Burns Halperin ReportReceives $100,000 Ford Foundation Grant

TheBurns Halperin Report, a publication launched by Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin in 2018, has been awarded a $100,000 grant from theFord Foundationin support of its fourth edition, themed around Latinx artists and set to be published in 2025. According toArtnet News, Burns and Halperin will use a portion of the money to hire a data fellow to assist them with looking closely at US museum collections and auction sales to assess the representation of Latinx artists in institutions and in the art market.

Burns, an independent journalist and founder ofStudio Burns, and Halperin, a onetime executive editor of Artnet News, inaugurated the report with the intent of investigating the progress made by African American artists. Though the broad conception was that such artists were enjoying increased attention and success at the time, the report’s first edition revealed that this was not the case. The following year’s report focusing on the success of women artists presented similarly dismaying results. The2022 edition, which combined the subjects of the previous two and traced the representation of Black American artists, female-identifying artists, and Black American female-identifying artists in US museums and the global art market, showed progress stagnating in the US market and moving slowly in the global arena, with racism and sexism seeming to inform both the purchases of institutions and private collectors.

For the fourth iteration of the report, Burns and Halperin assembled an advisory committee, whose members have assisted in arriving at a definition of Latinx art—that by artists of Latin American descent who live and work in the U.S., and whose work is informed by that lived experience—for the purposes of the report, and who have assisted in finding contributors and funding. “We’ve done this on such a shoestring for so long,” Burns told Artnet News. “So, to actually have resources at our disposal, so we can now hire someone and work with them to build something substantial feels like such a gift.”