ARTSblog

Michael Rohd

In 1991, I founded a theater-based civic dialogue program in Washington, DC called Hope Is Vital. It brought a group of local teens and a group of HIV+ men who were receiving services at a center called Health Care for the Homeless into meaningful, productive collaboration with each other.

For 18 months, we created and conducted performance workshops all over the metro D.C. area for hundreds of young people focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and sexuality education. We worked at schools, youth shelters, correctional facilities, hospital drop-in clinics, churches, and afterschool programs.

After a period of challenging but immensely rewarding work, we felt that our approach—our model—could be useful in other places. The group gave me a mission: take our product, which was in fact a process, and try, at the age of 25, to head out into the world and spread the word.

Pre-email and pre-cellphone, I accepted the recklessly ambitious and well-meaning, impact-based, artistic necessity of scaling up. Community by community, program by program. I spent almost seven years doing that. I learned some things.

First, do the thing

In 1993, one of the first things I did was write Madonna a letter. I asked her to help fund our idea for a national network of programs like ours. Instant scalability via pop star. She was a big funder of HIV/AIDS prevention work back in the day, so it was only a half crazy gesture. Madonna did not write me back. Read the rest of this entry »

Nina Simon

A lot of conversations I have about audience development with organizational leaders go something like this:

“We want to find ways to make our institution more participatory and lively.”
“Great!”
“We want to cultivate a more diverse audience, especially younger people, and we want to do it authentically.”
“Fabulous!”
“But our traditional audience doesn’t come for that, and we have to find a way to do this without making them uncomfortable.”
“Hm.”

Audience development is not an exercise in concentric circles. You can’t just start with who you already have in the middle and build infinitely outward. In most cases, growth means shifting, and shifting means that some people leave as others come.

This is incredibly scary. It requires trading a certain history for an uncertain future—a nerve-wracking prospect no matter the situation. It’s particularly scary if your institution relies primarily on private donors, members, and gate sales to cover operating costs. When funding is tied to a specific subset of your audience, you get protective of them, even if they are not the people most likely to ensure viability and sustainability in the future.

When I took on the director role at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, we were in a dangerous situation. We had a small cohort of members and donors who loved and supported us. Outside of that, our bench was very thin—no brand recognition, no up-and-coming audience, no big funders with an eye on the future of the organization.

Now, a year later, we’ve more than doubled our attendance, increased membership by 30%, attracted national foundation funders, and gotten great ink locally. Our audience has gotten younger and they come more frequently. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Sarian

(Suggested listening while reading this blog entry: Alice Cooper’s School’s Out...)

As I prepared to write this blog post, two things prevented me from truly being inspired:

1.) I am currently in pre-production for MCC Theater’s Summer FreshPlay Festival, a one-week event in which 10 teenage playwrights each receive a 25-hour workshop process with professional directors and actors in order to bring their plays to life.

In the past two weeks I’ve hired 10 directors, 12 production assistants, and almost 80 actors; and just as (seemingly) impossible, I’ve somehow managed to schedule a combined 250+ of rehearsals in a five-day period. Needless to say, this blog entry, while a refreshing break from pre-production, has been the last thing on my mind.

2.) I was asked to focus my blog entry on one of the following themes: research, evaluation, advocacy, arts integration, 21st century skills, partnerships, common core, assessment and/or national standards.

What’s fascinating about these two thorns is that in isolation, neither one of them would have fully stumped me from spilling my thoughts on paper. But combined…something just doesn’t feel right: the reason I put up with the stress of producing this festival (yes, it is my job) is because at the end of the day, it is arguably the most fun and rewarding of our annual education programs.

Simultaneously, not once in the past few weeks have I stopped to think about research, evaluation, advocacy, arts integration, 21st century skills, partnerships, common core, assessment and/or national standards.

So before I start feeling guilty about being a terrible Director of Education, let me ask this: why didn’t “fun” make our list of themes? Read the rest of this entry »