ARTSblog

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?

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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 »

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by Judith Tannenbaum 

Preserving the important qualities of the Teaching Artist profession, while still moving ahead with its professionalization.

Passing on the vision and practice of art-making is as old as culture itself: creation stories told during long winter evenings, women and young girls weaving baskets, men welcoming boys to their dances. One generation has always taught the next.

This history moves forward into the 21st century. Artists; arts program administrators; school, hospital, senior center, and prison administrators and staff; and professors in a variety of college departments are increasingly asking that the valuable work done for decades by teaching artists be recognized as a professional field. 

One repeated conversation is a fundamental one that questions the ways in which professionalization of the field strengthens or harms this work that we love. In the midst of these conversations, I often think of architect Chris Alexander. When brought to the site of a new project, Alexander is said to have asked community members not only what they wanted that they didn’t have, but also what they presently had that they valued and did not want to lose.

That’s the question I’d like now to ponder: What do we-teaching artists, students, program administrators, site partners, community activists”cherish about the work of art in other places, as Bill Cleveland calls it, as it has been practiced over the decades? What do we want not to lose as teaching artistry becomes a more formal field?

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In Thursday’s Washington Post, a column by John Kelly tells the story of a DC artist, Harold MacDonald, who rose to great prominence in the 1890s, but ultimately was institutionalized because of ‘mental illness’ and died there in 1923. Rudolphe de Zapp, the arts patron and journalist who tried to help him, said at the time, “The popularity of artists is a fragile thing. Anyone who sells beauty will tell you that the market rises and falls over night, and there is no forecasting the change in stocks.” How very true then and now.

An article this Thursday in Bloomberg News features our Americans for the Arts Policy Roundtable with Robert Redford at Sundance last fall, and talks about the increasing challenges facing private support for the arts. Noted in the article is the increasing trend among private funders to target dollars for solving social problems and away from the arts which they erroneously perceive as merely entertainment or about ‘beauty’ as de Zapp noted. There is nothing wrong with beauty, but ironically we all know that the arts deliver that and a whole lot more. Multiple stories in Thursday’s papers agree. 

Our Cultural Policy Listserv cites Forbes.com telling the story of how Tacoma, WA is enlisting music the power of symphonies to help combat street gangs and violence. There are literally hundreds of stories in the last month about the economic and jobs impact of the arts. Also on the Listserv, the Orlando Sentinel tells the story of the Davenport School in Polk County, FL, once rated as an extremely low performing D grade school. It enlisted a rigorous arts curriculum in 1999 and vaulted to a high performing A status by 2003 and stays there. We all know hundreds of such stories, yet seeing them in print today was ironic as the Center on Education Policy reported that 62 percent of school districts nationwide increased the amount of time in elementary schools spent on English language and math causing 44 percent to cut science, social studies, the arts and music, and even lunch. Somehow, the lessons of the multiple values of the arts continue to be lost in a quest for practical skills in a world where creativity in developing and using those practical skills will be the competitive edge.

This is not lost on China as I said in an earlier post, nor in the United Arab Emirates where, as pointed out in a Washington Post story Thursday by Hassan Fattah, the arts are being employed to change images and create new avenues of communication. “In nearby Abu Dhabi, which produces Poet of the Millions, (similar to American reality arts star programs) as part of an initiative to preserve historic heritage, the oil-rich emirate has begun a $10 billion plan to build and operate branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim museums on a sprawling arts and culture development meant to preserve Persian Gulf culture even as it embraces the arts and culture of the West.” $10 billion dollars!

On the good-news front, our ArtsVote 2008 project is noting that some presidential candidates are paying attention to the arts. USA Today quotes Governor Bill Richardson as calling for a massive federal program for the arts. Richardson made similar remarks last week in the debate among Democrat candidates. Governor Mike Huckabee, Republican candidate, misses no chance to talk about the value of arts and arts education and even talked about the importance of music and the arts as his closing statement announcing his candidacy on Meet the Press. Other candidates are welcome to chime in.

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

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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!]

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American Evolution: Arts in the New Civic Life

2008 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention
Philadelphia, PA
June 20-22, 2008

Call for Session Proposals – Deadline: August 3, 2007

Philadelphia is the birthplace of American democracy, and today it is a leader in the evolution of civic life. From history to hip, the city is alive with creativity. Cultures abound in Philadelphia, an open and engaged metropolis that welcomes a diverse community of artists, innovators, and creators. 

At this convention, Americans for the Arts will come together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first percent for art ordinance in the city that created it. We’ll visit traditions in arts education that date back to the founding of the country and continue on the cutting edge. We’ll also fast-forward to a new vision of civic leadership being crafted daily by the collaborative spirit of Philadelphia’s artists, arts administrators, business innovators, and elected leaders. 

Civic life is evolving in all of our communities and the arts are at the center.  In this year of democratic decision-making, more than 1,000 of your colleagues will gather together to laugh, listen, learn, and lead in the place where it all began, and is happening again.  Proposing a session is your opportunity to share your strategies and secrets for the future of creative communities.

The proposal deadline is August 3, 2007.  More information and the electronic proposal form is available at http://www.AmericansForTheArts.org/Convention/Proposals/

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So this is an experiment in my real time thoughts during internet advocacy leader Matthew Gross.

Former head of the Howard Dean campaign’s online activities. He changed the game. He’s sharing his rule book with us. As Nina said in the intro – He’s creating the landscape we’ll be walking through. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m Anne Katz, Director of Arts Wisconsin, Wisconsin’s arts service, advocacy and development organization, and your official blogger for the “Public Advocacy” track at the 2007 Americans for the Arts conference, and I have a confession to make: I didn’t actually attend any of the “Public Advocacy” sessions at the conference today.

I particfipated in the Putting Cultural Assets to Work: Strategies for Communities session in the morning, then had a private meeting about advocacy issues (so, ok, I did focus on advocacy, at least) with another conference attendee, and spent the final session of the afternoon participating in the “Arts Environmental Scan” discussion about AFTA’s planning process. I know that the final session of the day, The State Fiscal Landscape in Transition, was led by Stan Rosenberg, a great arts advocate and political leader from Massachusetts, so I’m sorry to have missed that. I know that tomorrow I will get to at least one of the sessions I am officially supposed to cover, so will be able to report on what I learn from that.

My feeling, though, is that all of the sessions at the conference are concerned with advocacy in some way, since it’s all about speaking up for and leading in the arts arena. No matter what session you attend, throughout the conference you, and all of us, are learning more about moving our local agendas, and the national agenda, forward.

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Americans for the Arts is proud to announce the release of Arts & Economic Prosperity III, our third study of the nonprofit arts and culture industry’s impact on the nation’s economy. These studies are the most potent and oft-cited advocacy tool used to justify public and private sector support to nonprofit arts organizations. This new study is our largest ever, featuring findings from 156 study regions (116 cities and counties, 35 multicounty regions, and 5 states). Data were collected from a remarkable 6,080 nonprofit arts and culture organizations and 94,478 of their attendees across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Read the rest of this entry »

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MEMBERSHIPS
Did you ever wonder why you received something in the mail marked as Arts Action Fund when you are already a member of Americans for the Arts? Or receive a renewal notice from Americans for the Arts when you thought you had already renewed? The membership team is here to explain the difference between the two memberships. Read the rest of this entry »

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Welcome to the launch of ArtsBlog and ArtCast.  ArtsBlog is the blog of Americans for the Arts and will feature posts by various staff members of Americans for the Arts as well as outside experts.  It is our hope that ArtsBlog will be a source of valued information and a home for important discussions.  Comments and questions on ArtsBlog are both welcomed and encouraged.

ArtCast is a monthly podcast produced by Americans for the Arts featuring Robert L. Lynch, President and CEO. To listen to ArtCast, click the play button below.

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