Help WolfBrown with a White Paper on Active Participation

WolfBrown, which is one of the best arts consulting outfits out there, approached me this week with a request for examples of “excellent, new, or unusual” arts participation programs offered by nonprofits that involve adults creating or performing. Thinking that this could be a useful exercise in crowdsourcing, I offered to post the request hereRead More

Around the horn: heat wave edition

First Things First EMCArts’s Director: Activating Innovation position, which we first posted about in March, is open again. Details here. Cool Projects You simply MUST watch the entirety of this video produced by the fine citizens of Grand Rapids. Organized after an article published on Newsweek’s website named Grand Rapids one of “America’s Top 10Read More

Cool job of the month

Instructor/Professorial Lecturer in Arts Management (term), American University The Department of Performing Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at American University invites applications for a one-year term position at the rank of Instructor/Professorial Lecturer in the field of Arts Management, beginning fall semester 2011. Qualified candidates will preferably hold a Master’s degree inRead More

Around the horn: staycation edition

ART AND GOVERNMENT Remember that debate a while back about whether video games qualified as art? Well, the NEA just declared it over by including support for “digital games” in its new Art and Media program. To Scott Walters’s everlasting chagrin, however, the NEA is still providing funding to organizations in New York, LA, andRead More

TEDx Talk

“Never Heard of ’Em”: Why Citizen Curators (not Daddy’s Money) Should Decide Who Gets to Be an Artist.

Around the horn: Donald Trump edition

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking in Chicago this Saturday, May 7 at David Zoltan’s TEDxMichiganAve event (you can buy tickets here). The talk is tentatively titled “Never Heard of ‘Em: Citizen Curators and Who Gets to Be an Artist,” and I will be synthesizing themes from my post on artistic marketplaces,Read More

The Social Network: Volunteer Edition

In honor of National Volunteer Week, let’s take a look at managing volunteers in true Createquity fashion–from a research-based perspective. Volunteers do a lot for arts organizations. They get mailings out the door, they get audience members to their seats, they bring in thousands of dollars, and they contribute their professional expertise to organizations theyRead More

Around the horn: government shutdown edition

Comings, Goings, and Mergers The nation’s three largest composer-focused arts service organizations have announced a major realignment. The American Music Center and Meet The Composer will merge into a new entity called New Music USA, while AMC’s membership and professional development programs will be transferred to the American Composers Forum. This is the legacy ofRead More

Cool jobs of the month: March

Director: Activating Innovation, EmcArts EmcArts, a social enterprise and program agency for innovation in the arts, is seeking an entrepreneurial leader to develop the company’s newest area of work in Activating Innovation field-wide. EmcArts has pioneered programming to spur innovation in selected arts organizations across the country. Building on this success, and recognizing the increasingRead More

On Stories vs. Data

(Cross-posted from the Fractured Atlas blog. This is the second in an occasional series on Fractured Atlas’s research approach and philosophy. The first can be found here.) Many of us, especially if we’ve been present at a Rocco Landesman speech in the past year or so, are probably familiar with the quote widely attributed to W.Read More