Americans for the Arts

I’m attracted to the idea of thinking inside the box. A 2013 piece in the Wall Street Journal, Think Inside the Box, posits, “People are at their most innovative when they work within the constraints of what they already know.”

When the Arts Education Advisory Council met in Washington, one week before Inauguration Day, there was a feeling of uncertainty in the air. In our meetings we speculated on how this new presidency might impact the world of arts and education. The threat to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts hadn’t been voiced yet. The furor over Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary was just beginning. There was a sense of urgency in our conversation this year. What should we be doing in our communities to help be pro-active? At the end of our three days together, we were committed to advocacy work as never before.

Performers co-create monthly performances at the airport in both pre- and post-security sites, including baggage claim, pedestrian bridges, escalators, near fountains and waiting gates, curbside, and at popular lunch spots. The approach has been, in part, to create scores (creative structures) that have a lot of improvisational movement so that the performers can adapt to the way people are moving through the physical environment. Each and every time, we take people by surprise as they encounter the performance happening around them in an unexpected way. 

From my interview with 16-year-old student and Pablove Shutterbug Cameron Washington: “Photography came when I was going through a hard time in my life with cancer. When I started it, it brought me into a different world and into seeing different things with a deeper meaning. It helped me learn how to tell a story and say things without using words. It helped me see where I was in the world. I feel like art is really important because you can express a side of yourself that you normally wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing with strangers.”

At Lighthouse Elementary in Queens, NY, the kids love to dance. They just never expected it to be tap dance. That’s where ArtistYear AmeriCorps Fellow Crystal Simon comes in. “When I told them no hip-hop dancing—they fought me tooth and nail. But once we actually put our shoes on and we actually started to make noise the kids’ face lit up! They were enjoying it. And they would even come to me in the halls and be like, ‘Ms. Simon! I’ve been practicing! I’ve been practicing!’” ArtistYear is the first national service program dedicated to partnering with school districts to provide every underserved student in America with access to arts education through a year of national service. ArtistYear trains and supports AmeriCorps members to serve as full-time teaching artists alongside established arts educators or classroom teachers in federally-designated Title I schools.

I know we all wear a lot of hats, whether we do administrative work, or maybe as an educator and artist, or even in our daily lives as parents or partners. Managing those hats is the trick to our daily balancing act. Sometimes maybe we try to be bigger than we are, which is why collaboration is so vital to the success of a nonprofit. At my company, Teatro Milagro, we fostered a group of LatinX visual artists, and they formed their own small coalition under our nonprofit called LaxIdeal, and they manage many of the visual arts exhibitions and workshops that happen in our center and in other spaces around the city. Our efforts to collaborate with social service agencies and provide authentic arts experiences that highlight LatinX artists and performers is not just “a thing” that we do, but makes us a model of best practices.