At a glance, the goal of public art seems simple: to beautify public spaces. Yet the benefits of public art extend well beyond beautification, including facilitating community cohesion and placemaking, strengthening local economies, and creating opportunities for cross-sector collaborations. State arts agencies play an integral role in the promotion of public art through special initiatives,…
2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Semiquincentennial activities across the country will commemorate that anniversary, celebrating our nation’s cultural heritage and using the arts to tell America’s stories. Governors and state legislatures have established America 250 commissions, and numerous state and jurisdictional arts agencies serve on those planning…
Helping the folk and traditional arts to thrive is an important part of what state arts agencies do. Using a mixture of federal and state funds, state arts agencies provide a wide variety of programs and partnerships that help culture bearers and communities to celebrate, preserve, share and dynamically grow their cherished traditions. Mississippi, Nevada…
The Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC), through its Dille Fund for Visual Art Acquisition, encourages the growth of publically accessible art collections to better enable Mississippians from across the state to engage with and enjoy the visual arts. Based on a 1993 bequest from a constituent honoring the memory of his parents, the Dille Fund underwrites…
In honor of Mississippi’s 200th birthday, the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) has developed and published a new arts based curriculum for elementary through secondary students. The 20-lesson curriculum, Mississippi History through the Arts: A Bicentennial Journey, is available for free on MAC’s website. Using images of art featured in two Mississippi Museum of Art exhibitions—Picturing…
The Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) has launched Mississippi Folklife, a digital magazine reviving a nearly 90-year old tradition of publishing documentary work investigating the state’s folklife and cultural heritage. The on-line publication is the latest iteration of what began in 1927 as the Mississippi Folklore Register, a peer-reviewed academic journal of the Mississippi Folklore Society…
The Gulf States Presenters Network (GSPN) is a collaborative effort of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the Mississippi Arts Commission to cultivate performance opportunities—and the creative economy—for presenting artists and arts organizations. The three state arts agencies each offer grants to presenters in their own state…
The Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) has taken its commitment to strengthening the state’s creative economy, places and communities to the next level with the recent launch of its Creative Mississippi Institute (CMI). Building off MAC’s 2011 Mississippi’s Creative Economy study, the new CMI is an on-line and broadcast-radio clearinghouse of technical assistance for creative economic…
In addition to incorporating diversity into their own policies and programming, state arts agencies can encourage their grantees and other stakeholders to commit to practices that foster cultural awareness and inclusiveness. A recent example of this can be found in the Mississippi Arts Commission’s (MAC) Diversity Toolkit, which offers guidance on how grantees can make…
The Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum is a new initiative of the Mississippi Arts Commission (MAC) that integrates the history, culture and art of Mississippi blues music into the state’s classrooms. The curriculum has 18 lessons, three each for six subject areas—music, meaning, cotton, transportation, civil rights and media. While the curriculum was developed for 4th-grade…
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