NEW YORK— Eighteen New York City-based arts organizations will receive $2.7 million in grants from the Rockefeller Foundation after winning the foundation's 2009 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund competition. Each of the organizations will receive a two-year grant of up to $250,000.

Most of the winners, selected from more than 500 proposals, focused on survival strategies for the arts during a difficult economy. Those approaches include new business models, prototypes for public/private partnerships, entrepreneurial approaches to capital generation, artist peer loan programs, and new tactics for marketing, especially to rapidly growing Latino communities. The projects reflect innovation in art as well, from the coupling of architecture with ballet and science with art to the use of 3-D urban design and social-networking technology.

The recipients include the Alliance for the Arts, which will use the money to help create open-source Web applications for the city's cultural industry; Brooklyn’s BRIC Arts, which intends to inaugurate a creative laboratory and residency linking the visual, media, and performing arts; and the Institute for Urban Design, which is launching Urban Design Week, an open-air festival celebrating the year's innovations in architecture and urban design.

Read more at Crain’s New York Business.