Happy New Year from Marquis Studios!

We just wanted to say thank you for a great 2010 to all of our amazing supporters, teaching artists, participants, and school communities from Marquis Studios. As we all know, the current recession has taken an especially hard toll on our public schools. It is a testament to the vitality of our programs that our grant funding has increased 44% over the past year, despite the difficult economic times. These increases include federal stimulus funds, several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, grants from City Council Members, and multiple grants in the same fiscal year from the CVS Foundation and the Japan Foundation. At the same time we undertook a 20 month long austerity program cutting our administrative costs in order to balance the 30% cut in funding our public school partners have received to their arts programs. In recent assessments by the Department of Education, only 2% of New York City’s public schools were fully compliant with mandated levels of arts programming. Clearly there is a huge gap, and we appreciate your help to restore and expand these vital arts programs to desired levels in our schools!
We wish you all a very happy 2011!