The author presents a summary of her publication with Nathan Weber Arts Funding: A Report on Foundation and Corporate Grantmaking Trends, which explores the role of foundations in the funding of the arts. In addition, the author extrapolates from this study and makes an assessment of future trends. These trends are important to art policy makers because government funding has never led to private support; it has followed it. Funders, according to Renz, will be looking to enhance institutional self sufficiency.

Since their establishment at the beginning of this century, grantmaking foundations have occupied a central place in American philanthropy. As defined by the Foundation Center, a foundation is a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization having a principal fund of its own , managed by its own trustees, and established to aid charitable, educational, religious or other activities serving the public good, primarily by making grants to other nonprofits. At latest count, more than 35,000 grantmaking foundations were active in the . In 1992, these funders contributed $10.2 billion to America's nonprofits, with the majority of the money going to education, health, human services, and arts and culture.

Foundations play a far greater role proportionally in arts funding than they do in most other nonprofit fields, primarily because the arts, unlike health or human services, for example, rely so heavily on private contributions . Philanthropic contributions account for from one-third to two-thirds of nonprofit arts revenue, and half of that likely consists of gifts of art objects and large capital gifts. Most of the remaining income - up to one-half - is earned through ticket sales, fees, interest, and the like. Direct government support accounts for only about 14 percent.

Among private sources, to be sure, individual donors supply the principal stream of funds, leaving foundations, and then corporations with respectively smaller shares. Yet even apart from other forms of private giving, foundations represent a surprisingly large source of revenue to the arts world. In the late 1980s, for example, foundations provided roughly one-tenth of the estimated income of nonprofit art groups. Equally surprising, estimated foundation arts funding through the 1980s was at least two and a half times greater than the National Endowment and state government expenditures combined.