Around the horn: St. Patty’s edition

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Over at NewMusicBox, Mark N. Grant has a wonderful history of American Presidents’ and Founding Fathers’ fascination with music and the arts. Did you know that John Quincy Adams studied the flute and Ben Franklin invented a musical instrument? A bill to legalize crowdsourced investment in startup companies is inching closer to passage in Congress.Read More

Around the horn: Linsanity edition

Quick announcement: Createquity Writing Fellowship alumna Katherine Gressel is curating an art show! And raising money for it! OK, back to regularly scheduled programming… ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Kickstarter got a whole bunch of press mileage last week out of the idea that it “gives out” more money to the arts than the NEA. Tim Mikulski explains why that’sRead More

Cool jobs of the month

Just under the wire…thank goodness for leap years! (Work for Nina Simon! For free, but…still!) Internships (many), Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History I’m personally most excited about the two types of interns who will be reporting to me: Community Research interns, who will start developing a methodology for us to use to understandRead More

Upcoming Speaking (and Singing!) Engagements

A bunch of speaking opportunities have come up over the next six weeks that’ll have me covering a wide range of topics, many of them for students and emerging arts leaders. Especially if you live in the New York City metro region, you’ll have a number of chances to see me in public in theRead More

Public arts funding update: February

For whatever reason, this is about the time of year when things start to heat up in budget land, for the federal government and states alike. From February through May, we’ll find out a lot about where the NEA and state arts council budgets stand for fiscal year 2013, and what the corresponding ramifications mightRead More

Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Public Art Worthy of Hate?

That’s the question asked by John Metcalfe in this silly-but-kind-of-not photojournal in The Atlantic Cities, The Atlantic magazine’s online urban planning spinoff. Metcalfe spends most of the piece rehashing a 13-year-old broadside by a group of Philadelphia artists against that city’s Mural Arts Program for the “amateurish” quality of its paintings. As it turns out, though,Read More

Around the horn: Whitney Houston edition

MUSICAL CHAIRS Americans for the Arts CEO Bob Lynch has been appointed to the US Travel and Tourism Advisory Board. The advisory board “consists of up to 32 members that advise the Secretary of Commerce on government policies and programs that affect the U.S. travel and tourism industry, offers counsel on current and emerging issues, andRead More

Congratulations to the spring 2012 Createquity Writing Fellows

I’m proud to welcome our first-ever Createquity Writing Fellows from the West Coast: Kelly Dylla and Jackie Hasa. These two ladies will be holding forth with some frequency between now and July. Because I select a small number of writers at a time based primarily on ability, I sometimes get oddly poetic intersections in interests.Read More

Let us now praise Katherine Gressel

Many of you have probably noticed that this website’s most thoughtful and detailed writing over the past month has come not from me, but rather from Katherine Gressel, who wrapped up her official tenure as a Createquity Writing Fellow last week. I don’t even want to think about how many hours Katherine put into this effort,Read More

Around the horn: Anyone but Mitt edition

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – DOMESTIC A professor’s quest to overturn a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that placed certain foreign works back under copyright after they had already entered the public domain appears to have reached an end. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is thinking about trying out social impact bonds. LooksRead More