ARTSblog

Roberto Bedoya

I ended my previous blog post with a reference to the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grants (CEG) program that I want to expand upon in the context of the democratic ideals of inclusion and stewardship.

CEG is a national model of excellence that shows the cultural sector, how through grantmaking one can address the systemic roots of inequity in society. CEG’s 19 years of service illustrates how the stewardship ethos of taking care is made real through programming strategies that serves our culturally diverse society.

This cheerleader moment for CEG is tied to the backlash being felt against the equity conversation that is heating up in our sector and the nation. CEG is a reminder of what’s possible — that citizens can manifested their passion for equity in a cultural policy designed to serve all.

Let’s call this backlash an example of “Culture Wars 2.0.” The first Culture War of the 90s was an attack on art and artistic free speech. Cultural War 2.0 attacks are against our civil and cultural rights — the right to be taught the works of Latino playwrights in high schools; a women’s right to control her body; the right of gays and lesbians to marry their loved one; the right to be free from racial profiling that is happening within intensity to America’s Muslim and Latino communities; the right of collective bargaining…Attacks by whom? — The 1%, the “me and my friends” of a privatized a “we” of self-interests, the intolerants? Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10%

Jan Brennan

The Denver Office of Cultural Affairs is no more. But don’t panic. In this case, it represents a positive development that helps ensure cultural programming and staffing remains strong in Denver.

This summer, the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs and the City Division of Theatres and Arenas combined forces to form a new, merged agency called Arts & Venues Denver.

The merger brings cultural programs and venues into an umbrella agency that brings together all of the City of Denver arts and entertainment assets. Arts & Venues Denver has adopted a new mission: To enhance Denver’s quality of life and economic vitality through premier public venues, artwork, and entertainment opportunities.

The former Office of Cultural Affairs has moved over as a department of the new agency, joining Facilities and Event Services Departments, and served jointly by Communications & Marketing and Finance sections.

We retained all of our staff, programs and budget in the transition, continuing to oversee public art, community events, arts education and creative sector initiatives. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6%

Felix Padron

San Antonio is at a crossroads.

It is a city whose traditional identity has been shaped by generations of families rooted in the region and immigrants from Mexico. This identity has deep historical and cultural implications shaped by a unique set of economic and cultural dynamics; the backbone of a context that more often than not, influences most political efforts and outcomes.

Yet San Antonio is undeniably a growing city. The bulk of its population growth comes from the outside, creating a more heterogeneous cultural environment, where different and specific cultural identities are now being engaged.

The challenge becomes: Can San Antonio expand in a global economy while staying committed to an “authentic” culture?

This question is at the forefront of most discussions regarding the city’s future.

It is a delicate balance for San Antonians, and it makes it difficult to reach consensus when trying to formulate strategies that allow for the cross-pollination of innovation and cultural preservation. This is certainly a challenge for local arts and cultural organizations as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6%

Tatiana Hernandez

This Salon sought answers to a very big question: what will it take to move and sustain arts and culture in community development, civic engagement, and social change?

The 21st century is all about intersections, networks, and hybridity. Our goal should be to ingrain arts in community development through cross-cutting projects that seek to anchor people to place. Caron Atlas nailed it by highlighting Arts & Democracy’s new book: Bridge Conversations, People Who Live and Work in Multiple Worlds.

The Stockholm metro is not only informally known as “the world’s longest art gallery” but it’s also a leader in energy conservation — harvesting body heat from passengers to help ease heating requirements.

An example of the art inside the Stockholm subway. (Image via Wacky Owl)

This is a creative solution that puts people (literally) at the heart of the work. Erik Takeshita said it best, “the importance of culture – not just art – is critical.” To Takeshita’s point, the Stockholm metro isn’t art specifically, its culture; a way of expressing the values of a society. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8%

Caron Atlas’ post about People’s Potlucks inspired me to write about my own experiment in food, community, and art, Feast of Words: A Literary Potluck. Co-founded with Irina Zadov, Feast of Words is a monthly event where people come together to eat, write and share.

Feast of Words is one year old, and since the beginning it has simultaneously been about bringing communities together and expressing, creatively, what sets them apart.

It was a spontaneous idea—Irina had hosted a dinner party where people shared their creative work and was looking for a “third place” that combined art making with the comfort of a shared meal. I had been attending literary readings, looking for one that was a good fit for SOMArts, which is a multidisciplinary arts space and cultural center. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 7%

Xavier Cortada

In using arts and culture to build community, we often forget that the greatest resource isn’t necessarily the program we design, or the object we create, or the idea we generate. It is the people themselves. We somehow forget that art is theirs; that for a very long time now people have intuitively used it to better connect with one another.

Sixty-thousand years ago, our deep ancestors in Africa began a slow-motion journey that populated that continent and the rest of our planet. Responding to nature, they hunted and gathered as they made their way. Along their migration through the land, some took to growing their own food and settled. Others continued on their path until they found a place to call home.

At each stop, they worked communally to build their society. They developed language and customs. They passed these on through rituals and stories. We see this in the artifacts archeology reveals to us today. They developed their culture in the context of their land. Grounded by nature, they built community.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost that sense of place, that connection to each other and the natural world. I use my art to try to help find our way.

In 2006, I developed the Reclamation Project — an eco-art intervention that invited my fellow South Floridians to engage in protecting their coastal ecosystem. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8%

Tom Borrup (center) and friends

I’m writing this post on the return flight to Minneapolis from Seoul, South Korea following a whirlwind three days after speaking at an international symposium billed as: Artist, Enterprise, and Industrial Complex.

This half-day symposium was part of a larger effort by the mayor of Seoul to transform old industrial spaces into creative engines of innovation, to cross-pollinate urban regeneration, technological innovation, and the emergence of a new Korean culture.

Known as Seoul Art Space, this network of nine centers serve as catalysts to bring a growing and changing city and its emerging creative economy onto a world stage. As part of its charge, Seoul Art Space works to forge productive dialogues across sectors and constituencies–largely among people who have seen no need to converse, and who barely have a language to do so.

During the day before the symposium, I traveled with my interpreter and guide Kyuwan (pronounced, he said, like the letter Q and number one) via subway and bus across the vast city. He warned me that Koreans are always in a hurry and not to take it personally if someone pushed me on the subway. I saw the characteristic playing out at multiple levels. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5%

Erik Takeshita

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. We have a responsibility to those who will come after us.  

These simple yet powerful concepts have been echoing in my head the past few days in New Mexico where I participated in a roundtable discussion held at the Institute of American Indian Arts sponsored by the Open Society Foundations, First People’s Fund, and Arts and Democracy Project. The people I met and the stories I heard reinforced the power of the arts – and more importantly culture – in transforming our communities.

Six case studies were presented at the roundtable: KUYI Hopi radio (Hopi Nation), Jikaat Kwaan Heritage Center (Alaska), Penn Center (South Carolina), Tamejavi Festival (Central Valley, California), STAY Project (Appalachia) and Cornerstone Theater (Los Angeles).

Despite the differences in geographic location, populations or medium, these exemplars all shared common elements: they were place-based, holistic approaches that engaged both youth and elders, and, perhaps most importantly, put culture at the center.

Place-based: When in New Mexico, it is obvious that place matters. This is, of course, true everywhere. Place informs who we are, how we act, our thinking, our relationships. Place is more that just a setting, but rather is an active participant that informs what can and should be done. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9%

The Los Angeles County Arts Commission was recently awarded a grant through the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town initiative to produce a cultural asset map in the unincorporated community of Willowbrook, CA.

Located just south of Watts and west of Compton, Project Willowbrook: Cultivating a Healthy Community through Arts and Culture will capitalize on the county’s over $600 million investment in health services and infrastructure. This includes the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Medical Center Campus Master Plan and the Wilmington Streetscape Plan that will link the campus to the nearby Rosa Parks Metro Station.

The arts commission and primary project partner LA Commons will use community engagement activities to identify artists, organizations, programs, and artworks, with the understanding that “art” and “culture” should capture both the formal and informal ways that people engage, this information will be compiled in a final report. The report will provide recommendations on long-term, sustainable strategies that will integrate art into development and achieve overall community objectives. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8%

On July 22, Americans for the Arts President and CEO Robert Lynch spoke as part of the Chautauqua Institution’s lecture series, discussing the arts and arts education in a speech titled “America at a Cultural Crossroads.”

You can view a portion of the speech below and the full speech at FORA.tv:

Popularity: 10%

Price Tower Arts Center

One of the wonderful things I’m re-discovering about Oklahoma is that art, culture, and innovation aren’t just thriving in OKC, but all across the state!

Tulsa, the state’s second largest city, is chock full of arts and culture innovators – from the Greenwood Cultural Center to the Philbrook Museum, which is currently exhibiting a collection of Robert Rauschenburg’s iconic prints, multiples, and other projects that resulted from his long-term relationship with Los Angeles-based publishing workshop, Gemini G.E.L.

Tulsa’s Living Arts, a unique contemporary art space, organizes an annual New Genre Festival with the support of the Warhol Foundation and the National Performance Network. Going on its 19th year, the New Genre Festival brings provocative contemporary art and performance to Oklahoma and endeavors to challenge the preconceptions around the role of art in culture by supporting artists working in nontraditional media, action-based performance, and unsanctioned guerilla methods. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10%

A sketch of Jean by blog post author Hoong Yee.

I love listening to smart women and being surrounded by many of them this weekend at the Americans for the Arts Convention in San Diego. There are ballrooms filled with people who are committed to working in the arts and with the arts to make life better.

Of course we know how the arts affect how we live together in this world. We are the arts people. However, I often forget that sometimes we need to think of ourselves as creative industries and creative exports especially when working in a global mindset.

After I stumbled out of the sunlight, properly caffeinated and ready to begin my conference blogging for the day, I  found myself in a session entitled, “Building Bridges: International Cultural Exchange” featuring two innovators, Jean A. Bonilla and Stephanie A. Madden.  Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8%

One of Rich's San Diego purchases.

Growing up in Los Angeles, San Diego (long known as “America’s Finest City,” but the first I heard of that in my life was Thursday evening from a cappella singers that greeted convention goers on the way to the trolley line) was a place we didn’t go to very often.

There was the time we went to Vacation Village and my dad beached the rental sailboat in Mission Bay, and the time I drove down to Rosarito Beach in the 12th grade with a couple of friends in a vain attempt to convince ourselves we were wild American high school kids (I remember drinking a lot of Mirinda orange soda).

And a couple of other short, unmemorable visits. (On one of them, when I came from DC — which didn’t have Trader Joe’s yet in those days — a highlight was the Trader Joe’s in Hillcrest.)

But for the most part, San Diego was a place you went through on the way to Mexico, or stopped in for a couple of days without ever really experiencing much of the “placeness” of the place.

So this time, while in San Diego for the Americans for the Arts Convention, I wanted to do things differently. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8%

Ron Jones

The phrase, “Town and Gown,” is a shorthand way to saying there is a tension or disconnect between institutions of higher learning and the communities in which they reside. Some of us know this to be extreme; others only experience this disconnect in minor ways. It is real.

We all know that and it’s real for good reason since the purposes and aspirations of community and institution are rarely compatible and aligned. For those of us in the arts, this disconnect has and continues to be even more amplified with communities sometimes, perhaps often, seeing university arts programs, arts conservatories, and art schools as isolated towers that stand aloof to and indifferent to the needs and sensibilities of the very community in which they reside.

Those days, in my opinion, must come to an end if the arts are to survive and realize a healthier existence in the tomorrows to come!
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 13%

Robert L. Lynch

One of the largest arts audience activities of the year happened earlier this week. Thousands of artists from around the United States and throughout the world prepared for months for this single event on one night in February. It’s called the Super Bowl. Yes there was football, too and some pretty exciting football at that. But this is a televised sports event where no one leaves their seat during the commercials because they might miss some really cool, fun art. Graphic design, computer generated imagery, audio engineering, musical composition, actors, lyricists, script writers, musicians, lighting designers, dancers, fabricators of all kinds produce these tiny bits of theater we call advertising.

I’ve often heard–and even said–that the arts are America’s secret weapon in developing our communities and cities. But lately it’s clear that the secret is out because more and more mayors, community leaders and government officials are using the arts to transform communities. This theme played out in several of the ads on Sunday night. One wonderful piece showed the benefits that public art, performance halls, design, choral music, architecture, and cultural life in general can have in the animation of a downtown and for the image of an American city. This ad without the soundtrack could have been a video poster for our nation’s five thousand city arts commissions. The city turned out to be Detroit, and the spot featured Eminem, one of Motor City’s most renowned musicians. And the ad was for Chrysler. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 16%