Parklets: Coming Soon to a City Near You

By Jackie Hasa | Published: March 14th, 2012

The original PARK(ing) Day parklet. Credit: Rebar

In the last year, parklets have taken San Francisco by storm. At the start of 2011, San Francisco had four of these sidewalk-adjacent, itty-bitty public spaces created by repurposing parking spots. Now there are more than 20, with dozens of others in various stages of review. Other cities, including New York, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Vancouver have taken notice of this phenomenon as a cheap, flexible way to enliven their streets with small seating areas and green spaces. Their importance for even non-design-oriented arts organizations is twofold: 1) their evolution from guerilla art action to policy success can serve as a blueprint in other arenas; and 2) parklet programs in development present opportunities for local arts organizations to shape these urban interventions to serve their communities.

While urban planners laud parklets as revolutionary uses of public space, their short evolution from the original PARK(ing) Day in 2005 to a celebrated piece of city policy in 2011 is perhaps just as astonishing.  PARK(ing) Day began in San Francisco, when the design collective Rebar paid a parking meter, set up some sod, a tree, and a bench, and used the space as a park until the two hours on the meter ran out.  Then, they rolled up the sod, and the space went back to its original car-oriented purpose.  By 2011, it had turned into a decentralized worldwide event, in which thousands of individuals and groups created 975 informal parks for a day across six continents.  In San Francisco, the Pavement to Parks program now officially supports the development of more permanent parklets with a permitting process and guidelines. Among other things, the guidelines stipulate that all parklets are sponsored and managed by a private partner, all seating must remain available for public use, and at least some of the seating must be permanent.

The first official parklet in San Francisco, at Mojo Bicycle Cafe on Divisadero. Credit: Jeremy A. Shaw

Although there has been a great deal of support for parklets, thus far, most in San Francisco don’t quite fulfill their promise. Arts organizations have a fantastic opportunity to improve upon their current form. The requirement for a local business steward means that parklets often end up serving as little more than well-designed outdoor seating areas for cafes or restaurants, albeit technically open to the public. In a review of 19 parklets, John King, the San Francisco Chronicle’s architecture critic, found that fifteen are managed by a cafe or restaurant, two are managed by other businesses, and one is adjacent to a private home. The 19th? An example to us all: the art gallery Fabric 8 is managing its own parklet, which will host art installations that rotate each year. The current installation, by Erik Otto, is available for purchase and can be moved to another location at the close of its exhibition at Fabric 8.

Fabric 8's first parklet, by Eric Otto. Credit: Fabric 8

Arts organizations in San Francisco and elsewhere should follow Fabric 8’s example and push for parklets that support public programs rather than supplement local businesses. A California Planning and Development Report already contains the kernel of a great idea–the creation of a sponsorship program to cover the $5,000-$10,000 in parklet start-up costs for worthy organizations that can’t afford it. Other possibilities include the coordination of parklet design to enhance (or generate!) arts districts, the development of a single permit to utilize all of a neighborhood’s parklets for a mobile arts event, the formation of new arts-business partnerships for parklet stewardship, or the creation of parklets specifically for performance. Parklets represent a version of place-based community development that even small arts organizations can deploy to achieve great impact.

 

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SOPA/PIPA and the Decentralization of Protest

By Jackie Hasa | Published: March 10th, 2012

In January, in response to a flood of protests from the Internet community, both houses of Congress indefinitely postponed voting on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA).  As many of you are aware, the contents of these controversial bills–which sought to regulate Internet content in the name of fighting piracy–are at least as important as they way they were stopped, by an enormous Internet protest that took the form of major website blackouts, activism on social networks, and petitions sent to representatives.  Many observers, including Jonathan Wiseman of the New York Times, have commented that this outpouring was part of a larger war between old and new economies, and thus also old and new ways of wielding political power.  With over 70 members of Congress coming out against SOPA/PIPA after the Internet backlash, it’s clear that the new economy won this battle.

Arts organizations, in general, have divided themselves along similar lines in their stance on SOPA and PIPA.  Supporters include several major players, mostly entertainment industry unions and associations with a great deal of traditional lobbying power; opposition includes a wider range of arts and culture organizations, including Fractured Atlas, McSweeney’s, Dance/USA, and the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture.  And just as corporate giants like Viacom have been dealt a surprising loss, so too have groups like the Actors’ Equity Association that represent artists on a national stage.

The fact that we are witnessing a dilution of the lobbying power of arts unions, and thus a loss of a certain amount of political pull for the arts writ large, may seem troubling.  It shouldn’t–Internet activism, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, is uniquely decentralized, placing a high premium on visibility, and thus precisely the kinds of creative protest that artists excel at. The campaign by the culture-jamming publication Adbusters that launched the Occupy Wall Street movement is only one of many examples of artists effectively using decentralized media to get their message across, whether by glitterbombing anti-gay public figures, or returning weighted business reply mail envelopes to drive up the costs to banks.

Artists and arts organizations can continue to build on these efforts by recognizing that the decentralized power of the Internet means that a great deal of our strength lies in the ability to spread, and shape, the messages produced by others.  Ideas and instructions for how to produce viral videos and memes abound, but anyone who has attempted to produce one knows even the most interesting pieces need a great deal of luck to catch fire online (though that doesn’t mean we should stop trying).  Still, we may be better served by recognizing even highly politicized pieces like glitterbombing as the efforts of artists and lending our support through social networks and other media.  In this way, we can further link the vibrancy of Internet culture—which also tends to be virulently anti-censorship—to that of the arts.  After all, as Occupy Wall Street shows us, the power of decentralization grows as a function of inclusiveness and openness.  The more voices we recognize and empower, the more we are amplified as a group.

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Around the horn: Linsanity edition

By Ian David Moss | Published: March 6th, 2012

Quick announcement: Createquity Writing Fellowship alumna Katherine Gressel is curating an art show! And raising money for it!

OK, back to regularly scheduled programming…

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

ON PHILANTHROPY

  • Rob Stephany is the new director of the Economic and Community Development program for the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh. The program will coordinate with each of the Endowments’ program areas – including arts and culture – on place-based investments.
  • Outgoing Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest offers a rundown of outcome-oriented philanthropy’s growth in the decade he has spent at the top of the one of the nation’s largest funders.
  • What good has organized (i.e., foundation) philanthropy accomplished in 100 years? GiveWell’s Holden Karnofsky analyzes a hundred case studies from Joel Fleishman’s book The Foundation: A Great American Secret to find out.

IN THE FIELD

  • The Chicago News Cooperative, a nonprofit news site launched with major support from the MacArthur Foundation, is suspending operations, at least in part because the IRS apparently isn’t sure that newspapers can be nonprofits. Or at least that’s the reason given by MacArthur, whose legal counsel wasn’t satisfied with the fiscal sponsor relationship that CNC had with local public television station WTTW. Regardless, there’s some egg on the face of MacArthur, who invested $1 million in what is currently looking like a failed experiment. Meanwhile, a lot of us are anxiously awaiting the IRS’s long-anticipated arrival into the 21st century, in which real journalism will hopefully be recognized as a genuine public good.
  • The Metropolitan Opera is the latest arts institution to adopt dynamic pricing.
  • Following up on our post about bad public art, John Metcalfe shines a light on a European conceptual public artist whose prankster aesthetic seems to involve annoying as many people as possible.
  • Brandon Reynolds takes an in-depth look at Kansas City’s jazz district, a creative placemaking initiative that hasn’t been very successful thus far.
  • Some good news for a change: Hawaii’s symphony orchestra is back from the dead. And there’s a new “fire arts” festival in Pittsburgh.

RESEARCH CORNER

  • It’s been a big couple of weeks for Big Data. First, the New York Times ran an article trumpeting the increasing importance of statistics and number-crunching in daily life (and the opportunities that abound for those fluent in such matters), to which Fractured Atlas’s Adam Huttler responded with a post about FA’s data initiatives in the arts. Michael Rohd had an interesting post on the artist as data scientist, making the point (which I completely agree with) that stories and emotions are data too. Joe Patti comments on the creepy side of Big Data, especially when the subject is us. And bringing it all back to the Grey Lady, their data artist in residence (yes, that’s his actual title), Jer Thorp, gave a well-reviewed speech at TEDxVancouver that is worth a watch.
  • Great article on Data Without Borders, a startup nonprofit that connects data scientists with nonprofits in need, founded by yet another New York Times staffer. They’ve been getting a lot of (well-deserved) attention, and while still very young, could end up being the most significant fieldbuilding organization since GiveWell.
  • Theatre Bay Area and its indefatigable Director of Marketing and Communications, Clayton Lord, are out with a new book on intrinsic impact in live theater. The anthology’s centerpiece is a study commissioned by TBA from WolfBrown of theatrical performances in six cities, using WolfBrown’s unique methodology for understanding intrinsic impact (basically, the emotional or cognitive effects that arts experiences have on individual participants). There are also four original essays and a number of interviews with leaders in the theater field. While the book is only available for purchase, the folks at TBA are rolling out a series of excerpts and supplementary material that can be consumed for free; check out this interview excerpt with Diane Ragsdale as an example.
  • A new study purports to demonstrate a positive impact on test scores for Chicago public school children receiving arts education.
  • Helicon Collaborative is out with a new paper looking at the characteristics of arts organization “bright spots” in the Pacific Northwest.
  • Adrian Ellis revives the supply & demand conversation in a big way with this expansive article for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader.
  • The NEA hosted a roundtable on arts education standards and assessment last month; you can read a brief report here or watch the webcast here.
  • Welcome Joanna Woronkowicz, new program analysis officer at the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis.
  • The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Kevin Bolduc writes about the progress of the Charting Impact project, which asks nonprofits to fill out a simple form describing their intended and actual results.
  • Cogent article from the Foundation Center’s VP for Research Larry McGill on the value of being transparent about limitations in data quality.
  • Interesting field experiment attempting to measure the effect of social pressure on charitable giving. Cool research design, although as several commenters point out, it would have benefited from a more sophisticated control.
  • There’s a Journal of Art Crime?
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Cool jobs of the month

By Ian David Moss | Published: February 29th, 2012

Just under the wire…thank goodness for leap years!

(Work for Nina Simon! For free, but…still!)

Internships (many), Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History

I’m personally most excited about the two types of interns who will be reporting to me:

  1. Community Research interns, who will start developing a methodology for us to use to understand how people in Santa Cruz connect with arts and culture experiences and what role the museum can play in satisfying their interests. This could be a serious research opportunity for someone interested in impact assessment, community attitudes towards the arts, and the role museums can play in transforming communities.
  2. Special Projects interns, who will do, well, whatever you want. This internship is for the truly self-motivated person out there with a brilliant idea for making museums more participatory, welcoming, community spaces who just lacks an institution at which to try it out. Our internships have generally gotten more structured. This is the Pigpen in the family–the internship for the wild-eyed but highly effective person who wants to make something amazing happen.
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Upcoming Speaking (and Singing!) Engagements

By Ian David Moss | Published: February 24th, 2012
A bunch of speaking opportunities have come up over the next six weeks that’ll have me covering a wide range of topics, many of them for students and emerging arts leaders. Especially if you live in the New York City metro region, you’ll have a number of chances to see me in public in the near future. I also have some exciting things lining up for the summer, and I’ll be sure to share those with you when the time comes. In the meantime, though, here’s my speaking schedule for late February through March:

Sunday, February 26
State of NYC Dance Symposium
Gina Gibney Dance Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, NY
10am – 5:30pm
More info; event is SOLD OUT
(I’ll be speaking on the “Data on NYC Dance” panel from 11-12:15 about Fractured Atlas’s research on fiscally sponsored dance projects with Carrie Blake.)

Saturday, March 10
“Innovative Strategies in Arts Leadership”
organized by Emerging Leaders of New York Arts and the Pratt Institute Arts & Cultural Management Program
Gina Gibney Dance Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, NY
6:30 – 8pm, reception to follow
Info here

March 23-25
Arts Enterprise Summit
Claremont Graduate University
160 East 10th Street
Claremont, CA
Info and registration
(I’ll be giving a workshop on “The Well-Informed Arts Professional” from 1:30-2:45pm on Saturday the 24th.)

During this time period, I’ll also be guest lecturing on “Arts, Economics, and Community Development” for Maria Guralnik’s “Making the Case for the Arts” class at Purchase College this coming Monday, and participating in a student colloquium at NYU on the subject of “Social Entrepreneurship in the Arts” on March 30. Unfortunately, those events aren’t open to the public, but wish me luck anyway!

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that C4, the collaborative chorus that I founded in 2005 and rejoined this past fall, isperforming twice next week in New York City. The concert is called “A Loss for Words” and features all music with either no or nontraditional lyrics, all composed within the past 25 years. You can learn more and buy tickets (powered by Fractured Atlas’s artful.ly ticketing system) here.

PS – this post was inspired in part by my recent discovery that a couple of panels that I’ve participated on in yesteryear were recorded and were subsequently posted to the web for public consumption. If you’re curious, here are a few that I didn’t know were available. If I find more, I’ll post them here or create an archive elsewhere on the site.

 

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Public arts funding update: February

By Ian David Moss | Published: February 23rd, 2012

For whatever reason, this is about the time of year when things start to heat up in budget land, for the federal government and states alike. From February through May, we’ll find out a lot about where the NEA and state arts council budgets stand for fiscal year 2013, and what the corresponding ramifications might be for their grantmaking. Createquity will keep you up to date on it all with monthly updates throughout the spring.

FEDERAL

The President’s FY13 budget request is out, and (as has been widely reported) it includes a modest increase for the National Endowment for the Arts to about $154 million. This is a welcome turnaround from last year, when he kicked arts advocates in the nether regions by proposing (and thus setting up as the best-case scenario) a 13% cut to the agency’s budget, but color me unimpressed nevertheless. The arts community had big hopes upon President Obama’s inauguration that he was finally going to make cultural funding a priority, but at the end of his first term things are pretty much the same as when he came in. We had the best opportunity in decades for a game-changer at the beginning of 2009, and BHO passed it up.

But that’s yesterday’s news, and our cultural policy is what it is. AFTA’s Narric Rome points out some of the easily-overlooked details in the NEA budget request, including the fact that (if funded) the Our Town creative placemaking program’s budget will nearly double to $10 million; the travel budget is being cut by 25%; and Donald Trump (of all people!) is buying out the NEA’s current office building to convert it into a hotel, necessitating a search for new digs.

As we all know, the NEA isn’t the only recipient of federal arts funds. Mike Boehm of the LA Times rounds up the other figures: the Smithsonian gets a 5.6% increase including both its operating and capital budget; the National Gallery of Art gets an 11.2% increase; the Kennedy Center is cut by 2.4%, the Institute for Museum and Library Services essentially gets level funding. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ budget is once again tied to that of the NEA, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stays flat.

STATE

Finally, some good news from the state arts council front! After three years of financial carnage, from which Michigan did not escape, ArtServe Michigan scored a threefold increase in the governor’s budget request for the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and from a Republican no less! Granted, a threefold increase is a lot easier to achieve after your budget has been cut by 81% as Michigan’s was three years ago, but every little bit helps. This also is a success story for the power of data visualization and storytelling, as I’d be willing to bet that the very effective infographic on the promise of the creative economy that ArtServe put out in December had something to do with the victory. Florida is also looking at a welcome potential boost after several tough years in a row.

Unfortunately, some states still can’t seem to catch a break. South Carolina’s governor Nikki Haley has once again called for the South Carolina Arts Council to be eliminated, despite failing to kill it last year; there is now a proposal in the legislature to direct a portion of the state admissions tax to the arts council. And New Hampshire conservatives continue to apply pressure to the state’s Department of Cultural Resources, whose budget is practically nonexistent at this point.

Finally, we have an interesting situation in Kansas, which as you may remember was the first state to have funding for its arts council completely eliminated last year. Governor Sam Brownback is now proposing the restoration of a $200,000 pittance in state subsidy, with the caveat that it will go to a Creative Industries Commission under the Department of Commerce.

Barry Hessenius (former director of the California Arts Council) has an extensive interview with Craig Watson, current director of the California Arts Council. Because of the dire state of California’s finances, Watson reports that more general funds for the agency are unlikely this year, even though governor Jerry Brown is a huge supporter of the arts. For that reason, the CAC is pressing ahead with its campaign to sell one million arts license plates, a strategy that (if successful) would increase the Arts Council’s budget to over $40 million.

Americans for the Arts’s Justin Knabb has a helpful roundup of what’s going on with other states over at ARTSBlog. And if you’re curious about where everybody ended up last year, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies just put out its annual summary (membership or purchase required).

INTERNATIONAL

We close with a few cautionary tales about the public arts funding. As I wrote earlier this year, it’s entirely possible for governments to have a pernicious influence on an arts ecosystem. Western Europe has managed to sustain cultural norms by which governments generously fund the arts while maintaining a largely hands-off orientation towards content (case in point: Arts Council England’s new £37 million “Creative Places and People” fund), but that doesn’t mean we can count on that always being so. Hungary’s recently elected national conservative government, for example, is making waves for “systematically replacing key figures in cultural institutions, staging pro-government exhibitions, rethinking permanent museum displays and replacing historic statues to fit its political agenda.” On the other side of the political spectrum, Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chávez has received criticism for trying to appropriate the legendary El Sistema youth symphony program that preceded his presidency by 24 years. (Doug Borwick rightly points out the amazing fact that an arts program would be popular enough to be seen as propping up the political fortunes of a sitting president.)

Don’t get me wrong. I do think there is a role for government arts funding in the United States, especially at the state and local level, and I think that role could and should be expanded substantially in this country. (Hence my frustration that the opportunities to do just that three years ago were not taken by the current administration.) In a way, though, I think the fact that we’ve had to get by without much help from the government has been good for the long-term development of the field. It’s forced us to be much more creative and resourceful about finding allies, building partnerships, and cultivating earned revenue than we might otherwise have been. And in a political environment in which the “culture wars” are expanding beyond cultural organizations, perhaps it’s to our advantage that arts groups simply don’t have that much left to lose from government. That said, with diversified revenue streams in place, increased government support can only make us even stronger – and, more importantly, help to even out the inequities in arts production and access that market-driven alternatives tend to exacerbate.

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Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Public Art Worthy of Hate?

By Ian David Moss | Published: February 21st, 2012

That’s the question asked by John Metcalfe in this silly-but-kind-of-not photojournal in The Atlantic Cities, The Atlantic magazine’s online urban planning spinoff. Metcalfe spends most of the piece rehashing a 13-year-old broadside by a group of Philadelphia artists against that city’s Mural Arts Program for the “amateurish” quality of its paintings. As it turns out, though, Philly’s famous murals have been attracting a fair share of local bile recently, with commentators questioning the city’s annual $1.5 million investment in the program relative to other priorities. (There’s an interesting comment thread attached to the article linked in the previous sentence that’s worth checking out as well.)

Characteristically, MAP founder and champion Jane Golden has fought back against the bad vibes, and frankly, $1.5 million $1 million a year in city money for a program that has now produced over 3000 murals and contributed considerably over time to Philly’s identity and reputation strikes me as a pretty ridiculous bargain. But rather than get too deeply into the merits of MAP here, I’m more interested in this broader notion of “bad” public art.

Mural by Jane Seymour (yes, that Jane Seymour) and Cathleen Hughes

A few years ago, I had this fantasy of starting an anonymous photoblog featuring user submissions of ugly public art. (I guess if I do it now, it won’t be so anonymous!) Think a Regretsy for public art – and judging by the number of my artist friends who are fans of that website on Facebook, I’m guessing there would be an audience for it. Because, let’s face it, not everything we do in this field is drop-dead amazing. And sometimes, the ravages of the elements can take their toll on outdoor artworks over time. In the worst cases, I do believe that public art can actually be (or become) a form of blight in its own right. Having a forum for people to call out the prime offenders encourages us to raise our game, or alternatively, invest in needed funds for maintenance and repair.

But more than that, I sometimes wish we wouldn’t take what we do so damn seriously all the time. Maybe this is coming from someone who’s spent too much time on Roadside America, but I think that by pretending that all artwork is sacred, we unwittingly make failure (acknowledged or not) unacceptable. Of course art is subjective, but that’s precisely the point. Maybe it’s okay to hate a specific piece of public art, if that’s one’s honest response. Maybe we should be encouraging honest responses. Especially to public art, which, unlike a bad performance, is still there the next day and, unlike bad museum or gallery art, is visible to you whether you want it to be or not.

Anyway, don’t worry, I’m not going to start that website. But no guarantees that someone else won’t – Huffington Post has already got us started down this road, and given the success of Regretsy it’s probably only a matter of time. Even if you hate this idea, you might not be able to escape it. Kind of like bad public art.

[UPDATE: in the comments, Philadelphia's Chief Cultural Officer Gary Steuer clarifies that the city's annual investment in MAP is closer to $1 million, not $1.5 million as has been widely reported.]

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Around the horn: Whitney Houston edition

By Ian David Moss | Published: February 20th, 2012

MUSICAL CHAIRS

  • Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch has been appointed to the US Travel and Tourism Advisory Board. The advisory board “consists of up to 32 members that advise the Secretary of Commerce on government policies and programs that affect the U.S. travel and tourism industry, offers counsel on current and emerging issues, and provides a forum for discussing and proposing solutions to industry-related problems.”
  • Sarah Lutman, CEO of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which has made waves recently with some field-leading audience engagement initiatives, is stepping down at the end of the month.
  • Margit Rankin is the new director of Seattle’s Artist Trust.

GETTING HITCHED

  • In 2010, the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) took on back office services for the financially troubled Columbus Symphony Orchestra, building a shared services empire that already included several theaters and has since added Opera Columbus. Now, another Ohio city, Dayton, is taking the concept a step further: the three “SOB” organizations (symphony, opera, ballet) are merging into the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. The new organization is billing itself as a “first-in-the-nation” entity.
  • Two of Hollywood’s largest unions, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, are set to merge.
  • The city of Abu Dhabi is combining its culture and tourism entities into one agency.

GETTING ENGAGED

  • Check out this dialogue vehicle created by blogger and theater-maker Guy Yedwab. The second video is particularly interesting, as it combines audience responses to the Broadway show Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and an event designed to question the depiction of Andrew Jackson in the musical. So the video basically makes what was a one-way dialogue bidirectional.
  • Joe Patti ponders what it might look like to get arts organizations engaged in arts advocacy campaigns in a deeper way.
  • Wait – so Nina Simon’s a boxer too? Could this woman possibly get any cooler? (In seriousness, that’s a very wise post on audience engagement linked there.)

IN THE FIELD

  • The Wallace Foundation has made a $4 million mega-investment in arts education on behalf of the Boston public school system. The local education nonprofit EdVestors has been leading the fundraising charge for this initiative, a nice example of a non-arts organization recognizing the value of the arts.
  • Michael Kaiser sees dollar signs for American arts fundraisers in Europe and Asia.
  • Seemed like a nice idea at the time, but a number of artists are finding that the value proposition of streaming services like Spotify just isn’t there for them and are pulling their tracks from the service.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

  • Rosetta Thurman has a great list of 10 national nonprofit conferences with registration fees under $500, and I was glad to see the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention on there. (I wouldn’t be that surprised to learn that these are all conferences she’s speaking at, by the way.)
  • Materials from last October’s 5th Annual World Arts Summit in Melbourne, Australia are now available online, including a summary report of the proceedings and full transcripts of the three-plus days of panels and keynotes – Rocco Landesman was one of the presenters. I’m often struck in reading about international arts policy gatherings how different the tone and content are from American conferences; they are generally more serious/academic and concerned with very different issues, particularly cultural preservation and globalization. Worth a skim if you have the time.

RESEARCH CORNER

  • Two book reviews: the NEA’s Sunil Iyengar has a nice analysis of Stanford professor Robert Flanagan’s new book on the economics of symphony orchestras, and Elizabeth Quaglieri takes on Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum.
  • What makes a street beautiful? OpenPlans.org is trying to put some data to this question by asking website visitors to engage in a sort of HotOrNot-style comparison of images from Google Street View. Try it: it’s kind of addictive, and will also teach you a lot about your own urban aesthetics.
  • Have you ever been in a brainstorming session in which you’re told to “just get as many ideas out as you can,” withholding criticism of any of them? I was just in one of those earlier this month at the Yale School of Management Philanthropy Conference. And yet that same week, Jonah Lehrer had published a fascinating takedown of the brainstorming concept in the pages of the New Yorker. His piece is worth reading in full, but in a nutshell a number of studies of brainstorming effectiveness have concluded that it doesn’t really add value over and above people working alone – and that instead, creativity comes from just the right amount of clash and debate between people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Phil Buchanan, for one, says he’s seen the light.

BEYOND THE ARTS

  • Yikes! The International Humanities Center, a fiscal sponsor representing some 200 projects worldwide, imploded in scandal over the holidays, causing the evaporation of more than $1 million in donations intended mostly for grassroots activist activities. Some great investigative reporting by Nonprofit Quarterly‘s Rick Cohen in that article.
  • Ever wondered how many L3Cs there are in the United States? Turns out there are a little over 550; here’s a helpful breakdown and list by state.
  • I have to say, I cracked up at these nerdtastic economist Valentines by Elisabeth Fosslein, writing in response to the #FedValentines Twitter meme. Well done!
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Congratulations to the spring 2012 Createquity Writing Fellows

By Ian David Moss | Published: February 14th, 2012

I’m proud to welcome our first-ever Createquity Writing Fellows from the West Coast: Kelly Dylla and Jackie Hasa. These two ladies will be holding forth with some frequency between now and July. Because I select a small number of writers at a time based primarily on ability, I sometimes get oddly poetic intersections in interests. In addition to their nearly-rhyming names, it turns out both Kelly and Jackie will be writing extensively about audience engagement while coming at it from significantly different perspectives. Below, you’ll find a fuller introduction to each. I can’t wait to share their writing with you.

I was first introduced to Kelly Dylla by none other than Laura Zucker, irrepressible leader of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and Createquity superfan, who sensed that we would be “simpatico.” She was right: Kelly is the co-founder of a great organization called Arts Enterprise that connects artists with business school students, something that I had wanted to do at business school but (as with many of my ideas) never got around to. These days, Kelly is a Los Angeles-based arts consultant specializing in community and audience engagement. From 2009- 2011 she led the Pacific Symphony’s audience engagement program to deepen and broaden audiences’ experiences with orchestral repertoire, a position funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this role, Kelly initiated and produced a county-wide public art project and awareness campaign, OC Can You Play?, leading to over 80 community performances throughout Orange County via online crowdsourcing tools. Prior to her work as an arts consultant and administrator, Kelly was a teaching artist for major arts institutions including the Lincoln Center Institute and New York Philharmonic. A graduate of The Juilliard School with a master of music in viola performance, Kelly also holds a bachelor of music from Rice University and an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She was awarded the Ross Innovation Award for co-founding Arts Enterprise in 2006.

Jackie Hasa brings to Createquity a deep background in the red-hot topic of games in the arts – specifically, street games. Jackie views the arts as holding the potential for both consumptive pleasure and empowering production, and is particularly interested in forms that allow audience members to become creators themselves.  She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she serves as Communications and Community Engagement Director for Come Out and Play San Francisco, an annual festival of street games.  Other projects include SFZero’s Journey to the End of the Night street game, which attracted 1,800 participants in 2011 to race across the city on Halloween, and the more recently formed Wanderers Union, a long-distance, non-competitive wandering club.  A generalist through and through, she has also worked in programming, publicity, and development for the San Francisco/Bay Area Emerging Arts Professionals, Yerba Buena Center for theArts, and the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and currently works at Harder+Company Community Research in business development.  In the future, she hopes to not only develop dynamic programs, but also work to strengthen the cultural institutions so necessary for their effective implementation and expansion.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Kelly and Jackie!

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Let us now praise Katherine Gressel

By Ian David Moss | Published: February 6th, 2012

Many of you have probably noticed that this website’s most thoughtful and detailed writing over the past month has come not from me, but rather from Katherine Gressel, who wrapped up her official tenure as a Createquity Writing Fellow last week. I don’t even want to think about how many hours Katherine put into this effort, but I’m glad it’s paid off for her, because hers is now a household name among policy wonks in Australia. (See further explanation below.) I’m currently reviewing final applications for the spring 2012 Fellowship and will be announcing those decisions next week, but before we get there I want to take a moment to review and celebrate Katherine’s contributions over the past five months. As in the past, bold titles indicate a place as one of the 15 most-viewed blog posts ever on Createquity.

  • The new Brooklyn Philharmonic: a “Site-Specific” Orchestra? Katherine’s examination of the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s bold season announcement placed the orchestra’s audience-centric programming within the tradition of “site-specific” visual art.
  • Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation is, by any measure, Katherine’s magnum opus for the blog (so far, anyway!). The value of public art has always been hard to pin down, but Katherine’s comprehensive treatment of the subject shows that emerging techniques may yet hold promise for this fiendishly difficult-to-measure phenomenon. On the strength of a pickup from ArtsJournal (only the third Createquity post to earn that honor) and quite a bit of incoming traffic from Australian Policy Online of all places, Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation is now the 5th-most-read Createquity article all time and the highest-trafficked guest post ever. Clocking in at over 5,000 words, it also gives lie to the myth that people don’t have the patience to read long posts.
  • Occupy and the Arts: Curating by Consensus in Lower Manhattan is the product of extensive firsthand research into the on-the-ground realities of Occupy Wall Street’s Arts and Culture Committee. The post also contains more pretty pictures than I’m liable to put up in three months, including some of Katherine’s own drawings, paintings, and photographs.
  • In Arts Policy Library: Investing in Creativity, Katherine takes an in-depth look at the study that launched Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) along with several other initiatives designed to support individual artists. Her much briefer wrap-up post provides the highlights in short form.

Katherine has indicated that she intends to continue writing here, so you can look forward to more from her in the coming months, including a follow-up to her massive public art evaluation treatise. In the meantime, let’s all give her a big hand!

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