Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence by Flickr user C.

Many teens around the world look forward to their governments “gifting” them the right to vote and/or permission to drink alcohol, when they reach their 18^th birthdays. Others receive absolutely nothing from the state. In Italy, however, teens born in 1998 will hit the jackpot this September. In addition to voting rights, they will receive a €500 “cultural bonus” from the Italian government. The program is intended to foster affinity between the country’s youth and its arts sector by providing Italy’s youngest adults with incentive to consume culture on their own terms. True to our times, the program will be administered largely through an app. Though other nations have experimented with “free money” vouchers, Italy is the only to target culture. Critics of the program question the wisdom of its launch in a struggling economy and its ultimate ability to empower workers in arts and culture. As this is the first program of its kind, we’ll have to wait and see.

Political Artists Feeling the Heat in the Middle East. Ever since the unsuccessful coup attempt to topple the regime of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July, experts have been raising the alarm about Erdoğan’s continued drift toward authoritarianism. Sure enough, soon after he regained power, Erdoğan shut down 29 publishing houses accused of affiliation with the political opposition, along with “a wide swath” of newspapers, magazines, and TV channels. Under Turkish law, the seizure means that all assets of these organizations are permanently transferred to the Turkish government with no possibility of appeal, leaving authors and other third parties in the lurch. It bears remembering that Erdoğan was once seen as a relatively moderate, democratically elected leader—especially in light of recent news coming out of Israel. A group of artists and arts organizations have filed a lawsuit against the country’s culture minister, Miri Regev, who has earned headlines for introducing a “loyalty test” for state-funded arts organizations and threatening cuts to those that refuse to perform in Jewish settlements in disputed territory. Want to help? Artists Rights Justice has a toolkit for you.

The Library is the Place to Be. Not so long ago, the future of public libraries appeared uncertain. What, wondered thousands of (usually digital) think pieces, would happen to those hallowed halls of books in the age of the e-reader, the audio book app, the personal hotspot? Well, it turns out that it wasn’t librarians lacking imagination.  It was all those writers. Public library systems are reinventing themselves as community spaces, where classes and meet-up groups, and special events and makers thrive. Seattle offers its public library cardholders access to free downloads of local music. In Erie, PA, the public library system is experimenting with mobile Wi-Fi hotpots, to help kids without access to broadband at home to keep up with their homework. Believe it or not, in Finland, a public library near Helsinki doubles as a karaoke bar.  The borrowers, it appears, are at the forefront of civic transformation.

Attack of the Short-Fingered Vulgarians. The more things change, the more the so-called alt-right tries to ensure they remain the same (as they were in the antebellum period). Once satisfied to post racist comments on 4chan, this online bastion of the Trump constituency is increasingly engaging in direct action up to and including the outright hijacking of actors’ social media accounts.   Another recent victim, science fiction’s Hugo Awards, opens up a new front in the culture war: vote-based artistic honors. For the second year in a row, nearly all of the shortlisted nominees were hand-picked by a collective known as the “Rabid Puppies,” thanks to a startlingly effective strategy of bloc voting that managed to put a short story called “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” up for an award. The Puppies’ ultimate aim? To ensure that the Hugo winners and nominees reflect themselves (white, male, conservative)—and no, they’re not subtle about this. Science fiction’s more, uh, culturally sensitive constituency has fought back using the same tactics, resulting in a victory for Puppy nemesis NK Jemisin in the Best Novel category and seven wins for “No Award” in the past two years.

Justice for Cultural Heritage. The Islamic State’s ongoing destruction of antiquities in the Middle East has received lots of coverage from Createquity over the past two years (see here, here, here, and here.) Unfortunately, such destruction didn’t start with ISIS; in 2012, fundamentalist group Ansar Dine’s destruction of world-famous heritage sites in Timbuktu made our round-up of the top stories of the year. This month, the International Criminal Court took Malian jihadi leader Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi to trial for the Ansar Dine actions. Mr. Mahdi pleaded guilty, and will now be sentenced. Although the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has handed down war crimes convictions for cultural destruction, this is the first time that war crimes against cultural heritage constituted the main charge of an ICC hearing. Though there is growing resentment among African states that the UN-backed ICC has concentrated its prosecutions on the continent, this case, which comes at a time of heightened international concern about the fate of similar antiquities, could prove useful. Currently, no international court has jurisdiction over crimes in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere; the Malian case could persuade other countries to pursue similar charges.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Two industry veterans recently announced their retirement. Alan W. Cooper, executive director of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, announced his retirement after 23 years with the organization. The search for his successor is underway. Meanwhile, Mary Kennedy resigned her position as CEO of the Mid-America Arts Alliance. Kennedy spent 27 years with the organization, including 14 as CEO, and will remain in a consulting role until her replacement is hired.
• Tracie D. Hall was named the director of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation’s Culture Program. In addition to her success as a community arts leader, Hall is a playwright, poet, and fiction writer.
• Claire Rice is Arts Alliance Illinois’s new Executive Director. She begins her tenure in September, after several years as the National Program Director of Harvard University’s Sustain Arts project.
• The Nathan Cummings Foundation is hiring for a newly created role: Director, Voice, Creativity & Culture.  No closing date.
• UC Davis’s Imagine America initiative is hiring a Faculty Director. Posted August 23; closes October 21.
• American Ballet Theatre is hiring a NYC-based Coordinator, Diversity and Inclusion. No closing date.
• Helicon is hiring a part-time Junior Research Associate. No closing date.
• Kickstarter is hiring an Arts Engagement Strategist. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• An Americans for the Arts survey on how the American public feels about the arts demonstrated that a majority supports arts education and government arts funding, and believes that the arts improve community quality of life.
• Chorus America released a first-ever systematic look at the motivations behind choral concert attendees–many of them social.
• An Australian study found that people who attend musical events and/or participate in dance are generally happier with their lives.
• According to an updated study by the Wellesley Center for Women on gender equity in leadership opportunities in non-profit American theater, lack of female representation in top positions is more of a “glass ceiling” than a “pipeline” issue.
• A new National Union of Students study of UK arts graduates found two out of three “don’t think a degree is worth £9k per year.”
• A UK study found an increasing decline in the number of children taking part in theater and dance.  However, research from the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport also shows that the country’s culture sector’s economic contribution has grown by 33% since 2010.
• New research explores the link between gentrification and racial boundary movements in major US cities. US colleges are also highly stratified by wealth, according to a new study from the Education Trust.
• A report from nonprofit consultancy Third Space Studio demonstrated the continued reliance of nonprofit organizations on individual donors.
• SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) recently launched its long-awaited KIPI Dashboard, a free online tool that allows arts organizations to compare their individual performance in nine finance and operations categories to that of similar organizations nationally.
• An analysis recently published in the journal Genome Biology found that a surprising number of scientific papers contain errors introduced by Microsoft Excel.
• As if expanded waistlines and slower cognitive response weren’t enough, a new study ties TV watching to blood clots.

Image: “Gogbot,” Installation at the Gogbot Media Art Festival in Enschede. By Flickr user Ineke

The Fractured Atlas and Createquity teams are back with a second installment of the Createquity podcast! Our first series, “Watch Where You’re Giving,” discussed the implications for the arts of the growing philanthropic movement called effective altruism.

In this series, we look at what it takes to “make it” as a professional artist, as explored in Createquity’s recent series of research-driven articles. Is a college education actually necessary, and how much depends on talent versus luck versus a high tolerance for uncertainty? And is the chance to succeed as a professional artist equally available to people of all backgrounds and income levels, or are people who, for example, grew up in lower-income families less likely to become professional artists?

In this latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists.

Episode 1:

Guest Michael Feldman (bio below) provides a quick rundown of the research Createquity has done on this topic. Hear about how the decision to become an artist is affected by socioeconomic background and tolerance for risk, and what artists have in common with tech entrepreneurs. This includes a comparison of different state-run programs for artists in countries outside the United States.

Episode 2:

In this case study of sorts, guest Theresa Hubbard, Program Specialist in fiscal sponsorship at Fractured Atlas (bio below), explains how fiscal sponsorship and the organization’s other programs can help mitigate some of the challenges and risks working artists face. She also discusses her own professional and personal experiences with access to creativity and her views on the future of the field.

The Host

E. Andrew Taylor, Host
Andrew Taylor thinks (a bit too much) about organizational structure, strategy, and management practice in the nonprofit arts. An Associate Professor of Arts Management at American University in Washington, DC, he shares what he learns at “The Artful Manager.”

China – photo by flickr user Diego Aviles

China has a long history of censoring free speech and media content in an effort to control the information its citizens consume. In 2016, Reporters Without Borders ranked it 176 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index, and that position is likely to keep sliding as China continues to fortify its virtual borders. (By comparison, Russia ranks at 148 on that same index.) This month, China went after Apple, which had long received somewhat preferential treatment in the country, shutting down its iBooks Store and iTunes Movies just six months after those services launched. That same day, it abruptly suspended a partnership between e-commerce giant Alibaba and Disney, struck in December 2015, which allowed Alibaba to license streaming Disney content. China also significantly tightened restrictions on foreign nonprofits under the guise of national defense, echoing Vladimir Putin’s policies in Russia. The month ended with a move against one of its own: China suspended Ren Zhiqiang, an outspoken property magnate, from the Communist party in retaliation for Ren’s publicly criticizing President Xi Jinping’s call for loyalty from the Chinese media. All signs seemingly point to the government of the world’s most populous country getting more and more repressive by the week.

Google Books scores a big win for fair use. A decade-long copyright battle has finally come to an end as the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming that Google’s scanning of books to make excerpts available on its search engine, without the authors’ permission, is a form of copyright infringement. Guild members believe Google is providing an illegal free substitute for their work, depriving authors and publishers of potential revenue. (An original 2005 settlement, later rejected by courts, would have required Google to pay authors.) The Supreme Court did not comment on its decision, but the crux of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals’s earlier ruling in Google’s favor was that despite scanning entire books, Google is only supplying “snippets” to the public. Since in most cases these snippets are vetted so as not to actually satisfy a reader’s need for the entire book, Google’s use of them can be considered “transformative” as permitted by the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law. The court also considers these excerpts primarily a source of information about the full texts, and individual authors have never been guaranteed “an exclusive right to supply information… about [their] works” under copyright law. ArsTechnica posits that “in the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.”

From robot-building to social innovation, Silicon Valley invests in artists: In mid-April, a group of artists, impact investors, philanthropic funders and social innovators launched Upstart Co-Lab. Led by Laura Callanan, who was briefly the NEA’s Senior Deputy Chairman under Jane Chu, the new collaborative aims to connect more artists with social entrepreneurship and impact investing opportunities, recognizing the importance of artists as catalysts for economic and social change in the private as well as public sector. With partners including the Ford Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Oberlin College on board, some of Co-lab’s more ambitious initial proposals include a new Creative Economy Index Fund (comprising U.S. public companies across the creative industries) that seeks to enable targeted impact investment in the arts for the first time. An “ArtPath” national initiative also promises to help artists develop career skills and plans to better make a living from their creative work. Meanwhile, according to a recent Washington Post report, one particular sub-sector of Silicon Valley is especially in need of creative professionals like writers who can “engineer the personalities” of virtual assistants, i.e. Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. An ambitious new crop of virtual assistant startups (garnering at least $35 million in investment over the past year) is developing bots that can engage in not just mundane office tasks but more “human” interactions, requiring the same types of colorful personalities and detailed backstories as Hollywood characters. Up for debate is just how lifelike to make these virtual assistants without causing psychological confusion. Yet giving these rookie robots enough “people skills” to handle all possible workplace situations (including avoiding being provoked by their “bosses” into publicly offensive behavior) seemingly requires the skills of true artists.

Music, art and the Panama Papers. The Panama Papers–a leak of 11.5 million files from the database of the world’s fourth-biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca–rocked the world when they were released this month by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The Papers–the largest leak in whistleblower history–reveal the myriad ways the rich have exploited tax havens to conceal their wealth, and have fascinated and horrified the public in equal measure with their scope and complexity. They implicate some 143 politicians, including twelve national leaders among its pages, with a $2 billion trail that leads all the way to Russian president Vladimir Putin. So what does this have to do wit the arts? For one thing, Putin’s apparent use of the St. Petersburg-based cellist Sergei Roldugin as his “bag man” has sparked the public’s imagination. More substantively, the art market, which this year has reached astronomical proportions, has had its underbelly exposed by the scandal. The papers reveal several instances of potentially shady dealings, raising troubling questions about the value of provenance and the legality of ownership.

Cinema returns to Gaza. The embattled Gaza Strip once enjoyed a vibrant cinema culture, with more than a dozen cinemas across the small territory showing films almost daily. In 1987, these cinemas burned during the first Palestinian uprising. They were repaired, only to be destroyed, definitively, in 1996. In January, Gaza Cinema, led by members of the production company Ain Media, quietly began a movie-going revival. They rented a small events space, and screened “Oversized Coat,” a 2013 film from the Jordan-based Palestinian director Nawras Abu Salehl. As word has spread, so has demand; this month the organizers added a second weekly show. Tickets are priced at an accessible $2.50, allowing many to participate their first-ever movie-going experience. For the moment, the organizers are focused on Palestinian films, though they plan to expand their content (with permission, of course).

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• After twenty-five years with the McKnight Foundation, Neal Cuthbert has announced he will retire from his position of vice president of program at the end of this year.
• Robert L. Hughes has been named the new director of K-12 strategy at the Gates Foundation.
• Regina R. Smith has been appointed managing director of The Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture Program.
• The Ford Foundation seeks a Program Associate. Posted on April 8; no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Several recent reports provide insights into United States philanthropy and the arts. According to the the 2016 edition of the BNP Paribas Individual Philanthropy Index, the U.S. ranks first among four regions worldwide in terms of the commitment of its philanthropists, followed by Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet the Foundation Center’s snapshot of 2013 arts and culture giving demonstrates that arts funding did not keep pace with a general rise in U.S. foundation giving that year; the arts also received a lower share of overall giving than in the previous three decades.
• Two reports this month parsed film data. One shows strong evidence that movies featuring black actors not only keep up with films at the box office and among the critics, but blow away films with no black actors at all. A second analysis, published in Polygraph, breaks down the dialogue of some 2,000 films by cast member age and gender, revealing some stark realities about equity.
• How Cities Can Grow the Maker Movement, published this month by the National League of Cities, explores the emergence of the maker movement within a selection of major U.S. cities.
• How much TV do millennials watch a day? A new report out from Nielsen suggests not all millennials (that’s people 18-34) are the same.
• Americans for the Arts’s latest National Arts Index measuring the vitality of arts and culture in the United States shows American exported arts goods rising in value and new technologies as increasingly important in engaging arts audiences, among other findings. Meanwhile, SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR)’s second Annual Arts Vibrancy Index ranked Portland, Austin and Kansas City as some of most vibrant art cities in the U.S.; they join a “top 20” list that also includes New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
• This month, the Education Commission of the States and Arts Education Partnership published its 2016 “State of the States” comprehensive survey of state policies for arts education nationwide.
• ArtPlace America released two field scans this month focusing on housing and public safety, kicking off an ongoing effort to assess “how arts and cultural practitioners have and might be partners” in achieving a range of ArtPlace’s community development goals.
• A first-of-its-kind study commissioned by several major US museums shows that the effects of arts programs can last well into adulthood. In other news, US museums spent nearly $5 billion on expansions during the time of economic recession between 2007-2014, more than the other 37 countries examined put together, according to research by The Art Newspaper.
• The percentage of Americans who visited a library in the past year is down sharply, according to a Pew report on the Future of Libraries–and technology may not be the only reason.
• For the first time, UK higher education data experts QS have ranked universities by their performing arts capabilities, with two music and drama conservatories making it into the top ten this year.
• A recent Creative Capital survey of its artist grant recipients from 2000-2013 found that the awards have had significant impact on both artists’ visibility and income.
• The LA County Arts Commission released a literature review on how organizations have addressed issues of diversity and cultural equity, as a first step towards achieving the November 2015 resolution from the County Board of Supervisors to diversify local arts organizations. D5 also published an annual report on the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in philanthropy. Related, in a paper recently published in The Sociological Quarterly, sociologist Keith Leicht argues that the conversation about inequality in America revolves too much around disparities between groups and not enough on the disparities within them.
• Barry’s Blog’s recent survey on how nonprofit arts organizations use communications internally and externally revealed that while many report “information overload,” few have formal communications plans (or staff) to address this issue.
• Research from the Chicago School of Business found that setting a donation option as the default in a charitable appeal can sometimes increase revenue, but not always.
• New research commissioned by The Guardian into the 70 million comments left on its site since 2006 provides the first quantitative evidence that articles written by women and minorities are more often the victims of internet abuse and trolling. Also across the pond, The Stage published two reports on arts professionals in the UK, one finding that local arts graduates earn less than graduates of any other subject, and the other showing that women leaders at the country’s top subsidized theaters are paid £29,000 less on average than men. But here’s something to inspire “confidence” about making a living as a visual artist: inflating your ego might also inflate your prices! A new study from the European Journal of Finance suggests that the work of narcissistic artists earns more at auctions.
• An exploratory paper out of the UK found mental health benefits to participating in drum circles. Are we all in fact born with a beat? Recent insights from neuroscience (aided by small zoo’s worth of dancing animals) shed light on the biological origins of rhythm.

Image: “Gogbot,”
Installation at the Gogbot Media Art Festival in Enschede. By Flickr user Ineke

Do you love thinking about the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them, but wish you could enjoy Createquity in your headset as well on as your screen? If so, you’ll be pleased to know that for the past several months, some of our team members have been hard at work with our friends over at Fractured Atlas to bring you a new Createquity podcast!

As reported previously, we’ve been exploring new ways of working with Fractured Atlas, Createquity’s fiscal sponsor, since this past fall. Fractured Atlas aims to empower artists, arts organizations, and other cultural sector stakeholders by eliminating practical barriers to artistic expression, so as to foster a more agile and resilient cultural ecosystem. This podcast, hosted with aplomb by Fractured Atlas board member and prominent scholar/blogger Andrew Taylor, is our first major project together. We hope you enjoy it!

Our First Series: “Watch Where You’re Giving,” available for download 

This first series of episodes discusses the implications for the arts of the growing philanthropic movement called effective altruism, which some define as doing the most amount of good possible with the resources available, based on rational scientific analysis. Considering that strict effective altruists might consider donating to an anti-malaria charity a better bang for our buck than supporting a local art museum, is this method of charitable giving dangerous to the arts and culture sector? If so, is it likely to take over the philanthropic community anytime soon? Is there any way that effective altruism could perhaps benefit the arts? Find out below:

Episode 1:
This episode can be treated as a primer to our discussion. Hear about exactly what effective altruism is, how it developed and for whom it has the most appeal, and why it makes people in the arts uncomfortable. Our guests on this episode include Ian David Moss, Julia Wise, and Gary Steuer (bios below).

Episode 2:
This episode takes us a little further into the argument. What are the pros and cons of effective altruism? Is there space for the arts in this method of giving — and could the arts even have something to learn from effective altruism? We’ll hear, again, from Ian David Moss, Julia Wise, and Gary Steuer, drawing from their personal experiences with philanthropic giving as well as their observations from the field.

Episode 3: 
This episode presents a case study of a particular arts organization and the extent to which its work is influenced by principles of effective altruism. We’ll be exploring Groundswell, a New York City-based organization focused on using art as a tool for social change. We’ll be hearing from Groundswell’s founder and former Executive Director, Amy Sananman, who now works for the NYC Mayor’s Office. (bio below).

Gary Steuer | President and CEO, Bonfils-Stanton Foundation
Gary Steuer has headed Denver, Colorado’s Bonfils-Stanton Foundation since October 2013. He oversees the foundation’s $3 million in annual grantmaking to arts and culture in the Denver area. From 2008–2013 he was the Chief Cultural Officer for the City of Philadelphia, directing the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy. Before that, Mr. Steuer was the Vice President for Private-Sector Affairs at Americans for the Arts, advancing foundation, corporate and individual philanthropy for the arts nationally. He served for ten years as the President and CEO of the national Arts & Business Council Inc. before and during its merger with Americans for the Arts. He has also been active in speaking and writing about cultural philanthropy and policy issues.

Amy Sananman | Executive Director, Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety
Amy Sananman is the Executive Director of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety. Prior to joining MOCJ, Ms. Sananman served for nearly 20 years as the founding Executive Director of Groundswell, NYC’s leading nonprofit for using public art as a tool for social change. During her tenure, Groundswell engaged tens of thousands of teens and hundreds of community groups to transform physical spaces across the five boroughs. Prior to Groundswell, Ms. Sananman’s experience includes tenant organizing and affordable housing development. Ms. Sananman holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley.

Katy Coy is the executive director of the Association of Arts Administration Educators. As the organization’s first full-time leader, she has grown membership, created a variety of new strategic partnerships, and increased the scope and impact of the organization’s annual conference. Previously, Katy was the Chief Communications Officer of eTech Ohio, a stage agency dedicated to funding and implementing educational technology initiatives statewide. Katy has held leadership positions with the Columbus Symphony, The University of Chicago’s Music Performance Program, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and more. She previously served as Treasurer of the board at Wild Goose Creative (Columbus, OH). Katy holds a BA in arts administration from Western Michigan University and an MFA in Arts Leadership from DePaul University.

Salem Tsegaye works at The New York Community Trust, a community foundation, managing two collaborative funds: the New York City Cultural Agenda Fund, which supports cultural advocacy, policy, and equity in the city, and the Fund for New Citizens, which supports immigrant rights advocacy, immigration legal services, and capacity building for immigrant-led nonprofits. She previously worked as a grant writer for the Queens Museum and as an arts philanthropy fellow for The Trust. Formerly, Salem coordinated training and technical assistance and capacity-building programs for small and mid-size nonprofits in Washington D.C. She holds an MA in Design Studies from Parsons The New School for Design and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University.

Benzamin Yi is a freelance graphic designer and communications consultant based in NYC. Previously, he was the Communications Associate at the Democracy Collaborative (formerly part of the University of Maryland), a Washington-based political economics think tank focused on democratizing ownership of wealth. During his time there, he designed many infographics simplifying complex economic models and striking data points on the inequality of wealth in America that have been published in various media outlets such as the Huffington Post, Alternet, Cooperative Business Journal, AFL-CIO, MIT CoLab, Shareable, and Upworthy. He is also the co-author of a report on the state of student activism and university relations in helping to build community wealth in its surrounding neighborhoods, titled Raising Student Voices (2013).  He holds a BA in Philosophy with minors in Political Science and Environmental Analysis & Design from the University of California, Irvine.

Cover image credit: “Applause” by Thomas Quine, via Flickr Creative Commons

“Netflix” by flickr user Jenny Cestnik.

This month, Netflix moved one step closer to media domination, launching its streaming service in 130 countries, bringing the total number of countries-where-one-can-watch-Netflix to 190, including India and Russia. (Notably missing: Indonesia, which banned the service because of its “unfiltered content.”) With some 70 million users and dozens of award-winning original series, the streaming giant is causing some in Hollywood to freak out. (Cable, meanwhile, is already in full-fledged panic mode with cord-cutting numbers rising dramatically.) But Netflix is only part of the story: Amazon, which closed 2015 with more US subscribers than Netflix, and earned serious accolades for its original series Mozart in the Jungle, Transparent, and Man In The High Castle, is now elbowing its way into film distribution. At Sundance this month, Amazon outbid Sony Pictures Classics, Universal, Fox Searchlight and Lionsgate to nab the Matt Damon-produced drama Manchester by the Sea. This is part of a larger trend of streaming services outbidding traditional theatrical distributors and is a major reversal from last year, when both Amazon and Netflix were shut out of the Sundance bidding, indicating streaming services are gaining ground not just with the casual watcher at home, but with directors, producers and actors on the international stage.

Canada Council commits to diversity regulations with teeth. Last June, the Canada Council for the Arts announced a major restructuring of its grant making programs, with plans to reduce its 147 separate programs–each with its own guidelines, deadlines and reporting–to six. The model will go live in April 2017, in honor of the Council’s 60th anniversary. Details of the plan emerged this past month, and the most interesting–and perhaps even radical–of them is the fact that the Council has decided to include diversity among the list of criteria considered when making recommendations of grants and grant amounts. For institutions with revenue of more than $2 million, the diversity of the arts “on stage” as well as that of the team “behind the curtain” will be judged. If your institution does not demonstrate a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of your organization’s geographic community or region,” this will now affect the size of grant received from the federal arts council. If the liberal government keeps its campaign promise, the Council’s annual budget will grow to $360 million over the next two years–enough for the Council to have a real impact on the diversity of the country’s arts organizations. The Council’s decision follows that of Arts Council England, which made a similar shift to towards increasing diversity in December 2014 (though organizations there have until 2018 to get in line.) The United States is not quite there yet, but the nation’s two largest cities seem to be laying groundwork in place: in New York, a survey by the Department of Cultural Affairs released this month indicated that by and large the city’s arts organizations do not reflect the city’s diversity, and Los Angeles County recently formed an advisory committee to examine “proposals that would lead to more diverse arts boards, staff, audience members, and programming at appropriate arts institutions.”

#OscarsStillSoWhite…but not for long? In what the LA Times described as “another embarrassing Hollywood sequel,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced for the second year in a row a roster of all-white acting nominees (and no best picture nominations for films focusing on minority populations despite various viable options). This prompted a resurgence of the 2015 hashtag #OscarsSoWhite (and the birth of its offspring #OscarsStillSoWhite), with actors such as Will Smith pledging to boycott the February 28 awards ceremony or calling for host Chris Rock to step aside. The Academy’s board and President Cheryl Boone Isaacs responded with an emergency meeting that resulted in a unanimous vote for “radical changes” with the goal of doubling the number of female and minority members by 2020. These include plans for reviewing and possibly revoking the voting status of the (94% white) lifelong members who are less active in the motion picture industry to make way for more diverse voters; an “ambitious, global” recruitment campaign (as opposed to the old small group nomination system); and the addition of three new board seats (to hopefully be filled by members of color). Though this year’s still-so-white Oscars announcement, and the Academy’s sweeping response, provoked a flurry of media attention (even a statement by President Obama), as we documented in our 2015 annual news roundup, Hollywood has been slowly waking up to the need to do something about its diversity problem over the past year. Despite grumbles from some established Academy members, the overall 2016 public and institutional reaction is in sharp contrast to Jesse Jackson’s failed 1996 protest against a similarly homogenous Oscars lineup. While the effectiveness of the Academy’s latest measures remains to be seen, one can be sure that the organization’s diversity efforts will receive some red-carpet-worthy scrutiny.

Philadelphia Media Network donated to the Philadelphia Foundation. In October, as part of a larger story on alt-weeklies and their perhaps dubious future, we noted that Philadelphia’s beloved City Paper had published its last edition. Philadelphia journalism captures our attention once again this month, but for much better reason. In a surprise move, H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, the sole owner of the Philadelphia Media Network, gifted the PMN, which runs The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com website, to the Institute for Journalism in New Media, a subsidiary of the Philadelphia Foundation. It’s the first time a major local newspaper has gone “nonprofit” since the advent of the internet, and the structure is certainly complicated. While unique and untested, the new alignment has the promise to preserve and enhance public-interest reporting while new electronic distribution methods are developed. The nonprofit status is not yet a done deal (the IRS has yet to weigh in), and the new format won’t necessarily solve outright the newspapers’ varied struggles. However, with newspapers continuing to struggle across the board, if this unusual structure is successful, it’s possible other papers will follow suit.

New directions at the Irvine Foundation. For the past year, James Irvine Foundation president Don Howard has been leading his staff in an deep exploration of what the foundation might change or do better. (You can read many of the responses to this question here and here, and Diane Ragsdale’s response, which pushes back against the foundation’s perspective that arts engagement is the most important issue facing the arts, here.) The foundation, which is the largest funder of the arts in California, has in recent years focused its resources on three areas, (1) engaging in the arts; (2) advancing democracy in California; and (3) preparing youth for success. Now, the foundation has announced an evolving focus: “expanding economic and political opportunity for families and young adults who are working but struggling with poverty.” This new direction seems squarely focused on two of those three areas, with the arts notably absent. The foundation has made assurances that it will remain committed to current grantees for the time being, and work continues apace on several existing programs, including the Arts Regional Initiative which just published a new report. In the long term, however, the arts’ role seems much murkier; a response to an inquiry about continuing arts support promises only that the foundation is “excited to explore how new initiatives focused on creative expression and the arts can be part of new initiatives aligned with our evolving focus.”

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Bruce W. Davis has been named President and CEO of ArtsKC, Kansas City’s regional arts council.
• Charles Thomas, an experienced social entrepreneur and civic innovator, will join the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as a program director based in Charlotte.
• The School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, invites applications for a full-time lecturer faculty position in the area of arts management. Posted January 23; no closing date.
• The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage hiring a Senior Visual Arts Specialist. Posted January 26; no closing date.
• ArtsKC is hiring a Director of Programs and Grants to replace the retiring Paul Tyler. Closing date February 26.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A research article published in AERA Open this month lends new evidence to argument for the benefits of arts engagement at an early age.
• Ingenuity’s third State of the Arts in Chicago Public Schools released this month details the arts assets available to CPS students in the 2014-15 school year.
• A longitudinal study of over 700 U.S. companies released this month suggests implementing diversity training programs does not actually increase diversity. On the flip side, a report published by Stanford Graduate School of Education found that at-risk high school students benefit from taking ethnic studies classes, which introduce a diversity of perspectives and may better align with personal cultural experience.
• New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman’s office sheds light on widespread abuses in ticketing industry in New York.
• A white paper from the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University examines the distinguishing characteristics of arts organizations that primarily serve communities of color, in a response to the widely discussed (and criticized) report from the DeVos Institute on the same topic last year.
• Move over TV: Repucom, which researches sports and entertainment markets, surveyed adults between 13 and 34 in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States and found that music is the top leisure interest for the millennial generation.
• Linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer analyzed all the dialogue from the Disney princess franchise and found that even in movies where the princess is the protagonist, male roles speak more than female roles.
• A few studies this month looked at art through a city lens. One, published in the academic journal Economic Development Quarterly, looks at the links between big performing arts organizations (those with budgets over $2 million) and the change in what Richard Florida defines at the ‘creative class’. A report commissioned by the Boston Foundation shows Boston trails other cities in institutional arts funding, and the Three-City Arts Study, released by Partners for Sacred Spaces, provides a scalable, replicable model for matching small to mid-size dance and theater companies having space needs with historic sacred places that have available space.
• Two reports this month looked at the contemporary art market. One, released by economics professors at the University of Luxembourg suggests that the international art market is overheating, creating the potential for a “severe correction” in the postwar and contemporary and American segments. Another looks at what kind of person who opens a private contemporary art museum.
• And finally, looking to the international stage, UNESCO released a report on the impact of the “Convention on Protection & Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions,” and the 2016 Global NGO Online Technology Report provided insight into the global NGO sector and its use of online technology.

Seward Johnson, “A Reason to Smile,” installed at Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ. (Photo by Flickr user Wally Gobetz)

On November 13, gunmen opened fire on approximately 1,500 unsuspecting audience members at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at Paris’s historic Le Bataclan music hall, killing 89. The Bataclan was the deadliest site in a cluster of coordinated terrorist attacks throughout the city that evening for which ISIS claimed responsibility. While U2 frontman Bono described the Bataclan massacre as “the first direct hit on music in this so-called war on terror,” the scale and locations of these attacks only solidified an unsettling new direction in terrorism: concert halls, stadiums, cafes, museums, and other cultural institutions (not just local or politically symbolic international sites) have all been targets this year. Indeed, ISIS’s statement of responsibility indicated that the attack sites were carefully chosen as symbols of “abominations and perversion.”

Leaders have responded by bolstering both physical and financial security for cultural venues. In addition to new safety measures, French cultural minister Fleur Pellerin established a “solidarity fund” of approximately $6 million to protect music groups from “expected declines in business and other financial hardships.” President François Hollande revealed a proposal for France’s museums to temporarily house Syrian cultural objects “at risk” of ISIS looting. Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has pledged 1 billion euros to spend equally on culture and security, which has raised concerns among Italy’s business leaders that a corporate tax cut could be postponed as a result. How to protect concert halls and stadiums, and who will ultimately pay, have likewise come up in New York City: Ray Waddell, a senior editor at Billboard, suggested that more metal detectors and bag checks may mean higher ticket prices.

While questions remain about how best to allocate resources, protecting culture now seems especially urgent in “fighting back against a group that is notorious for destroying cultural symbols and objects it deems idolatrous.”

STEM education just got a little STEAMier: In what arts education advocates considered a “huge win,” the joint House-Senate Conference Committee unanimously accepted a bipartisan amendment to the rewrite of the nation’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) (aka “No Child Left Behind”) that will integrate the arts into STEM education. Introduced by Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), the amendment sets the stage for new K-12 education policy by acknowledging that arts integration can “improve attainment of STEM-related skills” (science, technology, engineering and math). Last week, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that reauthorizes ESEA and includes additional language about the importance of the arts to a “well-rounded education.” ESSA’s more flexible math/reading test requirements and emphasis on state-level decision-making may also be friendly to arts education strategies, according to a detailed analysis by the National Art Education Association. This victory for arts ed advocates comes just after the Arts Education Partnership launched a five-year Action Agenda for Advancing the Arts in Education. It similarly emphasizes the importance of arts integration especially in underperforming and impoverished schools, and recommends incorporating the arts into training for teachers and academic leaders.

A new day in Canada: In a November letter to Minister of Culture Melanie Joly, new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demonstrated his intentions to make good on campaign promises to double the Canada Arts Council budget, provide $150M to CBC/Radio Canada, reinvest in Telefilm Canada and the National Film Board, and provide increased support for indigenous culture and youth initiatives. This is welcome news to arts groups after nine years of arts funding cuts under former conservative PM Stephen Harper. According to the Globe and Mail, Joly’s youth and relative inexperience in government will hopefully be an asset rather than liability in achieving this ambitious agenda while also redefining the ministry with “symbols of progressiveness.” Trudeau also gained popularity with social scientists when he announced in early November the reinstatement of a mandatory national census, which serves as the bedrock of all government data collection.

Ford Foundation’s new inequality-focused agenda will include the arts: In June we reported on Ford’s announcement that the foundation will shift its entire focus to fighting inequality. Three months later, president Darren Walker has revealed more detail on the specifics of the new strategy, which will involve consolidating 35 program areas into 15. While detailed arts funding guidelines have yet to be announced, Ford’s website lists a reframed creativity and free expression program encompassing “social justice storytelling” and “21st century arts infrastructure.” Walker’s “New Gospel of Wealth” essay suggests that the foundation’s ultimate goal is a reformed capitalist system, and creative expression is considered a piece of the puzzle. Ford will privilege initiatives for broader structural change over those providing direct assistance to the poor; discontinued programs include direct cash transfers in Latin America and microfinance, as well as causes like LGBT rights that have gained philanthropic support from other sources in recent years.While Ford’s program to construct new art spaces will also be cut, the foundation will increase its general operating support–with a new BUILD initiative to specifically strengthen the operations of social justice-oriented institutions and partnerships.

Cleveland arts organizations light up on election day as cigarette tax for the arts is renewed: An overwhelming majority of voters passed Issue 8, which will renew Cuyahoga County’s 10-year, 30-cent-a-pack tax on cigarettes to support arts and culture. The original approval of this tax in 2006 turned a region with scant arts funding into “one of the most highly ranked metro areas in the country in local public support for the arts.” More than 300 large and small arts organizations have depended on the $125 million in cigarette tax proceeds distributed since 2008 for both general operating support and special projects. The campaign to renew the levy was propelled by an Arts and Culture Action Committee that raised over $1 million for advertising, but the renewal faced very little visible opposition.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Prince Charitable Trusts welcomes Carolynn Brunette, who will head its Washington, D.C. office as Managing Director and also co-direct the Rhode Island program, beginning on January 1. Carolyn succeeds retiring Managing Director Kristin Pauly, who has been with Prince Charitable Trusts since 1998.
• New Orleans Arts Council CEO Kim Cook announced her departure at the end of 2015; Acting Director Nick Stillman will oversee the organization in the interim. Cook is moving to the Bay Area to serve as Burning Man’s Director of Art & Civic Engagement, a newly created position.
• Longtime theater critic Steven Leigh Morris will assume the role of LA Stage Alliance’s new executive director.
• UC Davis Law professor and international human rights scholar Karima Bennoune has been appointed special rapporteur on cultural rights to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
• The nonprofit sector mourned the sudden November 17 death of Rick Cohen, nonprofit advocate and national correspondent for Nonprofit Quarterly. Cohen previously led the led the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation watchdog, and was known for focusing on the needs of low-income and underrepresented populations.
• CERF+, a national nonprofit that “provides a safety net to artists through readiness, education and relief programs,” seeks a Director of Programs. Deadline 12/18.
• The Newark Arts Council seeks a new Executive Director. Deadline January 1.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• The new book Making Culture Count: The Politics of Cultural Measurement, part of Australia-based publisher Palgrave Macmillan’s New Directions in Cultural Policy series, explores diverse approaches to cultural measurement and their political implications.
• Nesta, a UK-based foundation, presents a potentially fresh approach for measuring the intrinsic benefits of the arts–including asking people how much they would need to be paid to compensate for the removal of cultural institutions.
• An initial report on spillover effects of public investment in arts and culture in Europe reviews existing evidence and recommends a future “holistic research agenda” for the European Union.
• In the United States, the Nonprofit Finance Fund published an arts-specific analysis of its annual State of the Sector Survey, encompassing data from over 900 arts, culture and humanities organizations. Trends include decreased debt (but ongoing challenges with sustainability), and an emphasis on expanded programming and audience-building, as well as more focus on outcomes measurement.
• The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s new assessment of the nonprofit arts sector spanning 11 U.S. metropolitan areas (using Cultural Data Project data) found that increased earned income is driving many organizations’ recession recovery, but they also face decreased contributed income among other fiscal challenges.
• A Theater Communications Group study indicates that U.S. nonprofit theaters still face shrinking attendance despite increased revenue; offering more family-friendly programming may help. Early exposure to theater could benefit young people in various ways; the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders published findings from a randomized control trial that suggest theater training may boost skills in kids with autism.
• A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia offers a closer look at the pros and cons of gentrification in the City of Brotherly Love, with implications for national urban policy.
• The arts management workforce still does not match the diversity of the general population. Meanwhile, a survey of UK arts professionals suggests a “stark gender pay gap.”
• A Los Angeles County Arts Commission report analyzes the importance of volunteers to arts organizations – and of volunteer management.
• With Adele’s new album enjoying record-breaking sales last month despite not being available for streaming, researchers continue to debate the impact of digital music distribution. The NEA responded to a methodological debate that broke out earlier this year between the New York Times Magazine and The Future of Music Coalition by looking at what two alternative datasets might tell us about the viability of making a living as an artist in the digital age. Meanwhile, an analysis of two years of Spotify data from the Bureau of Economic Research suggests that music streaming “brings virtually no financial gain to the industry, but it also prevents losses.”
• Several reports explored the “dark side of creativity,” with growing evidence that creative people may be more dishonest and prone to depression and an exaggerated sense of entitlement.
• Finally, will there be more to be thankful for than usual this year? A Charities Aid Foundation study found that charitable giving is up around the world, including an increase from young people and men.

As I described in my January 2012 article “Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation,” however, gathering reliable data on a public artwork’s impact at the audience and neighborhood level is difficult. When I first started researching this topic as a graduate student in 2007, interviews with leaders in the field indicated that little was being done to document how many people experience a work of public art, or their responses to it. Similarly, little effort was put toward providing interpretive materials that might enhance visitor understanding or participation. Such endeavors were seen as too costly and complex for most organizations.

Today, just six years later, web and mobile technologies offer new learning opportunities for organizations and audiences alike. Myriad interactive public art websites, social media platforms, podcasts, mobile audio tours, and smartphone apps allow people to easily find, learn about, and interact with public artworks. These tools bring comprehensive images and information literally to users’ fingertips. Can they also provide valuable information on public art’s audience, telling a broader story about public art’s community impact? Can they help us evaluate as well as promote and explain public art?

Through interviews with public art organizations innovating with interactive technology, close analysis of several organizations’ social media pages and online photo albums, and my own experience curating the FIGMENT sculpture garden, I discovered that it is difficult to evaluate the impact of public art itself on audiences apart from the impact of the engagement tools. Yet while not a substitute for more formal research techniques like audience surveys, these tools can play an important role in the evaluation process if used to their fullest potential.

How and why is interactive technology currently used to engage people with public art?

Information-sharing online

Increasingly sophisticated public art websites help people virtually experience public art. Most public art administrators seem to agree that documenting and sharing completed public art online is important to generate interest and funding for new programs, and to enhance public art tourism and appreciation in a region. Over 80% of respondents to a 2012 survey and focus group conducted by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF)’s Public Art Archive (PAA), reaching 60 public art collections nationwide, reported that they have put at least part of their public art collections online, or plan to do so in the future.

Screen shot of a sample collection from PAA. PAA’s mission is “to provide a sophisticated, free, online, searchable [web and mobile] database of public art in the United States and Canada.” PAA puts all types of public art collections online and now hosts works from over 250 collections across the U.S and Canada.

Web technologies also allow public art organizations, like museums, to set up online “curated” public art tours; close-up explorations of specific artworks; lesson plans (as seen on the New York City Public Art for Public Schools “teacher” section and an increasing number of other public art sites); and interactive quizzes and activities, each with robust audio and video components.

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program (MAP)’s website has online mural tours organized by themes like food, social justice, or black history. MAP’s site exemplifies the trend of, in the words of Philadelphia’s Association for Public Art (aPA) director Penny Balkin Bach, having “authentic voices… people from all walks of life who are personally connected to the [public art].” aPA and MAP both offer downloadable public art tours narrated by artists, curators, civic leaders and community members.

Philadelphia Mural Arts Program’s Mural Explorer allows viewers to zoom in to murals like the above Heart of Baltimore Avenue by David Guinn, and click on each “character” in the mural for a related video. Source: http://explorer.muralarts.org/#/mural/heart_of_baltimore

Information-sharing at public art sites

While online public art tours allow the art-curious to have multi-sensory experiences with art from all over the world without leaving their homes, mobile tours put information at the fingertips of those who incidentally encounter public art on site. Many public art organizations give walking, bike or bus tours of their collections. However, scheduled tours often require a fee to participate and do not necessarily engage “the spontaneous viewer [who] typically has not planned ahead, paid a museum admission, or signed up in advance for a cultural tour” (in the words of Penny Balkin Bach).

QR codes, links, or phone numbers on physical signage at public art sites can direct passersby to download or dial for more information on a particular public art piece, locate additional art nearby, and, in the case of apps like Kentucky’s Take it ArtSide! Museum Without Walls, locate other cultural tourism activities in the area.

An ongoing project of professor Christine Huskisson of the University of Kentucky and her students, Take it Artside! pinpoints different public art locations around the state, and provides data on cultural institutions, gallery walks, and arts events. The app has several game features: visitors can earn points based on the art sites they “check in” to, and track their fitness routines through an ArtFit game that integrates public art into workouts.

Promoting social interactions and dialogue

In contrast to websites and mobile platforms that house comprehensive archives on public art, social media and photo-sharing platforms can promote ongoing dialogue and activity around the artwork. These sites help public art organizations keep their followers informed about both the art and other related content. For example, NYC-based community mural organization Groundswell often posts articles related to the social justice issues or community organizations depicted in its murals on its Facebook page. Social media also invites visitor-uploaded content (more on this below).

These virtual archives, tours, and apps clearly provide the public art visitor more information about public art—but how can we use those same technologies to learn more about the visitor, and ultimately evaluate the public art itself?  It is first worth looking at previous efforts to capture and quantify audience response to public art.

How have public art’s audiences traditionally been studied?

Art historian Harriet Senie has long considered the question of how to study people’s reactions to and behaviors around public art. Each semester, her students at City College of New York are assigned to do a “public art watch.” Every student selects one artwork to study over the course of a school semester, at different times of the day and week, using the following research methods:

• Observation of people’s behavior at public art sites
• Surveys of random passersby in front of public art, through open-ended interview questions such as “Do you know the purpose and significance of the artwork?”, “Have you noticed it before?” and “What do you think of the work?

Similar evaluation laboratories have been conducted by a handful of arts organizations in recent years, usually in partnership with universities or independent researchers. For example, Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program and researchers at the Yale School of Medicine are undertaking a rigorous program evaluation of MAP’s Porch Light Initiative, which uses mural-making to achieve public health objectives in target communities.  Trained volunteers conduct interviews with random community members at each completed mural, offering transit tokens as an incentive.  In a spring 2012 study by the Arlington Arts Council, a group of graduate students interviewed passersby at public art sites to determine their interest in and preferences for future public art.

In late 2012, the New York City Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) Urban Art Program conducted onsite interviews and online surveys to gauge public interest in this nearly five-year-old public art program and advocate for its continuation into a new mayoral administration. DOT required a dedicated manager to oversee the project and train volunteers in conducting the on-site interviews.

Purely observational studies can also yield meaningful results. In the June 2012 issue of Public Art Dialogue, urban design professor and researcher Quentin Stevens details his “empirical observations of [Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial] and visitors’ [often inappropriate] actions around it”—i.e. climbing, striking silly poses, smoking or drinking at the memorial. Stevens observed people’s behavior under different daylight and weather conditions throughout 25 different visits in May and July 2006. This “50 hours of discreet observation…yielded 5000 photographs and 200 video segments documenting the actions of many hundreds of individual visitors.” Stevens concluded that a majority of visitors were perhaps missing the artist’s intent, and ignoring instructional signage nearby.

Interviews and observation require specialized training and sufficient on-site presence to reach a good number of respondents. These methods work well in academic environments or targeted case studies, but are not practical for most arts organizations to implement on a regular basis. Furthermore, they work best when organizations can easily identify both specific audiences to target and specific outcomes to measure using accepted methodologies in a given field. However, many organizations do not know where to begin in identifying such outcomes and indicators, and may not have a need for such in-depth evaluation on an ongoing basis anyway. Still, they might benefit from collecting some kind of visitor feedback after each completed project or across many projects over time. This feedback might start to hint at some possible outcomes and indicators that could eventually direct a more structured study. Can the interactive technologies described earlier, many of which have components that collect users’ responses and track their behaviors, serve this function while simultaneously engaging audiences in dialogue with the artwork itself?

The goals of public art projects and organizations vary widely, as do their definitions of “audience” or “public” (for the sake of this article, I am using the two terms interchangeably). However, there are certain common research questions that typically drive studies of permanent or long-term public art installations:

1. WHO are the audiences of public art? What are their demographics? Are they already involved in the arts? What is their reason for visiting a public art site?

2. HOW MANY people stop and notice the public art/take an interest in it during a given time frame? Does this vary according to factors like time of day or season?

3. WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK of public art? Do they like and identify with it? Do they want to see more public art?

4. WHAT DO PEOPLE KNOW about public art? Do they understand its meaning or significance?  Do they want to learn more?

5. WHAT DO PEOPLE DO with public art? For example, is it a meeting place, a backdrop for photos?  Do people interact with an artwork in the way intended by the artist/organization? How does the public art impact the public’s experience of an overall site?

6. WHAT DO PEOPLE DO AS A RESULT of public art experiences? For example, are they inspired to find out more about related topics, programs, or places? Do they engage in commercial activity in a given region? Do they recommend the public art to friends?

7. WHAT DO PEOPLE WANT? What type of public art would they like to see most in the future, and what types do they favor over others?

What can we research through interactive media?

In researching this article, I have sought to discover the potential of interactive tools and new technologies to help answer the above questions. So far, they seem most effective at the following:

Tracking the number (and demographics) of users of the tools themselves

Most public art websites and apps have built-in systems such as Google Analytics which track how many people visit in a given time period, which pages get the most traffic, and how people are referred to the sites. Mobile app vendors such as iTunes track number of downloads, while phone companies keep a count of callers. aPA’s Penny Balkin Bach recently reported over 50,000 “audience engagements” with public art via the organization’s Museum Without Walls website, mobile app, and phone tours. Such metrics have assisted in securing funding for Phase II of the project, which will add more artworks and tours.

The fact that “about 90% of aPA’s callers listen through to the end of an audio” is considered strong evidence that the tour content is engaging enough to hold one’s attention; according to Communications Director Jennifer Richards, “It is significant if people stop for three whole minutes on the street next to a public art piece to listen to information about it.”

Unfortunately, this does not allow us to measure the total number of people who experience public art without interactive tools. Capturing the numbers who do, however, still has benefit. Organizations can compare people’s engagements with different public art pieces to hypothesize which are considered most interesting or eye-catching, helping to fine-tune and promote the engagement tools themselves and inform future programming choices.

Portland, OR’s Public Art PDX mobile app has a mechanism for users to submit suggestions for artworks they feel should be added to the online collection, or corrections for mis-located or mis-labeled artworks on the app’s map.  Tools like this help gauge general stewardship of public art.

Organizations can also look at how often public art websites, or URLs/QR codes on public art signage, refer visitors to related sites, or vice versa. For example, tracking the number of people who access public art-related content within cultural tourism apps can help make a case for the importance of public art to regional tourism.

Most organizations using interactive tools have not taken the next step toward analyzing who is using these tools, and why. Some mobile apps do ask users for basic profile information like their zip code and email address, and could easily ask for more before allowing usage. Without collecting detailed user data, it is difficult to determine audience members’ cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds, prior knowledge of/interest in art, or motivations for using the engagement tools – all information that is usually gathered in more formal public art audience surveys. Yet in a field where collecting any kind of quantitative data has traditionally been deemed problematic, having this free and user-friendly way to begin to quantify audience engagement with public art is refreshing.

Collecting written anecdotes, comments, and stories

While they may churn out impressive statistics about people interacting with public art, what can these new platforms tell us about how the art impacts the public? Most leaders in the field whom I interviewed agree that collecting and analyzing meaningful qualitative responses via these tools is trickier than simply counting views or “likes.”

Posting images of public artworks on Facebook can generate feedback on what people think of an artwork and what they might like to see in the future. From the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit and Urban Design’s Facebook page. Artist: Tricia Keightley.

Even so, feedback gleaned through interactive media can answer some of the questions typically asked in formal public art audience interviews. For example, in the above Facebook comment thread about an artwork in the NYC Arts For Transit collection, Jeff Konigsberg’s response suggests not only his approval of the artwork, but imagery that he and perhaps others would like to see in future subway art. Some of the commentators on the below post, also from the Arts for Transit page, speak to the role that public art plays in riders’ everyday lives; others express intent to visit the artwork again, or tell friends about it. According to Arts for Transit director Sandra Bloodworth, such feedback, while not analyzed or reported formally by her staff, helps “affirm the public’s appreciation” of the work.

A September 3, 2012 post on the MTA Arts for Transit page, featuring Owen Smith’s “An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders.”

While most other organizations I interviewed are not formally reporting social media feedback, New York City’s Public Art Fund, which commissions several large-scale long-term public art installations per year, cites comments collected on Twitter and Instagram in email newsletters as one way of demonstrating public interest.

In the Public Art Fund’s May 29, 2013 e-newsletter, this Twitter feed is meant to demonstrate public “excitement” for the organization’s installation Ugo Rondinone: Human Nature at NYC’s Rockefeller Center

Image from Public Art Fund Facebook page, featuring artwork by Monika Sosnowska.

Feedback that could be interpreted as negative (such as the above example from Public Art Fund’s Facebook page of one user’s interpretation of an artwork’s intent) is less common on social media. Most people probably would not be comfortable bashing an organization’s content on its Facebook wall, for the same reason they would not insult artwork hanging in their friends’ homes in front of their friends. In addition, someone who does not enjoy or care about public art is unlikely to follow a public art organization online.

Comments to news articles and blog posts, however, reveal a more diverse range of opinions. Within the last year, writeups on controversial murals, on Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and The New York Times’s City Room blog cite lively discussions on Facebook reflecting a broad public’s reactions, and prompted further reader comments. Online comment threads like those above can be mined to identify the most effective arguments for and against an artwork, the same way Facebook and Twitter feeds are commonly used by the news media to cite the public’s reactions to more mainstream debates.

The question is how to spark such rich dialogue online about public art that is not controversial, or especially current and newsworthy. For some organizations, generating any kind of dialogue, positive or negative, is an indicator of a public artwork’s success. Groundswell Executive Director Amy Sananman explains, “We can perhaps look at which murals have been most successful with audience engagements via social media to find out what types of future projects might cause the most discourse.” For an organization like Groundswell that aims to spark dialogue around social issues through public art, this type of analysis could be important in shaping new programming. Groundswell, like many organizations, is still figuring out how best to utilize online comment forums.

Best practices in collecting written feedback

In addition to posting pictures, or signs inviting comment at public art sites, it is important to engage with users’ normal communication channels. Jennifer Richards of The Association for Public Art believes social media is the most natural forum for sparking dialogue. Both aPA’s Museum Without Walls smartphone app and dial-in audio tours have mechanisms for people to share stories about their experiences, but according to Richards, the mobile tours generate only 1-2 voicemail comments per month. By contrast, people comment much more frequently than that on social media posts.

The wording and formatting of posts also matters. Perhaps the main shortfall of many invitations to participate via these interactive tools is their open-endedness, which may inhibit both participation in the first place, and the formulation of meaningful responses. In designing interactive platforms, whether online or mobile, it might be wise to follow Nina Simon’s observation in The Participatory Museum: “Participants thrive on constraints, not open-ended opportunities for self-expression.”

“Name that sculpture” post from August 2012 on the Association for Public Art Facebook page that gauge visitors’ knowledge of historic public sculptures in Philadelphia.

“Name that sculpture” post from March 2013 on the Association for Public Art Facebook page that gauge visitors’ knowledge of historic public sculptures in Philadelphia.

Some organizations are employing such constraints with what seem to be meaningful results. For example, quizzes like the above posted by Association for Public Art on Facebook not only test people’s prior knowledge of public art, but can inspire comments about their opinions and personal experiences. Based on my study of about 10 different organizations’ social media pages, this approach seems to solicit more discussion than simply asking visitors to leave a comment, or advertising a new project with just a photo and title. According to Penny Balkin Bach: “The whole point of our social media effort is to encourage appreciation for CONTENT; so we don’t ask people what they like — we ask them what they know.”

Public Art Fund uses Twitter for its “Trivia Tuesday” contests highlighting current public art exhibitions.

Of course, it is unclear whether these public art quiz examples are truly evaluating the public’s prior knowledge of public art, or engaging them in a quest for more knowledge. Yet regardless of how participants arrive at the “right answer” to a quiz question, it is revealing that so many are interested enough in the art to seek further information about it.

By contrast, posting traditional questionnaires on social media or in mobile apps does not seem to be very effective. So far, the surveys I have seen organizations use on social media have not yielded enough responses to draw any conclusions. A Public Art Fund multiple choice question on Facebook asking people to select their favorite aspect of its Fall 2012 “Discovering Columbus” installation had only five responses, a week after it was posted. Marketing Director Janet Cooper of Dublin, OH’s Dublin Arts Council similarly reported very little use of the feedback survey on the council’s Facebook page.

Interactive media may fail to excite people about taking traditional surveys, but we might consider it as an alternative, more organic means of unearthing public opinion. People who view filling out questionnaires as a chore may be much more likely to engage in a conversation, or play a game, about an artwork on Twitter or Facebook. Freed from answering leading prompts or selecting between limited multiple-choice questions, they might be more likely to offer up unexpected and surprising information.

It is worth noting that several organizations have reported positive outcomes when soliciting responses to public art surveys across multiple interactive channels, with social media as one element in the mix. The City of Albuquerque’s public art program, for example, recently succeeded in collecting both demographic data and opinions about public art from 1300 tourists and local residents through two public art questionnaires, the results of which are summarized on the city’s website and incorporated into a strategic plan. The survey link was “distributed through local and national e-mail listservs and subscriptions, local print and digital news media and tourism outlets,” but director Sherri Brueggemann cites a partnership with a local tourism bureau as especially important in getting so many people to take the survey.

Determining what people are doing with public art: inviting photo and video submissions

Just like stopping to listen to an audio tour or commenting on a social media post, stopping to take and post photos of public art is an indication that the art has caught one’s attention. For the Public Art Fund and Association for Public Art among other organizations, directing visitors to photo-sharing links via signage at public art sites has been especially effective at soliciting user submissions.

Public Art Fund’s Director of Communications Kellie Honeycutt reports, “Visitor-submitted photos help us see how people are actually interacting with the artwork.”  I first experimented with this concept as the co-artist of Pallet City, a complex interactive sculpture made from recycled shipping pallets for the 2010 FIGMENT Sculpture Garden on New York City’s Governors Island. The sculpture had different components that each encouraged a type of action, indicated by signage. In addition, my collaborator and I put signs up all over our project telling people to email pictures of themselves interacting with the sculpture. To our pleasant surprise, we received an average of three submissions each weekend the project was open. This was enough to convince us not only that people were noticing the project but that we were achieving our goal of fostering a range of participatory experiences. People were clearly noticing the signs on the sculpture that labeled each section’s intended purpose. For example, we received many photos of people doing somersaults, dances, and even juggling on a stage area labeled “perform.”

Photo competitions can be an especially efficacious and easy way to get a wide range of photo submissions in a short time. Association for Public Art recently held a competition asking for the best photos of the iconic Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture in Philadelphia submitted via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. aPA offered gift cards as prizes to three winners and a free printed poster of all the photos to the general public. According to aPA’s Jennifer Richards, “I almost wish we had told people to submit a picture of a public art work they ‘love’ the most. Then we would have known better what types of public art people love and why.” The competition was set up using a Facebook contest feature that allowed page visitors to vote on the winners.

Example of user-submitted photo, and voters’ comments, at the Association for Public Art’s “Love ” photo competition: https://www.facebook.com/assocforPublicArt?ref=ts&fref=ts

Example of user-submitted photo, and voters’ comments, at the Association for Public Art’s “Love” photo competition

While the “Love” competition did not lend itself to comparisons between different types of public art in Philadelphia, the 180 submissions give a glimpse into the range of ways people view and interact with the sculpture–from using it as a backdrop for marriage proposals and photographs in formal wear, to sporting it as a tattoo–and the sculpture’s important role in placemaking and boosting civic pride. Some photo submissions prompted additional comments from Facebook users—many speaking to their “love” of Philadelphia (see above).

How do we analyze and make use of all this feedback?

Filtering through all of this information on a regular basis to find evidence of public art’s impact is a challenge, particularly when individual comments don’t comprise anything close to a representative sample of a broad public’s opinions or experiences.  However, those comments suggest ways in which a larger group of people might be impacted, and could be the basis for designing more structured logic models or questionnaires around public art.

Each time a new substantive comment or photo comes in from any source, it could be archived by topic, resulting in a collection that can be periodically analyzed to discover trends, or mined for juicy quotes. Jennifer Richards from aPA suggests establishing 3-4 “buckets,” or different categories of comments, and having someone assign each online comment to a different bucket as it comes in. This is not something the organization has put into practice yet, however.

Richards also stresses the importance of storytelling, not just number-crunching, in  reporting on the impact of one’s work. While they may be used infrequently, the mobile tour “leave a comment” channels have produced some good anecdotes commonly used in grant proposals for the audio tour program itself, such as the following audio-recorded message a local trolley driver left after he took one of the cell phone tours, which, according to Penny Balkin Bach, “reinforced the broad reach of MWW:AUDIO”:

“I drive a Philadelphia trolley, and drive pass number 12 (the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors) everyday…and I think it’s wonderful that you have this program set up. It was educational. It was educational for me, and emotional, as an African-American. It makes me feel much better to be a part of Philadelphia.”

Comments like this are certainly evidence of the reach of a tour, but could also be considered evidence of the ability of the public art to connect to local residents, once they know more information about it.

Further questions and suggestions

Interactive tools can be tweaked to be more directed towards evaluation, as can our methods of analyzing the feedback that comes in. The tools still cannot replace rigorous, formal evaluation initiatives. Organizations must consider the following points when determining how to factor interactive media into an overall evaluation plan:

Reaching a more random audience sample

The audiences who take surveys or make comments via an organization’s Web site, social media page, or mailing list are most often people who are already supporters of, and familiar with, the organization’s work. In some cases, especially when the art is very much rooted in a local community, an online commentator may have actually participated in helping select or create the artwork.

Also, not everyone has access to interactive public art engagement tools, or chooses to use them. The City of Albuquerque’s public art survey, for example, found that while “70% [of respondents] feel that public art would be better served with signage and/or interpretative information associated with public art…97% say they have never used a public art smartphone app.”

Emily Colassaco, manager of the NYC DOT’s Urban Art Program, believes the best way to reach the broadest public is still through in-person surveys with random passersby at public art sites. The majority of respondents to DOT’s web-based survey were already familiar with the program.

Yet even if the majority of comments or photos do come from people who already support an organization, or have even participated in public art creation, these comments can still help tell a valuable story, and inform the questions that can be asked of a wider sample of the public, if and when the time is appropriate.

Distinguishing between evaluating the impact of public art on its own and evaluating the impact of learning about public art via these new educational tools

So far, most organizations using these new tools cite goals and metrics that may assess audience response to the engagement tools themselves, rather than audience response to public art. As an alternative to studying responses to interactive platforms designed by public art organizations, looking through visitor-uploaded photos of public art on a platform like Flickr, or simply Googling the name of a public art piece and seeing what comes up on a wide range of websites, might be a possible way to study the public’s unmediated experience of the art.

However, often education and evaluation go hand in hand. If we go out and ask for people’s comments about a public art piece, we’re also opening up opportunities for people to ask and learn about the artwork, the surrounding community, and the commissioning/partnering organizations. By giving people accessible information about a public art piece, we are in turn empowering them to speak about it and other public art in a more informed way. It may be advantageous to integrate evaluation of art projects into an organization’s outreach or communications activities, rather than treat it as a separate expenditure of time and resources.  Yet because education or evaluation are likely to happen simultaneously, it is especially important to set clear goals for what we are trying to evaluate, and which tools are appropriate to use.

To give an example, if an organization’s goal is to use community murals to educate  local communities about important issues, it might be a stretch to post photos of two completed murals on Facebook at the exact same time, and conclude that the one with more “likes” or comments is more successful at achieving this goal. It is difficult to know what external factors motivate participation online, and if the people participating are even members of target communities. But perhaps it is possible to compare how easy it is to design engaging posts, mobile tours or web pages or around certain artworks over others, and look at the content of users’ responses to these engagement efforts to find evidence of both planned and unexpected learning outcomes.

Project specifics and organizational capacity

It is easier to launch, and evaluate, a big user participation campaign for a hyped-up public art installation that only lasts a few months, like the Public Art Fund’s Discovering Columbus in NYC’s Columbus Circle, than it is to determine whether people notice, or care about, a sculpture or subway mosaic that was created years ago. To invigorate interest in Philadelphia’s historic public art collections, aPA worked with a special grant to develop Museum Without Walls; many permanent public art collections do not have this type of support, and are more focused on the regular commissioning of new work.

Final remarks

Though their effectiveness as evaluation and engagement tools may vary based on the specifics of a public art organization or project, platforms like social media and photo-sharing sites are almost universally accessible and widely used, as are website analytics. While there is still the challenge of sorting through the overwhelming amount of feedback coming in through so many different sources, these free tools can be useful knowledge-gathering mechanisms for public art organizations. In addition to engaging people in new ways with public art, they are effective at collecting stories, photos, and, in some cases, even numbers that can at least hint at possible impacts of public art that were previously much more difficult to document on a regular basis. These platforms are also beginning to integrate public art evaluation into people’s everyday lives, by linking public art commentary to social, enjoyable activities in which the public is already actively engaged.

Above image by Christina Kelly

Nearly two months after its initial publication, the July-August Atlantic Monthly cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, still has people talking (among them Steven Colbert and the listeners of the Brian Lehrer Show). The article details the author’s difficulties balancing a career as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department with her responsibilities as a mother. This reportedly became the magazine’s most widely read article, provoking a “firestorm” of responses from journalists and readers alike. These included critiques of its very title (did feminism ever promise women that they could “have it all,” vs. simply having choices?) and its presumption that “work-family dilemmas are primarily an issue for women” and not parents of both genders.

Despite these debates, critics do seem to agree that Slaughter makes compelling suggestions for policy changes to the “insanely rigid” American workplace culture “that produces higher levels of career-family conflict among Americans…than among any of our Western European counterparts.” Slaughter also makes some compelling recommendations for “reorganizing individual career paths to lessen that conflict.”

Like just about every other woman I know, I devoured all six pages of Slaughter’s largely personal narrative—but couldn’t help feeling less than satiated by a discussion mostly limited to traditionally cutthroat, male-dominated professions like corporate leadership, government and law (with academia offered as the main contrast). The perspective of women who work in my field, the arts, seemed notably absent.

I grew up with the presumption that a woman artist could “have it all,” with my own mother, Eleanor Cory, as my role model: a new-music composer who was very involved in my and my sister’s lives while continuing to write music (and get it performed and recorded), landing a tenured college teaching job in NYC, and winning competitive residencies and grants. She has always told me, “It’s a very creative thing to have kids. It made my music better.”

Yet many childless artists I’ve encountered in my generation seem to struggle to reach a situation similarly conducive to raising a family and earning a living without sacrificing creative passions. I’ve frequently heard artists say things like, “How does one juggle a day job + an art practice + babies? Art is already my baby.”

To gain additional perspective, I interviewed a number of artists I know who are also mothers, and perused parenting blogs geared towards musicians, artists, and writers. (While I was preparing this article for publication, Artinfo published a similar investigation by Alanna Martinez with a focus on “high-achieving women in the [visual] arts,” including leaders of several major institutions. My interviewees, by contrast, included practicing artists at various career stages in both the visual and performing arts. They offered more extensive suggestions for specifically balancing art-making and family, not only work and family. They also generated more ideas for tailoring existing artist support structures more towards parents.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of these artists believe that the arts sector is more female- and family-friendly than, say, a top post in Washington D.C. Yet “having it all” in the arts can nevertheless take tremendous dedication, organization, and luck.

Below are some of the most common and compelling points from our conversations.

The path to “success” for an artist is open to interpretation

Anne-Marie Slaughter discusses women’s fear of “falling off the ladder” and missing out on positions of power in fields like politics, business, and law, due to children.

By contrast, according to installation artist Caitlin Masley, “how an artist defines success is relative to the artist.” Masley, with Dannielle Tegeder, is co-founder of Momtra, a blog for artists with young children that contains helpful hints for maintaining work-life balance, a list of successful, well-known artists who are also mothers, and myriad personal accounts. Says Marilyn Minter in the Artinfo piece, “The art world is difficult whether you have children or not. I’ve seen some women become better artists when they had children. Now they had to succeed!”

I spoke with one composer/PhD student who believes there may be risk in scaling back work to start a family, but asserts, “If that means my music won’t be played in the biggest concert halls by the most prestigious groups, that’s fine—I know my work will still be appreciated and performed.” Nevertheless, she believes that the art world’s “obsession with youth” (as evidenced by the number of award programs in her field for artists under 30) drives many artists to wait until their early or mid-30s to start a family, after gaining some career recognition. Artists who do make this choice are likely to face the greater risks associated with having children later in life (an issue addressed by Slaughter in her piece).

The importance of flexibility and time management 

Slaughter believes the mainstream American workplace should provide more opportunities for employees to set their own schedules and work from home. She discusses the relative ease of motherhood when serving as her own boss, prompting her decision to return to her tenured professor position at Princeton after two years in Washington.

The approximately 60 percent of artists that are self-employed (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) should, by Slaughter’s definition, be in the ideal position to be parents. Most artist-mothers I interviewed did indicate that the ability to work out of home studios, and plan work time around naps and bedtimes, is indispensable.  Performing artists needing to take jobs dependent on others may have a harder time; however, a blog post in Paste Magazine, 18 Musical Moms Talk Motherhood, is full of stories of female band members bringing babies on tour.

Slaughter also discusses the importance of shifting the American workplace culture to one that values working fewer hours but more effectively.  Several artists with young children described being brutally strict about time: for example, squeezing in an hour of “writing time” right after a child’s bedtime, in the words of one testimonial on the Momtra blog. My mother believes that “less time to work means clearer faster decisions, greater intensity and commitment, elimination of unnecessary activities.”

Despite greater job flexibility, artists must navigate a three-way balancing act: parenting, working to earn money, and making artistic work that does not necessarily earn money.

Patricia Runcie, actor, director, theater producer and teaching artist  (and mother of a 16-month-old) explained, “Often to work on an artistic project doesn’t make any financial sense.  However, as an artist, you have this compulsion to keep working…So even when unpaid/low pay opportunities come up, you want to take them.”

In addition to missing out on benefits like employer-provided health care and maternity leave, artists I interviewed who are piecing together part-time work also described challenges like having to rehearse and perform in spaces with no breastfeeding accommodations.

Jeanne Quinn, visual artist and single mother of a one-year-old, is extremely grateful for her university tenured job in Colorado: “I had a semester of maternity leave at full pay…Nobody in the US has this…and I know exactly how lucky I am.”

Like Quinn and Slaughter, my mother attributes much of her successful balancing act to good academic jobs.

Every artist I interviewed mentioned the importance of hiring (and the challenge of paying for) help to watch children even when working from home–“the only way to get work done,” as one put it. One artist exclaimed, “Sometimes it doesn’t even make sense for me to take paid jobs instead of staying home because if I’m not home all the money I earn goes to childcare.” Many artists I interviewed cited the far better childcare and family leave systems in other countries, particularly in Europe—an observation backed up by the American Sociological Association.

The art world could still use an attitude shift

Slaughter believes that “While employers shouldn’t privilege parents over other workers, too often they end up doing the opposite, usually subtly, and usually in ways that make it harder for a primary caregiver to get ahead.”

I will never forget when one of the artists in the 11-month-long residency program I coordinate waited almost nine months before even mentioning her eight-year-old daughter. Though our program welcomes artists with families, she described being told in the past by other galleries not to mention it “or people won’t take you as seriously.”

Actress/director Runcie described having to pick and choose the productions (“largely organized by people who know me and the value of my work”) willing to accommodate her parenting schedule. “As a theatre artist (especially an actress),” she said, “I find there is this attitude in the industry that there are a million more of us out there, so if I have kids and it might be a ‘problem,’ they’ll just go with the other girl…I keep my family life very secretive unless they’ve worked with me before.”

Rebecca Hackemann, a British multimedia artist and mother of two school-aged children, states, “There seems to be a prejudice in the art world, that once you become a ‘mother’ you are no longer hip, cool and fascinatingly eccentric.”

Not every artist I interviewed reported such dilemmas. Quinn and Masley both described positive experiences in galleries with sympathetic curators (especially those who are also mothers). Said Quinn: “[My infant son] and I did four big installations this year, and his pack-n-play was set up in the middle of the gallery every time when we were installing.”

Suggestions for accommodating motherhood in the art world

Most artists I interviewed emphasized the importance of grants and residency programs to continue making art after giving birth. Some described using unrestricted grants to help pay for childcare while at a residency or while executing specific projects, and cited awards programs like the Sustainable Arts Foundation, whose mission is to fund artists (of both genders) with at least one child under 18.

Several artists also described the difficulty of leaving young families for out-of-town residency programs and praised  programs like that of the Headlands Center for the Arts that provide living accommodations for entire families. Some suggested that grant and residency programs set aside a limited number of spots for artists with children to encourage family balance, not just unrestricted studio time.

One visual artist with a 2.5 year old son brought up the importance of “seeing and being seen at openings;” she and most others mentioned the difficulty of fitting in this type of networking with children in the picture: “If you go to events [like openings] to try and network, or support non-friend artists—you cannot bring your kids.”  Masley would like to see more galleries hold later evening weekday or weekend daytime art openings, outside the typical 6-8pm time when parents are putting young children to bed. She also believes more museums could offer special childcare rooms, citing examples at the Katonah, Aldrich and MassMOCA Museums. Several performing artists hoped for childcare at rehearsal and performance spaces.

Masley’s Momtra blog also recommends establishing not only support networks of artist-parents (who may feel isolated from their childless colleagues) but “artist baby-sitting coops.” Online resources like Momtra could be an inspiration for more mainstream service providers like local arts councils to highlight family-friendly arts institutions and resources or offer special workshops for parents.

Is balance in the arts just a women’s issue?

The artists I interviewed (and Martinez’s interviewees in Artinfo) were divided in perceiving vast differences between men and women in the art world, but several artists echoed Anne-Marie Slaughter’s belief that it is more difficult for a woman to be away from home, especially in a child’s early years.

In her article, Slaughter discusses the importance of marrying the “right person” who is “willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately).” Some artists in my sample group and their freelance husbands split the caregiving.  One visual artist married to a musician described the difficulty of balancing work and family when her husband is touring. When asked if it would be just as easy for her to leave her 1-year-old son if she were a musician that needed to travel, she said, “in addition to the responsibility of breastfeeding, a baby just really needs his mother.”

Visual artist Jennifer Dalton is one of several artists in the Artinfo article who mention the persisting disparities between men and women in the arts, in both earning power and exposure. She believes this makes it especially difficult for women to get ahead with children. In her longer interview published in Artinfo, Dalton describes her 2006 survey conducted with almost 900 anonymous artists, “How Do Artists Live?” “Among those responding the male artists with kids had the highest percentage (approximately 50 percent) of gallery representation. Female artists with kids had the lowest percentage (approximately 20 percent). Male artists [without] kids and female artists without them were about tied, about 27-28 percent with gallery representation.”

On the flip side, male artists may face different pressures that discourage fatherhood, as suggested by one reader comment on the Artinfo article: “A male artist has to sacrifice family and social life in pursuit of his talent; as society expects males to be the bread winner.”

My father, Joel Gressel (also a new-music composer) landed a steady day job in the financial sector that allowed my mother to teach only part-time for ten years and pay for part-time childcare to watch me and my sister while she wrote her music at home. A few other artists discussed the importance of their partners working as the primary, if not the only, earner.

Expanding the Conversation

This exploration has led me to believe that artists able to work on flexible schedules from home are in a better position than many types of workers to forge fulfilling career trajectories that include families.  Yet when babies compete with both day jobs and creative work time for scarce hours in the day, sacrifices such as scaling back hours spent on artistic work or declining networking opportunities can result.  Although most artist-parents I interviewed have had at least some luck finding grants or residencies, flexible day jobs with benefits (especially in academia), spouses with stable incomes, helpful family members, etc., even these parents fear losing touch with their artistic selves and communities (in the words of Patricia Runcie, having to balance the “inner angsty artist with the person my baby sees as mommy”). I believe most of the challenges faced by artist-parents are not unique to women, but in the arts, as in other historically male-dominated fields, mothers perceive that they must work especially hard to be taken seriously after giving birth, and are vulnerable to lingering societal pressures to prioritize family over work.

I am interested in opening up this discussion to other Createquity readers–not just more women artists but male artists with (or without) children, artists in the for-profit entertainment and design industries, other arts leaders, etc. How difficult would it be for arts organizations to better accommodate the scheduling needs of parents, or for artist service organizations and grantmakers to turn their attention to parents as a group with unique needs? Are there arts fields or career options that are more family friendly than others? How are male artists coping with their own set of societal pressures?  And, importantly, should the arts sector, in the words of Slaughter, “value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family?”

Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structures for U.S. Artists (2003), an Urban Institute publication authored by Maria-Rosario Jackson, Florence Kabwasa-Green, Daniel Swenson, Joaquin Herranz, Jr., Kadija Ferryman, Caron Atlas, Eric Wallner, and Carole Rosenstein, sheds light on the economic and employment situation of individual artists in the United States following the cessation of NEA funding to individual artists in 1995.  The report reflected several years of research, which included interviews with artists with arts leaders in nine cities, a national poll on attitudes towards artists, and expansion and analysis of a new NYFA Source database, in partnership with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

Investing distinguishes itself by “providing a new and comprehensive framework for analysis and action, which views the support structure for artists in the United States as a system made up of six key dimensions of the environment in which an artist works:”

1. Validation: The ascription of value to what artists do.
2. Demand/markets: Society’s appetite for artists and what they do, and the markets that translate this appetite into financial compensation.
3. Material supports: Access to the financial and physical resources artists need for their work: employment, insurance and similar benefits, awards, space, equipment, and materials.
4. Training and professional development: Conventional and lifelong learning opportunities.
5. Communities and networks: Inward connections to other artists and people in the cultural sector; outward connections to people not primarily in the cultural sector.
6. Information: Data sources about artists and for artists.

This is a helpful framework for further research on artists’ conditions in any given region, and also marked a new understanding that it is not be enough to simply restore cuts to funding for artists.

Some especially salient findings and recommendations in the report are as follows:

1. Individual artists are undervalued by society, in comparison to art itself. Artists’ societal contributions are not well understood, documented, or publicized—but if they were, it might be easier to make the case for allocating resources to individual artists.
2. Individual artists feel overshadowed and neglected by large urban institutions, and are frequently left out of arts-based urban planning initiatives.
3. There is a perceived inequality of opportunities for artists (such as exhibitions or awards programs) based on factors such as race/ethnicity, and art form.
4. An artist’s career spans multiple markets and disciplines: this is especially important when assessing artists’ needs.
5. Many artists face the economic uncertainties of irregular employment, lack of health insurance, and lack of affordable work or living space.
6. Training in the practical side of working in the arts, and in specialized or hybrid fields like arts education/community work, is limited. Training should be expanded and diversified.
7. Grants and awards need to be more accessible, equitable, and relevant for artists. An “information clearinghouse” with data on resources, and the capacity to support further research, would be helpful.
8. Various arts organizations, arts councils, and artist networks are meeting some of these artists’ needs described above, but these organizations need strengthening.
9. It is also important to cultivate stronger networks of people from both arts and non-arts fields advocating for artists’ needs.

Investing was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and supported by consortium of 37 other funders, some of whom were committed to acting upon the findings of the research. Therefore, the study is notable for having led directly to the development of several concrete initiatives to increase support for artists:

1. A new NYFA Source online database allowing artists and other users to access customized, up-to-the-minute information on awards in all arts disciplines 24 hours a day
2. The Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) initiative, a ten-year national initiative to improve the conditions for artists working in all disciplines. LINC funds, researches, and aggregates information about three core areas identified as key artist needs in the report: Creative Communities, Artist Space, and Health Insurance for Artists.
3. Investing is also cited in the development of the United States Artists (USA) grant making program, which gives unrestricted $50,000 grants to artists in all disciplines.   

Investing in Creativity did raise several critical questions for me: first of all, whether it is problematic to build a case for increased support for individual artists so heavily on the idea that artists benefit society, when there was little research to back up this claim.  I also believe that Investing pinpoints many challenges in the employment system for artists, yet never suggests that an entirely new system is needed. Instead, the implication is that conditions for artists can be improved through better information-gathering, networking, and training.

Whether or not the fundamental situation for artists has changed significantly since this report’s publication, Investing at least paves the way for more dramatic changes by suggesting ways in which the existing nonprofit sector can be better equipped to meet artists’ needs.