Denise Brown Featured In Philadelphia Life Magazine
Leading Women: Denise M. Brown
By Leigh Stuart, for Philadelphia Life Magazine
December 2015 Issue
Photograph by Noelle Theard
Advancing dialogue at the intersection of art, culture and social change
“Arts and culture are a basic part of life. Whether we realize it or not, we all benefit from even passive participation in acts of culture, and so I believe that arts and culture have always been a part of social justice movements.”
So says Denise M. Brown, executive director of Philadelphia’s Leeway Foundation (leeway.org), which has been creating funding opportunities for artists since its inception in the early 1990s. The organization’s founder, Philadelphia based artist Linda Lee Alter, started small by awarding grants in particular artistic disciplines each year, but over time the organization and its scope of artists and disciplines grew. Today, the Leeway Foundation supports women and trans artists and cultural producers working in communities “at the intersection of art, culture and social change.” Through initiatives including the $2,500 project-based Art and Change grant and the Leeway Transformation Award, which is given in recognition of a body of work or an individual’s commitment to arts, culture and social change, the Leeway Foundation supports approximately 60 artists each year.
“Sometimes we have given short shrift to those contributions, and so I think part of what Leeway is trying to do is make more visible those connections to encourage people who are doing various forms of cultural work to think about ways they can engage in moving social justice issues forward,” Brown says. “A lot of times, in socialjustice movements, we tend to default to the use of words to try to make our case—which is certainly important—but I think sometimes what can be done with a powerful image, a single photograph or a painting or a performance of some sort, can also move people in ways that sometimes we can’t with words. I think these things are just sort of intertwined and always have been.”
Brown, who also serves on the board of directors for Grantmakers in the Arts, became executive director of the Leeway Foundation in late 2006. Prior to that she was associate director of the Bread & Roses Community Fund, a group comprised of activists dedicated to supporting causes of social justice, where she ran the grant program.
Brown says there is much on the horizon for the Leeway Foundation, notably in terms of the group’s advocacy of gender equality and gender justice.
“I think it’s important to be deeply connected within the region that we’re in, and then build national relationships to help elevate the kind of work which is our core mission,” she says. “To begin to build relationships internationally, I think that is something that I and others in the organization would like to see. … There are certain social justice movements and issues that translate into other countries in other ways, and it could be really interesting to bring these perspectives into the mix so we’re thinking globally.”
