ARTSblog

Hillary Anaya

Having received my BA in Music Business from the University of South Alabama back in 2010, I began a career in arts administration working for the Mobile Arts Council.

Yup, I’m fresh off the boat with big plans and a sense of urgency to accomplish giant things. I seek to move the world tomorrow. Okay, fine, in the next two minutes.

Yet as I try to move the world here comes (insert Jaws theme song) a pile of real world inconveniences: paperwork, phone calls, and technological dilemmas. All the while, in the back of my already overloaded mind, I complain, why do they have to happen, do they really matter?

The answer: ABSOLUTELY! These annoyances are just the world’s little positive thinking exercises.

Okay, I have to be honest; this one is a work in progress for me because I’m a natural “Negative Nancy.” However, when asked how am I going to engage my colleagues to make an impact for the sake of the arts, I’m learning “Nancy” is not my girl and a positive outlook will help sustain the future of the arts. Read the rest of this entry »

Molly O'Connor

Spring is in the air…which means that in Oklahoma the redbuds are in full bloom and one can look forward to the regular chorus of tornado sirens.

For me and my colleagues at the Oklahoma Arts Council, springtime also brings new promise and excitement for the arts as we coordinate and present our Leadership Arts Program.

Founded in 2008, Leadership Arts, is a professional development program open to 30 class members from across the state of Oklahoma. Now in its fifth year, this program continues to build up a growing statewide network of arts advocates.

Leadership Arts class members represent a diverse and talented mix of individuals from communities both small and large and every corner of the state. The class is generally made up of arts administrators, civic/community leaders, educators, artists, tribal, and cultural representatives.

Each class meets for two days over the course of four months in a different community in Oklahoma. Class curriculum specifically addresses how the arts play a crucial role in the economic impact, education, and quality of life throughout Oklahoma.

Recently I met with Georgia Williams, co-founder of Leadership Arts and former cultural development director for the state arts council, to learn more about how the concept for this program originated. Read the rest of this entry »

Elizabeth McCloskey Miller

In my last post, I wrote about a “leading vs. following” conversation that happened at an Emerging Arts Leaders DC event with Liz Lerman in January.

Lerman’s most recent book, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, sparked another interesting topic of conversation at that same event.

In her book, she dedicates a section to “Structures and Underpinnings.” In the introduction to that section, Liz acknowledges that her dance company is always in transition, and attributes this frequent shape-shifting to the improvisational structuring that informs choreography.

At the event, Liz emphasized the importance of building flexible structures in our art and our arts organizations. This idea resonated deeply for me. Too frequently we identify a process, idea, or concept as successful, then proceed to build walls around it. That marketing strategy worked for one show, so now we need to do it for every show. Creating inflexible structures not only inhibits our success as emerging leaders, but also inhibits our ability to create and support art in our community.

The conversation about flexible structures immediately made me think of a survey I was creating at work to assess interest in a project. We had filled the questionnaire with “select one” answers designed for quick and easy analysis of the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Elizabeth McCloskey Miller

I have the pleasure of serving as co-chair of the steering committee for Emerging Arts Leaders DC (EALDC), a volunteer-led initiative that provides professional development, networking, and information relevant to emerging arts professionals in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area.

EALDC hosted our first-ever “book club” event in January with the incomparable Liz Lerman. Liz agreed to meet with our group to discuss her new book Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. About twenty emerging leaders came out for the event, which Liz began by getting the group on their feet for a short icebreaker activity.

Liz paired up the group, assigning one person from each pair the role of leader and one person the role of follower. The follower closed their eyes and was led by the leader around the room. Leaders were encouraged to move their partners in creative ways as music played. When instructed by Liz, the leaders and followers swapped roles and swapped partners.

For me, the most interesting part of the exercise came mid-song when Liz told us to stop moving and decide individually whether we wanted to continue in our current leader or follower role. After the activity ended and we took our seats, Liz told us that in this self-directed segment of the leader/follower activity, there was a time when almost everyone in the room had elected to be a follower. Read the rest of this entry »

Jaclyn Johnson

I write from Nashville, TN, a nationally recognized music city and a burgeoning arts town.

As an actor, community arts project manager, theatre producer, and staff member of an arts service organization, my days bustle with arts leaders, new and seasoned. They provide the spark for the city’s growth. And those stepping forward as new leaders will define the future of the creative sector.

When I look around at my ensemble and community, I see common characteristics that will weave through our individual impact as emerging leaders.

In this blog series I will explore three of those characteristics: who we are, how we will work in the arts and why we will dedicate so much of our hearts to it.

Who are we?

We are artists first and manager-janitors out of necessity. We are arts entrepreneurs.

From crowdfunding to self-publishing, it is becoming increasingly easy to take this do-it-yourself approach to making art.

“Film is an ever more do it yourself word,” said Coke Sams at a recent Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville seminar on alternative funding options for art projects. Coke is a producer at Nashville-based Ruckus Films and part of the team for the Blue Like Jazz film, the most successful film project in Kickstarter history raising over $345,000. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Elliott

This post began as a series of thoughts on the future of human resources in the arts, and opened up into a personal conversation gone global.

Also, it involves something I am deeply passionate about: brunch.

Once a year, my friend and I—let’s call her Kay—get together for brunch. It’s important for us to check in with one another, to swap ideas about careers, arts management dilemmas, and our Netflix queues.

Kay and I have been friends for twelve years; we’ve both just turned thirty, we both hold MAs in Arts Management, and we both work in jobs we love, for arts organizations on opposite coasts.

Kay took a big bite out of her bagel and lox and said to me, “I’m leaving the industry.”

I blinked three times, as she took a deep breath and told me that, while she loved working in arts marketing, and while it was a fulfilling and affirming line of work, she had desires in life that she and her husband couldn’t reconcile against the current job offerings and future of the industry. I leaned back in my chair, which is the universal sign between the two of us for “game on.”

What happened next was a long debate about what we have in our lives and what we want, and our accomplishments and what’s going to happen next. Read the rest of this entry »

Molly O'Connor

If you could get a glimpse of my desk right now you might not see anything Zen about it.

Maybe you could just accept my latest explanation: “I’m an artist and this is my own ongoing-interactive-avant-garde-installation/happening-type performance work?”

Amongst the collage of papers, Post-Its, office supplies, and arts swag, there is one tiny bit of Zen wisdom taped to my computer monitor that stares back at me on a daily basis. It allows me to realign myself whenever I lose sight of the bigger picture of my work, a simple quote from one of those page-a-day calendars:

“A Zen master, when asked where he would go after he died, replied ‘To hell, for that’s where help is needed most.’” ~ Roshi Philip Kapleau

Before you assume that I’m comparing my current situation, job, or life in Oklahoma to hell, I would like to add, I feel genuinely blessed to have a career as a cultural worker in Oklahoma, where our work as arts leaders and advocates is always meaningful and definitely cut out for us.

I actually feel this quote is just another version of the Irish blessing: “May you always have work for your hands to do.”

Interestingly enough, both bits of wisdom seem to relate directly to our Oklahoma state motto: “Labor Omnia Vincit” (Latin for “Labor Conquers All Things”). Read the rest of this entry »

Michael R. Gagliardo

In the arts world, we find ourselves constantly searching for ways to engage the community. Every day we think about how we draw in more constituents: bigger audiences, more donors, a larger base of support, etc. And often the answer seems obvious—offer more.

But is there a point of diminishing returns?

It’s the old question of quantity versus quality. Sometimes it seems like the only way to bring new audiences to the table is to offer more—more concerts, more exhibits, more performances, more, more, more. But does it work?

Are we really bringing a new crowd to the work that we hold so dear? Or are we simply “watering down” the arts in an attempt to make them “user friendly?”

This is a hard question to answer—a hard question to face, really—when arts organizations are struggling for funding and watching audiences fade away and make other choices of where to spend their money and time.

I have heard people scoff at the notion of consumers spending their “entertainment dollars” on the arts. But we have to be realistic—the arts are a form of entertainment, and we have to compete with every other entertainment industry in the market.  Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve made a decision, and perhaps a leap of faith, to go to graduate school. You do your research, visit some schools, talk to faculty and current students, apply, and get accepted into your dream program. Voila.

You are now a student in an arts management program (in my case, at American University in Washington, D.C.)!

Now what?

There is no perfect recipe for success that works for everyone, but here are a few tips (more to come next week) and advice from some brilliant and passionate arts professionals as well as from my personal (well, professional) experience:

1. START WITH YOUR ACADEMIC PROGRAM

You are likely to meet people from various and very interesting professional backgrounds in your graduate program. Start with this inner circle.

For example, my classmates include a database manager for a nonprofit, a development associate at a museum, an orchestra manager, a stage manager, a music teacher, and an actor/director of a theatre group. Read the rest of this entry »

I work for a nonprofit organization where my title is the incredibly glamorous “Administrative Assistant and Database Coordinator.”

Sometimes when talking myself up I like to say I’m the “Database Manager” as it sounds slightly more important. A couple months ago, my management was questioned when on a development call with the board chair the following bomb was casually dropped, “It’s time for a new database.”

I sat on the other end of the phone in horror. Sure, our database currently has lots of problems, but that’s not because of the program, it’s because of the data.

We have data imported from Sales Force, Sphere, Excel, Access, Oasis, Giftworks…the list is never ending.

The worst part of all: all this data was input, coded, and organized in different ways by different people. I am the Database Coordinator for a database to which at least seven different individuals currently access over 20 years of data. I spend a majority of my time cleaning up bad data, reorganizing and coding current data, and being contacted by upset staff who don’t understand why their 19 slightly different codes were combined into a single one.

Bad data = bad database! Importing it into a new one isn’t going to make it any better. Read the rest of this entry »

New Year’s Resolutions for the Arts Administrator:

Stephanie Evans Hanson

•    Participate in one arts and culture activity or lecture per week (okay, realistically – maybe two per month)
•    Finally read the pile of field related books and articles that I’ve been collecting on my desk
•    Volunteer for another arts organization and/or join a board
•    Take a class or workshop totally unrelated to my job
•    Give more public speeches
•    Write more blogs

Do those sound familiar? Are any of my New Year’s career goals similar to yours? Does writing or reading your own professional or personal list of goals for the year feel as exhausting to you as reading mine does to me?

Yes, all of the above tasks and goals I outlined for myself are important to me, and they are things that I’d like to do. But lately, I’ve found myself wanting to unplug more and do less. I’m finding that when I allow myself to disconnect from daily tasks, to do lists, Twitter, and Facebook feeds, a funny thing happens: I’m actually more productive.

During the holiday break, I really did take a break. From everything. When I came back to the office yesterday, my head felt clear. I moved through projects and tasks with lightning speed, and left feeling energized and excited about what I worked on. Read the rest of this entry »

Stephanie Riven

Perhaps you have been following David Brooks’ series of op-eds in The New York Times. He asked people over 70 to send him “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well.

No need to wait until we turn 70 to reflect on these “life lessons” and devise our own, especially as we approach the time for New Year’s resolutions.

Formulating lessons are important for all of us who work in the arts, whether as a performer, an administrator, an advocate, or an educator. These lessons are especially important because of the nature of our field — low wages, long hours, competition for jobs, among other obvious challenges.

What can we learn from Brooks and those who submitted “Life Reports?”

Divide your life into chapters: Brooks talks about “the happiest of his correspondents being those that divided time into (somewhat artificial) phases.” He describes these people as those who could see time as “something divisible into chunks” and they could more easily stop and self-appraise. This approach, he says, “gave them more control over their lives.” Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Spring

Michael Spring has been pretty busy these days; even more so than usual. Not only does he oversee a half billion dollar capital project budget with the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, but Spring recently came off of a five-month stint as an assistant county manager while Miami-Dade searched for its new mayor.

“I accepted the challenge,” Spring says, “on three conditions: that I would not get the office, that I wouldn’t get the parking space and that I wouldn’t get the title; I really wanted it to be an interim responsibility.” Since 1990, Michael Spring has served as Director of his department, and 21 years later, he still just wants to be nothing but a “director of a great local arts agency”.

With the appointment of Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez in July 2011, Spring sees great promise for his community: “Our new mayor is a ‘progressive arts supporter’” and in realigning much of the county government, he “took all of the cultural facilities that were being managed by the parks department and transferred them to my department”.

When asked about this ‘added responsibility’, Spring says, “Organizationally speaking it’s the right thing to do. Practically speaking these facilities have been starved for years in the Parks Department. They come with enormous challenges. They are underfunded, understaffed, and in desperate need of capital improvements” In align with his Department’s mission, he resolves, “We’ll have to dig in and figure out a way to make them great. But that’s the job, right?” Read the rest of this entry »

Guru(?) Michael Spring

November — Take ideas and turn them into concrete concepts. This is the month to unveil adventurous public art works because media and elected officials are in an uncommonly distracted state of mind due the launch of the holiday season and preoccupation with this year’s election cycle.

December — It is OK to have a hidden agenda. Put as many items on the county commission meeting docket as possible this month — the planets have aligned in celebratory configuration to curtail debate in the interest of good will, peace on earth, and holiday shopping for all peoplekind.

January — Take time to get in touch with your inner budget. Now is the moment to act as though old issues are new again and assume a fresh and cheerful view as though it were not insanely optimistic to propose increases in staff and resources.

February — Sometimes cupid plays tricks on us. Go ahead and believe that there will be love for the arts in the state legislature but redouble your advocacy efforts as the planets’ collisions over redistricting, casino gambling, and presidential primaries may deflect arts’ arrow’s flight.

March — Adopt a playful demeanor. Never let your staff know how worried you are about forecasted revenue shortfalls, possible mergers, and the end of the world (see December below). Read the rest of this entry »