102635
Celebrating Creative Life
I was recently awarded the Champion of Arts Education Award by the Center for Arts Education in New York City. As the owner of a business that relies on artists, I am deeply committed to supporting arts education initiatives. The arts bring so much joy both to adults and children alike, but this rarely translates to encouragement to follow artistic passions. This raises the question: Why do parents do so much to dissuade their children from pursuing an arts career? We celebrate our children’s work on the refrigerator until something happens that begins to make us shudder with fear. When our child comes to us and says, “I think I want to be an artist,” we try to avoid showing our panic right away—knowing that this might just be a passing notion for the day. Then comes a day, as you begin to plan for your college visits, that your son or daughter says to you, “I want to go to an art school,” or they might couch it with, “Yes, I’d like a school that has an art program … and of course a strong biomedical program.” But, whether your child ends up in an art career or related art career, or does get that biomedical engineering degree, what you’ve supported through their school career is an incredible gift. At Golden Artists Colors, we support arts education because having a creative life is a something that will benefit and last an entire lifetime.
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102614
A Reviving St. Croix
When the Music in Motion School for Higher Dance Education (MMSHDE) in St. Croix reached out to the International Association for Blacks in Dance (IABD) for support in September 2018, I snatched the online bulletin and hit the ground running. I had been looking for a way to get more involved with IABD, but at the time, I didn’t have reliable transportation which would have allowed me to take part in their Administrative Internship Program at Headquarters. But if I knew that if I could find a way to participate in and help my dance community, then I would. I reached out to local dance studios: Washington Dancewear, Divine Dance Institute, Supreme Productions and Company, and Neema Dance Collective, who willingly agreed to donate brand new and new condition dancewear to ship off to our Sister Island in the US Virgin Islands. Now, in 2019, it’s an exciting time for the revived dance school. After the island saw devastation from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the school is back to holding classes, performing regularly, and participating in community affairs.
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102615
2018 PAN Year in Review Trends and Themes: Nature and Systems
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.
At the forefront of the current dialogue across the nation and around the globe are questions concerning how we negotiate with the world around us to address the growing concerns of resource allocation, preservation, and climate change. The pursuit and development of the policies, systems, and infrastructure needed to provide long term sustainable solutions to these issues reaches across multiple fields from the political to the scientific and serves as inspiration to many of the 2018 PAN Year in Review projects. Though the materials, execution, and duration are all unique, these projects are unified by the role of the artist(s) in translating the collective experiences and stories of our essential ecosystems and habitats into personal narratives of site.
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102609
Observe, Learn, and Shape
As I look to my past to see what my task as an arts leader is for the future, I cannot help but think of cultural equity. Succession planning is creating a series of feeder groups up and down the entire leadership pipeline of an organization. While concern for senior leadership positions is what comes to mind, it is the intentional retention of key staff members and volunteers, coupled with sufficient and professional development, that the sector needs. By reading this week’s Blog Salon, you have witnessed evidence from change makers both seasoned and emerging—artists and administrators working across disciplines and sectors from all across the country. As a whole, these individuals are making waves and laying the foundation for cultural equity in their organizations, their communities, the field, and the nation.
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102608
What have we learned from history? A musing on arts policies and practices in the public sector,
There is generally a perception that the arts are a progressive, forward-thinking sector. The attention to racial equity by many arts and cultural institutions may contribute to this. However, in local, state, and federal arts agencies, we’re often bound to the policies and practices largely created and upheld by white people—and far from progressive. While working in the public sector for much of my arts administration career, I have been complicit in adhering to largely inequitable practices—especially when it comes to grant funding. And while my fellow public sector arts administrators and I get excited by moving the needle—even just a little—to make our policies and practices more equitable, we’re still not addressing the core structures that created these inequities in the first place. We focus our attention on moving the needle within these structures, but hasn’t history shown us that these structures don’t (and won’t) work to get us to a more equitable reality?
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102606
Elevating the Arts through Non-Arts Spaces
I am an artist by training, art historian by education, (former/on-hiatus) arts administrator by chance, creative placemaker by practice, and lifelong supporter of the arts by choice. And while most of my career has been in the arts, I’ve never been employed by an arts organization. Most of my life has also involved the arts. Aside from a failed attempt to be a ballerina when I was five, my childhood was defined by art classes and encouraging teachers. Despite having continuous opportunities to pursue artistic and creative interests, I never thought my hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, was a place to experience a diverse or growing arts and culture sector. I wanted to see more people in the arts who looked like me or had a story similar to mine. I also wanted to see the arts outside of purely arts spaces, to be less confined, and to be more accessible to the greater public. However, I had no idea what my career path in the arts would look like, only that I did not want to be a professional artist, nor work in a traditional museum or gallery after college.
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102605
Ideation without Execution is Fear Wrapped up in Procrastination
I lived in a blanket of fear and anxiety as an artist for the first decade of my career. I remember when my dance teacher told me I wasn’t good enough to get into a prestigious dance school in South Florida. I auditioned for theater instead to ensure my acceptance. I remember booking a national commercial in college for a rhythmic dance routine. My sound and precision were perfect. They used my sound and one of my castmate’s “looks” for the actual principal. She was ethnically ambiguous, which sells more product. Both of these moments seeded doubt in my abilities to succeed in the industry. I always knew it was important to write a vision. Write it down, make it plain. One day, I looked up at a journal full of ideas—planned out with extravagance—and realized that I had not acted on a single one of them. I was only putting pen to paper while in complete awe at the people around me who were actually making things happen.
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102612
Pick Your Left Foot Up When Your Right Foot’s Down: My Story of Navigating Life through the Arts
I was born and raised in West Philadelphia. Yes … like the song. On the day I was born, my Nigerian pharmacist turned American accountant father, my US-born IRS specialist sometimes saleswoman mother, and my then-teenage and new to the US sister gave me names—a hospital-room nod to traditional Yoruba naming ceremonies. One of my many names, Abiola, roughly indicates a child that brings wealth and honor, and my parents always treated me as though I could. Growing up, I was in and out of braces and the hospital, stood out physically, and was top of the class. Elementary school was rough. Still, I saw every new encounter as a potential friendship and had an insatiable desire to learn and create—which my parents fostered. When I’d say as a child that I wanted to be a writer, dancer, artist, and veterinarian, they’d say “ok.” At school, I was whatever label peers landed on for the day, but in our home, I was a writer, sculptor, dancer, singer, researcher, and more.
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102611
Innovation in Education
So many terms are tossed around each day in the world of education: personalized learning, student-centered learning, innovation, creativity, proficiency-based learning, 21st century skills, mass-customized learning, competency based education, and on and on. I’ve been thinking more about “innovation in education” lately. It seems that innovation can be a hiccup for many educators. We know that teachers are responsible for so much more today than even five years ago. In this century and the focus on the global economy, innovation is a critical component. Frequently, my thoughts turn to wonderings and questions including: What are we doing in arts education to support and/or teach innovation? Are we providing the opportunity and encouraging learners to create innovative works of art? What is the role and responsibility of arts education and arts educators when it comes to innovation?
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102604
Want to be relevant? Create cultural currency in your organization.
According to a December 2018 report from the World Economic Forum, by 2020—next year!—half of the global workforce will be made up of millennials. Despite the growing number of upwardly mobile millennials, young people are often overlooked as candidates for board seats in arts (and other) organizations. Most organizations are hyper aware of creating a well-balanced board, representing increasingly diverse communities. While we continue to actively address (and we must) race and gender diversity, age diversity is rarely considered. Leaving potential young board members out can be detrimental to an arts organization. A young board member brings energy, creativity and a fresh perspective. They often have a greater sense of inclusion. They can act as a peer to a young staff or to young visitors and attendees. Young board members also have a very deep social influence and can use it to promote programming, ideas, and giving. In a small community, like Lynchburg, social chatter can quickly increase attendance and helps to keep our organization top of mind.
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102602
Engaging Young Professionals in Arts Leadership
I vividly recall my first meeting with Isela Sotelo and Manuel (“Manny”) Prieto, the outgoing and current Executive Directors of LAMusArt. They introduced me to the issues that LAMusArt and other arts organizations face, such as the need for better engagement of Millennials and younger generations, as well as the need to build a more diverse pipeline of board leadership. Traditional board member duties have often been limited to raising large donations; however, the dynamic and evolving nonprofit arts and cultural landscape demands that arts leadership look to their boards for deeper engagement, creative thinking and problem-solving, and fresh ideas in order to grow and thrive into the future. I shared with them the desire and passion that I and other young professionals have to make a more sustained impact on nonprofit organizations, contributing new and innovative ideas and building new leadership skills—goals that many existing one-off volunteering opportunities fail to meet. From that conversation, the idea for our Young Professionals Advisory Board (YPAB) was born.
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