David Fraher Fund for Innovation
In 2019, Arts Midwest established the David Fraher Fund for Innovation in honor of former President & CEO David Fraher. This Fund recognizes and celebrates David’s legacy of curiosity by creating a space for Arts Midwest to pursue a question that was at the forefront of his career: What if we tried something different?
Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts“David’s career at Arts Midwest measurably changed American culture for the better.”
Rooted in the belief that artists and organizations thrive when they are given the space to think big and test new ways of working with their communities, the David Fraher Fund for Innovation was created to offer a source of courage funding to seed new projects and new ideas. It invites our field to reimagine how we work together to ensure the Midwest continues to be a place where arts and culture thrive. And it creates space to take risks, learn from them, and pivot along the way.
About David J. Fraher
David J. Fraher served as Arts Midwest’s founding president and CEO from 1983 until August of 2019. During that time, David guided Arts Midwest to its current position as a major force in the U.S. arts and culture landscape, with creative programs and services reaching close to one million individuals each year in communities across the Midwest, the nation, and the world.
At the helm of Arts Midwest, David designed and oversaw an array of programs that have had a lasting impact on the region’s cultural landscape. These include efforts to foster cultural exchange between the Midwest and more than three dozen nations around the world; support communities across our nine-state region in celebrating, exploring, and enjoying performing arts residencies and visual arts exhibitions; and develop leadership initiatives that have since strengthened arts organizations and our region’s cultural infrastructure for decades. His vision was for a region that had lasting access to creativity, and he approached all of his work with curiosity and collaboration.
That compelling vision, and David’s unprecedented leadership, have been recognized nationally and internationally, with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Assembly for State Arts Agencies, the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, and the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, among others.
As Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts reflected, “David’s career at Arts Midwest measurably changed American culture for the better.” Arts Midwest is honored to celebrate David’s legacy and to continue to bring his visionary work to communities across our region.
Innovating Impact
Here is how the Innovation Fund has been used to date.
In 2025, Arts Midwest continued our work to support innovation within each of our nine member state arts agencies, awarding support to the Michigan Arts and Culture Council for their ongoing innovative efforts.
In 2024, Arts Midwest launched a new nine-year effort to support innovation within each of our nine member state arts agencies. We began by supporting the South Dakota Arts Council as they undertook a comprehensive review of their organizational structure. The work included realigning staff duties, exploring new grantmaking tools, and imagining how additional capacity could deepen their ability to serve communities across South Dakota.
In 2023, Arts Midwest contracted with the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies to develop a detailed dataset on the 42 Native Nations that share geography with our region. This work, focused on reservations, treaties, and governance structures, advanced our Living Commitment to Native Nations and provided essential insights to guide future relationship building with Native Nations.
In 2022, Arts Midwest launched a new storytelling effort. We drew on support from the Innovation Fund to enhance our planning around this effort. Here, we contracted with industry experts and gathered media representatives from across the Midwest to brainstorm how we might work together to amplify stories about the power and importance of Midwestern creativity. In the first year, we published more than 60 stories viewed 160,000 times that celebrate art, culture, and creativity in the Midwest.
Our 2020 shared conference provided important insights into how we could best serve the performing arts industry via a virtual marketplace and showcases. With considerable feedback from constituents about the 2020 conference platform – and without the Western Arts Alliance as a partner – we shifted strategy for 2021 and leveraged support from the Innovation Fund to host a new gathering platform with added functionality to connect our colleagues.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Arts Midwest partnered with the Western Arts Alliance to pivot our annual performing arts booking and education conferences to a shared virtual platform. The Innovation Fund helped support the unexpected costs of making this substantial shift in how we gathered, connected, and supported our colleagues.
Thanks to the Innovation Fund supporters.
We wish to extend our gratitude to the friends, colleagues, and leaders across our community who have invested in this Fund.
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