First, some context: For the past ten years I have worked in the field of the arts and arts education as either an artist, teaching artist, arts administrator, or some amalgam of all three. Over the course of my tenure in the field it’s been hard to ignore the undercurrent of grumblings from my peer group as they’ve grown increasingly more frustrated with the structure of the arts sector.
While many young arts professionals deal with issues of low salary, glass ceilings, lack of a reliable career path, and a general disconnect with their colleagues in other institutions, what seems to be the most consistent theme amongst many young arts leaders I’ve encountered has been the lack of voice they have in the larger arts conversation.
If you give a good look around you’ll quickly notice a paucity of young arts professionals (a) contributing to the field’s literature, (b) participating at senior staff meetings, and (c) presenting at national conferences. Some individuals I have spoken to have even suggested that the field “systematically squelches” or “boxes out” young voices. This inherent bias in the arts to favor veteran field leaders has caused many young arts professionals to leave the arts for more purposeful work in other domains. Over the years people have begun to talk about this phenomenon in a more open manner, but no one seemed to be doing anything (concrete) about it.
To address these issues I established, 20UNDER40 (www.20UNDER40.org)—a new anthology of critical discourse—to collect twenty essays about the future of the arts and arts education, each written by a young arts professional under the age of forty. In doing so, 20UNDER40 aims to bring the voices of tomorrow’s arts leaders out of the margins and into the forefront of our cultural dialogue.
While having the best of intentions, the 20UNDER40 project has been vociferously attacked by veteran arts practitioners who have called the anthology “ageist,” “exclusionary,” and “dangerous.” The issue of positive bias exercised by 20UNDER40 has been hotly debated, first on the New England Consortium of Artist-Educator Professionals (NECAP) listserv, and then on the 20UNDER40 Facebook Group Page.
Suffice it to say, launching the 20UNDER40 anthology has been a crazy ride. There are many issues I could discuss in regards to this project, but, in writing the initial post for this blog-a-thon, I thought it would be most helpful to kick things off with one simple set of questions:
What’s your story?
Have you experienced and/or witnessed bias in your work in the arts?
How have you reacted to this?
If you haven’t experienced such bias—from your perspective, what’s all the fuss about?
Feel free to respond to these direct questions—or to take the conversation wherever you feel it needs to go. I’m excited to dig deep into the discussion.
Cheers,
—Edward
Edward P. Clapp
(b. February 14, 1974)
Editor and Project Director: 20UNDER40
Popularity: 6%
I share similar professional history with this post writer, but do not think of my self as an “emerging leader” because I’m over 40. What I do think of myself in arts administration life cycle is “Late Bloomer” as many of my colleagues are second/alternative/additional career to artist and teacher. We are the self-taught, the dedicated, the frustrated, but more than ever before – the ones who can guide the next generation with multiple stories of “if I new then what I know now, I would have done X”
Our learning curve of the “middle managers of mature means, and contemporary sensibilities can bridge the gap between understanding older practices, while still holding value to new ideas and taking risks.
This is not an “ageist” complaint – but merely a sensibility of strengths. The 20UNDER40 should not become an “us vs them” contest – but a open dialog to building awareness of what we all need to do to keep the arts healthy, thriving and RELEVANT to our audience.
I’ll be taking time each day to read and contribute to the blog. And I hope that the Google-analytics shows another earthquake on the end of the week reader report.
Well done, Ed. Now let’s get this party started.
I’m a musician, and in my field of so-called “classical music,” one of the biggest problems is that our work and our comments happen almost exclusively within the field. We don’t talk very much to the wider world outside the music business, and that wider world doesn’t seem too interested in the music we make or the words we write about it. Over many years, this art form which used to be of general interest, sometimes even crucial importance, has become isolated from the rest of society.
Nowadays when we compose or perform, we seek responses mainly from others in our profession. Even when we have enthusiastic support from lay people, we seem, as a field, to value their responses to our music much less than we value the opinions of other professionals like colleagues and critics. Even projects that aspire to national or international importance are so only if music professionals in other cities and other countries pay attention.
I suspect that this problem afflicts the other arts, too, so I’d like to see some of the conversation around emerging leaders address the problem of insularity. Maybe it would help if the talk included some people and some yearnings from outside the arts.
John, your post made my day (and echos things I have been saying privately… well and publicly somewhere on this thing too). What you have described, from my experience, is applicable to the entire arts world though I am sure each discipline has its own nuances of it. Bottom line, until we start connecting with, including and challenging a wider sphere of thinkers, activists, economists, policymakers, business people, etc. I don’t think the arts will ever be truly credible or critical to society.
Part of how I live this personally is that I work outside the arts as well. And, I don’t just consider it my day job and that world (happens to be the nonprofit cancer community) knows that I am both a program director and an artist (and a whole slew of other things too).
One suggestion, there are lots of emerging leader conversations happening in other sectors. Why aren’t we blogging/talking/meeting with them?