You may have missed one of the most amazing speeches from the Americans for the Arts Arts Adovcacy Day memories. Wynton Marsalis gave an inspiring story and message to all of us who work at the grassroots (and grass tops) levels of arts advocacy. Just wait until you read the transcript. If you might not get the transcript of the 22nd Nancy Hanks lecture…. better up your membership level.
This was legendary.
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Initiatives to offer arts instruction to all students within large urban systems have succeeded in recent years. These efforts work to align private resources in support of sustained arts education provision by the public education system. The leaders of these efforts do not rely solely on central offices, state departments of education, or other individual education leaders or institutions. They understand the entire system and engage its leaders in decision-making and execution.
Decision-making critical to the provision of arts education is not centralized; it is distributed throughout the school system, from central office to classroom teacher. It is a series of decisions that determine how minutes and dollars are spent in public education and ultimately what students experience daily. These decisions include district offices but also principals and other administrative staff that work between central office and teachers. Read the rest of this entry »
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Podcast: Download (Duration: 4:28 — 4.1MB)
Bob Lynch, President and CEO of Americans for the Arts, talks about a recent event at the John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Bob describes how the Arts & Artifacts Indemnity Act and other United States arts policy can be powerful global diplomatic tools.
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On-line events calendars and community arts portals – like those created and run by numerous arts councils, service organizations and other local partnerships – are widely recognized as today’s “state of the art” collaborative strategies for raising visibility and increasing arts and cultural participation.
Today, I’m delighted to share news (and invite participation) in a Mellon Foundation-funded “planning process” – www.ProjectAudience.org – whose aim is to envision the next generation of technology and practices for such collaborative, community-level audience development work. Read the rest of this entry »
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City of Memory is an online community map of personal stories and memories organized on a physical geographical map of New York City. Visitors to the site can explore an interactive urban story map and “meet” some of the city’s characters and “visit” some of the city’s cultural landmarks.
Late last week, I received one of City of Memory’s e-newsletters and read that St Augustine’s Episcopal Church, a cultural landmark on the Lower East Side, has at long last entered the first phases of a historic restoration of its slave galleries. In the 19th century, African Americans would sit in the galleries — box-like rooms above the balcony in the church— while the white congregation worshipped in the pews below. Check out City of Memory to hear some great firsthand audio perspective from Reverend Deacon W. Edgar Hopper of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church and Steve Zeitlin, Executive Director of City Lore — a New York based nonprofit designed to convey the richness of NYC’s cultural heritage, and the host of City of Memory. Read the rest of this entry »
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In this moment of substantial change, most companies are looking inward to determine what adjustments need to be made to their business models to flourish in today’s new economic climate. Significant shifts need to be made to address the new reality, and that new reality includes taking a hard look at how consumers get information about the arts.
Since the mid-1980s, newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States, but the current economic crisis has thrown gasoline on the fire, causing huge losses for newspapers nationally. Just recently we have seen four major newspapers cease print publication: the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Tucson Citizen and the Christian Science Monitor. Additionally, four newspaper companies including the owners of the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer, have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Even before the rapid failure of many printed newspapers, arts coverage in many daily newspapers was shrinking, going from 912 column inches on average in 1998 to 702 column inches in 2003 according to Reporting the Arts II, a study conducted by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.
A huge shift in communications is about to occur away from organizations pitching stories to mainstream media for coverage and toward setting up institutional distribution channels to cover stories themselves. We have seen this in the past decade as the ways we communicate with our customers have become cheaper, quicker and more segmented. We now have e-mail lists, websites, direct mail, telemarketing, social networking, online video distribution, podcasts, photo streams, and blogs. Some large organizations can currently reach more than one million people using these distribution channels. Considering the New York Times has a circulation of 1.6 million, these distribution channels which used to be considered on the fringes of communications have become almost as powerful for some companies as their local newspaper. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Tyler School of Art has been entrusted with hosting the International Wolgin Prize for an emerging artist. From their website:
The Prize will be given each year for work that expands creative expression and exemplifies the highest level of excellence and artistic achievement. Work will be considered in painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, ceramics, metals, glass and fibers … The Prize will be awarded after a nomination process with international arts experts. Nominated artists will submit materials for review by an international jury.
The winner of the Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Arts will be selected by a jury of internationally renowned professionals in the arts. The largest Prize of its kind, the Jack Wolgin Competition in the Arts will be open to artists around the world by invitation only.
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It’s a damn hard question, particular in this economy:
How much do you charge for your artistic events or products?
Let me give you a few things to consider as you make your decisions:
1. Price alters perception – The more you charge, the better people are going to expect the event to be . . . and the less forgiving they will be of things that take away from a good experience (i.e. low production values, low customer service, etc.)
2. High prices to some can lead to low prices for others – I know, tickets to things like theatre and other artistic events are too high. I get it.
But there is a pleasant side effect to charging a high ticket price that gets overlooked. Let me try to explain:
It’s a Saturday night at my theatre. In the center section is someone who bought a ticket the day before because she read a good review of the show. She paid $56 for her ticket. Behind them is a college student, she paid $10 for her ticket.
So how could we afford to give that college student a $10 ticket? Read the rest of this entry »
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Podcast: Download (Duration: 3:01 — 2.8MB)
Bob Lynch, President and CEO of Americans for the Arts, discusses a recent event at the British Consul-General’s residence in New York City that focused on sustainable practices in the arts. Environmental sustainability—in tandem with economic sustainability—is a core theme of the 2009 Annual Convention in Seattle, Washington this June.
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I spend of a lot of time thinking about the structural challenges arts organizations have, i.e. whether or not the traditional nonprofit model is the best way to present non-commercial art, whether having a Board of Directors is a good or bad thing . . . you get the idea.
The irony is that when I work with troubled arts organizations most of their problems have one of three causes: Read the rest of this entry »
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Antony Gormley’s very Public Art project … I REALLY like how the web component will make the project more public and encourage participation: http://oneandother.co.uk/
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When flying to Alaska, I recommend choosing a window seat. The flight was long, but the view out the airplane window, spectacular. The snow covered mountain landscapes sloping down to narrow lines of frozen rivers were one of the mesmerizing experiences from the journey. As the flight descended into Anchorage, the landscape was like none other, pines peaked above the mist and the frozen ice at water’s edge cracked into patterns reminiscent of desert alluvial fans. This was no desert. Welcome to Alaska.
As Manager of Public Art for Americans for the Arts, I was invited to present at the Alaska Arts and Cultural Conference sponsored by the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Getting out of the office and into the field–connecting with the creative professionals, administrators, artists, civic leaders and more–is the most rewarding part of my job. Meeting the Alaskan arts community was an honor and a rare opportunity as Executive Director, Charlotte Fox attested to in her opening welcome. Traveling to Anchorage from within Alaska is a journey in itself. The joyful spirit of what it took for everyone to get there, to re-connect with friends and colleagues was evident from the din of hugs and greetings heard throughout the hotel ballroom and this same warmth was felt even outside in the cold as many of us took in the beautiful ice sculptures on display this time of year downtown.
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In January, the Atlantic posed a scary question: “What if the New York Times goes out of business –like this May?”
The answer is even scarier:
It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400 million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46 million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.
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