The Prize Director: Carolina García Jayaram
“If you’re not on the side of democratizing culture, you’re on the wrong side of history.”
5 QUESTIONS WITH CAROLINA GARCÍA JAYARAM
FOUNDING EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE ELEVATE PRIZE Foundation
Miami, FL
Carolina García Jayaram has more than two decades of experience in leading national institutions and initiatives dedicated to enriching and shaping social-impact, philanthropic and cultural communities across the United States. As the Founding Executive Director of the new Elevate Prize Foundation, Carolina is leading the Foundation’s launch and distribution of $5M in funding and professional support to a group of 10 social entrepreneurs who are tackling the most challenging problems of our time.
She most recently served as CEO & President of the National YoungArts Foundation and, prior to that, as President & CEO of United States Artists, where she helped manage $25M in unrestricted awards to this country’s most accomplished artists and spearheaded an innovative $20M operating endowment campaign. While in Chicago, she was a member of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Cultural Advisory Council and was named “Chicagoan of the Year in the Arts” by the Chicago Tribune. View Carolina’s full bio below this interview.
1. The Elevate Prize is designed to “dramatically amplify the impact of innovators, activists and problem-solvers who are impacting communities every day.” I can think of no better time for a prize like this to launch. What was it about this mission, now, that drew you to it as Founding Executive Director?
Our mission is to inspire and awaken the hero in all of us by creating a platform that amplifies the impact of innovators, activists and problem-solvers. We do this by finding the most radically diverse set of global impact leaders who are elevating humanity and providing them with transformational monetary and professional support. That’s already pretty great, but the magic really happens when we begin to share their stories with the world, and the world begins following and feeling inspired by our winners’ progress. But we want to do much more than inspire them. We want to awaken the hero within everyone, using tools, incentives and community building practices to mobilize action and over time, elevate the human experience for all.
I was drawn to the mission because it’s the first I’ve seen that assumes the world’s biggest problems already have solutions and the best way to find those solutions is to include as many people as possible, empower them to take action, and make the world better, safer and more enlightened as a result. Frankly, I was tired of the old paradigm of top-down support that assumed regular citizens needed saving when what we believe at The Elevate Prize is that regular citizens are the ones who can best save the world.
2. Coming to this role with an incredible legacy as an arts advocate and CEO of national cultural organizations, how has your work in the arts contributed to your view of social entrepreneurship?
The drum I was always beating in the art world was that artists were just like everyone else — artists are entrepreneurs, educators, activists, scholars, inventors, and leaders, and should therefore be considered and included at all levels of civic life and planning. The fact that funding for arts was always a separate category from social entrepreneurship never made sense to me. I am all about mixing it up — in the arts I sought to break down barriers between disciplines because I watched how artists were doing it themselves in their practice. The more this happened, the more I saw the possibility for how funding could match up to creative aspirations and unlock incredible artistic potential. And yet most funders were not adapting to that reality. Within social entrepreneurship, I believed artists could uniquely contribute in terms of design thinking, messaging and problem solving across what have become the path markers for social impact: the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. I hope to merge these worlds; bringing awareness, learnings and innovation across sectors in such a way that leads to new ways of seeing and working.
3. A core goal of Elevate is to “build a powerful platform to mobilize communities”. As we are facing a public health crisis, a pandemic-driven recession, and massive social justice uprisings, what do you see as the potential of the arts (and socially-driven practitioners) to drive forward social change in communities?
The potential is almost unimaginable at this stage because we are living the historical shift in real time, but I have no doubt that incredible art is going to emerge from this period, maybe the best in decades. Throughout history, art is what has marked time. To understand any period, you look at the art, the music, the food, the fashion, the literature. What’s different now is that creativity has become this country’s greatest currency and if we can leverage creativity from the arts sector to collaborate with and bolster creativity from other sectors, then art can do so much more than interpret the moment — it could shape the future.
4. As society is questioning systems and structures and imagining new paradigms, the events of 2020 could alter the landscape of cultural engagement and patronage. In your view, how does it most urgently need to evolve?
The power needs to be decentralized, far more transparent and egalitarian. You don’t have to look further than the Whitney Board Chairman’s resignation last year to see that artists and audiences have lost patience with power brokers using cultural institutions to bolster their personal wealth, influence, and privilege. The central tension between artists’ desire to share their ideas with the world and the current paradigm granting VIP access and control to the highest bidder, should and must come to an end. If you’re not on the side of democratizing culture, you’re on the wrong side of history. But this goes far beyond free museum attendance to systemic changes like rethinking board dynamics to make meaningful space for community members and artists, giving them equal influence as top donors and inviting a diversity of voices and ideas. In other words, the tying of funding to access and control over culture must end if we as a society are serious about dismantling our tyrannical systems.
5. I believe making the case for its relevancy is the cultural sector’s most urgent task. How do cultural organizations, leaders, and change-makers better come together in collaboration or partnership to create more relevancy for their work?
It is in times like these that we MOST need arts and culture. In Europe, we saw Germany’s billion plus investment in the arts sector just as COVID-19 took hold because they instinctively understand that arts and culture isn’t a luxury; it’s a critical lever in maintaining a healthy society. That instinct is cultivated over generations of prioritizing the arts and artists. Like any other kind of first response, the arts have a vital job to do in not only giving people hope and inspiration, but in unifying people, lifting voices and presenting new ideas and ways of thinking. I think this has been obvious during the last couple of weeks and the ways the Black Lives Matter movement has been able to galvanize and inspire the world to join them. They couldn’t have been as effective without the help of artists, who created videos, designed social media content, wrote and performed music, raised funds through auctions, etc. Art carries and delivers the message of change like nothing else. As I answered in the previous question, if art and culture could get away from the elitist institutional framework, and become by and for the people, it has enormous power to heal and transform. Artists are on the front line in moments like these — they are teaching in the after-school programs, they are entrenched in grassroots mobilizing, and they are shaping the uprising’s message.
There is an increasing overlap between traditional fine art practices and art for social impact, and I believe that is because movements draw artists and vice versa. But it’s hard to make the argument that art institutions that have long cultivated a sense of exclusivity are suddenly an essential service for everyone. However, if the institution was considered a community center for everyone, then that institution could pivot, like other kinds of institutions have, to become centers of aid, gathering and relief. It’s hard to pivot from an exclusive to an inclusive space overnight. In order to be relevant now and into this new future, culture needs to stop being exclusive and by doing so, will become instantly far more relevant. I know the reality here is that exclusivity drives the funding, but this is like the ancient uroboros serpent eating its own tail and if this moment has taught us anything it’s that now is the time to be courageous and believe that humanity cares enough about arts and culture to find a better and more egalitarian way because this old guard way has outlived its use.
Carolina García Jayaram has more than two decades of experience in leading national institutions and initiatives dedicated to enriching and shaping social-impact, philanthropic and cultural communities across the United States.
As the Founding Executive Director of the new Elevate Prize Foundation, Carolina is leading the Foundation’s launch and distribution of $5M in funding and professional support to a group of 10 social entrepreneurs who are tackling the most challenging problems of our time.
She most recently served as CEO & President of the National YoungArts Foundation and, prior to that, as President & CEO of United States Artists, where she helped manage $25M in unrestricted awards to this country’s most accomplished artists and spearheaded an innovative $20M operating endowment campaign.
While in Chicago, she was a member of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Cultural Advisory Council and was named “Chicagoan of the Year in the Arts” by the Chicago Tribune.
Her philanthropic work extends to serving on the Board of Directors for Guitars Over Guns, the Advisory Council for Ruth’s List Florida (which aims to elect progressive women to public office in Florida), and on the Latin American and Latinx Committee for the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Carolina received her JD (with honors) from the University of Miami School of Law, where she is now an Adjunct Professor as well as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Law School’s Art + Sports Law LLM program. She has also studied not-for-profit management at Harvard Business School.
In 2019, she delivered the commencement speech at Broward College and received an honorary degree for her commitment to community service and leadership.