Poet Laureate of San Antonio Laurie Ann Guerrero has added another title to her name: Literary Arts Director/Writer-in-Residence at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. The Center cultivates, promotes, and preserves traditional and contemporary Chicano, Latino, and Native American arts and culture through multidisciplinary programming, and is one of the largest community-based organizations in the US. 

Composer Jimmy López will make his operatic debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago this winter, largely thanks to the decision to upload his vocal music onto YouTube. After an extensive quest for a composer to musically adapt Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto to the operatic stage, Lyric Opera came across Lopez’s samples on YouTube and immediately contacted him.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s first nationwide survey to assess the gender and ethnic diversity of American art museum staffs reveals a significant movement towards gender equality within the art museum world. In partnership with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), the survey provides the first statistical baseline against which progress in the museum field can be measured.

The original artists of Berlin’s famed Kreuzberg murals have decided to remove their work by painting over the two pieces with black paint. Conceived several years ago by a small team of artists, the murals were painted by Italian street artist BLU and French artist JR. The first murals depicted two figures showing East and West Berlin gang signs attempting to unmask each other, and the other showed a man shackled by gold watches on his wrists.

This August, officials from the White House, famous Hispanic artists, and Americans for the Arts staff were on hand to visit Meadow Homes Elementary School in Concord, California and observe its two year growth in a new arts-centered curriculum.

On September 21^st, more than 400,000 people came out for the People’s Climate March in New York City.  And what could be found in that sea of thousands, carrying messages of fear and hope and action, was art. Ben Pomeroy from Hyperallergic was on the ground documenting the handmade creations—many collaboratively built—that were central to the march, acting as sounding boards and representing the diverse array of voices within the thousands.

Roberto Bedoya, cultural activist and Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, recently wrote on creative resilience in communities of color, highlighting the Chicano practice of Rasquachification as a method of this resilience.  

Public Art Network Council member Constance White will be the next Vice President of Public Art at the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Originally from Texas, White earned her BFA in art history from Southern Methodist University and worked for nine years for the Percent for Public Art Program at the Office of Cultural Affairs with the city of Dallas. Most recently she has spent the last eight years as the Art Program Manager for the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority.

“Good ideas can come from anywhere…if you ask us, convicts are pretty interesting people” comments Ben Pfutzenreuter, one of the founders of Concepting with Convicts, a project that partners with convicted felons to create powerful ads through the prison pen pal system. The partnership consists of the felon serving as art director or writer for an ad that is completed with help from the four directors of the project.