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!