ARTSblog

Danielle Brazell

It’s election season in the City of Los Angeles. Eleven candidates are vying for the mayoral seat and a whopping 40 are vying for eight city council seats. Because of these changes in representation, the political landscape in Los Angeles will shift significantly.

We—as artists, as creative entrepreneurs, as arts administrators, curators, audience members, parents, and students—have the opportunity to leverage our collective voice to help chose who will represent our values.

Although forbidden by IRS regulations to endorse specific candidates, nonprofits can initiate a public dialogue about the role arts and culture play in building healthy, vibrant, and prosperous communities. And, for the past seven years, Arts for LA has been doing just that.

Our nonpartisan candidate survey is a way for prospective leaders to map out their vision for our city. Just four questions—and the 100 word responses from each candidate—have provided a window into what those running for office in the City of Los Angeles would do to invest in creativity:

1. What was a meaningful arts and cultural experience you had growing up?

2. What do you believe the role the City should play in the development and support of the region’s cultural infrastructure?

3. How would you champion modifications to, or expansion of the City’s current funding stream for local arts and culture?

4. What three things would you do to deepen the City’s investment in its creative economy (cultural tourism, in-direct and direct jobs, nonprofit, and for profit)?  Read the rest of this entry »

Angela Adams

Arlington County’s public art program benefited greatly from our collaborative effort with Virginia Tech and Americans for the Arts mentioned in Dr. Elizabeth Morton’s post from earlier this week.

Like many programs across the country, we are adjusting to the new normal of increased scrutiny of public spending as it relates to the arts. We are also adjusting to our recent relocation from the Department of Parks and Recreation to that of Arlington Economic Development and are just beginning to understand the difference in priorities between the two agencies and how these will impact our future work.

We are currently working on developing a white paper on the value of public art to Arlington through four lenses: community and social benefits; civic design and placemaking; economic; and aesthetic/experiential.

It is helpful that the field of economics has begun to look seriously at developing measurement tools for such intangible phenomena as human happiness or fulfillment as well as the intrinsic value of the arts, so there is an increasing body of literature to draw from here. The findings of the Virginia Tech students will similarly help us in making the case for how and why public art adds value to our community.

To summarize some of the more interesting (even surprising) findings of the four teams discussed in the previous post and their value to Arlington’s public art program: Read the rest of this entry »

Kaity Nicastri

Editor’s Note: Following Public Art Network Council Member Sioux Trujillo’s post, project partner Kaity Nicastri describes the benefit of using logic models in evaluation.

Evaluation. That’s a hefty word. Most people cringe when they think of evaluation, but it’s really not that scary and doesn’t need to be feared.

With the arts in mind, evaluation can take on many forms—it can be programmatic, project-based, user/patron feedback, monitoring sales/attendance, but they all have a unifying theme: understanding the impact of your work.

I started working with a community public art program over two years ago as a Master’s-level intern from the University of Michigan’s Community Based Initiative. With a concentration in policy and evaluation, I fit the nerdier side of social work. I’m not your average caseworker.

In my new role, I was faced with a program that had surveys, but no real evaluation and no understanding of the results of the surveys. Simultaneously, taking a technical evaluation course, I started with a logic model. This process is truly the crux of all good evaluation. If you don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish, evaluation will mean very little.

Through the logic model, I learned invaluable information about the structure of the program and goals of the directors, funders, and participants for various investments in the program. The logic model process created a useful document that informed my evaluation knowledge and development. Read the rest of this entry »