103005
Advancing the Arts: African Proverbs Provide a Blueprint
I attended the 2019 Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was amazing to be in a place with thousands of other arts supporters and enthusiasts. I was among artists, researchers, educators, community organizations, politicians, board members, and so many others. All of us came together to learn, share, network, and champion the cause of elevating the arts in our communities. There was power in the sheer number of people who traveled from all over the country to be in attendance. All of us traveled individually—one by one, to come to one place for one reason: the arts. We came together to advocate, connect, and support the power of the arts in America. I believe the African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” In those simple words, the proverb teaches us the blueprint for monumental progress.
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103007
From the Barre to the Boardroom: The Power of Arts-Based Learning for Business Professionals
Arts education certainly doesn’t have to (and really shouldn’t) end after high school. At least that’s our belief at COCAbiz, the arts-based business training division of COCA-Center of Creative Arts in St. Louis. COCAbiz provides immersive arts-based training, programming, and consulting for business professionals. We are constantly exploring how to unlock creative energy and build skills to meet today’s business challenges by providing leaders with new tools, techniques, and perspectives from the arts. COCA’s Executive Director, Kelly Pollock, wrote about COCAbiz for Americans for the Arts back in 2011, suggesting “businesses might be more innovative and achieve greater success when they give their employees all of the tools that the arts and the creative process have to offer.” She’s right. As we round out our first decade of COCAbiz, we have learned that arts learning is powerful and needed with business professionals. In a world where automation and technological dependence are becoming the norm, human creativity still reigns as the ultimate competitive advantage.
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103004
Engaging Partners on Art Education for Students with Visual Impairment
“You mean an artist made this for us?” A student with a visual impairment is seeing a work of art for the first time at an art museum. The student had just been told that a visual artist recreated Native American on Horseback by Ronald Lockett for their group especially. The group is part of a program called STARS (Social, Therapeutic, Academic and Recreational Services) at the Center for the Visually Impaired in Atlanta, Georgia. This year-long program is for students with visual impairments and helps them “gain the self-confidence and skills necessary to thrive.” The Center for the Visually Impaired (CVI) is in Midtown Atlanta, less than two miles from the High Museum of Art. CVI and the High officially began a partnership in 2016 through a Museum Access for Kids contract from the Kennedy Center VSA. Through this partnership and others, High Museum staff have received training on working with visitors with various abilities.
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103003
A Reflection on the Current Climate for Arts Educators in Schools
Summer is coming to an end and schools across the country once again are opening their doors and welcoming learners of all ages. The education systems of 2019 are shifting to meet the needs of these learners, and this is an ongoing and huge challenge for school leaders. Some students aren’t returning to a traditional school, while others never stopped their learning when the last school year was “officially” over. Fortunately, we have excellent educators across the country leading with innovative ideas to tackle aspects of these differences. As a veteran arts educator of 43 years, this blog is a reflection of what is circling around in my head.
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102998
An artful partnership that creates connections and accessibility
Spider Man, Black Widow, and Captain America combine with skyscrapers, skylines, and life-sized pop art. Hands form clay and mouths elicit the spoken word. Creative Clay’s six-month Artlink Apprenticeship Program is yielding a diverse collection that will adorn the walls and fill the spaces of St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts. Collaborators work in tandem to create art that celebrates each partner’s unique talents and touches. These collaborators weren’t colleagues back in March when they met for their first Artlink session, but today, they’re partners, friends, and advocates. The Artlink Apprenticeship Program is one way that Creative Clay, a non-profit in St. Petersburg, Florida, creates accessibility for all through the arts. Artlink pairs a professional artist with a member artist from Creative Clay’s Community Arts Program, one of seven programs that serves individuals with neuro-differences.
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102955
Employees Matter: Why Leading Arts Organizations are Embracing Financial Wellness in the Workplace
Content presented by the Institute of Financial Wellness for the Arts (IFWA).
If you’re an employee of Veterans United Home Loans, one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” on Fortune magazine’s 2019 list, you might be invited to a crawfish boil or a party “welcoming the seventh employee named Emily to a department.” Hilton, the hotel company, provides massage chairs for workers on break. And many companies routinely offer stock bonuses for innovative ideas. But for arts organizations operating on lean budgets, those employee perks are impractical. Young actors, dancers, musicians, and arts staffers have more pressing needs than crawfish boils, and one of the aims of the Institute of Financial Wellness for the Arts (IFWA), launched in 2018 and expanding nationally this year, is to provide advice on handling money to artists of all stripes.
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102961
Business Spotlight: Architecture Firm Builds on the Arts
The arts are core to what we do at Opsis and our relationship to, and support of, our local and diverse arts community helps us make connections with members of our local and regional community that we might not otherwise be able to do as effectively. As a result, Opsis is well known in our local arts community as an available supporter, participant, and resource. Opsis is a firm filled with people for whom the arts are as personally and professionally important. Folks come to us because we value the arts as a fundamental priority and integrate the arts into our practice with every opportunity. We partner with arts organizations to help raise money, plan and design facilities (often pro-bono or at cost), and we invite creatives into our office for monthly lunch-hour talks that demonstrate this focus and accelerate the exposure of our staff to other creative people from a wide variety of disciplines.
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102956
Artists, Funders, and Disruption in the Public Realm
When artists activate the social imagination and cultural practices bring people together, when new images and events claim or create public space, and when cultural organizing mobilizes people to action, art disrupts and influences social and political dynamics and discourse in the public realm. And, when funders shape programs to support this work, they too are influencers and activists in the public realm. As definitions of public art broaden to include social and civic practice, art in the public realm continues to recur as a central idea and practice. The concept of the “public realm” recognizes public space as more than physical places for locating art. They are connectors that support or facilitate public life and social interaction. In April, Americans for the Arts and The Barr Foundation released Programs Supporting Art in the Public Realm: A National Field Scan with snapshots of 28 programs supporting and building capacity for artists working in the public realm. The scan highlights how funders and cultural agencies are shaping programs to support artists for more place-specific and issue-specific work as well as cross-sector collaborations.
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102937
Creative Summer: Intern Experiences at Americans for the Arts
“What is justice?” In my first year of college, I had a research assignment to choose a case study related to this question. I wrote about the need to increase equitable access to arts education in the United States as a means for social justice, and used resources from Americans for the Arts for my research. With previous experience as a visual arts student as well as an art teacher for students from underserved schools in the Washington, D.C. area, I knew the transformative power that the arts could have to empower individuals and communities. My classmates were eager during my presentation to hear more about the case for the arts as a matter of social justice, as many of them reflected that they had never thought about arts in the context of social impact or equity. Since then, I have wanted to be an advocate for the arts wherever I go, knowing that it is so intertwined with issues of equity and social justice. I have pursued ways to integrate my interests in the arts with my professional goals of advocacy and related communications fields. This summer, I had the perfect opportunity to integrate my interest in the arts with my professional goals as the Marketing and Communications intern at Americans for the Arts.
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102908
Joliet, Illinois Establishes an Arts Commission: Voices From the Cultural Community
On July 16, 2019, the Joliet City Council voted unanimously to establish a Joliet Arts Commission. At over 170,000 residents, Joliet is the third largest city in the state and was, until recently, the largest city in the Illinois to not have an Arts Commission or Arts Council—and the community felt this void. On August 6, 12 of the 17 members of the arts commission were appointed. The process of starting an arts council (or local arts agency) was not an easy one and involved input from many voices from the community. Here are a few voices of the artists, educators, and community members who have been advancing Joliet’s cultural and artistic landscape leading up to this milestone.
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102906
Pathways to Freedom: We Put the ‘Public’ Back in Public Art
The Jewish Arts Collaborative was new to public art when we commissioned Julia Vogl to create Pathways to Freedom in 2018. Our priority was to take the Passover Exodus story and make a universal story of freedom, exile, and immigration—relevant to all in the Greater Boston community in a major way. It was a bigger undertaking than our staff of five really understood, but we knew that Julia’s commitment to digging into individual stories and beautifully featuring them was just what was needed in our community. We took a leap of faith on a project of this size and cost—and this is what we learned.
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