Americans for the Arts

A local host committee has been working for months to organize tours and special events to show off public art in Pittsburgh during the 2013 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention to the most discerning public art audience: Public Art Network (PAN) Preconference attendees. No pressure!

The photo for our album cover – Public Art n’At by the Office of Public Art and Morton Brown: Live From Agnes Katz Plaza

On Wednesday, June 12, all of the preconference attendees are invited to our Welcome to Pittsburgh event. Meet up in the lobby of the Westin to get your registration and Dine-Around location organized.

A guide will walk with you a few blocks down to Agnes Katz Plaza in the heart of the Cultural District. The photo was taken at the end of March. We promise you won’t need a winter coat in June! But you might need an umbrella, so please pack one. 

Julie Hawkins

Why advocate for public funding of the arts?

It's a question I've never really asked myself, because it's always been valuable to me.

I grew up in North Carolina during the height of the "Culture Wars." The summer after my junior year of college I interned in the budget office of the National Endowment for the Arts. One of the highlights of the internship program was a meeting with your U.S. Senators.

Thus it was that in 1993, at the ripe old age of 21 and full of piss* and vinegar, I got to meet the Hon. Jesse Helms and his staff to make my case for government support of the arts. I learned a lot about government and the arts that summer, and some of that piss and vinegar still fuels my passion for arts advocacy today.

I know that answering the question of why we should advocate for public funding is not easy, though, because if it were we'd see many more people engaging in it every hour of every day.

And to be perfectly honest, though arts advocacy and public funding are deeply held values of mine, I've still encountered moments where I wonder if it's working and if it's worth it, particularly in a period of time when we've experienced some substantial reductions to public funding for the arts.  

Michelle Clesse

An installation art museum, a nationally renowned glass studio, and a cartoon museum walk into a bar. Just kidding. Museums and studios do not have legs, and therefore, cannot walk anywhere.

Plenty of cities have great art resources for artists and art enthusiasts alike. When I stumbled into Pittsburgh in 2009, I was amazed by the combination of major arts institutions, niche arts organizations, and scrappy little start-up arts groups; but even more so by how approachable and accessible the Pittsburgh arts community was.

I had a hotbed of arts at my fingertips. By the time I’d been in Pittsburgh for a year, I’d taken two glass blowing classes at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, dragged every out-of-town visitor to the Society for Contemporary Craft, and learned about Gertie the Dinosaur at the ToonSeum.

Now, I certainly didn’t limit myself to the visual arts scene. During my first year I also saw the Pittsburgh Ballet perform twice, checked out the Pittsburgh Symphony, and saw The Mikado performed by CMU’s School of Drama.

As I’ve settled into the city and put down more roots, I still frequent some of my favorite art spots fairly regularly. I have also continued to explore both large and small performance art groups, while keeping my hands busy (and dirty) at many of the public access and cooperative art studios.

Throughout the country, many performing groups have taken to public forums to display Random Acts of Culture™ (supported generously by the Knight Foundation) covering all art forms including music, dance, and theater.

Just a few weeks ago, the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte captured this dance performance from their local airport:

But there are so many other examples to choose highlight including a string quartet at an outlet mall in Georgia:

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John Eger

Welcome to the global economy and society.

U.S. astronauts reflecting on their experiences in space all seemed to see the earth as one "big blue marble."

As NASA writes: "For the first time in history, humankind looked at Earth and saw not a jigsaw puzzle of states and countries on an uninspiring flat map—but rather a whole planet uninterrupted by boundaries, a fragile sphere of dazzling beauty floating alone in a dangerous void."

Thanks to the pervasive worldwide spread of internet technology, the "big blue marble age" is here, the global economy has arrived, and in a sense, the world's map is being redrawn in a way never envisioned.

While interviewing Nandan Nilekani, the C.E.O. of Infosys, Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times and author of The World is Flat, observed:

"There (has been) a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, (and) those things...created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again."