Virginia Maksymowicz and Blaise Tobia, artists and teachers living in Philadelphia, and also good friends of mine, have been working with a small number of colleagues for five years on a project to record the impact on the arts made by a federal program, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1973 – 1981) – known as CETA. Maksymowicz and Tobia were two of nearly 20,000 literary, performing and visual artists and culture workers who found full-time employment through the federal program. This was the largest federal support for artists since the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, which notably commissioned murals in Post Offices and other federal buildings across the country. Yet, as crucial as CETA was to the ecology of the art community during the 1970s, it has been left out of all the historical accounts.
Two NYC exhibitions about CETA were held recently on the Lower East Side. One was at City Lore Gallery, which sponsored both exhibitions along with Artists Alliance, Inc.; the other was at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space. The City Lore exhibition emphasized visual documentation, giving a very lively and engaging picture of what artists contributed to city life at the street level. The Cuchifritos exhibition covered back-of-the-house operations: written documentation in the form of correspondence, proposals, reports and press coverage. It was fascinating for anyone with experience in arts administration, and provided a good picture of the...
In 2025, U.K. insurers found fewer bogus claims than in 2024, but the cases they intercepted tended to involve more money. According to The Independent, insurers stopped 1.34 billion (about $1.77 ...