Americans for the Arts

At first glance, the Arts and Business Council of New York’s (ABC/NY) Diversity in Arts Leadership (DIAL) internship program looks like your typical summer arts internship: undergraduates descend on the city and ABC/NY helps them get their foot in the door of one of NYCs coveted arts and culture sector organizations.

However, you might not guess that DIAL doubles as an arts-based platform to engage employees in the corporate sector. Huh? How?

In the decades of my arts learning career, I have encountered inequities everywhere I go. In just the week I write this, I have been addressing inequities in the number of musicians of color in U.S. orchestras, in the provision of arts performances in rural areas, in the funding for different kinds of arts groups, and in the persistent preponderance of white teaching artists serving communities of other races.  

There have been long chunks of my career when I "saw" the persistently gross inequities and biases in and around arts organizations, but without really seeing them because I was so intent on other priorities like the quality of the work of teaching artists, fulfilling the purpose of arts education programs, the effectiveness of partnering.  I am not proud that during those years of prioritizing other issues, I was complicit in that unfairness.

The world is in turmoil and I want to work at a place that is invested in making positive change and where the staff is committed to growing, learning, and deeply caring about each other. I hoped our staff retreat would reaffirm these characteristics of Americans for the Arts while giving me the faith I need to keep moving forward.

If we’re going to talk about diversity, we also have to talk about inclusion. Diversity acknowledges and celebrates the differences we all bring to the world. Inclusion is about picking up all of those differences and putting them to work together, and using them to drive designed and desired outcomes. Diversity and inclusion are critical at Aetna, particularly when we think about our consumers—they don’t all look and think the same way. Our employees must be diverse so that our strategies and services are diverse, leading to a practice of inclusion that allows our customers to receive the support that best suits them individually.

Animating Democracy’s new Aesthetic Perspectives framework spawned multiple parallel scenarios in my head. In one, I was continuing my conversation from a few weeks ago with a foundation grant officer, who told me that their organization was “not so interested in social justice”; you simply had to “have artistic excellence.” I had presented my most cogent argument that artistic excellence is often conceptualized in dangerously narrow ways, to the detriment of appreciating arts and social justice work—only to be brushed aside. What would have happened if the framework, offering many different ways of reading “excellence” in socially engaged art, had been at my fingertips then? 

The integrity and transparency with which we conduct ourselves at the National Public Housing Museum is extremely important to everyone involved. This is work where the process is as vital as the result itself. And we intend to evaluate the so-called “excellence” of our efforts in how much justice we help to create in the world. The Aesthetic Perspectives framework emerges at a key moment for our work, as both a blessing and offering. It opens up a utopian and expansive new terrain for how to reflect on work that is meant to be socially engaged and transformative.