I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been hired as the next Research Director for Fractured Atlas, a national arts service organization based in New York. It’s a full-time job, and my primary responsibility for 2010 will be implementing a prototype version of the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map (BACAM). (Longtime readers may remember BACAM from my internship with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in summer 2008.) BACAM’s main purpose is to aggregate a number of disparate data streams into a single, interactive web-based tool, enabling a more holistic and detailed understanding of who’s making art, who’s engaging with it, where it’s happening, and how it’s made possible in the San Francisco Bay region. You can read more about the BACAM project in a recent interview with my liaison and former officemate at Hewlett, Ron Ragin.
I’m really excited to be joining the Fractured Atlas team. I’ve been an admirer of FA since I first became familiar with the organization four years ago. In fact, before I was a Fractured Atlas employee, I was a Fractured Atlas member and participant in its excellent fiscal sponsorship program for my experimental rock “bandsemble,” Capital M. As it happens, I met the founder, Adam Huttler, in October 2006 at Fractured Atlas happy hour event called “Fractured Tuesdays,” and the ensuing conversation played a major role in my decision to apply to business school. Adam was also one of the first people in the arts field to discover this blog and give it some much-needed attention. So I’m pretty psyched that of all the bosses I might have had, it would turn out to be him.
So what does this all mean for Createquity? To be honest, I’m not totally sure yet. But I’d be willing to hazard a guess that three things will be true. First, I probably won’t be able to post here quite as often as I have over the past year (particularly in October, when I averaged a post a day). With BACAM consuming most of my working-hour attention in the short term, that’s just the way it is. But don’t worry, I’ll still be around. On the plus side, my role at Fractured Atlas is no normal day job, and many of the things I’ll be doing (such as attending the Arts Visioning Retreat in Sacramento or the NEA Cultural Workforce Forum in DC) should provide me with lots of material. In fact, I may actually get more opportunities to write about certain topics like conferences than I would have otherwise. Second, for those of you who follow the Fractured Atlas blog, you’ll start to see some entries crossposted in both places. Finally, you may well start to see some additional voices here. Young superwhiz Guy Yedwab has already authored a couple of articles for the Arts Policy Library with another on the way, and I’m working on adding a few other contributors in the meantime.
Thanks to everyone for reading along. Createquity has become a huge part of my professional life over the past year or so, and it’s all because you’ve given it shape and meaning by participating in the dialogue. I’m looking forward to what the future brings.