Americans for the Arts

Evaluating the social and aesthetic efficacy of arts and social justice work requires disrupting mainstream evaluation practices that distort—or even undermine—the connections among art, culture, and social justice. We have the opportunity to embed creative, culturally relevant human-centered design into the way we evaluate our arts and social justice work. Our values and practices in our communities can be reflected in the way we evaluate our work.

I recognize that for many artists and arts professionals the very language of “measuring impact” makes your skin crawl. That the highly personal, downright epistemological work you do is beyond the transactional input/output speech of “measurement.” That may or may not be so, but if we as cultural workers can’t articulate the significance of our work, we limit the full spectrum of support available to us. And if in aggregate we can’t name our impact as a field, we remain vulnerable to the persistent devaluation of arts and culture as frivolous at best and elitist and self-referential at worst.

So the question is How? How best to tell the story of our projects, our organizations, our purpose so that the meaning of our work is as transparent as the value it creates? And how to do so while negotiating the power dynamics of external standards driven by grant reporting requirements and an arts economy that regularly changes the mechanisms by which art is valued? 

I want to live in a world where there’s room for both studio artists and community artists.

I really want to live in a world where artists have the freedom to move back and forth between those two perspectives and – especially – to allow those two perspectives to inform one another.

I believe in art for justice’s sake, in art for learning’s sake, in art for discovery’s sake, in art for empowerment’s sake. I’d like to believe that when we say “art for art’s sake” we could mean any or all of that.

Oscar season is upon us and rather than debating who will win Best Picture or Best Actor/Actress, the debate has been how “white” the Oscars are.  #oscarssowhite went viral and African American actors began to boycott. As a result, the Academy (which is 94% white) responded by making the bold move to change their composition to reflect more diversity.

The Oscar issue is reflective of a much larger issue across all sectors of the arts; lack of diversity. I just returned from the annual meeting of American’s for the Arts and all of their advisory councils. This issue was front-and-center over the three-day meeting, as it has become a top priority for AFTA. As I sat and looked around the room I could see why.

Sometimes the most exciting and memorable speakers at the New Community Visions Initiative regional meetings are—like many magical things in the rest of life—serendipitous and unplanned.

One of those inspiring moments occurred at the meeting in Macon when Reverend James Lawrence Wofford gave us words we needed to hear about equity.

Throughout this Blog Salon, you’ve heard testimony from arts leaders across the country: creatives working in street symphonies and theater companies in LA; administrators building community practices in Florida and Boston; artists and curators invested in equity work from Portland to Washington, DC, and all points in between. By using this Blog Salon as a platform, the ELC is combating the dominant narrative that power in the arts exists only in the hands of a historically white, historically male, historically wealthy minority. We’re collectively organizing our experiences into a larger tapestry to change the story. Another intention: all of this year’s contributors identify as People of Color (POC). By centering experiences of POC who are artists, administrators, and experts, we’re attempting to course-correct decades of exclusion, disenfranchisement, and marginalization our communities have experienced working in the arts.