Congratulations to Lindsey Cosgrove and Jena Lee, the last-ever Createquity Writing Fellows (the program will be known as simply the Createquity Fellowship starting this spring). Jena and Lindsey were much more integrated into the daily operations of the site than previous Fellows and are the first group to have participated in every Around the Horn published during their term, each contributing a handful of bullet points per post. In addition, they continued the Createquity tradition of challenging, in-depth original analysis with the posts below:
Lindsey Cosgrove added a second perspective on arts education to complement that of associate editor Talia Gibas, and brought a penchant for examining new initiatives or trends for Createquity.
- Lindsey took a new resource for arts marketers through its paces with CultureHive: A New Home for Busy Arts Marketing Bees. Released just prior to the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Portland, OR, this was the most-read post of the term.
- Lindsey followed up that piece in short order with No Strings Attached, a revamped edition of the blog post she wrote as part of her Fellowship application. The post examines the story of GiveDirectly, a new charity whose no-nonsense approach to helping the poor is favored by effective altruists, and considers the parallel to the nonprofit sector’s thirst for general operating support.
- Lindsey has the distinction of publishing her Arts Policy Library piece earlier than anyone else in the program’s history, a full week and a half before the end of the term! Arts Policy Library: How Art Works praises the common-sense approach taken in National Endowment for the Arts’s research agenda and system map, but wonders why so much of the effort was spent reinventing the wheel. How Art Works: the I’m-late-to-work version gives the highlights.
- Grantmakers in the Arts Goes to Washington chronicles GIA’s arts education advocacy partnership with DC lobbyists the Penn Hill Group, and the progress the two organizations have made in the nearly two years since the engagement began.
- Lindsey wrapped up her term with Portfolios: The Next Wave of Student Assessment? The piece considers the rise in using portfolios, a key instrument of arts education, as a means of evaluating students in non-arts subjects as part of a growing trend called performance assessment.
Much of Jena Lee‘s work this fall focused on the intersection between economics and the arts, and visual arts in particular.
- Jena’s application piece, Detroit Institute of Arts: What’s a museum to do?, gave a great summary of the confusing situation surrounding the DIA in the midst of Detroit’s bankruptcy, and pointed out that the inflamed rhetoric around deaccessioning could be limiting the institution’s options in unintended ways.
- Artists not alone in steep climb to the top, Jena’s most popular piece to date, draws parallels between the “winner-take-all” structure of the individual artist economy and that of two unexpected professions: fashion models and lawyers.
- In Value vs. Value: An inside look at appraising artworks in museums, Jena gives draws upon her background as an art appraiser to give context to how the art market works and makes an impassioned defense of capitalism in the process.
- Arts Policy Library: Studio Thinking examines the seminal research of Project Zero researchers Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner into the “real” benefits of visual arts education. Studio Thinking: the condensed version reviews the major points in a quarter of the time.
- Jena closed out 2013 in style with For Public Artists, a Very Public Removal, a sympathetic look at the long-term maintenance issues and shifts in public opinion that can threaten public art and artists.
Some of Jena’s and Lindsey’s better work was swallowed up by the holidays, so I encourage you to check it out if you missed it – particularly the two Arts Policy Library pieces and Value vs. Value. In the meantime, please join me in toasting our two graduates!