Note to folks going to the annual Americans for the Arts Convention in Nashville – Ian and Talia will both be present, and presenting: Talia at Making Arts Education More Equitable and Available to Everyone and the Lightning Workshops during the Arts Education Preconference; and Ian at Creating a Culture of Learning at Your OrganizationRead More
Around the Horn: Marian McPartland edition
Compiled by Talia Gibas, Daniel Reid, Lindsey Cosgrove, Jena Lee, and Ian David Moss ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Australia is relatively fresh off the adoption of a national cultural policy, and with that policy come calls for new ways to measure culture’s intrinsic value. Fractured Atlas has created a simple but useful infographic explaining what ObamaCare meansRead More
Everyone is a Lot of People
(This essay was originally written in my role as an outside consultant to the city of Calgary’s cultural plan. You can read all of my contributions to that process here.) For my second essay responding to the #yycArtsPlan process, I thought I would focus on the last paragraph of the “Summary of Vision Statements fromRead More
Solving the Underpants Gnomes Problem: Towards an Evidence-Based Arts Policy
Arts research is broken. Here’s how to fix it.
Around the horn: Amtrak edition
ART AND THE GOVERNMENT Really scary stuff about political meddling in editorial content at the Alabama public television network. Seems like one of the underreported stories of the year. MUSICAL CHAIRS Congratulations to Randy Engstrom on his appointment as interim director of the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, replacing Vincent Kitch who left abruptly in August.Read More
St. Louis
Any Createquity readers from the Show Me State? I’ll be in town for a brief visit to speak at the Rustbelt to Artist Belt: At the Crossroads conference on Friday. Organized by the Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission (RAC) in partnership with Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts andRead More
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
Uncomfortable Thoughts: Is Shouting About Arts Funding Bad for the Arts?
(I’ve had the pleasure of working with Margy Waller for almost a year now helping her organization, ArtsWave, with its Measuring the Impact Initiative. Margy focuses on strategic communications and creative connections to promote broad support of the arts at ArtsWave and Topos Partnership. Previously she was Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, with a joint appointment in theRead More
The Top 10 Arts Policy Stories of 2010
Everybody likes a Top 10 list, right? Especially the nerdy ones! So here’s my contribution: the second annual list of the top ten arts policy stories from the past year. You can check out the 2009 edition here. 10. Intrinsic Impact Research Marches On WolfBrown’s groundbreaking work on measuring “intrinsic impact” (the intangible, hard-to-define effectsRead More
Around the horn: March to Restore Sanity edition
Ron Ragin’s guest stint over at the Center for Effective Philanthropy blog, covered in last time’s round-up, continues with a meditation on general operating support in uncertain times and, my favorite from this series, lessons learned from grantee interactions. In the latter, Ron tackles the subject that no one in philanthropy likes to talk about:Read More