Museum Camp is a creation of Nina Simon and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Createquity readers might recognize Nina and her fantastic work at Santa Cruz MAH from such Top 10 Arts Policy Stories posts as 2012‘s, not to mention many shout-outs before and since in blog posts here and there. Nina used to be a rockstar experience design consultant in the museum field and earned a measure of fame at the beginning of this decade as the author of The Participatory Museum, which you can read online for free. A couple of years ago, she decided to take the job as director of the Santa Cruz MAH, and she and her team have been up to amazing things since then, including a previous version of Museum Camp that sounded like pretty much the most fun anyone has had in a museum ever.

All that fun ultimately adds up to something significant, though, and it’s important to be able to describe what’s meaningful about what we do effectively and convincingly to people who weren’t there – not to mention ourselves. So my colleagues at Fractured Atlas and I are happy to be helping Nina bring a new edition of Museum Camp to life focused on social impact assessment, a three-day event in which small teams of people will develop creative ways to evaluate the work that diverse organizations are doing to transform communities. Our focus is on social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes–like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity–that are not commonly covered in standard evaluative practices. This is a learning experience with a heavy focus on actual doing throughout the event. In addition to representatives from Fractured Atlas and MAH, we’ll have “camp counselors” from the United Way, WolfBrown, Harder & Co., Animating Democracy, and more on hand to help attendees navigate the conceptual and practical issues associated with measuring what matters.

If you are interested in attending, you can fill out an application through February 28. Space is extremely limited, so the sooner the better. We look forward to seeing you!

• Weird, the very day that the Huffington Post published my “debate” with Carla Escoda about arts funding, the New York Times published a “Room for Debate” feature on a very similar topic. Something in the water? Anyway, Sean Bowie has a nice summary if you don’t have time to read all eight entries.
• The National Governor’s Association, which has been friendly to the arts in the past, has released another study highlighting the economic role of arts and culture in state government.
• Marisela Treviño Orta has a good take on a bill proposed in the California Assembly that would have placed a tax on live theater tickets. Thanks to advocacy by the LA and SF arts communities, the bill has been withdrawn.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Andrew Taylor is leaving his longtime post as the head of the University of Wisconsin’s arts administration program to join the faculty at American University in Washington, DC. Quite a coup for Sherburne Laughlin and company.
• Anne Corbett is moving on from her role as executive director of CulturalDC (formerly Cultural Development Corporation) to lead a commercial real estate development project in northwest Washington, DC.
• Congratulations to Mary-Kim Arnold, new arts program officer for the Rhode Island Foundation…
• …Wayne Martin, new executive director of the North Carolina Arts Council…
• …and Earl Lewis, new president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, succeeding Don Randel. Mellon continues its record of hiring its head honchos from academia – Lewis was provost of Emory University and already serving on Mellon’s board.
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently published an interesting analysis of the winding career paths of foundation CEOs.

IN THE FIELD

• A huge gift from Oregon philanthropist Fred W. Fields will go to the Oregon Community Foundation to support education and the arts.
• Nina Simon shares some lessons learned from her first year as executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
• Liz Lerman has choreographed a performance of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun for the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra played from memory and danced around the stage during the piece. While the dancing is about at the level one would expect from classical musicians, there’s enough there to suggest a vision of what might be if people actually pursued this as a serious subgenre. The video and further discussion, from Andrew Taylor, are available at the link.

INTERVIEWS, CONVENINGS, AND CONVERSATIONS

• The Animating Democracy project at Americans for the Arts hosted a wonderful blog salon during the first week of May on impact and evaluation of social change in the arts. The posts are well worth sifting through, but some of my highlights included contributions from Rachel Grossman, Mark Stern (and again), Chris Dwyer, and former Createquity Writing Fellow Katherine Gressel. And now, just a couple weeks later, the Public Art Network is doing a blog salon on evaluation in public art.
• Barry Hessenius has another interesting interview, this time with Association of Performing Arts Presenters director Mario Garcia Durham.
• Nina Simon reports from the 2012 American Association of Museums conference.
• The Foundation Center’s PhilanTopic blog has a “Flip” (video) chat with Courtney O’Malley, VP of the Starr Foundation, about foundation transparency. It’s an interesting choice of topic (and thus, conversation), given that Starr is probably one of the least open and transparent foundations supporting the arts in its size group.
• The NEA’s Art Works blog did a week’s worth of posts on art and science (or “artscience”). Here are a few examples. In the last link, the NEA’s Senior Advisor for Program Innovation, Bill O’Brien, notes that the NEA will be encouraging grant applications that involve collaborations with science across all of its programs.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA co-organized a convening at the Brookings Institution last week on the topic of “The Arts, New Growth Theory, and Economic Development.” I was fortunate to attend and may share some of my notes later, but in the meantime, audio from the day’s sessions is available here.
• Great list of data and visualization blogs worth following from stats blogger Nathan Yau. You can find Createquity’s version of this here. Nathan also shares five common statistical fallacies. Have you been guilty of at least one of these in the past week?
• GiveWell is doing some interesting and important research into strategic cause selection (the merits of supporting international aid over domestic education, e.g.). After some preliminary investigation on what large funders are most likely to support today, they have identified four priority cause areas for future exploration: global health and nutrition, scientific research, something called “meta-research,” and mitigating catastrophic global risks such as climate change and nuclear war. I’m particularly interested in the meta-research cause area, which GiveWell defines as “trying to improve the systematic incentives that academic researchers face, to bring them more in line with producing maximally useful work.” I wonder if they will focus on non-academic research as well. As for arts and culture, GiveWell announces that it will not be a priority; while I’m not surprised at this outcome, I’ll be curious to read their justification for it as promised in a future post.
• House Republicans have acted on their dislike of the American Community Survey and voted to eliminate it (this has no chance of passing, thankfully). Here is more on the American Community Survey. The politicization of government data collection is a very troubling trend.
• Child mortality in Africa is going down, down, down – is this a vindication for international aid, free markets, or both?
• Mark Kramer says we need a flexible paradigm for evaluation, because social problems are complex. I couldn’t agree more. Talking about evaluation in blog format is hard because the conversation requires a lot of subtlety and nuance. There isn’t one right way to do it, but at the same time there are countless wrong and/or dumb ways to do it.
• The online education revolution is only in its infancy: Harvard and MIT have just committed $60 million toward a new online course platform called EdX.

• 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.
• Grantmakers in the Arts has officially launched its Arts Education Funders Coalition and hired a lobbying firm to help work on arts education policy.
• The California Arts Council is getting serious about its strategy to fund itself through selling a million arts license plates.
• Hartford joins the list of cities seeking to increase the share of money that local nonprofit institutions pay in lieu of property taxes, a trend currently sweeping across New England. This could end up becoming an important policy story before all is said and done.

CONFERENCES AND BLOGATHONS

• Barry Hessenius and Arlene Goldbard hosted a thought-provoking weeklong series this week on political power and clout in the arts. (The two make for an interesting pairing, as their opening exchange demonstrates.) I also enjoyed Diane Ragsdale’s contribution, and Linda Essig participated in the discussion on her own blog.
• Beth Kanter put together a wonderful blog team to cover the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations biannual conference. The avalanche of entries makes me jealous not to be there!
• The National Arts Marketing Project Conference wants your session proposals, and they’re especially eager to hear from beyond the usual suspects this time around. Are you up to the challenge?

IN THE FIELD

• There’s been a lot of buzz about Pinterest, the new picture-based content-sharing/social media platform. Nina Simon explains how her museum has been using it to document (and share) its internal creative process.
• The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre is no more.
• Looks like the Napa Valley Symphony is down for the count after the death of its chief donor.

FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY

• The Three Masters: a wonderfully succinct Seth Godin rubric especially relevant to artist-entrepreneurs.
• Whoo! Phil Buchanan, the fire-throwing president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, doesn’t hold back in this list of “7 habits of highly ineffective foundation boards.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• Listen up kids: this casual discussion on the empirical value of the arts to society hosted by Stephen Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics book and blog, is instructive because we don’t typically get to eavesdrop on people who are neither in the arts nor have a particular anti-arts axe to grind talking to each about the kinds of advocacy arguments we typically use. And indeed, what we hear isn’t pretty. Faced with the question of whether “a lack of exposure to the arts can lead to disastrous results for individuals,” Dubner opines,
  

  I have to say that what I have read [on the benefits of arts exposure] isn’t all that convincing. It seems to me a classic area in which correlation is mistaken for cause — i.e., highly productive societies have a lot of creative arts; ergo (some may claim), the arts are a contributor to that high productivity (as opposed to, say, a side benefit that’s generated because of that high productivity).

  The (by far) best-rated response comment adds, “I suspect it’s an even simpler correlation: anyone employed in purveying X is pretty sure that X is essential to human flourishing. It’s so obvious that the plethora of research proving it doesn’t even require a cite.”

• Americans for the Arts’s Animating Democracy project has a new website bringing together much of its output over the past decade and a half into one place.
• The Wallace Foundation has been pumping out the publications recently: the latest edition is a report from a convening of foundation-supported arts groups to share learning about building audiences.
• Speaking of GEO, the organization is out with a new study suggesting that grantmakers aren’t walking the walk when it comes to best practices in dealing with grantees.
• GiveWell has another takedown of published data involving bogus assumptions. This one isn’t quite as dramatic as the DCP2 debacle, but still serves as a warning that not everything you read on the Internet can be trusted.
• A new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts details the growing financial pressures on municipal library systems, with Los Angeles and Philadelphia facing particularly severe cutbacks in recent years. Yet usage of libraries is up, and in Philadelphia at least, that’s being driven by computer use, which has increased 80% in half a decade. Makes Bill Gates’s famed technology investments in libraries in the 1990s seem downright prophetic.
• For you German readers out there, Maria Davydchyk has a new book examining the transformation of cultural policies in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union.
• Tina Mermini takes a look at the UK’s latest stats on private investment in arts and culture in that country.
• Also in the UK, Hasan Bakhshi at Britain’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts appears to be leading some breathtakingly daring research on the impact of creative industry policy using randomized controlled trials.
• ArtsWave’s Ripple Effect Report is the inspiration for the “world’s first game-sourced movie,” a 10-minute film by digital media company Possible Worldwide that celebrates the beneficial effects of the arts on local neighborhoods in graphic novel style with the help of thousands of user-submitted images.

Basic Job Function: Ignite the “explosive engagement” between theatre artists and the community that powers Woolly’s mission statement—by working to expand the Woolly family, deepen the audience experience in our theatre, and link our productions to the civic discourse that happens every day in the nation’s capital.

Specific Duties and Responsibilities:

• Identify local stakeholders, institutions, and events that may resonate with each individual play
• Facilitate discussions between artists, staff, Board, and audience members to develop a shared vision for:
• An “entry point” for each play (“What is the conversation this play wants to have with our audience and community?”)
• A “designed audience” for each play (“Who needs to be in the audience to bring energy and meaning to that conversation?”)
• A “total audience experience” for each play (“What can we do to accent, extend, and deepen the experience of each audience member?”)

No deadline provided.

Freelance Writer, The Art Newspaper

The Art Newspaper is looking for a experienced arts news journalist, based in New York City, to contribute—on a contract freelance basis—to our art market and news pages and website, as well as analysis/special focuses.

We are looking for an arts news journalist with an established track record to contribute approximately 3,000 words each month to the paper and website, following agreed commissions and deadlines. As this is a freelance post, you will be free to work from your own home/office and arrange your own hours, but you will be expected to attend editorial meetings in our New York office at least twice a month.

Deadline: tomorrow! January 23, 2012.

Internship, Animating Democracy, Americans for the Arts

As a program of Americans for the Arts, Animating Democracy brings national visibility to arts for change work. By demonstrating the public value of creative work that contributes to social change and fostering synergy across arts and other fields and sectors, we work to make the arts an integral and effective part of solutions to the challenges of communities and toward ensuring a healthy democracy.

Animating Democracy is seeking motivated individuals to work on an array of projects related to our IMPACT and Arts & Social Change Mapping Initiatives. Through research, communications, and outreach focused on driving database development, resource cultivation, and program promotion, interns will expand their knowledge of the field while contributing ideas and content that supports the Animating Democracy mission.

Positions are available immediately for winter/spring as well as summer and fall 2012 for qualified individuals.  Most do not require working in the Americans for the Arts office and can be arranged as virtual internships.  A modest stipend is offered.

No deadline provided.