ARTSblog

Laura Bruney

When the board and volunteers of over 1,000 non-profit arts groups in Miami-Dade donned clipboards to conduct surveys with their audience and patrons, they wanted to showcase that the arts are an essential part of the economy. Their hard work paid off in a big way.

The surveys that were collected from hundreds of groups and their participants were compiled and studied. The resulting report, Arts & Economic Prosperity IV developed by Americans for the Arts for cities and states throughout the country shows that even in a declining and difficult economy the arts are relevant and can be considered an essential tool for economic stimulus solutions. The Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs partnered with Americans for the Arts for the local component.

Here are the drum roll worthy results: the arts in Miami-Dade have an impressive annual economic impact of more than 1.1 billion dollars. From Aventura to Homestead, from Coral Gables to Miami Beach, from downtown to the seashore the arts are everywhere. There are more than 1,200 non-profit arts groups in our community and they employ more than 22,000 full-time professionals and workers.

“The arts are an integral part of Miami-Dade County’s economy and our creative design industry is one of the top reasons why companies choose to establish their businesses in our community,” says Pamela Fuertes, Vice President of the Beacon Council. “Under our One Community One Goal (OCOG) study, the creative design industries were identified as a key industry that is vitally important to our present and future growth, and the arts are a big part of that success.”

Every day, arts and cultural organizations act as economic drivers—creating an industry that supports jobs, generates government revenue, and is the cornerstone of our tourism industry, playing a leading role in Miami-Dade’s success.

According to George Neary, Vice President of Cultural Tourism for the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, cultural tourism increases visitors and attracts people that spend more time and money in our destination…

Read the rest of this post at KnightArts.org as it was originally published on that site on August 11…

This post is one in a weekly series highlighting The pARTnership Movement, Americans for the Arts’ campaign to reach business leaders with the message that partnering with the arts can build their competitive advantage. Visit our website to find out how both businesses and local arts agencies can get involved!

Kristen Engebretsen

In my previous post, I described an arts education trend called “coordinated delivery,” in which I discuss the roles of some of the key stakeholders in arts education. Over the past year, Americans for the Arts has been refining our thinking about the theme, “It takes a village to educate a child.”

While the term “coordinated delivery” includes all of the major players that make arts education happen in a single community, it falls a bit short in defining all of the stakeholders, including those at the state and national levels, such as funders or legislators.

The field of arts education is a complex network of partners, players, and policymakers—each with a unique role. After the work we did last year in investigating coordinated delivery, Americans for the Arts wanted to create something that demonstrated how all of these players interact, and to help arts education practitioners understand their relationship with other stakeholders in arts education.

So…we created The Arts Education Field Guide.

The Field Guide is a 48-page reference guide that captures information in a one-page format for each arts education stakeholder, from national down to local partners. Each page defines a constituency and highlights its relationship to arts education in several key areas: support, barriers, successes, collaborations, funding, and national connections. The Field Guide is divided into sections based on federal/state/local tiers, and each page provides information that will help readers understand a stakeholder’s motivations and connections in arts education.

The Field Guide utilizes the concepts from biology of a network or an ecosystem. When bringing this concept to life, we wanted a way to graphically illustrate all of the key players in the field of arts education. I used Google Images to find a representation of the word “network” and then worked with a designer to come up with the motif for our ideas. We also utilized the term “field guide” (the kind that a botanist would use when trying to identify a plant or flower), as a play on words of “the field of arts education” to come up with the title.

Let’s take a quick look at the diagrams in The Field Guide: Read the rest of this entry »

Tiffany Hsueh

I’ll speak frankly and concisely: art is not my thing. Coming from a liberal arts background, I feel as if I am straddling two worlds, one of the strictly rational and one of the creative. It is an amalgamation of two worlds that requires abstract thinking, but also real life application of solutions to problems that arise; a world deeply seeped in theory, but living in reality.

I do not think of myself as particularly artistic or creative or musically inclined, even though I’ve tried many times. But art has become, to me, a method of thought, a mindset in which to think, and a lens though which to observe.

Art has moved beyond the physical and literal motions of creation into the realm of the theoretical underpinnings that drive it forward; its genesis. I don’t always agree with a piece of art or the artist, but I respect the thought behind it, the point of view of the artist, and the eventual creation. It’s the process that interests, but also befuddles me. To gain the ability to see, feel, touch, or taste a sensation or concept is enlightening and complicated; complex. I think it’s our ability to empathize with others that allows us to interpret art. It’s the next to best thing other than being the artist his/herself. I would say that the arts are part of our human nature. It is embedded within us just as human emotions are part of our genes.

I was not immersed in theater or band or painting or writing nor did I go to an arts-focused high school. Art was an elective class I took throughout elementary school and middle school and picked up for two years in orchestra during high school. I’ve never taken an art history or photography class, which isn’t to say that I’m not interested in art; I just wanted to explore other things. However, my summer interning at Americans for the Arts has opened my eyes to something so much grander than my notions of art.

While I understand the vast scope of the arts and its importance in society, I did not understand it beyond its textbook definition—that art has been, is, and will continue to delineate culture, history, and life. Art sustains life even in the face of economic trials and political upheavals. It is the process of art that makes it invaluable to me. The arts bring many immeasurable additions to the table and should never be debased to its most tangible form because that’s not all art is. Read the rest of this entry »

Since I started my tenure at Americans for the Arts, we’ve been discussing variations on the theme of: “It takes a village to educate a child.”

During the 2011 Annual Convention, we had two arts education leaders (Ayanna Hudson and Margie Reese) discuss how this works in their respective communities. At the time, we were calling this phenomenon “coordinated delivery.”

We featured this trend in our Fall issue of ArtsLink. “Tete-a-Tete: Integrated Arts Education Approaches” defines coordinated delivery as “collaboration across communities for both shared delivery of arts instruction by arts specialists, teaching artists, and general classroom teachers AND shared leadership for arts education among arts agencies, education agencies, parents, and businesses.”

The article highlights the similarities and differences between two well-known coordinated delivery systems in the country: Arts for All in Los Angeles (Ayanna) and Big Thought in Dallas (Margie).

Here are two charts to illustrate the idea of coordinated delivery:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Mikulski

Thanks to a tweet from Rhode Island School of Design President John Maeda on Friday, the world became aware of a new tool that I hope will greatly move the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education movement to STEAM (A=arts) instead.

What single tool could be that impactful?

I’ll give you two hints. He’s three-and-a-half years old and he’s red. Get it yet?

Elmo could be the next great STEM to STEAM advocate thanks to plans for a new Sesame Street segment for the show’s 43rd season this fall. According to a description of the new “Elmo the Musical” segment of the preschool learning show:

“An extension of our STEAM curriculum, each 11-minute episode is an interactive, fun-filled musical adventure created by Elmo and the child at home. Focusing on imagination and math skills, such as enumeration, relational concepts, addition/subtraction, geometric shapes and many more, Elmo takes viewers on thrilling explorations as he imagines himself in ‘Sea Captain The Musical,’ ‘Guacamole The Musical,’ ‘Prince Elmo The Musical’ and even ‘President The Musical!’ In ‘Elmo The Musical,’ kids can sing, dance, play and imagine along with Elmo on math-filled adventures!”

It sounds like a solid effort in showing parents (and their kids) the power of the arts in helping young children to learn other vital skills in science, technology, engineering, and math. Think about it. Are you still able to sing the words to songs like this from Schoolhouse Rock? Read the rest of this entry »

Although federal transportation funding has recently moved away from including public art projects, there is still state and local funding available to help bring the arts to more people in your community via murals and roadside/town square-type public art work.

In this video from MinnPost.com, the presenter walks viewers through the city of St. Paul as murals are playing a large role in the installation of a new light rail system. Americans for the Arts member Laura Zabel, executive director of Springboard for the Arts, also appears to help explain the project:

Are there similar marriages between public art and transportation in your community?

Tell (or show us via web links) us about them in the comments below!

Marisa Muller

The old saying goes, “The only thing constant in life is change.” And with the current pace of change in the workplace, there is a demand for businesses to be ready for anything and everything. In order for business leaders to thrive in today’s market, they must be receptive, responsive, and adaptive. But how can business leaders prepare themselves for the unexpected?

Frank J. Barrett, professor of management and global public policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, suggests that business leaders take a cue from jazz musicians and practice improvisation.

In his article featured in Fast Company, Barrett explains how the skills jazz musicians develop while improvising can also be helpful working in the office. Through improvisation, one nurtures spontaneity, cultivates creativity, encourages experimentation, and facilitates dynamic synchronization—all traits that are becoming increasingly necessary to succeed in business. By harnessing these qualities, businesses will be better equipped to tackle challenges that come their way.

Barrett proposes the following practices to help business leaders replicate the environment of a jazz band jam session:

Treat each task as an experiment

Every time a jazz musician improvises with a band, he/she tries different combinations of notes and rhythms over the chord changes of a song. As the musician performs, he or she is aware of his or her actions, listens to what works musically, and is receptive to others’ responses. Each spontaneous composition, therefore, becomes a learning process.

By adopting this experimental approach for the office, Barrett believes you will obtain a mindset focused on discovery. Because you are constantly proposing new ideas and testing new hypotheses, you are more receptive to different ways of thinking and encourage breaking the routine. By consistently approaching projects through this process of trial and error, you become more aware of yourself and your own experiences, and you consequently learn more. Read the rest of this entry »

Rob Schultz

One of the more disturbing trends in our local public schools is the reduction of classroom time devoted to non-tested subjects. Despite the arts being labeled as “core,” tested areas of the curriculum are among the few things receiving adequate time and resources from strapped school districts.

Going the way of the horse-drawn carriage are things like music, chorus, theater, and visual arts, as well as formerly routine components of a well-rounded education such as recess, and field trips.

For those of us who work outside of public school systems but are determined to provide children with quality arts opportunities, one answer lies in building effective partnerships with our schools.

For many years (decades, actually) the Mesa Arts Center has worked with our local public school system as a partner in delivering accessible programs. For several years, grant funding allowed us to bring fifth graders from a 100 percent at-risk school to our arts center for targeted, afterschool activities in both visual and performing arts, taught by our full-time arts instructors. While the school didn’t have resources for transportation, our grant provided it—from school to the arts center, and we took them home.

More recently, for the last six years the arts center has used funding from our own Foundation to present our “Basic Arts” program at another elementary school. This program focuses on literature, with the school hosting our teaching artists and kids learning about a literary story. As a finale, the students are brought to the arts center to see the story performed live on the stage of one of our theaters, followed by talk-back and Q&A with the actors and director.

As we saw the results of these two programs and the benefits they bring to underserved children, we committed to hiring a full-time Arts Education Outreach Coordinator to really move things into high gear and create other partnerships.

Under her direction, we began a Creative Aging Program that brings a visual artist and a dance artist to assisted living facilities to work with ambulatory seniors, as well as a group of seniors afflicted with dementia; the Culture Connect Program, which provides free theater tickets to area schools so their students can attend performances, participatory activities, workshops, literature, and live artist demonstrations; and a comprehensive Jazz A to Z Program that uses the National Endowment for the Arts’s Jazz Curriculum as a guide to provide students opportunities to improvise, analyze, synthesize, engage in group collaborations, develop an individual voice, and broaden cultural perspectives—all through the uniquely American medium of jazz. Read the rest of this entry »

The August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble
(photo courtesy of Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council)

Join us June 14–16, 2013 in Pittsburgh, PA to continue the national conversation on the “new normal” as the 2013 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention draws attention to how the arts are meeting the needs of communities as demographic shifts continue to take place

The Annual Convention program will explore community strategies to adapt, transform, and revitalize in a changing landscape to build the 21st century American community.

We are seeking proposals for two types of presentations:

1. Convention Sessions: sessions are 90 minutes and should be complete learning experiences with specific outcomes and learning objectives. Sessions can include multiple speakers, but are limited to no more than four speakers per session.
2. Roundtable Discussions for Career, Organization, and Community 360. Roundtable Discussions are a great networking and issue-based discussion opportunity. Roundtables offer a variety of topics related to promoting sustainable careers in the arts and tackling difficult capacity-building issues in arts organizations and your greater community. Roundtables should only include one discussion leader per table.

Proposals should focus on innovative strategies, tested tools, and best practices that relate to the frames of the Annual Convention, including diversity, equity, and access; placemaking; education; social impact; technology; demographic shifts; and building business partnerships and new business models.

Beyond these frames, we welcome sessions addressing fundamental concepts in fundraising, advocacy, marketing, and board development and engagement.

Americans for the Arts is also accepting sessions for the Emerging Leaders Preconference and the Public Art Network Preconference. Both will take place June 13–14 and end by the start of the Annual Convention. The opportunity to designate your session proposal for one of these two preconferences can be found on the Convention Session proposal form.

Submissions are only accepted online at convention.artsusa.org/proposals, but hurry and submit as our deadline is September 19!

We look forward to hearing from you!

Valerie Beaman

Are you interested in learning what our business-focused affiliates have been paying attention to this year?

Respondents of the annual Private Sector Survey were asked to answer questions regarding their programs and initiatives fostering collaboration between arts and business. The survey requested detailed information regarding specific programs that support arts and business relationships.

Programs like board training are often components of local arts agencies, but many programs designed to engage the business world may be new to the wider field. We invite you to explore the survey and learn more about how your organization can expand its partnerships with the business world.

The 2011 Report surveyed eight Arts & Business Council (ABC) affiliates, 11 Business Committees for the Arts (BCA), 13 Business Volunteers for the Arts (BVA) affiliates, and 56 United Arts Funds (UAF), making up a universe of 83 organizations that focus on collaboration between arts and business. Of these 83 organizations, 52 completed survey responses. (To learn more about all of our private sector affiliates, visit our Private Sector Network page.)

Here are some of the most relevant statistics collected in this year’s survey:

• Nearly three-quarters of the responding organizations (71 percent) served multiple county regions or combined city and county regions. The average population size of the geographic area served by all responding organizations was more than 7.1 million.
• Responding organizations provided a total of $70.2 million in the form of grants or contracts to support arts organizations and/or individual artists during fiscal year 2011. A total of 3,028 arts organizations and individual artists were supported by this funding.
• Responding United Arts Funds raised a total of $80.9 Million in 2011.
• Total arts organizations served through responding UAF, ABC, BVA, and BCA arts and business partnership programs: 3,920.
• Total businesses served through responding UAF, ABC, BVA, and BCA arts and business partnership programs: 3,791.
• The most common programs that served arts organizations were seminar and/or workshops, advocacy resources, technical assistance, arts management training, and publicity & promotion services.
• The most common programs that served businesses were networking opportunities, board training and/or placement, ticket discounts, and seminars, forums, and workshops.
• 67 percent of the Private Sector Network affiliates hold recognition events that honor business support for the arts.
• 35 percent of responding organizations operated some type of board development programs during their fiscal year 2011. These programs made a total of 216 board placements, served approximately 702 people, and were predominantly funded by a combination of grants, fees, and sponsorships. Read the rest of this entry »

You may have read that the Arts Council of Fort Worth is facing a 25 percent budget cut (from $716,000 annually to $450,000) in the proposed city budget that the city council will take up for a vote next month.

It just so happens that Randy Cohen, vice president of research and policy at Americans for the Arts, was slated to be in town promoting the local results of our Arts & Economic Prosperity IV study as this news came out.

As you can see from this local news report, the arts council is doing all the right things and already changing minds as they advocate for alternatives to the proposed funding changes:

When it comes to local arts advocacy, you want to have a utility belt full of reasons to make your case, and the Arts Council of Fort Worth is doing the right thing by using our excellent local research (Arts & Economic Prosperity IV, Local Arts Index) as well as their own outreach to rally community arts leaders, elected officials, and the local media to get their message out in the month before the city council vote.

Although it is too soon to tell if this intense advocacy campaign will pay off when it comes to the city council on September 18, the fact that council members are willing to listen to the proposed use of hotel tax funding (a model that several other cities use to fund the arts) or another source so that funding will be dedicated rather than just another line item in the general fund, is a very encouraging sign.

Stay tuned to ARTSblog for updates on this story!

Stephanie Riven

The findings in the recent 2012 National Arts Index describing the state of the arts are profoundly disturbing.

The Index reported a long list of measures that trend down for arts, music, and cultural organizations, among them: waning program budgets, attendance, funding, expenditures, and a decrease in the overall number of arts organizations themselves.

As arts professionals we have heard all of this before. It’s not time to bemoan our fate but it is time to refocus our energy to reverse these trends. Consider these three core strategies to begin the process:

1.  Setting and communicating a vision: We clearly need to seek out innovative leaders that can communicate big and bold ideas broadly, consistently, and in a wider context. Can we discard our identity as an “underdog” and provide a platform for people to speak about radical new suggestions for the future? By extending the context to include the pressing need for social change in this country, we will attract visibility, excitement, and extend our influence. In addition, we must be willing to listen when new ideas are proposed, give support and participate in implementation.

2.  Developing Collective Impact as a core strategy: Despite our diverse agendas, it’s time that we look past our differences and speak with a more cohesive, unified voice. In the process, we can learn important lessons from our colleagues in the social service and education sectors about collective impact. A commitment to collective impact would encourage us to abandon our individual agendas in favor of a collective approach to policy, practice, and the delivery of the arts and arts education.

3.  Establishing a commitment to community: Can we engage substantively with our communities and cultural partners, not just to sell tickets or extend the reach of our organizations but to improve the lives of all people in our communities? As Doug Borwick says on his Engaging Matters blog, “It is the creation and support of healthy, vital communities that provide the ultimate justification for the allocation of financial and human resources that the arts require. Communities do not exist to serve the arts; the arts exist to serve communities.” Read the rest of this entry »

Victoria Ford

My summer internship with Americans for the Arts has regrettably come to an end. If I knew an inch about marriage, I’d say this feels a lot like the ride back from the honeymoon. Which I mention only to suggest how uneasy I feel saying farewell to ten weeks worth of swimming through everything art. With people who love it so tremendously, they fight for it each day.

It’s times like this when every instruction kneaded into my writing toolbox knocks on my door and offers itself to me—mostly to make sure each emotional simile this blog post doesn’t need can be prevented, like overlooked leaks beneath the kitchen sink (they persist, nonetheless).

At any rate, the advice knocking today is this: “Kiss the beginning.” And I think it’s only right to revisit the very first question I posed this summer (presented to you in the title), to see what many experiences I’m able to offer at its side.

As I mull everything over now, though, I’ll present just a couple. These two ideas, I hope, should suffice.

So to begin with a lesson I’ve learned on this journey, which is less about art and more about being human: I am small. This is not a commentary on my physical stature, but more on my existence and each of our lives. We are unfathomably small.

It’s hard for me to grapple with this truth, because since conception we’ve been taught and treated otherwise. The idea of our singular importance persists by way of talent shows, academic ceremonies, sporting and artistic competitions, promotions, and so on. And it’s not my wish to attack the way our societies reward this measure of our own greatness. If anything, with the Olympics as a perfect example, a single person’s achievements help to heal and unite an entire nation. Read the rest of this entry »

Janet Langsam

This year’s summer Olympics has raised sports to an art form. Gymnast Gabby Douglas might have been a ballerina for all her grace and flexibility. Swimmer Michael Phelps might have been a sculptor for all his power and focus. Glued as I was to the TV, watching what to me, was performance art at its finest, I wondered why we don’t have an Olympics of the arts.

That line of thought led me to bemoan once again the absence of the arts at the “real” Olympics. The Olympics after all elevates the value of competition. It celebrates diversity and ambition, and it engages everyone…participants and audiences alike throughout the world. That kind of broad, worldwide visibility is just what we need in the arts.

Imagine if the arts were as fundamental to the Olympics as sports. That fact alone would make the arts more important than they currently are. Let’s perhaps focus on Brazil in 2016. Think about how a four-year outreach for nominations from all corners of the globe would hype the arts and at the same time uncover nascent talent throughout the world. There must be thousands of young people in art and music college programs whose careers could benefit from the exposure. Perhaps Americans for the Arts could take the leadership in this effort?

Years ago, (naturally, way before my time) painting, drawing, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture were all a part of the Olympics, and all categories in which competitors could take home a medal. The idea—the brainchild of International Olympic Committee founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin—was to bind together athletics and aesthetics, body and soul, action and ideas, like in the old days in ancient Greece.

A major flaw in the rules was that artists’ work had to be inspired by sports, thus limiting the quality and quantity of participants. Then too, they simply couldn’t figure out how to maintain the Olympics as a competition for amateurs while at the same time extending eligibility to artists who were also professionals. So, by the time the fifties rolled around, the arts were out of the Olympic games. Read the rest of this entry »

In loving memory of Alyx Kellington (1964-2012)

Two weeks ago the Arts Education Council at Americans for the Arts and the arts education community at-large lost a tremendously talented artist, educator, and advocate in Alyx Kellington. She passed away on July 29, 2012 near Palm Beach, FL, leaving behind an incredible career in the arts and many friends.

As the news of her death begins to settle in for so many of us, I’ve been reflecting on my last experience being in Alyx’s presence and have been asked by the Arts Education Council to share this story with you as our lasting tribute.

A few of us were fortunate to have spent 2012 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in San Antonio with Alyx—she and I were hotel roommates. That first evening together we hung out at a restaurant where an amazing Dixie Land style band was playing. She spoke of her rich and diverse experience with music growing up in Austin, TX and was quite fortunate to have been exposed to such an array of musical talent at an early age.

At the Convention opening reception, I’ll never forget how happy Alyx seemed as we watched musician after musician take the outdoor stage. She grew up listening to many of theses famous acts as a child, and now here they were all together on one stage under the canopy of a beautiful Texas night.

Alyx was like a walking Texas arts and culture history lesson where I, along with several other arts education council members, learned so much from her that week.

Only knowing her as an arts educator, many of us were surprised to learn of her amazing photojournalism career that took Alyx literally all over the world. She really lit up when she talked about photography, the people she met along the way and the places where she lived. Her beautiful and captivating photojournalism work can be found archived on her website. Read the rest of this entry »