The Minnesota-based Bush Foundation, created in 1953 by Edyth Bassler Bush and 3M executive Archibald Granville Bush, announced last week that it will no longer administer its longstanding individual fellowship programs, including one targeted to artists. Instead of discipline-specific awards—grants had been offered specifically to artists, medical doctors, and nontraditional students—the organization will now run a single fellowship competition open to innovators of any stripe who are invested in social change in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
"We need 'all hands on deck,'" the foundation says on its Web site, "every social entrepreneur, business owner, artist, public sector employee, community volunteer, and the like—to embrace the opportunity to learn and grow so others in our communities can have the hoped for future." The foundation says it will focus on tackling "tough problems through building individual leadership capacity," particularly in schools and with Native American nations working to rebuild their governments.
Since it began in 1976, 431 artists from Minnesota and the Dakotas received funds from the fellowship program, including poets Robert Bly and David Mura and memoirist Patricia Hampl. Guidelines for fellowship application and information about the new initiative will be posted on the Bush Foundation Web site tomorrow.
In the video below, Bly reads his poem "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings" in an excerpt from the 1978 documentary on the poet, "A Man Writes to Part of Himself." (The film was released the same year that Bly received his first Bush Foundation artist fellowship).