Welcome to the 2019 Emerging Arts Leaders Blog Salon! This year, we have approached a number of emerging leaders in the field to reflect and respond to the theme: “Own your past, shape your future.” You will hear from a number of emerging leaders and change agents in the field who are forging a new path for the arts in America. Along with the theme, we have also asked all our blog salon participants the question, “How is history shaping the future of the arts in your community?” In the coming days you will hear from a number of brilliant emerging leaders who are working to mold and shape the future. This is being done through deliberate, mindful, and creative leadership that is creating discomfort (in a positive way). They are taking what they have been handed, creating dialogue, and forging a path for a stronger tomorrow.

This is a pivotal moment for Seattle. King County, Washington is experiencing rapid growth, attracting new companies and a diversifying, expanding population. We are also grappling with pressing challenges around education, homelessness, healthcare and mental health, workforce development, and income inequality. The benefits of our region’s growth are not broadly shared, and inequities persist. To ensure a healthy and equitable future, we need to find new mechanisms to solve these interconnected, complex challenges. To inject insights about how arts can play a role in addressing these needs, ArtsFund, a Seattle-based grantmaking and advocacy nonprofit, recently published the Social Impact of the Arts Study: How Arts Impact King County Communities. Defining “social impact” as the ability to advance community priorities, we focused on key areas where arts intersect with our region’s challenges. We center on equity throughout, examining how arts can lessen the opportunity gap. Our report offers a new way of looking at things—how investment in the arts is a proactive, strategic investment in community—with potential implications for advancing and amplifying the social impact of the arts in other localities. 

I conducted my first survey of local arts agencies in 1991. It was all paper in those days. We didn’t even ask for fax numbers because too few had one! Over the years we have fielded dozens of local arts agency (LAA) surveys—some were short and easy to fill out and provided useful information, but lacked adequate depth; others were comprehensive and extremely informative, but were too long and hard for respondents to complete. While the paper surveys became online surveys and technology has made distribution more expansive, what remains as pressing as ever is the need for reliable, relevant, and easily accessible information about the LAAs—research that provides early alerts about new trends, drives discourse about how the industry is evolving, and simply allows LAAs to see how they compare to their peers. In 2018, Americans for the Arts implemented a new annual survey to accomplish just this—The Profile of Local Arts Agencies. There are multiple ways you can put the Profile findings to work for you! 

During this past school year, Dr. Lauren Neefe with Common Good Atlanta reached out to the High Museum to do a guest lecture experience at Metro Reentry Facility, a state prison reentry program in Atlanta. We came to one class during a series of art and art history lectures at the facility. This blog post features Dr. Neefe’s experience with incorporating art from the High Museum and music in her curriculum.

Last fall, as the volunteer site director for Common Good Atlanta’s education program at Metro Reentry Facility, the newly reopened and “re-missioned” state prison in southeast Atlanta, I was given the opportunity to give a series of lectures on art and art history to the 28 incarcerated students in our college course. My doctoral training is in English literature and poetry, not art history; but I knew I was up to the task of introducing art as a contested category of culture and knowledge. Maybe I could reframe the obligations of punitive discipline as the pleasures of an aesthetic one. Maybe the students and I could write over the indignities of one kind of suffering with the dignity of another, the kind artists and scholars know as passion.

Annually, the Public Art Network (PAN) Year in Review recognizes outstanding public art projects that represent the most compelling work for the year from across the country and beyond. The projects are selected and presented by a jury of three professionals who represent different aspects of the public art field, including artists, administrators, and other public art allies. New this year, the PAN Advisory Council curated the selected 49 selected projects for 2018 under five unique themes to broaden the exposure of the selected works on ARTSblog and social media, and to provide context to the works through national trends and themes that are impacting the field today.

Due to increased public discourse over social issues that include marginalized communities, and the current state of our welfare infrastructure, artists are creating works for public space that demand closer examination of our society and our treatment of one another. Indicative of the evolution of public art practice, these works suggest the expanding role of public art in framing and directing public thought and activism. Of the 2018 selected PAN Year in Review projects, three projects represented the intentionality of artists in centering marginalized identities and geographies. These works help frame social justice and inclusion within their communities in a number of ways.