ARTSblog

Katherine Damkohler

When visiting a foreign country, you are expected to know at least a few choice phrases, if not speak the language. In addition, you need to know local customs, pastimes, and the economic/social contexts of its citizens.

In much the same way, a school’s arts partner must also be aware of the academic environment they enter, and understand the perspective of the faculty and students. Of course, as arts partners we have something unique and important to contribute to the school (that’s why we’re there, after all), but speaking the language and understanding the challenges of the school make the connections so much richer.

We all talk about the power of the arts to engage students. Engaging students is vitally important, but it cannot be empty engagement—they must be engaged in a way that inspires learning and connections across the curriculum. By speaking the language of the school you help the school’s mission and your organization’s mission simultaneously.

Currently, and in the near future, the dialog within schools focuses upon the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The shifts that are required to implement the CCSS are vital for arts partners to understand. Read the rest of this entry »

Jessica Wilt

In part one of our two-part post, Alex Sarian and I asked an important question:

In trying to keep up with for-profit ‘heavy-hitters’ that arguably boast of greater resources than the average nonprofit, from which of the three areas (quality, engagement, and partnerships), if at all, do you find yourself most cutting corners?

In light of a very recent and rather candid op-ed in The New York Times, we chose to spin our question to incorporate the story of Greg Smith, who this week boldly resigned from his position as executive director at Goldman Sachs after making startling connections between the “success” and the “community” of an organization; a connection that, in many ways, affects all of us who are surrounded by a culture in which we are asked to do more with less.

Smith writes:

“…culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.” Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Sarian

Arts education organizations and professionals (otherwise known as teaching artists and consultants) are no strangers to the repercussions of budget cuts, financial meltdowns, and the continued sluggish economic climate.

However, in true “arts ed” fashion, the field is slowly boasting several small success stories that offer a model for sustainability. Many administratively-savvy folks around the country are proving that smaller cultural organizations can still compete with the best of the larger, more visible organizations. In part two of our blog discussion (I’m working with fellow Arts Education Council Member Jessica Wilt) we’ll highlight several.

These success stories can however be few and far between. When will the old ways of doing business be a means to an end?

Some teaching artists and organizations haven’t quite made the effort to learn from others’ successes on how to adapt to the “new reality” or more importantly—learn from failures.

How can we prevent playing a continuous game of arts education Russian roulette? Read the rest of this entry »

Joyce Bonomini

Arts education is my passion and I believe a solution to most problems in the world.

I could stop there, but I won’t.

I am fortunate to lead a team of arts educators and administrators that are committed to a vision and definition of arts education that insists on quality, engagement, and partnerships to sustain.

We believe:

1. Arts and arts education are essential to human development.
2. Arts are vital to the life of the community.
3. The measure of our culture lives in the art we value and pass on to our children.
4. Art is personal; art changes lives.

Through professional leadership, adherence to standards of excellence, responsiveness to our constituents, and uncompromising dedication to principals of inclusion, The Hoffman Institute provides a dynamic resource to all segments of the community for life-long experience, exploration, discovery, and mastery of the performing arts.

Our educational philosophy follows that vision as we believe that the performing arts are integral to human development and essential to the quality of life of a community. Furthermore, quality programming engages the community as a whole in an ongoing dialogue that strengthens the individual, our organization, and the community at large. Read the rest of this entry »

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

Over the last several months I’ve been hearing a lot about “collective impact.” This is the idea that social change can be more deeply rooted and successful if there is a coordinated effort to bring together dozens of organizations through a broad cross-sector approach around a shared agenda. Simply stated, by working collectively we can make a greater impact.

The Winter 2011 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, written by Mark Kramer and John Kania, is aptly titled Collective Impact and it provides the best overview of how this movement is helping communities create meaningful reform around education, health, and welfare issues.

The assumption is that large-scale efforts require multiple stakeholders. What sets collective impact apart from other collaboratives is that the collective impact effort builds a central infrastructure, has a dedicated staff, and holds a shared agenda as well as a system of measuring outcomes. The “collective” is about many and diverse entities working together with a common goal.

A quick Google search brings up dozens of references to articles and websites that describe how collective impact efforts have supported social change.

Locally we’ve talked in some arts education circles about how we might use a collective impact approach to create a better system for educating our children. I’m always interested in arts education being at the table when discussions about education reform take place but so often, it’s not on anyone’s radar except the arts organizations that are dancing as fast as they can to provide programs in schools to fill in gaps or enhance district efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Donner

Government budget deficits and budget limits of charitable foundations have made alternatives for financing arts projects more important.

Five programs in Los Angeles this February showed that many other approaches to funding the arts can work well—and help arts organizations boost participation at the same time. Each program has taken a different approach to raising funds from private sources, demonstrating that there are many different choices that match the needs of different communities.

The Princess Grace Foundation USA celebrated its 30th anniversary with a reception for past grant winners in Beverly Hills and a gala for patrons in Orange County.  Generous contributions from patrons of the arts and several corporate sponsors have raised much of the $8.5 million in grants that the organization has awarded to promising artists and arts administrators.

But a significant source of funding for these grants comes from licensing projects and exclusive commemorative “Princess Grace” limited editions. The licensing program is highly selective and this has furthered traditional fundraising by prestigious associations with licensors, including Estée Lauder Cosmetics and Mikimoto Pearls.

Seven private companies and two nonprofit film festival organizations joined the Italian Trade Commission and public cinematic arts academy to present a weeklong festival of Italian art, fashion and cinema called “Los Angeles Italia.” Read the rest of this entry »

Mary-Helen Rossi

Anyone with their eyes open today can’t help but wonder if those “gloom and doomers” might at least be partly right — should we be worried for our organizations’ survival?

And if so, with many arts organizations closing their doors, what we do to keep ours open?

CREATIVE PRAGMATISM

For decades now, arts programs have gotten funded based on their case studies (we all have terrific stories, don’t we?) and assertions as to the benefits of the arts. And why not? Those benefits are real, and incredibly valuable. But case studies and avowals aren’t exactly tangible and they just aren’t cutting it any more.

TIME FOR A CHANGE?

Let’s face it — human beings do not like to change, but I’m not willing to bet I’ll be okay if I don’t, are you?

Well then, how can we change — what’s the direction to head in? Read the rest of this entry »

Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical by Marcia Muelder Eaton

“Great art rewards sustained attention.” This simple theory comes from philosopher Marcia Muelder Eaton, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota.

In my personal experience, it is true. Eaton has been considering art and writing about aesthetics for a few decades. Her early publications get to the heart of this definition but a later book, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (Oxford Press 2001) offers an inclusive concept of art, aesthetics, and value that is very relevant to the themes of Fusing Arts Culture and Social Change.

In that book, Eaton suggests that “formalists in the world of aesthetics ignore the roles that artworks play in the life of community and conversely, ignore the ways in which communities determine the very nature of what counts as artistic or aesthetic experiences that exist within them.” I recommend her writings in general and this book specifically.

I share Eaton’s work here because my enthusiasm for the conversation raised by Fusing Arts Culture and Social Change is not to call out the major institutions and question whether they deserve support, but rather to encourage sustained attention for small, mid-size, and community-based arts groups that are rooted in communities, neighborhoods, ethnic, and tribal traditions. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Scott

By now, it’s probably a safe bet to assume most arts organizations have at least a Facebook page, and are possibly on Twitter and maybe even Google+, and are using them as part of their marketing approaches.

But do we need these channels, or more to the point, do we understand what these channels can give us?

Here are some points to keep in mind:

#1 Social media is not about selling tickets — While we are all anxious to get more people in the doors at our shows and events, more and more data is coming out about the ineffectiveness of using social media simply to sell a product. Announcing an added performance or offering a special discount is one thing; that’s news and it’s appealing. But simply reposting your standard ticket offer again and again gets old really fast. Your followers want to know when you have an event, but they aren’t looking for a hard sell. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Folk

“There was nothing to do here.” That was Toledo’s myth.

Sure, if you bought it as it is often packaged, you would see Toledo, OH as a barren, struggling post-industrial city with a bleak future and little cultural vitality. Toledo is near bull’s eye center in the “rust belt” region, frequently discounted on a whim and cast with a left-for-dead mentality too often projected on to mid-size Midwestern cities.

Yes, it is true that our community faces stern economic challenges, scant resources, and is faced with its own reinvention. But too, we are graced with profound, rich, and growing artistic heritage and cultural identity.

And let’s not forget, Toledo is a labor town, a little hard work has never scared us.

Scratch just below the soot of our “rust belt” stereotypes, and you’ll see a burgeoning artist community and growing public participation in the arts. Scratch a little deeper and discover that the Toledo Museum of Art was voted America’s favorite museum (it’s true) and that its halls hold the bulk of your art history book.

A little past that and you’ll see the world class Toledo Symphony Orchestra recently performed, by invitation, at Carnegie Hall. Read the rest of this entry »

María Muñoz-Blanco

Almost a century ago, a gentleman by the name of Henry Garrett (then superintendent of the Dallas Police & Fire Signal System) installed a 50-watt radio transmitter in the central fire station to transmit fire alarms to the other Dallas fire stations.

Between fire alarms, Garrett connected the transmitter to a phonograph and played his collection of classical music recordings. Thus began the life of WRR, which 90 years later (and with a much, much stronger signal) is one of the divisions of the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs.

WRR 101.1 FM is a 24/7 classical music station, operating under an FCC commercial radio license. Because of this commercial license, WRR is what we call in the city an enterprise fund: the station sells advertising to generate revenues to cover its operating expenses, pay for capital upgrades, and keep an operating cash reserve.

The station plays an important role as the voice of the arts in North Texas, providing a venue for call-to-action advertising for arts organizations. I never expected to be in the radio business, but I find that many of the strategies used by the station to meet its bottom line can be successfully applied elsewhere in the agency and by our local arts organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

Roberto Bedoya

As an introduction to this blog post, I will be writing about Stewardship as a key to the values of the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC), the community we serve, and to the cultural sector at larger because of its ethical and aesthetic dimensions.

To begin let me contextualize TPAC and Tucson a bit. TPAC is the designated local arts agency (LAA) that serves the city of Tucson and Pima County. Tucson is the second largest city in the Arizona and the metropolitan region’s population recently topped one million this year, of which 40 percent is Latino and Native American.

Pima County is the largest county in the state (which is bigger than the state of Connecticut) and is one of four Arizona counties that border Mexico. It is the home to two Native American tribes – the Tohono O’Odham and the Pascua Yaqui Nations; and numerous small towns and ranches.

Against this background, Southern Arizonans are mindful of the Sonoran desert that we live in, its heritages, its power, and its profound beauty and how these qualities informs the social imaginary that operate here. How taking care of the land and our relationships to each other are grounded in the ethos of stewardship. Read the rest of this entry »

Maggie Guggenheimer

At Piedmont Council for the Arts (PCA), we often find ourselves in conversations about collaboration.

The Charlottesville (VA) area has a high number of arts and cultural organizations for its relatively small size.

Don’t let the quaint college town aesthetic fool you – with organizations like Monticello, The Paramount Theater, Live Arts, The Pavilion, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, and three amazing festivals, we’re busting at the seams with high-quality cultural experiences. It’s exciting, but it’s also competitive. For many of the smaller nonprofit arts organizations in the area, collaboration is necessary for getting big projects done with a small staff and budget.

PCA participates in collaborative projects and gathers arts representatives together for networking events and roundtable discussions to address collaboration strategies. I’m amazed at how much even the busiest directors seem to appreciate the opportunity to connect face-to-face and think “big picture.” In today’s funding environment, no one doubts the importance of effective partnerships, and we all need to unplug and brainstorm together every now and then.

But beyond this necessity, lately I’ve been thinking about collaboration in a new way. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Stein

My first full-time job after finishing grad school was as executive director of the Oswego County Council on the Arts in upstate New York.

Three and a half years ago, I returned to arts council management after more than 25 years as a theatre producer and director, when I was appointed executive director of Arts Orange County.

I don’t know which is worse, running an arts council or running a theatre in times like these, but one thing I’m sure of: I owe my success to breaking the rules.

There are plenty of people who’ve attempted to dissuade me from that path or criticized me for failing to adhere to the conventional wisdom of the field. Conventional wisdom may have contributed to the growth of America’s arts organizations in decades past, but it sure isn’t helping them much today.

I see this every day—and not just in the reforms I’ve been instituting at Arts Orange County, but among the many constituent organizations we serve. Read the rest of this entry »