Thursday February 7, 2008
The Knight Foundation has announced major grants to three local arts organizations: $10 million to the Miami Art Museum, $5 million to MoCA, and $5 to the New World Symphony. Other organizations and individual artists can apply for a chunk of another $20 million available for smaller grants, which must however be matched by funding from other sources. Given this, and given the recent $30 million Arsch gift and the $10 million recently given to the Harn museum in Gainesville, the question becomes: who’s going to be the next to step up with an 8-figure donation?
Monday January 14, 2008
Carnival Center renamed the Arsht Center
On Friday, the performing arts center previously known as Carnival dropped the bomb: it had received a $30 million donation from one Adrienne Arsht, and would now be forever after known as the Arsht Center. Well, actually, the official name is the “Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County.” Observations, bullet-point style:
- I think the name is great. The 11-word “real” name is so grotesque that it will never again be uttered, and “Arsht Center” has a nice snappy ring to it, so don’t even go there. (Oops, they went there.)
- There’s the logo, cleaned up as best as I could manage from the photo accompanying the Herald story. It seems to boldly proclaim that the avant-garde implications the first season at the center have been thoroughly and permanently quashed. I actually doubt this is true, and so I hope this is just an ad-hoc logo and they’re working on something a little less generic.
- What’s up with a .com or a .org? If they’ve secured these domains, a nice “website coming” splash would have been helpful, and if not, I’d think that the negotiations would be a lot more, err.. difficult, now: “Hey, we just got $30 million, and we need to buy your domain.”
- It’s very difficult to sound humble on an occasion like this, and Adrienne Arsht didn’t bother trying. Her speech began: “As I look around, it’s clear that I stand here on the shoulders of giants. And what I hope I have accomplished in making this gift is that my shoulders become those which you stand on to take this farther.” Here’s a nice profile on her.
- $30 million is serious money. Of that, Carnival is taking back $10 million of its original donation (That’s very big of you guys. Carnival still sucks.), and $14 million goes to Miami-Dade county government to repay a loan (so why are they added to the name? And what’s with the huffiness?). But what it does show is that there is serious philanthropic money in Miami, boding well, one would think, for the MAM building.
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Friday November 10, 2006
“More importantly, we discussed the university’s apparent ability to receive as much as $100 million for the naming rights… We therefore request that my name be removed from the FIU College of Medicine and suggest that it be renamed for the donor that makes the $100 million donation to the collegue. It would be selfish for us not to extend this financial opportunity to the university.” (link to letters, via SotP/a)
