Working with CalArts since 1992, we’ve shared and built upon a common vision of the arts through a broad range of programs that began with a focus on young children and has continued with the support of mid-career artists. With the arts in schools and in our society unceasingly marginalized, it’s important now—more than ever—to be supporting the arts, especially individual artists.

We continue to be inspired by CalArts’ commitment to develop, train and motivate artists, and by the artists’ enthusiasm and drive to forge ahead, and their desire to contribute their gifts. As political, economic and social climates shift, in the end they are the ones who help remind us of who we are and that, with creative energy, courage, freedom of thought, and no small amount of work, one really can have an impact.

Rona Sebastian, President, The Herb Alpert Foundation

This spring CalArts proudly announced that henceforth its School of Music will be known as the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts. This significant step for CalArts is a recognition of the profound commonality of purpose between the Herb Alpert Foundation and CalArts, rooted in our shared faith in the radical originality of the genuinely independent artist, and expressed in the Foundation’s support for many areas of CalArts’ work and now in this major endowment gift. The ongoing cooperation between the Foundation and CalArts, centered on the Alpert Award in the Arts, is also reflected in the fact that two Alpert recipients are now deans at CalArts and two others critical members of the faculty. This is fundamental to what CalArts is today and will become in the future. We thank Herb and Lani and our compatriots at the Herb Alpert Foundation and look forward to the next chapter in a beautiful friendship.

Steven D. Lavine, President, California Institute of the Arts

If this year’s Alpert recipients share a common vision with the Herb Alpert Foundation and CalArts, it is the restless grappling with their medium in the service of engagement. If there is a commonality among the artists, it is the necessity of interrogation. In these pages, you’ll find some of the questions they, and this year’s panelists, are asking, and asking one another. Questions about lineage, mentoring, collegiality, legibility, culture and perception, as well as those two still shimmering arenas: process and inspiration.

Irene Borger, Director, Alpert Award in the Arts