ARTSblog

Americans for the Arts and NonFiction Media presents “Taking Stock: Connecting the Dots”, a video chronicling the Puget Sound Region’s Emerging Arts Leaders’ dynamic series of Creative Conversations.

Ride along as young arts administrators grapple with the shifting landscape of arts funding, advocacy and space use models.

Thrill to the strains of peer networking, collaborative problem solving, and mutual edification!

This film shows what is possible when today’s leaders come together to invent the way forward–rather than waiting to have it shown to them.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 16:34 — 15.2MB)

In this month’s ArtCast, Bob Lynch, President and CEO of Americans for the Arts, discusses the organization’s work toward the 2008 presidential primaries and election. Find out how Americans for the Arts is focusing its efforts to impact the dialogue of the presidential primaries, including the creation of a new arts position issue brief for all the presidential candidates.

Earlier this summer the Americans for the Arts Action Fund launched ArtsVote2008, our effort to bring the arts to the forefront of the ’08 campaigns. We’ve assembled staff and grassroots volunteers and are establishing a significant presence on the ground in New Hampshire–the first primary state. Thanks to the efforts of these dedicated arts advocates, we have already seen results on the campaign trail:

• Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM), just last month, announced his national education plan, which included a ground-breaking $250-$500 million proposal to invest in arts education in schools
• Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) herself contacted our New Hampshire ArtsVote leadership to highlight her record of support for the arts and said that she considers the arts a necessity, not a luxury
• Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (Rep.), himself a musician, has been outspoken in his support for arts education on the campaign trail enthusiastically calling arts education a “Weapon of Mass Instruction”
• Former Senator John Edwards answered a question from a University of New Hampshire student about how he would address the lack of funding for the arts in education during the MTV/MySpace debates on Thursday. He responded by saying, We have a responsibility to promote arts education not only at the college level, but at a much, much younger level: first, second, third grade. He also suggested that federal funding from Congress was the answer. “The president of the United States can go to the Congress and ask for specific marked funding for the things that we’ve been talking about. Whether it’s diversity in our academics or whether it’s the arts. Because I believe so strongly in the importance of the arts, I will ensure that we, at a national level, are providing incentives and funding to help promote the arts both at public schools and at colleges and universities.

As the presidential election ramps up, the Arts Action Fund will be updating our members and the media with the latest candidate information. But right now, in the early stages of this race, every candidate is a potential ally. With just a few weeks left before the first presidential primary ArtsVote is hosting the first ever Presidential Arts Policy Forum at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH. Candidate surrogates and prominent figures, including representatives from the U.S. Conference of Mayors and Miss New Hampshire Rachel Barker, will speak about the importance of the arts in the 2008 presidential race. The event is free and open to all New Hampshire voters who support the arts. For more information, you can visit www.artsvote.org. This event will play a key role in ensuring we put a friend of the arts in the White House next year!

Robert L. Lynch, President and CEO of Americans for the Arts, takes a look at the arts and news across the country. He discusses a variety of programs and events that occur this October in celebration of National Arts & Humanities Month. For more information visit: www.AmericansForTheArts.org/NAHM.

Artists made a stunning and under-appreciated difference in the history of education. Research, such as that from Illinois and New Jersey, is now telling us the “will of the leadership” determines whether or not arts education happens.

I take this moment to appreciate leadership by the arts for education:

THE DAY LOUIS ARMSTRONG MADE NOISE ABOUT SCHOOL SEGREGATION

Fifty years ago, and two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, Louis Armstrong was on tour in Grand Forks, N.D., writes David Margolick in the New York Times. Larry Lubenow, then a 21-year-old journalism student at the University of North Dakota, was sent to Armstrong’s hotel to interview him, with his editor’s caveat of “no politics.” This would have aligned with Armstrong’s wishes, as up to that point he had been quoted as saying “I don’t get involved in politics…I just blow my horn.” With the help of a bell captain and a room service lobster dinner, Lubenow snuck into Armstrong’s suite, and Armstrong agreed to speak with Lubenow. Lubenow initially stuck to his editor’s script, but soon brought up t he happenings of Little Rock. The response was shocking–Armstrong said President Eisenhower was “two-faced,” and had “no guts.” He called then Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus “an uneducated plow boy,” and sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with obscenities substituted for the lyrics. Lubenow knew he had a story, but couldn’t get anyone to run it, as the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis wouldn’t believe Armstrong had said those things. So the next morning, Lubenow went to Armstrong’s suite with a photographer and showed him the story. After reading it, Armstrong, who was once called “Uncle Tom” by Jet Magazine, said “don’t take nothing out of that story,” wrote “solid” below the last line and signed it. There was typical backlash, but Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, and others quickly backed Armstrong. One week later, President Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers into Little Rock, and the next day those soldiers escorted nine students into Central High School.

A recent opinion article by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, in the LA Times, echoing opinions he has expressed earlier and elsewhere, has stirred up quite a debate. The various threads include an article in The New York Times about a month ago that touched on similar themes, and an article in the Washington Post. These are all referenced on The Chronicle of Philanthropy website, including some reader postings. In a nutshell, what Reich (and some others) contend is that the wealthiest Americans are self-serving in their philanthropy, and are not sufficiently generous is helping the truly needy. Reich specifically singles out arts organizations as nonprofits that essentially serve as playgrounds for the rich. Major universities like Harvard with its multibillion dollar endowment are also cited. Reich’s solution: advocating a change in the federal tax code that favors charities that provide direct services to needy people, suggesting, If the donation goes to an institution or agency set up to help the poor, the donor gets a full deduction. If the donation goes somewhere else to an art palace, a university, a symphony, or any other nonprofit, the donor gets to deduct only half of the contribution. Read the rest of this entry »

Week after week, story after story is published in newspapers and magazines all across the country. They take different angles, but they all have the same message: an education that includes the arts produces workers that companies want to hire.

• The San Diego Business Journal writes that in an age of increasing globalization, jobs that lack elements of creativity will wind up overseas. So while math and science are important, it might be music and art that make the difference between a lay-off and a promotion.
• The Daily Press in Escanaba, MI, published a story this week about China’s shift from a teaching-to-the-test curriculum to one that encourages creativity, just as the United States is doing the opposite. The No Child Left Behind philosophy is not preparing our children for tomorrow’s world.
• Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is driving the point home in speeches on the campaign trail, saying that employers are looking for creative types. Like Richard Florida, Huckabee believes that creatives will make up the American workforce in the future.

So the word is getting out. The idea is catching on. Creative workforce has Buzz. And Buzz is the beginning. Before Paris Hilton was everywhere, she had Buzz in the Manhattan nightlife scene. Before healthcare reform was on every politician’s agenda, Michael Moore’s Sicko had Buzz.

But what do we do now? How do we in the arts harness the creativity Buzz and use it to ensure that every child gets a quality arts education?  At Americans for the Arts, we are working on leveraging the Buzz to get foundations, corporations, and political leaders involved so that No Child Left Behind doesn’t leave the arts behind.  We know you are working on it too. What are you doing with the Buzz?

Bob Morrison and host of other movers and shakers in New Jersey arts, arts education, education, and politics unveiled the results of the New Jersey Arts Education Census Project today in a graceful and eloquent press conference televised from the New Jersey Network studios in Trenton, NJ.

In a brilliant stroke, the new New Jersey Arts Education Partnership a coalition of supportive leaders and organizations speaking with one voice for arts education made the recommendations from the Project its strategic plan. Is there a better way to make an impact from the data than to make it someone’s to-do list? The Partnership is currently hosting committees addressing each major area of the report: students, teachers, policies, resources, and community.

The most potent piece of the data is the mapping: an actual picture of each school district colored according to their Arts Education Index a number like a grade, based upon flexible, comprehensive criteria for high-quality and fully accessible arts education.

Read the rest of this entry »

A letter-to-the-editor from Bob Lynch was recently published on the New York Times website.

The letter calls for a reunification in the debate among arts education professionals about which benefits of arts education should be researched by scientists, designed for by providers, and touted by advocates.

The letter is online.

Guest blogger Nick Rabkin has also offered his thoughts.

By Nick Rabkin
Center for Arts Policy
Columbia College Chicago
August 8, 2007

It is so rare that arts ed or arts ed research gets coverage in the daily press. The recent article in the New York Times about the “Studio Thinking” research project (1) is significant first because of its rarity. It is already generating a buzz about arts education that we rarely feel.

It is important for another reason as well, though. For the last decade or more a debate has raged about the “intrinsic” vs. the “instrumental” value of arts education. Ellen Winner, one of the “Studio Thinking” researchers, played a very big role in that debate several years ago, when she and colleagues published a “meta-analysis” of arts education research in which she found no evidence that arts learning contributes to student academic achievement. (2) Hence, she argued, it was scientifically irresponsible to make a case for the arts’ place in schools because they improve student performance in other subjects. Furthermore, she suspects that education policymakers will reason that if they want to improve math achievement, they will teach more math, not more arts. In the end, the arts are important in their own right and should be justified in terms of the important and unique kinds of learning that arise from the study of the arts.

Some researchers who believed that there was good evidence the arts did contribute to higher achievement across the curriculum criticized Winner’s meta-study, arguing that it excluded good research from its scan.  As one of many places in the country where teaching artists were inventing new ways to improve schools by connecting the arts to other subjects, many folks here in Chicago felt Winner’s study simply ignored their work and contributions. Others, more committed to arts education traditions, thought Winner bolstered their argument against “arts integration” and for “sequential and discipline-based instruction” in the art forms.

Read the rest of this entry »

An item about Iraq in the last Sunday’s Washington Post caught my attention regarding our ongoing discussion about the arts in a global context. Megan Greenwell says, “Baghdad’s once flourishing community of artists has all but evaporated. Streets formerly lined with galleries are now deserted and the artists who remain say they have not sold a piece since the U.S.-led invasion. Samarrai (a ceramicist) estimates that 90 percent of artists who were working in the capital in early 2003 have been killed or have fled the country.” There is not enough electricity to fire the ceramicists kiln so he will probably leave too.

We talk about and see evidence so often of the community development value of the arts. You have to start by addressing the joy, pain, beauty, ugliness, and questioning that music or painting or theater or dance bring, whether to kids in a school or people living in a neighborhood. We have all seen the arts’ presence become community energy that makes a better neighborhood, a more productive school, a kid with more options in life. And yes, we often get an economic benefit and a social problem-solving benefit as well. We don’t actually need research to see it all around us. But sometimes we don’t think about the opposite situation where the arts are dramatically stripped away, and the unraveling of those very same benefits that occurs, like what the remaining artists in Baghdad see and fear. Shayma Ahmed, a professor at Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts said in the same Post article “The threat to the culture is at least as devastating for Iraq’s future as the political problems. If the artists and the writers leave, who will be here to show what is happening and change the situation?”

When leaders and elected officials recognize the importance of the arts, the very value that the artists in Iraq see eroding, these leaders need to be recognized. The August 3 issue of the Indianapolis Star has a story about such a leader, Mayor Jim Brainard of Carmel, Indiana whom I have had the pleasure of meeting at the U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings. The mayor is fighting City Hall so to speak, insisting on a $700,000 arts appropriation in the 2008 budget. He says “it is very important to economic development that we have art and cultural life in the city.” The article indicates that some city council members disagree and actually voted against the entire city budget in opposition to any arts funding. Mayor Brainard is not backing down even as the dispute shapes up to be a possible fall election issue. Hats off to Mayor Brainard.

-Bob Lynch, President and CEO, Americans for the Arts

Uploaded to this blog post, you will find an audio podcast of Mathew Gross’s speech from the 2007 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention. Mathew Gross was the 2007 Public Advocacy Innovator.

Mathew Gross “rewrote the rules of presidential politics” and “put blogging at the center of the Democrats’ nominating campaign” when he left his home in Moab, Utah to launch the first presidential campaign weblog for Howard Dean in March of 2003. As Director of Internet Communications for the Dean campaign, Gross helped to develop and implement the online strategy that raised more than $25 million online and built Blog for America into one of the top weblogs in the world, attracting more than 100,000 readers per day at the height of the primary season.

Audio and video files from previous events, as well as Americans for the Arts’ monthly podcast, can be accessed from our website. To listen to this podcast, please click on the play button below.

The Chronicle of Higher Education carried a story about a Carnegie Mellon professor complaining that a film, Smart People with Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker, was being filmed on the Carnegie Mellon campus. He questions whether colleges and nonprofits are getting too commercial. Too late and wrong question. Too late because films have used college campuses and cultural and nonprofit facilities since the beginning of filmmaking. Then the question should be: are they getting commercial enough to stay in the competition? Our Americans for the Arts research shows that some 50 percent of the budgets of most arts organizations comes from earned revenue sources. This means sales and revenue come from something-tickets, coffee shops, bookstores, space rental, or perhaps even film shooting fees. All this is very commercial and necessary in today’s market. In a world where daily life is a blur of sectors and competing influences, this consideration is probably a fairly valuable one if taken as part of an overall learning opportunity. And all this commerce going on in the nonprofit sector today creates the need for commerce skills like branding and marketing. This is why our National Arts Marketing Project Conference and training programs are in such high demand. The for-profit and the nonprofit increasingly blur in creative ways. Ball State University in Indiana plans to name their $21 million communication and media building after television icon (commercial side icon) David Letterman who has been a $20k annual contributor to his alma mater since 1985, according to the Indianapolis Star and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The New York Times also quotes business superstar (and friend of the arts and Americans for the Arts) Sidney Harman of Harman International as saying “get me poets as managers”—a succinct understanding of the value of the arts in 21st century workforce readiness and the value that an arts education can bring to someone whether they are entering the nonprofit or for-profit career worlds. In Business Week, the presence of the arts in airports is celebrated as being both good for airports and the cities they serve, as well as good for the arts. “You’ve got a captive audience,” says Greg Mamary of the American Association of Airport Executives.

And of course in our country, it all comes together in politics, as the Southbend Tribune reports that country music performer Sammy Kershaw announced to run for Lt. Governor of Louisiana. Why not Sammy Kershaw as a candidate, or Clint Eastwood as a mayor, or Arnold Schwartzenneger as governor, or Ronald Reagan as president, or Alec Baldwin, Issac Stern, E.G.Marshall, Uma Thurman and all the other non profit or for-profit artists I have had the pleasure to work with in advocating for the arts and arts education for all Americans. I am for more arts experiences, more arts involvement, more arts presence whether from the nonprofit, the for-profit, or the unincorporated sectors of America. The mix makes working, playing, and just living all the richer.

– Bob Lynch, President & CEO, Americans for the Arts

I recently had the pleasure, with an Americans for the Arts colleague, of participating in a “stakeholders convening” for The Conference Board on the issue of workforce readiness. Their recent study, “Are They Really Ready to Work,” found that businesses rate their incoming workforce (college educated, 2-year college educated, and high school educated) as poorly prepared with the skills needed in the workplace today. In contrast to the national obsession of the past few years on “basic skills” (see No Child Left Behind) – particularly math and science – the corporate folks surveyed (mostly HR execs) rated “applied skills” as particularly critical, and relatively poor in their incoming new workers. These include creativity and innovation, communications skills and teamwork.  Sound familiar?  We arts and arts education advocates often press our case based on the role the arts can play in building these skills, and in fact many of the HR leaders interviewed for this research cited the arts in talking abut the importance of creativity. But one thing made clear by this stakeholders meeting (the actual content of which I  can’t report on because confidentiality was promised in order to foster an open dialogue) was that we don’t seem to have enough data to support this linkage.

Do we really know that the arts foster creativity, innovation and imagination, in ways that make people more creative, innovative employees? (Not just in creative industries, but creative scientists, or financiers or factory supervisors.) It may seem obvious to us – one of those “duh!” questions - but can we prove it?  What about the other applied skills – teamwork, collaboration, cultural sensitivity, communications, etc. Again, seems obvious that the arts build these skills, but what research do we have that backs it up, particularly in a workforce context?

Americans for the Arts is now looking at how we might partner with the Conference Board and others to do some research that might build a clearer definition of creativity and innovation in a business context, and more clearly show how the arts can foster the so-called applied skills. The relationship between the arts and workforce development was also one of the themes of our MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum Series this year. And our Creativity Connection program fosters the use of arts-based learning with the current workforce – but this is different than making a case that arts education better prepares workers for 21st Century business challenges.

I would love to know if any of our ArtsBlog readers know of any good existing research in this area; if so, please share it with us. This could even include case studies – for example, a business that finds that new hires that have studied a musical instrument and played in a school orchestra or band excel in some measurable way in the workplace over those without such a background. The more data and tangible examples we can gather, the more powerful a case we can make for the arts and arts education as critical to business competitiveness. Making this case better could be the key to reversing the slippage in corporate arts support we have seen over the past ten years.

I have been serving on the Communications and Marketing Advisory Task Force for Independent Sector, which met today and I thought would be a good opportunity to share some thoughts on our Blog about their efforts to change public perceptions of the sector. First off, the Task Force is really a response to the recent serious of major news stories that present a negative picture of nonprofits – from the Aramony/United Way scandal of a few years ago to the most recent stories about the Smithsonian and Larry Small.  Independent Sector has been doing some really interesting work on researching attitudes toward nonprofit groups.  We in the arts need to be following and taking advantage of this new research and the findings. What they found is that approximately 82% of American adults volunteer, donate or advocate with a philanthropic organization.  This group is what they consider the “engaged public.”  Among this group, those who think nonprofits are “on the wrong track” has steadily declined over the past year, from 32% to 24%.  Most interestingly, the percentage who are “not sure” is consistently extremely high – now at 41%.  The folks at Harris Interactive, who do the research, feel this is an extremely high “no opinion” response, and basically means millions of Americans are easily swayed by whatever negative story happens to be in the news. The other interesting finding: There are five qualities that the public rates as highly important in a nonprofit that are also rated as relatively poorly delivered – Selfless, Efficient, Accountable, Effective, Results-Oriented.  The public already gets that we are committed, caring and passionate about what we do, so we don’t have to work as hard change any hearts and minds on that front, though we certainly should take opportunities to reinforce our existing strengths in those areas. Independent Sector recommends that all nonprofits adapt their communications to especially emphasize these qualities. Here are some other important aspects of the “message framework” they are developing:

1. the phrase “nonprofit community” seems to resonate best when describing the larger sector (not words like charities, philanthropies – or sector)
2. find ways to illustrate the key values listed above
3. use plan language – nothing lofty, avoid jargon
4. don’t denigrate business or government – emphasize that all three sectors are needed 
5. Offer collaboration and solutions to problems, not complaints 
6. emphasize people, not organizations
7. tell our stories, and move from describing what you do to what impact it has on people

 While this research does not separate out the arts, as IS begins to roll out this messaging campaign (which is targeting not just the general public, but Congress as well), arts groups would do well to think about how their messaging can reinforce this effort.  These findings also reinforce what we learned in our National Arts Policy Roundtable about how the arts are perceived – that we need to be telling our stories better, and emphasizing the impact we have on the people we serve. Among all segments of the nonprofit community we especially have a tendency, I would posit, to use lofty and potentially alienating language in describing our work. Independent Sector’s annual conference, where a lot of this messaging work will be shared, takes place October 21-23 in Los Angeles. I’ll be there, and it would be nice to have some more arts folks participating. [Also, see the article about Arts & Economic Prosperity III on their Web site!]