Innovation 80 began just before COVID hit. In response to the pandemic, many funders concerned with underserved communities focused on food, housing and other basics. Still, it seemed crucial to us to support arts programs in these Chicago neighborhoods. Here are some reasons why:
The Arts Matter
The arts empower. The arts give voice to the voiceless. The arts help transform American communities and the result can be a better child, a better town, a better nation and certainly a better world.
–Robert L. Lynch
The country needs to be healed. Art is the healing force.
–Robert Redford
Art washes the daily dust of life off our souls.
–Pablo Picasso
Before children speak, they sing. Before they write, they paint. As soon as they stand, they dance. Art is the basis of human expression.
–Phylicia Rashad
Art … helps children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else.
–Sydney Gurewitz Clemens
[Art is] very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.
–James Baldwin
Art brings people back to their sensibility as human beings.
–eL Seed
Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person – into something whole.
–Louise Bourgeois
Art is the highest form of hope.
–Gerhard Richter