If his case fails, the award to the photographer Patrick Cariou, whose works Prince reused in his “Canal Zone” series, is potentially “in the millions”, Cariou’s attorney Daniel Brooks says. Papers submitted by Prince’s legal team cite as justification work by artists Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Yet there is growing evidence—albeit rarely reported—that, although these artists may have started out as willing or unwitting outlaws, they decided that possibly infringing other artists’ copyright was legally unwise and potentially expensive, and they stopped.

Jeff Koons has not used a copyrighted work without permission for a long time, says his attorney, John Koegel. His client “has learned more about copyright” since defending himself in five infringement suits. “Where permissions are perceived to be needed, they are sought,” Koegel says.

In 1992, the Second Circuit, the highest US court to hear the case, ruled against Koons for using photographer Art Rogers’s postcard of a husband and wife holding a litter of puppies as the source material for the sculpture String of Puppies, 1988. Koons had sent the postcard to his fabricators in Italy with written instructions that the “work must be just like [the] photo”.

“The copying was so deliberate,” the court decided, “as to suggest that defendants [Koons and the Sonnabend Gallery] resolved that so long as they were significant players in the art business, and the copies they produced bettered the price of the copied work by a thousand to one, their piracy of a less well-known artist’s work would escape being sullied by an accusation of plagiarism.”

That case was one of four that Koons ultimately settled out of court, although he won the fifth and last, when the Second Circuit ruled in 2006 that his use of an Andrea Blanch photograph was protected under copyright law as “fair use”.

Koons hasn’t stopped using copyrighted material but now gets licences first—his “Popeye” series, shown in 2009 at London’s Serpentine Gallery, is just one example. Koegel says that although responses to Koons’s requests vary, “hordes of people” have granted permissions, including United Feature Syndicate, which had earlier sued him, and Marvel Comics.

Sherrie Levine, who recently had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, began appropriating as a self-conscious outlaw. “She made it clear that piracy, with its overtones of infringement and lack of authorisation, was the point,” reported Gerald Marzorati when he interviewed Levine for Artnews in 1986.

In the early 1980s, Levine photographed and duplicated classic works by US photographers Walker Evans and Edward Weston, changing only the title. Both the Evans and Weston estates objected to her unauthorised use of their pictures. Arguably her most famous work, her photograph of Evans’s historic portrait of Depression-era sharecropper Allie Mae Burroughs (After Walker Evans: 4, 1981), in fact appeared in a Whitney brochure during the retrospective as copyright of the Walker Evans Estate, not Levine.

“She doesn’t have the copyright because of a dispute with the estate,” says a staff member at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents her, and none of her Weston “re-photographs” were included in the retrospective. The “understanding” of Howard Singerman, a professor of 20th-century art and theory at the University of Virginia and author of Art History, After Sherrie Levine, is that Levine agreed not to exhibit the “After Edward Weston” series or use any of his copyrighted photos, and agreed not to sell the “After Walker Evans” series though she could show it. Her gallery says: “The artist would not like to disclose information about these questions.” In any event, Levine apparently changed her practice to avoid “copyright snags”, rephotographing works that were already in the public domain, Marzorati reported.

There are older precedents. The young Andy Warhol, for example, was caught using copyrighted material, but then started working with rights holders to secure licences. According to gallery owner Ronald Feldman, who worked with Warhol on some of his most famous prints, including the smiling Mickey Mouse, “we went for permissions”.

In the 1960s, Warhol faced three infringement lawsuits when he used photographs by Patricia Caulfield, Fred Ward and Charles Moore. He settled all three cases out of court. “Andy wasn’t trying to steal,” Feldman says. “He learned a lesson from the lawsuits. I was always concerned about the rights, as was he.”

According to Feldman, for “Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century”, he tracked down and obtained the rights for all the source photographs. “We paid for [the rights to] the Kafka photograph because we had to,” he says. “Trude Fleischmann gave [her Einstein photograph] to us for free.”

Warhol desperately wanted to do Disney characters, so Feldman persuaded the company to allow Warhol to use images of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Warhol agreed to Disney’s demands for shared copyrights and other controls, along with original prints. Superman, 1981, from Warhol’s “Myths” series is also a joint copyright, with DC Comics.

San Francisco photographer Morton Beebe only discovered that Robert Rauschenberg had used two of his photographs in the 1974 print Pull when his friends, artists Christo and Jean-Claude, were looking at his portfolio. Christo pointed to the photograph Mexico Diver and said: “My God, is that yours or Rauschenberg’s? Have you seen Time magazine this week?”

Beebe got hold of the magazine and saw in a feature about Rauschenberg that he had not only used Mexico Diver but also his photograph of a native New Guinean repeated across the top of the print. Both pictures were part of a series Beebe had shot for an advertisement for Nikon cameras that had appeared in 17 magazines.

Beebe sued. Rauschenberg’s printer testified that the artist had showed him the Nikon ad and said: “I’ll just lift it.”

Rauschenberg settled, paid the photographer’s legal fees and gave him a numbered print of Pull. He promised that whenever the image appeared in print Beebe would be acknowledged. Later, when Beebe discovered another unauthorised use of Mexico Diver, Rauschenberg gave him another print of Pull, which Beebe sold for $13,000.

Beebe points out that potentially high legal fees makes photographers reluctant to sue (in the US litigants typically bear their own costs). After the suit settled, in 1980, Rauschenberg shifted to using his own photographs exclusively for the next 28 years if his life, according to the Guggenheim Museum and others.

Some artists, such as Mike Bidlo, who has copied other artists’ work for decades in the same size and medium as the original, regularly work with rights holders. When unsuccessful in getting permission, Bidlo may do something else with the work he wanted to copy. Years ago, when he wanted to replicate Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain, he wrote to the artist’s heir Jacqueline Matisse Monnier for permission. When he “didn’t get the response we were looking for”, Bidlo created what he called “extrapolations” and “transformations”—drawings based on the object.

As for Richard Prince, he has cultivated a reputation as an outlaw who takes whatever image he wants without asking permission. “I didn’t exactly ‘fall’ [into photography] as much as steal,” he told Artforum in 2003. But at his deposition in the Cariou case, Prince testified that in 1992 he had paid $2,000 to Garry Gross for reusing the photographer’s 1976 photograph of ten-year-old Brooke Shields standing naked in a steamy bathtub. The image, which Prince titled Spiritual America, 1983, is one of his most notorious: it was pulled from a 2009 Tate exhibition because it could possibly violate obscenity laws.

“I bought the rights,” Prince testified. Apparently, the Whitney, which in 1992 was organising a Prince show, would not display Spiritual America without evidence that Prince had licensed the original.

Would the history of art be different if “appropriation” artists in America were always more a part of the process—as the most famous ones became—seeking permission or paying fees? “Can I be agnostic on that?” Singerman says.

Looking at the practice of some of the best-known “appropriation” artists reveals that they often came around to acknowledging copyright law more quickly and more fully than is generally thought—without negative effects on their reputation, success or creativity.

The Art Newspaper

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/No-longer-appropriate?/26378

A record price was tallied Wednesday night for Roy Lichtenstein’s “Sleeping Girl,” a 1964 comic-strip painting that reverberates against Constantin Brancusi’s 1908 sculpture “Sleeping Muse.” London’s Frieze Art Fair just had its first outing on an East River island adjacent to Manhattan, charging $40 a head to enter a specially constructed display tent that alone cost $1.5 million to erect. Just days after Edvard Munch’s iconic “The Scream” — one of four versions — sold for $120 million at auction and garnered thousands of headlines as the most expensive work of art ever publicly sold, a 1961 Mark Rothko abstraction fetched $87 million, more than the initial estimate for “The Scream.”

And don’t you love the doggy term “fetch” for auction prices?

The hand-wringing over this Pavlovian confluence of art and money has been audible, but it has generated more heat than light. Most of the shrieks center on the confusion of authentic value, represented by a degradation of art’s capacity for meaning in the hard face of promiscuous cash. One art expert even went on a network morning news program to denounce “The Scream” sale as “a freak show” — an observation I’d say misses the point entirely.

After all, what price for a pastel drawing would transform a freak show into a respectable sale: $40 million? $10 million? $50,000? Even that last sum bumps up against the annual median income of an American family.

And that’s where the actual point about current art prices might be found. The obscenity isn’t in the astronomical sums art has been fetching, it’s in the circumstances that make those prices possible.

Two years ago a team of economists at Yale School of Management and Tilburg University in the Netherlands crunched the art market numbers and came to some sobering conclusions. Using mostly British art-market data compiled since 1765, William Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog and Christophe Spaenjers found a variety of factors were involved in today’s stratospheric art prices. They include things like the new globalization of the buying pool. More wealthy buyers equals more competitive bidding.

However, for the period between 1908 and 2005, one factor edged out all others: Art prices rise — and rise faster — when income inequality goes up.

Occupy Wall Street gave visibility to today’s stark income inequality, which is the real freak show. Since Ronald Reagan took office, the average 1-percenter has nearly tripled his share, growing from 12 1/2 times the median household income to a staggering 36 times greater. The Senate Budget Committee was told in February that CEO-to-worker pay rose from 42-to-1 in 1980 to 325-to-1 in 2010. The national income held by the top 1% is at roughly the level it was in 1928, just before the Roaring Twenties erupted in the fireball of the Great Depression.

Art prices have followed. The study’s authors found that a “one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1% triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent.” Dyspeptic Edvard Munch would probably agree: That’s quite a multiplier.

I’m not an economist and can’t assess the researchers’ sources and methodology. But Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” An art critic might add: We may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or we may have an art market that is not a freak show, but we cannot have both. Shrieking about “The Scream” rather than income inequality is spitting in the wind.

LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-knight-art-money-20120510,0,5987894.story

Chris Colfer of Glee tweeted, ” Check out this amazing Save the Arts video”. Turns out they are trying to remove art from classrooms in California. Go to www.adoptthearts.org if you want to help get it back.

It is the mission of Adopt the Arts Foundation to bring together well-known artists, public figures, and the general public to save the arts in America’s public schools. We believe that it is morally and ethically incumbent upon us to foster the creativity, dreams, hopes, and imaginations of our children. Adopt the Arts Foundation is dedicated to improving the academic performance of every child through the gift of making art and music to our public school students.

Stars of video: Sam Macaroni, Johnathon Schaech, Steven Tyler, Jane Lynch, Kiss, Tony Okungbowa, Matt Sorum, Shay Carl, Epic Lloyd, Hiimrawn, Davin Dell’osa, Wayne Hoffman and the awesome artwork of Mary Doodles!

Directed by Sam Macaroni
Written by Johnathon Schaech

Watch here: http://www.gleeksource.com/Cast-Members/Sue-Sylvester/Sue-Sylvester-s-Blog/May-2012/Watch-Glee-s-Jane-Lynch-in-PSA–about–Save-the-Ar.aspx

While the program has attracted the support of celebrity artists including Chuck Close, Yo-Yo Ma, and Sarah Jessica Parker, not everyone is impressed. “This is a teeny, tiny little band-aid on what is a giant, national festering problem,” says Diane Ravitch, author of The Life and Death of the Great American School System. “And it doesn’t begin to address the needs of the schools.”

Ravitch served in the Department of Education in the administrations of both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. She was also a prominent supporter of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, before becoming one of its fiercest critics in 2006. As Ravitch sees it, NCLB’s stringent standardized testing requirements have forced schools and teachers to obsess over test scores at the cost of teaching critical thinking and creativity. “The very nature of standardized testing is that new ideas are punished,” Ravitch tells Kurt Andersen.

“If we have a generation of kids who can’t think for themselves, our whole country is in trouble,” Ravitch warns. “Nations that have the highest test scores have the lowest creativity scores. The more we raise our test scores, the more we sacrifice creativity.”

But the solution, Ravitch says, is not more federal money for the arts in schools. “The funder of the arts should be and must be the local and state governments,” she says. They, in turn, must consider music and visual arts as valuable subjects as reading and math. “The arts are just as important in schools as the basic subjects — [art] is a basic subject.”

Studio 360

http://www.studio360.org/2012/may/04/can-obamas-turnaround-arts-initiative-save-schools/?utm_source=local&utm_media=treatment&utm_campaign=daMost&utm_content=damostviewed

Local Autonomy Networks: Find Each Other is a collaboration between Micha Cárdenas, PhD student in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California, Allison Wyper, Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UCLA, Natalie Rosen and Claire Viele. We need funding to support the production of 12 Autonets garments and the presentation of performances and workshops at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, MI, the International Symposium of Electronic Art in Albuquerque, NM, the HTMlles festival of feminist new media art in Montreal, QC and the American Studies Association annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The project has been invited to all of these venues, but none of them are able to provide funding for all our travel costs, or materials to produce the electronics for future performances. The video above uses two early prototypes, but the actual Autonets garments are still in development. The devices will be made open source under an Open Hardware license and the designs will be made publicly available. We hope to be able to give working devices to people who need them through workshops once we feel they are working well enough to be distributed.

Performance – Find Each Other – “What is the practical meaning of deposing power locally? …How do we subsist? How do we find each other,” asks the Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection. Find Each Other is an experimental movement piece in which two performers explore space to the sound of poetry, using proximity sensing electronic garments from the Autonets series. The lights in the performers’ clothing change based on the wireless signal strength, a rough approximation of distance and a visible interpretation of connection.

Workshop – Building Local Autonomy Networks – How can communities build networks of communication that are not dependent on corporations? How can these networks facilitate safety for women, queer and trans people, people of color, differently abled people and all people subject to systemic violence on a daily basis? How can community based networks of communication facilitate community autonomy? Building on inspiration from the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project I worked on with the Electronic Disturbance Theater to recycle used cell phones to turn them into life saving GPS devices that provide physical and poetic sustenance for people crossing the US/Mexico border, the Autonets workshop will engage a broad range of participants in a discussion of how we can form local networks of autonomy and solidarity in order to create community based responses to violences which are personal, gendered or state sponsored. Also inspired by the SOS SMS project, using text messages to respond to domestic violence, the workshop will consider a variety of approaches. Interested participants can take part in the second day of the workshop on building mesh networked wearable electronic fashion. This workshop was developed in collaboration with the Artivistic collective, based in Montreal.

Project Background

Wearable electronics are a new form of electronics that are enabled by threads and fabrics which have conductive material woven into them. The initial Autonets prototypes use the Lilypad Arduino and Xbee wireless transmitters, led lights and EL Wire to be able to send direction and distance information.

Autonets considers the potential uses of wearable electronics to create networks of communication based on mesh networking that do not rely on the internet to function. The project includes the development of technologies including wearable electronics, community building methods, theory and poetry. Autonets was the subject of Micha Cárdenas’ TEDx talk at TEDx Del Mar. The first iteration was presented at the Queerture fashion show at UCLA. Later generations were shown at the Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica.

I envision a wide range of possible uses for Autonets. For example, a group of sex workers collectively organize to protect each other from violence. A group of bicyclists want to flock together for a group ride. A group of women, transgender and cisgender, agree to let each other know when they are walking home and when they’ve arrived home safely. All of these communities can benefit from Autonets, remapping urban environments.

In economic and ecological crises, large scale communications networks often fail and locally based, mesh networked solutions become life saving technologies. My current work seeks to develop wearable approaches to mesh networking. Mesh networking is bottom up instead of top down, not depending on telephone company infrastructure, each garment in the network relays messages to other surrounding garments.

The point is to change the dialog about these forms of violence so that they are no longer seen as an individual problem to be solved on an individual basis, but as social problems to be dealt with collectively.

Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist who works in performance, wearable electronics, hacktivism and critical gender studies. She is a PhD student in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) at University of Southern California and a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from UCSD, an MA in Communication from the European Graduate School and a BS in Computer Science from Florida International University. Her book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, published by Atropos Press in 2012, discusses art that uses augmented, mixed and alternate reality, and the intersection of those strategies with the politics of gender, in a transnational context. She blogs at transreal.org and tweets at @michacardenas. Micha’s recent publications include Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, with Barbara Fornssler, from Atropos Press, “I am Transreal”, in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation from Seal Press and “Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology Study” in Code Drift from CTheory. She was previously the Interim Associate Director of Art and Technology for UCSD’s Sixth College. She has been a lecturer in the Visual Arts department and Critical Gender Studies program at UCSD and an artist/researcher with the b.a.n.g. lab at Calit2, the UCSD School of Medicine and CRCA. Her collaboration with Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, was the subject of widespread media coverage. She has exhibited and performed in biennials, museums and galleries in places around the world including Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, Colombia, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain, Switzerland and Ireland. Her work has been written about in publications including Art21, the Associated Press, the LA Times, CNN, BBC World, Wired and Rolling Stone Italy.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/163496660/local-autonomy-networks-find-each-other?ref=recently_launched

A seated interventionist held an enlargement of one of the numerous bronze plaques set into the pavement demarcating the perimeter of the university. Behind her stood a half dozen cohorts, displaying hand painted signs which spelled out the threatening language of the plaque in white on black, all of them with their mouths covered by black duct tape.

“I feel this action was necessary because this is an issue that is relevant to everyone on campus, and people know surprisingly little about it,” one of the interventionists told us.

At the same time, spokespeople for the group engaged the public in dialogue and distributed flyers to prompt passersby to question the UC Regents’ corporate ownership.

What was it like for the students to do this?

“Personally, this was my first public involvement in social action. I felt a bit tense at first, because I have never done this kind of thing before, and a little hesitant to be under speculation of strangers. But I soon got used to the stares, and soon I wanted more people to stop by and see us. It was fun seeing the “?” look on people’s faces — people walking by, people driving by, and people working at American Apparel…”

All of this comes at a time when highly paid UC administrators push for yet another tuition hike, which if passed would mean that tuition has effectively doubled over the past five years, rendering access to middle and working class families increasingly out of reach, as national student debt breaches the trillion dollar mark.

It also comes in the wake of recent “Stay Away” orders issued to students who were retroactively charged with criminal offenses for their participation in protesting the privatization of the university (for which many of them were violently beaten, to national outrage, but not arrested), making real the Regents’ threat to revoke the right to pass.

The truth is that the UC Regents heavily invest public funds, and their own, in private for-profit colleges, and financially benefit from the construction of new university buildings which has continued despite all the administration’s lamentations of budgetary shortfalls, seemingly without any effective regulation of these apparent conflicts of interest.

All of which comes at the expense of the greater common good.

We at the Asians Art Museum applaud this handful of creative and courageous students for taking a stand through elegant, fierce public action.

Asians Art Museum’s Samurai Blog

http://asiansart.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/uc-student-art-action-protests-corporate-privatization-of-public-education/

City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program grants support Oakland-based art and cultural activities that reflect the diversity of the city for citizens of and visitors to Oakland. Applications for 2012-2013 are now available for the funding categories of Organizational Assistance, Organization Project Support, Individual Artist Projects and Art in the Schools. All applicants must be Oakland-based, and all proposed activities must take place in Oakland.

More information and online applications are available at: www.oaklandculturalarts.org.

Contact: Steven Huss
Email: shuss@oaklandnet.com
Website: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/CityAdministration/d/EconomicDevelopment/o/CulturalArtsMarketing/index.htm
Grant link: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/CityAdministration/d/EconomicDevelopment/o/CulturalArtsMarketing/DOWD000729

Scope of Work:
* Photographer shall shoot numerous frames to obtain various exposures, and perspectives/viewpoints of each artist in her/his studio.
* Photographer shall present a broad selection of images from which Metro shall select and approve the final 4 deliverables for each artist’s portrait.
* Photographer shall be responsible for obtaining photo release signatures from each artist prior to shooting portraits. Metro shall provide release forms.
* Photographer shall coordinate all studio visits with the individual artists.

Location: Portraits shall be taken at each artist’s studio. Studios are located in neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County. Scheduling of studio visits should consider geographic adjacency of neighborhoods for maximum efficiency.

Artists: Project entails photographing a total of 37 artists.

Deliverables:
* Photographer shall provide (4) portraits of each artist. Portraits shall include head shots and full body within their studio environment.
* All photos shall be high resolution TIFF for a total of 148 photo images.

Conditions:
* Services shall be provided as an independent contractor to Metro with no employee benefits.
* Selected photographic images shall be used by Metro in the development of collateral materials. All photo images selected shall become the property of Metro upon payment to photographer.
* All photo images shall be furnished with unlimited rights, including copyrights, to Metro and shall be free from any proprietary restrictions.
* Metro cannot guarantee crediting the photographer in Metro publications and printed materials.
* Metro shall provide artist contact information.
* The selected photographer will provide General Liability and Automotive Insurance. If the photographer has employees, Workers’ Compensation Insurance shall be required.

Milestone/Payments: Payments will be based on the final, agreed-to project amount negotiated between photographer and Metro. Metro reserves the right to not award a contract.

Period of Performance: Full photographic services and deliverables must be completed no later than June 29, 2012.

Evaluation Criteria:
* Quality of past portrait photography work as evidenced in portfolio of photographic samples (40%)
* Portrait photography experience as evidenced by resume (20%)
* Cost quote for scope of work and deliverables (20%)
* Ability to meet Metro job conditions and schedule (20%)

Submittal Requirements:
Interested professional photographers must submit:
* A letter of interest
* Current professional resume
* Digital portfolio of portrait photography work samples (10 to 12 images, TIFF or JPEG), 300DPI, 5MB or smaller
* Line item budget quote. (Submit Cost Quote Page, Attachment A.)
* Minimum of three client references related to previous photographic jobs performed

Deadline: Submittals must be received by Metro by 5:00 pm on May 22, 2012.

Email submittal materials and portfolio samples to: honge@metro.net
Subject line: “Photographic Services (Portraits)”

Working under the supervision of the Development Director, the Grants Manager’s primary roles are to: 1) assure the completion of all grant-related work in a professional and timely manner; 2) write all foundation, corporate, and government proposals and reports; and, 3) perform research, including compile data and organizational stories
relevant to development efforts. Specific responsibilities include:

1. Grants Research
· Research new funding opportunities on at least a quarterly basis; providing a regular synopsis to the Development Director, and enter new prospects into the funder database

2. Grants Management
· Manage the grants database for foundation, corporate, and government LOIs and Full Proposals, including maintaining an accurate grants calendar, scheduling and tracking funding prospects, proposal submissions, and funded grants
· Assure that the grants calendar is always projected out at least a year, including prior prospects and previously funded grants, as well as new prospects
· Write an average of six requests (LOIs or Full Proposals) per month
· Complete all grant reports, submitting just prior to deadline
· Gather and analyze organizational statistics and stories for use in proposals and reporting
· Research and maintain field and agency data, for proposals and reports, at least annually
· Refresh standard grant language, at least annually and more frequently, as required, to accurately reflect current or changing programs and priorities.

3. Contract & Related Information Management
· Manage all received contracts, including logging requirements into the database and writing funder correspondence and grant reports
· Annually update Guidestar, the Cultural Data Project, and related, within 15 days of the completion of the Annual Audit

4. Other Development Activities
· Participate on the Development and Marketing Team
· Manage peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns
· Write individual donor thank you letters, assuring timely (1 to 2 days of receipt) completion
· Assist with other development-related events, campaigns, and activities, as directed

Qualifications:
The ideal candidate has at least 2 years experience in grants management, with a track record of having successfully secured grants from foundations, corporations, and/or government agencies. Must be an excellent writer, able to produce professional-quality work under tight deadlines. Must be extremely well organized, demonstrate an attention to detail, and must be able to calmly and efficiently manage multiple priorities. She or he most demonstrate a genuine interest in the agency’s mission and have the ability to articulate this mission to others.

Experience with donor software is required, Filemaker Pro, is a strong plus. Must possess a professional demeanor and the ability to interact with funders in a positive and thoughtful manner. An understanding of standard nonprofit laws and regulations, familiarity with the Cultural Data Project and Guidestar, and familiarity with youth development and/or arts funders is a strong plus. An understanding of how to analyze and work with financial documents, including budgets, books (QuickBooks, preferred), and financial reports, preferred.

An advanced degree or certificate in fundraising/development is desirable, but is not required.

Salary and Benefits: This full-time position starts at $42,000 per annum. Vacation and sick time accrue after successful completion of an initial, 90-day period. Full or partial medical benefits are also paid after the 90-day period, with the percentage based on the job classification level.

How to Apply: Please provide your résumé, along with a cover letter highlighting relevant experience to: lizleshin@venice-arts.org

http://www.venice-arts.org/index.php?view=home

Please: no phone inquiries or walk–ins. Writing samples and additional information will be requested if an interview is scheduled.

Qualified candidates will have a BA or BS degree in a related field or equivalent experience an 5 years of experience in institutional development within a non-profit arts organization. Prior experience and success in the preparation of grants (private foundation and government) is essential, including strong writing skills and understanding of budget reporting. This position may be needed during occasional nights and weekends.

Please send résumé, cover letter, and salary history to: jobs@laopera.com

http://www.laopera.com/company/jobs.aspx