Last week, we had a flurry of posts from our Createquity Writing Fellows, Kelly Dylla and Jackie Hasa, including Arts Policy Library entries on two important studies of cultural participation and audience engagement. Now that Kelly and Jackie have successfully completed the third round of the CWF, I wanted to take a moment to highlight their accomplishments.
In all of her posts this spring, Kelly Dylla drew our attention to new ways of thinking about the relationship between organizations and their audiences in fun and lighthearted style. Kelly wins the award for champion juggler, as she managed to move her family from Los Angeles and Seattle and start a demanding new job as VP of Education and Community Engagement for the Seattle Symphony in the midst of her fellowship. Despite this, she took on what was probably the most challenging Arts Policy Library assignment to date: 500 pages and nearly a dozen separate publications all analyzing the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Here are Kelly’s posts:
- Earlier this year, Dutch airline KLM announced a “social seating” scheme designed to facilitate matchmaking among plane passengers. In Won’t you be my neighbor?, Kelly considers whether the model could be applicable to the arts.
- Teaching artists are experts in making the arts familiar to diverse constituents, Kelly argues, which is Why Teaching Artists Will Lead the Charge in Audience Engagement.
- In All You Can Hear: The SPCO’s Netflix-Style Membership, Kelly analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of a new buffet-style approach taken by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
- Arts Policy Library: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Since 1982, the National Endowment for the Arts has been tracking arts participation rates across a number of “benchmark” indicators. But is a lens from 30 years ago the best way to understand audiences today? Kelly unravels the reams of text to find out what’s really going on with arts participation.
A modern Renaissance woman, Jackie Hasa continually impresses me with the breadth of her interests and knowledge. When she’s not landing consulting contracts by day, she’s organizing gaming festivals and helping emerging leaders connect by night; her excellent contributions to the blog ranged the gamut from a two-part post on the promise of games and the limits of gamification to an image-rich meditation on small-scale placemaking. Below are Jackie’s contributions to the conversation:
- Written as part of Jackie’s Fellowship application, SOPA/PIPA and the Decentralization of Protest considers the role that aritsts played in the dust-up about internet copyright controls earlier this year.
- In Parklets: Coming Soon to a City Near You, Jackie provides an accessible and visual introduction to the little-known phenomenon of tactical urbanism called parklets, and urges more intentional involvement of artists.
- In Games and the Arts in the 21st Century: An Introduction, Jackie points out the huge audiences games of all kinds are drawing, and argues for their relevance as an art form. She elaborates on these points in Beyond Gamification: Alternative Models for Games in Arts Organizations, which draws a distinction between intrinsic and instrumental purposes for games and describes how arts organizations could potentially interact with a number of specific gaming subgenres.
- Finally, Arts Policy Library: Cultural Engagement in California’s Inland Regions has Jackie wrestling with a key WolfBrown study that is one of several commissioned by the James Irvine Foundation to better understand arts participation. As such, it’s best read in conjunction with Kelly’s Arts Policy Library piece above.
A hearty thanks and toast to Kelly and Jackie for their hard work these past few months! Applications for the fall 2012 Createquity Writing Fellowship will open later this month.