Tiffany Atrium Supports Derrick Adams' The Last Resort Artists Retreat in Baltimore

Creating Tiffany Atrium

Tiffany & Co. has introduced Tiffany Atrium, a social impact platform that advances opportunities for historically underrepresented communities in the fine jewelry and creative fields. Tiffany’s parent company LVMH has taken a strong position on its change-agent obligations in a post-George Floyd world.

Many companies in the fashion and design industry have accepted the challenge of increasing the numbers of diverse creatives and artisans in its ranks. The LVMH luxury brands are big leaders in this initiative and Tiffany & Co is perfectly positioned to carry this mantle forward with purpose and agency, having championed key initiatives like animal conservation and ethical jewelry making for years.

Tiffany & Co. understands that this work requires commitment, leadership, and learning—all of which is reflected in Atrium’s three core pillars: creativity, education and community.

Enter Derrick Adams and Everette Taylor

L-R: Artist Derrick Adams, Artsy CMO Everette Taylor, at Tiffany Atrium x Artsy Launch Breakfast. DARIAN DICIANNO/BFA.COM via Forbes.

Seeking to help supporters and Tiffany & Co. clients visualize the new Atrium concept, the iconic American jeweler reached out to artist Derrick Adams, who created an original artwork called “I Shine, You Shine, We Shine” for the Atrium launch.

Derrick Adams’ work reflects how people of African descent interact with art, American history and consumerism. “I shine, You shine, We Shine” will be auctioned by online art shopping platform Artsy until August 10. The current bid for the artwork is $40,000 against an estimate of $50,000 to $70,000.

In late July well-heeled guests enjoyed Bellinis and caviar-crested canapés in a real-life ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. Forbes profiled the breakfast, in which Adams was joined by Artsy CMO Everette Taylor, to discuss the inspiration for his artwork, collaboration with Tiffany & Co., and expanding opportunities for underrepresented communities.

“It's very important for brands and artists to work together especially if you're doing things that can benefit communities that are not getting as much exposure and enough shine,” Adams said this morning in a conversation with Artsy CMO Everette Taylor. “Helping other people does not take away from helping yourself. The idea (is) that a brand like Tiffany, working with artists like myself, can actually bring awareness to the importance of supporting communities that are not necessarily considered in certain aspects like design. When you think about design, who's designing things, you don't see a lot of Black people as a center. I think that having me here and having me talk about these things and having me work with Artsy or with Tiffany is a great collaboration. I think it's probably the beginning of many more with artists working with Tiffany and Artsy, because I think that these types of collaborations, a crossover with different brands working together, is a great model to really support communities, communities that have creativity, communities that are thriving creativity, but lacking an opportunity.”

The Last Resort Artist Retreat in Baltimore

100% of profits from the sale of “I Shine, You Shine, We Shine’ are going to The Last Resort Artist Retreat [IG] an art residency program that Adams founded in his home city of Baltimore, Maryland, with the goal of providing support, community and invigorating creative refuge to African-American artists and cultural workers.

Read more about the project in Baltimore Magazine: Derrick Adams to Launch a Visionary Archive in Waverly.

The project is slated to welcome its first month-long residents from the Black creative community to his hometown of Baltimore in March of 2023. Surface Magazine also spoke with Adams and Taylor at the Atrium launch breakfast and highlighted information about TLRAR.

Adams says the bed and breakfast-style residence in Baltimore’s historic Waverly neighborhood has already hosted dinner parties with historians, visual artists, culinary artists, and musicians to begin cultivating more connections within the city’s creative community. “That’s our focus: to think about leisure as a therapeutic practice, to really think about people who experience oppressive structures that are built to keep people out, to think about joy, or think about the idea of leisure within the turmoil that we experience constantly. It is a political act for me, to put this face into existence, and for people to come and unwind,” says Adams.

Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation on Artsy

As the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, who founded Tiffany & Co. in 1837, Louis Comfort Tiffany ushered in a new era at the famous jeweler as the house’s first art director.

One of America's most celebrated artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany revolutionized the production of stained glass and incorporated it into innovative designs and unusual decorative items. This served to reinvigorate an industry that had barely changed since the Medieval Period.

The artist had convented his summer mansion in Cold Spring Harbor in Long Island into an artists’ residency in 1918, when Tiffany established the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the first organization of its kind in the United States.

Today, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation is very active on Artsy and their own Biennial Grants reward 20 artists with $20,000 stipends for which the artists have not applied. More than 500 American artists have benefitted from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation since the first awards launched in 1980.

How fitting that the foundation is now involved with Artsy and tangentially — if not directly — involved in supporting The Last Resort Artist Retreat in Baltimore. A fire destroyed Laurelton Hall in 1957, when it was in a state of disuse.

In 2018, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation celebrated its centennial anniversary, making it the oldest artist-endowed foundation in America, and the first to have been founded by a living artist.

MacKenzie Scott's HBCU Giving Contrasts Starkly With Historical White Funders

By Tyrone McKinley Freeman, Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies, Director of Undergraduate Programs, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, IUPUI. First published on The Conversation

Novelist and billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has so far given at least US$560 million to 23 historically Black colleges and universities. These donations are part of a bid she announced in 2019 to quickly dedicate most of her fortune to charity.

Scott’s gifts, including the $6 million she donated to Tougaloo College in Mississippi and the $45 million she gave North Carolina A&T University, vary in size but nearly all of the colleges and universities describe this funding as “historic.” For many, it was the largest single donation they had ever received from an individual donor.

Scott, previously married to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is not making a splash just because of the size of her donations. She has an unusually unrestrictive get-out-of-the-way approach.

“I gave each a contribution and encouraged them to spend it on whatever they believe best serves their efforts,” Scott wrote in a July 2020 blog post.

She sees the standard requirements that universities and other organizations report to funders on their progress as burdensome distractions. Instead of negotiating detailed agreements before making a gift, she works with a team of advisers to stealthily vet a wide array of nonprofits, colleges and universities from afar before surprising them with her unprecedented multimillion-dollar gifts that come without any strings attached.

Scott is also supporting students of color through donations to the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which give HBCU students scholarships, and by supporting many other colleges and universities that enroll large numbers of minority students.

Her approach sharply contrasts with how many wealthy white donors have interacted with Black-serving nonprofits, including HBCUs, in the past. As a historian of philanthropy, I have studied the paternalism of white funders, including those who helped many of these schools open their doors.

HBCU Origins

The first HBCUs were founded in Northern states before the Civil War, including Cheyney and Lincoln universities in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce University in Ohio. After the war, most HBCUs were established in Southern states. These institutions were lifelines for Black Americans seeking higher education during decades of Jim Crow segregation that locked them out of other colleges and universities. (Disclosure: I earned my bachelor’s degree at Lincoln University.)

Although many white philanthropists made large gifts to these schools, their support was fraught with prejudice. Initially, white funders pushed for HBCUs to emphasize vocational training, then called “industrial education,” such as blacksmithing, printing and shoemaking, over more intellectual pursuits.

White philanthropists including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had poured millions from their fortunes into the proliferation of Black industrial schools by the early 20th century. The HBCUs Hampton University in Virginia and Tuskegee University in Alabama, which received donations from Scott, were leading models of industrial education for decades.

Black students during a class on the assembly and repair of telephones at Hampton Institute (1899). US Library of Congress.

The vocational curriculum at these schools was promoted as preparing Black students to be skilled laborers and academic teachers. During this era, however, most graduates worked as unskilled laborers or vocational teachers.

White Southerners overwhelmingly approved of this arrangement, which left many HBCU grads on the bottom rung of society rather than making them educated citizens. Emphasizing industrial education at HBCUs preserved the superior economic status of white Americans and the racist system of segregation. But African Americans’ educational aspirations required much more.

W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black intellectual, was a leading critic of the funding HBCUs got from wealthy whites. He said: “Education is not and should not be a private philanthropy; it is a public service and whenever it merely becomes a gift of the rich it is in danger.”

In 1904, the HBCU leader Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Florida’s Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls – now Bethune Cookman University – felt this pressure. She placed “industrial” in her school’s name to attract white funding. But she sought to give Black students a liberal arts education that she believed would support their full citizenship.

Decades later, the sociologist Charles S. Johnson served as Fisk University’s first Black president, starting in 1946. He sought to turn that Tennessee HBCU, founded in 1866, into a powerhouse of Black liberal arts education in partnership with white philanthropists and foundations rather than covertly.

HBCU leaders have, in short, faced a predicament for generations: When rich white donors offer big donations, can the money truly be used to support Black educational interests and goals?

Prejudiced Backlash

When HBCUs secured funding early on, that money was often jeopardized because of bigotry.

In 1887, for example, the Georgia state Legislature withdrew $8,000, worth approximately $220,000 today, in critical annual funding from Atlanta University. The HBCU, founded in 1865, had flouted Southern norms by allowing whites and Blacks to share campus facilities, which white politicians did not appreciate.

Later, the school embraced a liberal arts curriculum, bucking the more vocational emphasis white segregationists preferred.

In response, many white philanthropists withdrew their donations.

Despite that challenge, Atlanta University persevered, eventually merging with Clark College. And so it is historically significant that Scott gave Clark Atlanta University $15 million in 2020 to use as it sees fit. The school is using the money for academic innovation, infrastructure and scholarships, and to build up its endowment.

Undercutting Black Medical Schools

In 1908 there were seven Black medical schools in the U.S. By 1921, following a sustained attack on those institutions, only two remained: Meharry Medical College in Nashville and Howard University in Washington, D.C.

The loss of those schools began in 1910, when Andrew Carnegie’s foundation funded a report by educator Abraham Flexner. Part of a larger reform movement to standardize medical training, Flexner’s study recommended the closure of five Black medical schools. It led white funders to sever their support.

At the time, there were extensive problems with medical education across the board in the U.S. There were no standards for curriculum or instruction. But Black medical schools’ particular problems – poor funding, insufficient faculty and inadequate facilities – were exacerbated by Jim Crow segregation and condescension from the establishment.

Flexner’s site visits were incredibly short. He castigated Black doctors as a group without interviewing them. He recommended support for Meharry and Howard to ensure that at least some Black doctors would be able to care for Black patients in segregated hospitals and prevent the spread of disease to the white population.

Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s foundations were initially reluctant to support the two surviving medical schools in implementing Flexner’s suggested reforms. Their subsequent funding ebbed and flowed irregularly. Scholars have estimated that the Black medical schools closed after Flexner’s damning report would have produced 35,000 Black doctors over the past century.

For decades HBCUs such as Xavier University in Louisiana, which received $20 million from Scott in 2020, have been top producers of Black graduates who become doctors.

A Continuing Problem

A long-term shortage of Black doctors remains a critical public health issue today, reflecting the sustained underfunding of HBCUs.

For example, Maryland’s HBCUs won a settlement against the state in 2021 totaling $577 million intended to remedy decades of underfunding compared with the state’s predominantly white colleges and universities.

Scott funded three of those public institutions: Bowie State, Morgan State and University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 2020.

A review completed in 2021 of Tennessee State University, another HBCU, found the state underfunded it by an estimated $544 million compared with the school’s white counterparts, dating back to 1950.

HBCUs Today

Today there are about 100 HBCUs, half of which are public institutions. They enroll roughly 300,000 students and award nearly 50,000 degrees annually.

Seventy percent of HBCU students are eligible for Pell grants, making the schools critical for first-generation and low-income students. Although they represent only 3% of all degree-granting institutions, HBCUs confer 13% of all bachelor’s degrees earned by Black Americans.

Today, a disproportionate share of HBCU grads become doctors – making these schools a vital on-ramp into the middle class for students of color.

And yet HBCUs are financially fragile. The 10 largest HBCU endowments total $2 billion, just 1% of the $200 billion held collectively by the 10 predominantly white colleges and universities with the largest endowments.

Despite the financial challenges these schools have faced, HBCU graduates include some of America’s most prominent figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., Vice President Kamala Harris, multimedia mogul Oprah Winfrey, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, filmmaker Spike Lee and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

There’s no way to know the full toll endured by HBCUs and the Black community as a whole from long-term underfunding and donor hostility. In my view, it will take decades of Scott-style giving for HBCUs to recover what has been lost in time, compound interest and impact over generations.

5 Ways MacKenzie Scott's $5.8B Commitment to Social and Economic Justice Is a Model for Other Donors (Copy)

By Elizabeth J. Dale, Assistant Professor of Nonprofit Leadership, Seattle University. Forst published on The Conversation.

The author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott announced on Dec. 15 that she had given almost US$4.2 billion to hundreds of nonprofits. It was her second announcement of this kind since she first publicly discussed her giving intentions in May of 2019.

In July 2020, Scott revealed that she’d already given away nearly $1.7 billion to 116 organizations, many of which focused on racial justice, women’s rights, LGBTQ equality, democracy and climate change. All told, her 2020 philanthropy totals more than $5.8 billion. Scott directed her latest round of giving to 384 organizations to support people disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. She made dozens of gifts to food banks, United Way chapters, YMCAs and YWCAs – organizations that have seen increased demand for services and, in some cases, declines in philanthropic gifts.

In the two blog posts she has written to break the news, Scott has encouraged donors of all means to join her, whether those gifts are money or time.

Previously married to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the philanthropist announced in July that from now on she’ll be using her middle name as her new last name. She left it up to the causes she’s funding to reveal precise totals for each gift.

Morgan State University and Virginia State University, two of several historically Black colleges and universities receiving her donations, said these were the biggest gifts they’d ever gotten from an individual donor. A number of her gifts are also funding tribal colleges as well as community colleges.

MacKenzie Scott's Philanthropy Priorities

MacKenzie Scott announced in 2019 that she would give away at least half of her fortune, which is worth tens of billions of dollars. In July 2020, she disclosed an initial round of gifts totaling nearly $1.7 billion.

As a scholar of philanthropy, I believe that Scott is modeling five best practices for social change giving.

Amounts shown do not reflect the $4.2 billion in additional giving Scott announced in December 2020.

Table: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: MacKenzie Scott

1. Don’t attach strings

All of Scott’s gifts – many in the millions or tens of millions, like the $30 million she gave Hampton University and the $40 million to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which advocates for and builds affordable housing – were made without restrictions. Rather than specify a purpose, as many large donors do, Scott made it clear that she trusts the organizations’ leaders by providing absolute flexibility in terms of how to use her money to pursue their missions. This hands-off approach gives nonprofits an unusual amount of freedom to innovate while equipping them to weather crises like the coronavirus pandemic without stringent restrictions imposed by donors.

2. Champion representation

According to Scott, 91% of the racial equity organizations she funded in her initial round of massive giving, such as the Movement for Black Lives and LatinoJustice, are run by leaders of color. All of the LGBTQ equity organizations, such as the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Transgender Law Center, that she’s backing are led by LGBTQ leaders. And 83% of the gender equity organizations, such as the Indian nonprofit Educate Girls, are run by women. She says this approach brings “lived experience to solutions for imbalanced social systems.” Backing groups led by people directly affected by an issue is a common tenet of social justice giving at a time when organizations led by people of color receive less funding than white-led groups.

In addition, some of her other gifts to grassroots organizations like Southerners on New Ground, an LGBTQ community-organizing nonprofit, and Southern Partners Fund direct support to a region of the U.S. that is often overlooked by donors and foundations.

3. Act first, talk later

Rather than making lengthy announcements about her plans, Scott chose to distribute this money rapidly and directly. Unlike philanthropic peers like Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill and Melinda Gates, Scott’s first round of giving wasn’t channeled through a large-scale foundation or other entity, like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, bearing her own name or that of another billionaire. And when she made her public announcement, the gifts were already made.

4. Don’t obsess about scale

Many of the organizations receiving these gifts are relatively small in scale and lack widespread name recognition. The multiracial justice group Forward Together and the Campaign for Female Education, a global aid group often called CAMFED, for example, until recently operated on annual budgets of $5.5 million or less, while the Millennial Action Project had an even smaller budget.

5. Leverage more than money

Philanthropy that’s intended to bring about social change inherently expresses the donor’s values, Scott acknowledged in her announcement. She also recognized her immense privilege, highlighting the need to address societal structures that sustain inequality. And like the many women donors I’ve interviewed and studied, she is using her position as the world’s second-wealthiest woman to amplify the voices of the leaders and groups she supported. Her goal is to encourage others to give, join or volunteer to support those same causes.

As Scott noted, the issues her philanthropy addresses are complex and will require sustained and broad-based efforts to solve.

This is an updated version of an article published on July 30, 2020.