is just the least of the many strange omissions and distortions in the history of what has become a landmark in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. Warburg’s lecture is fraught with the tension between between paganism and classical culture, and with the implications of this tension for the human soul. It is unresolved in its view of the psychic and cultural resonance of the rational versus the irrational. It is full of the then modish preoccupation with the relations between Athens and Alexandria -- that is, between classical civilization and its roots in something wilder and less restrained. Underneath it all lies Warburg’s anxiety about what he felt to be the tragic split between man’s need for distance and his lost and irrecoverable ability to control nature directly

Johannes Molanus on Provocative Paintings: "De Historia Sanctarum Imaginum et Picturarum," Book II, Chapter 42

The first ecclesiastical writer to take the Tridentine decrees relating to the use and abuse of religious imagery as a starting point for an analysis of the question of nudity in art was Johannes Molanus, in his De Picturis et Imaginibus Sacris (Louvain 1570). It is true that Gilio da Fabriano had already published his Dialogo degli Errori de' Pittori in 1564,t~he year after the final session of the Council of Trent, but he does not mention its decrees concerning art at all, and the problem of nudity is dealt with only in the specific context of Michelangelo's Last J~dgment.~Molanus, on the other hand, makes the first generalized investigation of this problem in the chapter headed 'In picturis cavendum esse quidquid ad libidinem provocat'

The Power of Wood and Stone; The Taliban Is Not the First to Fear the Mysterious Lure of Art

Essay on the demolition of the two colossal Buddhas of Bamian, Afghanistan

Choirs of Praise: Some Aspects of Action Understanding in Fifteenth-Century Painting and Sculpture

Did Jan van Eyck go to Italy? This is an old question about Van Eyck, and raises a number of important issues about his art. I do not intend to settle it here. Rather, I ask it because it casts into high relief a central issue in the ways we think about responses to art, and, more specifically, about the relations between observation and action imitation

Damnatio Memoriae: Why Mobs Pull Down Statues

For hours the TV cameras played on the efforts to topple the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Al-Fardos ("Paradise") Square last week, and we all watched, fascinated. It seemed an epochal event. What is it about a dead and really poor statue -- a boring one indeed -- that rouses such personal antipathy? And why did we who were not there stay so gripped throughout the whole business