The Office–by flickr user Rum Bucolic Ape

Income inequality, slow economic growth and wage stagnation have been hot button issues in recent years. Last month, the Obama administration did something significant about the latter, announcing an updated overtime rule that would make millions more eligible for overtime pay. Effective December 1, 2016, the new rule doubles the salary threshold—from $23,660 to $47,476 per year—under which most salaried workers are guaranteed overtime. The rule is expected to affect some 4.2 million workers, though whether it will benefit these workers (through increased wages) or possibly harm some of them (through lower base salaries and reduced benefits) remains to be seen. The implications for industry, however, are likely to be dramatic no matter what, especially for firms like publishing, fashion, media, consulting and yes, nonprofit arts organizations that have long relied on the willingness of young, ambitious employees to work long hours for little pay in exchange for a shot at the big time down the line. The shift might not be such a bad thing for the arts more generally, however. If nonprofits and businesses have less incentive to overwork low-paid employees, those employees will likely have more time for leisure activities, which could lead to a (further) boom in amateur arts participation and entrepreneurial arts ventures once this rule goes into effect.

Brazil Dumps, Then Reinstates its Cultural Ministry. Brazil has become a familiar character in the twenty-four hour news cycle in recent months, what with the impeachment trial of President Dilma Rousseff and a faltering economy, along with concerns about the zika virus in light of the upcoming Olympics (which is plagued with its own corruption and other scandals). The cultural sector had its fair share of drama this month after interim president Michel Temer, who replaced Rousseff in what many are calling a coup, announced a plan to subsume the Brazilian cultural ministry into the education ministry on May 12 as part of a broader effort to streamline the government. The plan immediately met with fierce opposition from Brazil’s cultural community. Artists staged occupations of government buildings across 11 cities and even music legends Erasmo Carlos and Caetano Veloso lent their support, giving a concert at a Rio de Janeiro protest on May 20. The pressure clearly worked; many credit artists with Temer’s reversal.

LISC Tries a New Model to Fight Gentrification. Adaptive reuse of abandoned spaces has long been a tried-and-true move in creative placemaking playbook, but concern has been growing about the gentrification effects of such policies in an era of increasing income inequality. The Local Initiatives Support Corp., a national nonprofit organization that has been investing in neighborhoods since 1982, has decided to try something different, committing $50 million to help prevent the gentrification many fear will be a byproduct of the redevelopment of Washington, DC’s 11th Street Bridge. The new park development along the Anacostia River–which has been likened to New York City’s High Line–is expected to increase adjacent property values, pricing out poorer residents who have long called the area home. LISC funding will support groups providing affordable housing, early childhood education, medical care, food support, arts education and other services near park site, in an attempt to preemptively ensure that poorer residents are able to remain in their communities. The park is slated to open in mid-2019, but LISC says it is committed to the project and to the price tag no matter the timeline.

Big Shifts in British Public Broadcasting. Last August, we reported on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC’s) financial struggles–compounded by a trend towards internet media consumption–and noted that the government had appointed a committee to review the BBC’s Royal Charter. That charter expires at the end of 2017, and all agree the 94-year old company finds itself at a critical juncture. Much has changed in the decade since its charter was last renewed, and the BBC–which receives an outsize £5 billion in licensing fees, commercial and other income–is under close scrutiny. This month, culture secretary John Whittingdal unveiled the government’s plans for the BBC in a white paper. The main takeaways? An emphasis on greater transparency and fiscal responsibility, and a new board with government appointees (which some critics worry compromises the BBC’s journalistic independence from the government). The white paper also notes that it “welcomes the BBC’s commitment to develop and test some form of additional subscription services,” giving the corporation the green light to launch a Netflix-like paid subscription service. The uncertainty facing the BBC comes as the UK’s state-owned, commercially funded broadcaster Channel 4 held off a threat to sell off the government’s stake to the highest bidder, which was called off after outcry from channel representatives and the wider public. In many ways the BBC and Channel 4 will serve as a harbinger of other government-sponsored news organizations’ fates in the digital economy.

Kresge Pairs Health and Art & Culture Programs for Neighborhood Revitalization. Food and culture have always been closely aligned; this month, the Kresge Foundation took that relationship a few daring steps further by pairing up its Arts & Culture and Health Programs to launch Fresh, Local & Equitable: Food as a Creative Platform for Neighborhood Revitalization, or, FreshLo. This unprecedented program, which aims to strengthen economic vitality, cultural expression and health in low-income communities, will distribute nearly $2 million in grant funding in support of neighborhood-scale projects demonstrating creative, cross-sector visions of food-oriented development. The foundation seems to be onto something with the food+art thing: more than 500 organizations applied for FreshLo funding, and Kresge ultimately decided to fund six more grants than initially planned. Though the Kresge Foundation has a long history of tackling food deserts, this is the first time a national funder has intentionally integrated food, art and community to drive neighborhood revitalization at this scale.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Melanca Clark has been named president and CEO of the Hudson-Webber Foundation.
• Loren Harris has been appointed Vice President of Programs at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
• Susan Delvalle has been named president and executive director of Creative Capital.
• Shannon Daut is the new Cultural Affairs Manager of the City of Santa Monica Community and Cultural Services Department.
• The Field Foundation of Illinois has appointed former Joyce Foundation culture director Angelique Power its new President.
• After a decade working with the Future of Music Coalition, CEO Casey Rae leaving to become SiriusXM’s director of music licensing.
• After seventeen years with The Association of Independent Music, Alison Denham is taking on a new, global role at Worldwide Independent Network.
• Artstor President James Schulman has joined the Mellon Foundation as a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Mellon Foundation.
• Acclaimed music and culture writer Sasha Frere-Jones has abruptly exited the L.A. Times after less than a year at the paper due to “ethical issues.”
• Local Initiatives Support Corporation seeks a Program Officer. Posted May 6; no closing date.
• Slover Linett Audience Research seeks a Vice President. Posted May 12; no closing date.
• Arts Consulting Group, Inc. seeks an Associate Vice President. Posted May 26; no closing date.
• Nina Simon’s Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History is hiring a Director of Development and Community Relations. No closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Out west, a survey commissioned by the Oregon Community Foundation and the Oregon Arts Commission provides a snapshot of the state of arts education in Oregon. In Boston, the Boston Public Schools Arts Expansion released a case study on the successes of its work. And across the pond, a UK study reveals deep concerns about the future of arts education among those in the theater industry.
• A report from Lifetime Arts looks at arts education for the aging in America’s libraries.
• Diversity continues to dominate conversation the field. The Americans for Arts and National Endowment for the Arts (following up on the former’s cultural equity statement) released the results of their 2015 Local Arts Agency Census, revealing that taken a whole, the field could do a much better job of diversifying board and staffs. The website CNTRST calculated the total percentage of ‘whiteness’ in mainstream films, and found that white men take up twice as much space on the silver screen than they do in real life. A study commissioned by the professional association Directors UK shows that women make up just 13.6% of film directors in the UK; a percentage that has barely changed in the past decade. In more encouraging news, a study released by Asian American Performers Action Coalition show gains for minority actors in New York City: in the 2014-15 season, 30% of theater roles in NYC went to black, Latino and Asian-Americans. Related, Richard Florida shared the results of his research on the racial divide within the already-advantaged creative class.
• A new evaluation assesses the successes and impact of the New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship over 25 years.
• Two interesting papers from Bridgespan this month. The first finds that funders’ reluctance to fully fund overhead costs prevents many nonprofits from maximizing their impact. The second argues that billion-dollar philanthropic investments in key areas could improve social mobility and revive “the American dream” for low-income families.
• A report on the first three years of the Taking Part survey’s longitudinal study (which has been conducting annual interviews about arts engagement with a group of 4,600 adults in England) reveals statistics on who attends the arts most often and why people stop engaging.
• A study commissioned by Intermedia Arts assesses the demand and availability of arts-based community development training and investigate how the benefits of Intermedia Arts’ Creative Community Leadership Institute could be made accessible for a broader range of communities.
• A report from the February 2016 Salzburg Global Seminar looks the role of the arts in advancing environmental sustainability.
• A study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences suggests that creative individuals share more personality traits with psychopaths than their less creative peers do.
• A report from the UK calls for stricter rules for primary ticket selling sites, rather than harsher punishments for secondary sites. And it turns out, according to a survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries, that Shakespeare is far more popular in Brazil, India, China, Mexico and Turkey than he is in the UK.

• In a reversal, the FCC has drafted new net neutrality rules that critics claim are unworthy of the name: they would allow broadband companies to provide a “fast lane” for content providers willing to pay a “commercially reasonable” fee. The FCC’s public comment period opens on May 15. Related: if the Comcast-Time Warner merger is approved, “the combined company’s footprint will pass over 60% of US broadband households.”
• A belated tax tip for artists: emigrate to Mexico. Or, for those committed to staying in the US of A, consider launching a worker cooperative as a means of upping income while maintaining time for artistic pursuits. For those on the collector side, there’s always lending your new purchases to a museum in Oregon, Delaware or New Hampshire first.
• Several record companies have filed suit in New York against Pandora to secure royalties under state law for the use of recordings made before 1972, which are not protected by federal copyright. Sirius was targeted by a similar lawsuit last fall.
• Classical musicians may now have a harder time leaving and re-entering the United States thanks to a ban on ivory meant to protect African elephants.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Grant Oliphant, former Pittsburgh Foundation leader, will begin a new role as president at Heinz Endowments this June.
• Also in June, the Canada Council for the Arts will welcome its new CEO and president Simon Brault. Brault was previously vice-chair of Canada Council’s board before moving to the National Theatre School Montreal, and will serve in his new position for a five-year term.
• Michael Kaiser, a man who wears many hats, will add another one in co-chairman of IMG Artists, which will also involve managing a new cooperation between IMG Artists and DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland.
• Jonathan Fanton, former president of the MacArthur Foundation and of the New School, has been named President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Former president Leslie Cohen Berlowitz resigned last July in the wake of a scandal over her compensation and qualifications.
• Lorin Dunlop will join the M. J. Murdoch Charitable trust this June as Program Director. Most recently, Dunlop was responsible for public safety grant programs of the Oregon Criminal Justice System.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• PonoMusic, a new high-def digital audio business, raised $6.2 million on Kickstarter to become the third-best-funded project in the site’s history. Neil Young, who started Pono to provide a higher-quality alternative to current digital formats, set the initial goal at $800,000.
• Yet another contender is trying to elbow its way into the crowdfunding game: Crowdrise, a new(ish) platform dedicated exclusively to nonprofits, just received an additional $23 million in financing.
• The Walter & Elise Haas Fund, working together with the Foundation Center and Mission Minded, has developed an open-source, free solution that any grantmaking entity can use to make its grantmaking data searchable, publishable, sharable, and fully accessible. You can see “Open hGrant for WordPress” in action on the Haas site.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera has outlined a new fundraising strategy to avert closure and announced a meeting on Monday of its 850-person membership. It’s been a bumpy ride: half of the 58-member board has resigned; a new chair, Carol Lazier, has taken over and personally pledged $1m to save the organization; general and artistic director Ian Campbell has been placed on indefinite leave; and protests by unions and members have added financial and legal complications. The opera’s plan includes a new $1m crowdfunding campaign with a deadline of May 19; it is actually only one of several San Diego cultural institutions that have been shuttered or are imperiled.
• A closer look at the end of the Trey McIntyre Project.
• A bid by a group of philanthropic organizations to buy out Pittsburgh’s failed August Wilson Center for African American Culture was dropped, with the foundations claiming a preference on the part of the Center’s court-appointed receiver for a commercial developer.
• New York City is facing a sudden rash of failing institutions. The Incubator Arts Project is closing, citing — you guessed it — difficulties raising revenue. The Brecht Forum, a Marxist educational and cultural space, is buckling under the weight of a lawsuit for back rent. And Manhattan’s legendary Canal Street art supply store Pearl Paint has shut its doors and is mourned.
• Is an arts-centric Coursera in our future? Barry Hessenius decries the state of professional development in arts administration and calls for a virtual “one stop shop” of on-demand courses, articles, and networking/mentoring opportunities.
• A handful of arts organizations have been experimenting with a lesser-known organizational structure called the “disregarded entity,” which may offer non-profits a more flexible alternative to independence on the one hand and fiscal sponsorship on the other.
• In The Foundation Review, authors Gary Cunningham, Marcia Avner, and Romilda Justilian of the Northwest Area Foundation note declining philanthropic investment in communities of color and make a pointed call for foundation leaders to commit to reducing racial inequality. And across the pond, British comedian Lenny Henry is leading an effort to secure better representation for minorities on the BBC.

BIG IDEAS

• National Arts Strategies’s Sunny Widmann suggests arts organizations create their own Skunk Works® divisions — originally conceived by Lockheed Martin and not as stinky as the name suggests — to nurture innovate programs and practices.
• We hear a lot about the intersection between creative placemaking and gentrification, but is dealing with it just a matter of saying hi to your neighbor and identifying your privileges? At The Atlantic Cities, Daniel Hertz suggests that if we really care about gentrification, we should be paying a lot more attention to housing policy.
• Global inequality of wealth is at a 100-year high, with the infamous 1% owning half of the planet’s wealth, according to a hot new book by French economist Thomas Piketty. One consequence: “professionals have now been priced out of the [art] market and it’s shifted more toward investment bankers.”
• Barry Hessenius is looking for the next set of big ideas – and the people behind them – with another edition of the Arts Dinner-vention. Nominations are due May 15.

RESEARCH CORNER

• A music psychologist found that introducing random repetition into a piece of music makes it more appealing – and makes people think it was more likely to have been composed by a human being.
• Research suggests literary fiction can help short-circuit ethnic stereotypes.
• A new paper examines the intersections of the arts and health via case studies from Cleveland on interventions including art therapy and the artistic design of healthcare facilities.
• The NEA is out with a new report on the Education Leaders Institute Alumni Summit, a five-year effort on the part of the NEA to strengthen arts education policies at the state level. The Endowment’s Arts Education director Ayanna Hudson discusses the report in the context of the agency’s new strategy.
• A new center at Stanford will focus on meta-research in the medical sciences and examine how much publication bias — which raises questions about all research fields, including the arts — really is a problem.
• The Pew Research Center has published a new report on demographic and generational trends in America. The findings themselves are what you might expect – our population is aging, becoming more diverse, and moving away from religion; immigration and interracial marriage are on the rise; and Democrats and Republicans are at odds – but the presentation brings these and other trends to life.
• Seen any good movies at the theater lately? Probably not, according to new data on film reception by month of release as aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The numbers show that the summer and holiday seasons have the best pickings. Don’t believe it? You can play around with the data yourself.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The value of the creative sector to the U.S. economy? Half a trillion dollars. The value of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s official inclusion of our sector in its GDP analysis? Priceless. Responses from the field have been mixed. Some are celebrating how full the glass is: the creative sector, led by Hollywood, advertising, and television, accounted for 3.2% of the economy – more than tourism (2.8%) – and employed 2 million workers. Others have focused on the top half of the glass: the recession hit our sector especially hard and to lasting effect, and the bulk of the economic value is from advertising, with relatively little from “independent artists and performing arts.” Still others question the value of glasses entirely: embracing economic measurements of the arts could undermine aesthetic arguments for their necessity – though Createquity’s Jena Lee recently suggested otherwise.
• In the latest installment of the Detroit Institute of Arts saga, museum leaders have joined closed-door negotiations with several of the nation’s largest private foundations, both local and national, to protect the beleaguered institution by raising a whopping $500 million for the city’s underwater municipal pensions. Sources say they could be close to a deal. Meanwhile, efforts to raise private funds to spin the museum off from the city got a boost from biotech millionaire Paul Schaap, who has pledged $5m.
• The Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation has released a policy paper detailing several strategies for mayors and local government to support cultural entrepreneurship.
• A new report published by old friend Shannon Litzenberger intends to “ignite a conversation about addressing the existing logjam in arts funding in [Canada].”
• Arts Council England wants the the field to “transform itself into a low-carbon, sustainable and resilient sector” — so much so that it requires environmental reporting of its grantees, and is out with a summary of the first year of that effort.
• The Seattle Department of Cultural Affairs is offering $10,000 for an action plan on a Cultural Development Certification — intended to be the arts’ parallel to the LEED designation. Proposals are due January 22.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Deborah Rutter, President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will succeed Michael Kaiser as President of the Kennedy Center in DC, with potential implications for classical music programming.  This leaves a number of important vacancies at the capital’s cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran, the board of the Kennedy Center itself – oh, right, and both the NEH and NEA.
• Detroit’s Michigan Opera Theatre has found its first President and CEO: Wayne S. Brown, current director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. David DiChiera, the Theatre’s founder and general manager, will transition to serving as artistic director beginning January 1. Brown’s departure continues a recent exodus of top NEA officials, including the directors of Theatre & Musical Theatre, Literature, and Public Affairs/Chief of Staff.
• John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design and prominent advocate of “STEAM” education, is leaving his post at the end of the semester to join a venture capitol firm and consult for eBay – right as eBay announces plans to follow Amazon’s footsteps and launch an online art marketplace.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Debate over effective altruism is raging on, and not just in the arts. Charity Navigator President and CEO Ken Berger slams it as “defective altruism” in a blog post for Stanford Social Innovation Review, and 80,000 Hours co-founder William MacAskill counters. Lest the bickering ruin your holiday spirit, GiveWell released its top charities of 2013 (no, the arts are not included) along with a thoughtful set of notes from staff members on where (and why) they each plan on giving this year.
• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a new grantmaking priority to promote an American governing process that is more productive, more civil, and less polarized.
• A new Center for Effective Philanthropy survey suggests that most foundation CEOs are skeptical that real progress has been made against the major problems they are tackling, but that their own organizations have made substantial contributions. Lucy Bernholz points out that they also lack confidence in their own measures of success and wonders whether boards can effectively hold them accountable.
• Speaking of Bernholz, her annual list of philanthropy’s top buzzwords is out for 2013 and might just be the perfect gift for the “makers” and “solutionists” on your list this holiday season.

IN THE FIELD

• Louisiana ArtWorks, a lavish $25 million art studio construction-project-turned-fiasco that has stood nearly empty since its completion, is up for auction. On top of the $600,000 yearly mortgage left to New Orleans taxpayers, more than $15 million state and federal funds had been sunk into the project.
• A new 300-student charter school for the arts is set to open on the site of a former department store in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
• In the rare positive story from Motown, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is back in the black after a lengthy and debilitating musicians’ strike three years ago. Meanwhile, musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, having spent the last year locked out in a labor dispute, are going rogue by applying for a 501(c)(3) and organizing their own concert series.
• Philadelphia has been adjusting to the shifting priorities of three major local arts funders, and Peter Dobrin details the ramifications and changes in a three-part series.
• The History Colorado Center takes “visitor tracking” to a new level with a “business intelligence” system that integrates and mines data from all areas of the museum, including “who is visiting, whether they’re members or donors, whether they’re coming as families or in adult pairs or alone, and from where… Whether those visitors eat in the café or shop in the store, what they ate and what they bought.” Not creepy at all…

BIG IDEAS

• With the National Endowment for the Arts gearing up to announce new collective impact funding for arts education next month, now’s a great time to brush up on what collective impact is – and while you’re at it, dig into this new series on measuring backbone organizations’ success.
• Beth Kanter unpacks the developmental evaluation strand of last month’s Next Generation Evaluation conference and offers some insight on its relationship to social change initiative and nonprofit practice.
• The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is partnering with Google, Accenture and other for-profit companies to launch an art and technology lab that will “will award grants and make museum facilities available to help artists explore new boundaries in art and science.” Elsewhere in LA, though, the public school system’s efforts to equip classrooms with iPads seem to be suffering from One-Laptop-Per-Child-like problems, which one pundit blames on “innovation fatigue.”
• Real-estate developers are increasingly cultivating artists and designers as tenants in low-rent neighborhoods who will help transform the area, raise the rents, and eventually move out. One developer calls the process “gentlefication.”
• Now this is a different kind of conference report: Arts & Ideas has created a gorgeous interactive document of The Art of Placemaking conference hosted last month in Providence, RI by the folks at WaterFire.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Dallas’s National Center for Arts Research has released its inaugural report on the health of America’s arts and cultural organizations. The report includes the average performance of organizations in eight indices and an examination of what drives organizations, and introduces the concept of high performance and intangible performance indicators (KIPIs). NCAR is working with IBM to create a online dashboard for organizations to access their own KIPIs.
• Roland Kushner, co-author of Americans for the Arts’ National Arts Index, looks at the relationship between private sector giving and arts index scores between 2000 and 2011. He finds a correlation beyond charitable contributions to the arts increasing the vitality of the sector, arguing that “charitable giving and engagement in the arts may emanate from the same instincts, values, and attitudes.”
• Americans love libraries! Nearly half of adults have visited a library in the past year, and fully 90% believe their community would be adversely affected if the local branch closed, according to a Pew study.
• A new study from Germany suggests that the relationship between studying music and improved academic performance may be causal: when researchers controlled for differences such as parental background, student musicians still out-performed their peers on cognitive tests – especially verbal ones.
• Some interesting findings have been reported by psychologists studying the effects of first-person shooter games. They surmise that players who enjoy these immersive and violent games are satisfying an innate desire for control and split-second decision making that is rarely achievable in today’s society. Video games also got some support from a new study out of Israel’s Center for Educational Technology.
• Korea-Finland Connection, a collaboration between Korean Arts Management and Dance Info Finland, has published an evaluation of its three-year program intended to create long-term  relationships between Finnish and Korean artists and organizations in the performing arts.
• Half of Equity members in Britain earned less than $8,200 in the last year, according to the union’s latest survey.  Additionally, “95.8% said they had never been pressurised to appear nude at a casting.”

• A consortium of City of Detroit creditors have made the first legal move towards pressuring the Detroit Institute of Arts to sell city-owned artworks to help pay for debts owed. Executive Vice President Annemarie Erickson defends the museum against Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s demand that the museum find one way or another to contribute $500 million in assistance to the bankrupt city.
• The California Arts Council will apply a $2-million funding windfall it received from Assembly member John Perez to several new initiatives in arts education and community improvement, including Creative California Communities, The Arts in Turnaround Schools, and Jump stARTS. In the face of a 7.6% budget cut handed down last year, the state arts council is taking a gamble on the success of these programs winning fresh credibility with policymakers and an increase in annual funding.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jamie Bennett, chief of staff and director of public affairs at the NEA, will take over as executive director of the creative placemaking funder collaboration ArtPlace America starting in January. He succeeds ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta, who joined the Knight Foundation back in March, and interim head Jeremy Nowak.
• After a decade serving Californians as president of the James Irvine Foundation, James E. Canales will step down in the spring to become the first president of another arts funder, Boston’s Barr Foundation.

• There has been some shuffling in the world of state and local arts councils. Ohio Arts Council ED Julie Henahan has retired after thirty years; Milton Rhodes, President of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in North Carolina, has retired and been succeeded by Jim Sparrow; and Glenda Toups was dismissed from her position as ED of the Houma Regional Arts Council in Louisiana in the wake of the discovery by the board that the Council was not in compliance with state reporting law.

• We’ve known for a while that Michael Kaiser is leaving his post as President of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; now it turns out he’s taking the DeVos Institute of Arts Management with him. Both are moving to the University of Maryland, where Kaiser will be a professor of practice beginning in the fall, and hopes to expand the Institute to include a master’s program.
• Financial news giant Bloomberg has decided to discontinue its cultural journalism brand, Muse, in favor of focusing more on leisure and luxury. Along with the reassignment of Muse editor Manuela Hoelterhoff and a cadre of employees and contracted writers, the news outlet laid off theater critic Jeremy Gerard.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a rigorous new “Openness and Transparency” policy, which assumes from the outset that information the foundation creates should be made public to improve outcomes, spark debate, and foster collaboration. Hewlett’s President Larry Kramer offers context in a post on the foundation’s new blog; transparency watchdogs celebrate the policy.
• The D5 Coalition has released a scan of best practices and a guide to online resources for foundations wishing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion at every stage of their work.

IN THE FIELD

• Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall share profiles of El Sistema “encounters” in five of approximately 55 countries – Sweden, Austria, Korea, Japan, and Canada – that have borrowed from Venezuela’s seminal movement to realize youth development goals through “intensive investment in ensemble music.” The global umbrella for El Sistema has also released the first literature review of “research, evaluation, and critical debates” related to Sistema-inspired programs around the world.
• The Arts Council of Lawrence, New Jersey has shut down after 42 years, having, in the words of one member, “outlived [its] usefulness.” Originally formed by a group of female volunteers, the Council struggled to recruit younger members throughout the recession.
• The August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh is struggling mightily. After a struggle to find an audience and keep backers the organization has been forced to move further and further from its original intention to create a cultural home for the people portrayed in Wilson’s plays, working class African Americans. A conservator has been appointed to try to avoid liquidation.
• The Warehouse, an all-ages music venue in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has filed to become a nonprofit after 22 years as a for-profit, prompting some musicians to wax lyrical about their time there. Financial pressures were the primary impetus, but owner Steve Harm has indicated he will open the space to the local community in new ways to provide a public good.
• Fractured Atlas has added another tool to their encouraging-and-rewarding-arts-entrepreneurship tool belt. The Arts Entrepreneurs Awards will recognize artists and arts organizations who have “innovated new business practices or paradigms” or  “developed novel solutions to old problems.” Nominations will be accepted until December 22nd at 5:59pm.

BIG IDEAS

• A report from the Next Generation Evaluation Conference forecasts “game-changing” trends in impact evaluation, including shorter evaluation cycles and simpler measurement systems.
• “Is social practice gentrifying community arts out?” Arlene Goldbard parses the difference between the art world’s latest obsession and community cultural engagement.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research is about to release its inaugural report, drawing on what it calls the “most comprehensive set of data ever compiled” on arts organizations.  In addition to a statistical overview of the field – did you know that performance of an arts organization is lower in communities with a higher concentration of graduate degrees? – the report attempts to answer the question, “What makes one arts organization more successful than another?” The key turns out to be leadership.
• Speaking of data aggregation, Markets for Good has a progress report on the BRIDGE (Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities) project, an ambitious collaborative effort to identify and map philanthropic entities across the world.
• A new report by the Consumer Federation of America bashes “abuse of market power by a highly concentrated music sector,” argues against the need “to expand copyright holders’ rights,” and suggests that digital file-sharing (aka “piracy”) may, in some cases, actually be good for both artists and consumers. One well-circulated chart suggests that it is the proceeds of live performance, not recordings, that drives artists’ income.
• Gold standard at Crystal Bridges? In a rare, randomized, controlled (albeit “natural”) experiment on the effects of art on students, a single school-group visit to the major new museum appears to have raised students’ scores on vague but desirable traits such as critical thinking, social tolerance, historical empathy, and likelihood of future museum visits. It’s too soon to parse out the effect of contemporary art in particular.
• A study of STEM graduates from the Michigan State University’s Honors College found that graduates who went on to earn patents or start companies had more arts and crafts experiences than the average Americans – and believed their ability to innovate was influenced by that experience. (The paper itself is behind a paywall.)
• How “rampant” is gentrification? New research suggests that most urban areas experienced only “moderate” gentrification in the past decade, with significant variations across cities. Unsurprisingly, gentrification was most prevalent in large and dense metro regions with solid public transit infrastructure.

The Social Impact of the Arts Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1994 with the intent of studying the connection between the arts and community life. Over time, SIAP has established mechanisms to help us measure how the arts benefit the areas they inhabit. Culture and Community Revitalization is the result of two years of research done between 2006 and 2008 and consists of summary materials, a literature review, three policy briefs, and a community investment prospectus. The Rockefeller Foundation, which commissioned Culture and Community Revitalization, asked SIAP to partner with The Reinvestment Fund, a community development financial institution, and find ways to “merge cultural data with other types of information on urban revitalization.” Despite some promising findings from the research overview, Stern and Seifert end on a pessimistic note, cautioning that more research is needed before policy decisions can be based off of SIAP’s linkage of cultural engagement to community revitalization.

The literature review covers a vast array of research on the relationship between the creative sector, economics and social benefits, ultimately determining that while most research explores the connection between culture and economic gains, more work needs to be done better understand the less-quantifiable social impacts. The policy briefs make the case for local policymakers to place more of an emphasis on the arts as a way to unlock the human capital in urban areas. Finally, the community investment prospectus provide practical recommendations and case studies that demonstrate different approaches to investing in cultural clusters.

The main strength of the report is its innovative approach to quantifying the ways arts and culture contribute to community revitalization. One of the main highlights of the Culture and Community Revitalization project is a methodology called the Cultural Asset Index. Stern and Seifert were able to build upon The Reinvestment Fund’s Market Value Analysis methodology to demonstrate that a concentration of cultural assets can be connected to a rise in real estate value. Conversely, the study fails to fully grapple with the potential downsides of neighborhood cultural investment strategies, particularly when it comes to issues around gentrification and displacement. Stern and Seifert’s research leads them to conclude that the benefits of creative clusters are not only about economics but also creating and strengthening social bonds across different types of networks.

Stern and Seifert suggest that cities can encourage the development of “natural” cultural districts by attracting private investment; focusing on “quality of life investments” such as regular trash pick-ups, and more green space;  pursuing workforce development policies that help young people gain entry into the creative sector; and gathering more data and background information about how these cultural clusters work.

Stern and Seifert’s research has been applied in practice since the publication of Culture and Community Revitalization. Most notably, the national creative placemaking initiatives Our Town and ArtPlace have used SIAP’s work in varying degrees to shape their approach to arts funding.

(For a much briefer version of this analysis, please see the Executive Summary.)

SUMMARY

The Social Impact of the Arts Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1994 with the intent of studying the connection between the arts and community life. After all, “if the arts and culture do, in fact, have an important role in improving the lives of ordinary people, we should be able to measure it.” SIAP has completed 13 projects and dozens of related publications since its founding in 1994 and in recent years has frequently partnered with The Reinvestment Fund on its research.

From 2006 to 2008 SIAP’s Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert researched and compiled a set of documents that sought to investigate the real impact of the “creative economy” on community and economic development. The Rockefeller Foundation funded SIAP and The Reinvestment Fund to partner and “merge cultural data with other types of information on urban revitalization.” The project’s publications included a literature review, three policy briefs, and a community investment prospectus in addition to a range of summary materials. This project led SIAP to frame its subsequent work around the concept of “natural” cultural districts, or specific geographic areas dense with cultural assets that have evolved in grassroots fashion.

Literature Review

The centerpiece of Culture and Community Revitalization is an expansive literature review covering three main areas related to the creative sector: culture in the current context, current theories about culture-based revitalization, and the neighborhood-based creative economy. Stern and Seifert argue that, in contrast to the wealth of literature on quantifying the impact of the creative economy, a nuanced approach to the social and community benefits of developing creative sectors has yet to be fully explored. In the end, it may be the community-building influence of the creative sector that will prove the most impactful.

Culture in the Current Context

Stern and Seifert begin the literature review with a tour of various longitudinal shifts that they see as critical to understanding the context in which the creative sector now operates. They begin by analyzing what they call the “new urban reality,” characterized by a few specific factors: increasing social diversity, expanding economic inequality, and the physical reshaping of the city’s industry hubs.

Whereas the middle of the 20^th century was characterized by the exodus of middle and upper class citizens fleeing the urban core for suburbs, the last three to four decades have seen this trend dramatically reverse. An influx of new residents has shifted the types of diversity in urban neighborhoods, especially in the makeup of households (more unmarried households) and the age of inhabitants (more young adults). Additionally, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are increasing the ethnic diversity of urban centers and introducing new forms of artistic engagement into the mix. Meanwhile, income inequality in cities has been exacerbated—as the urban core becomes more attractive, the cost of living has also increased accordingly, pushing out low-income residents. The authors note that the cultural economy is specifically susceptible to the plight of “winner-take-all” markets, a theory promoted by Robert Frank and Phillip Cook that “changes in the American labor market have expanded the number of job categories in which the most skilled members reap a disproportionate share of rewards.”

These demographic and economic changes in cities have also contributed to changes in cities’ physical and geographic structure. Buoyed by the resurgence of cities in general, rehabilitated downtown areas began to serve increasingly important business, entertainment and recreational functions. Production clusters, or decentralized collections of small firms operating in related industries in close proximity, have emerged as a “new kind of spatial organizational form” that is particularly relevant to creative occupations.

Meanwhile, a significant reshaping of the nonprofit cultural sector has been taking place. The authors suggest that “the marketization of the nonprofit cultural sector—the increased stress placed on earned income and financial performance—has been the dominant policy of the cultural sector for the past 15 years.” Over the years these financial pressures, exacerbated by expectations placed on nonprofits by their funders, have put pressure on mid-sized organizations and further stratified the field. The number of small cultural organizations has exploded, but cooperation between community-based groups and large cultural institutions has proven challenging. In the context of this shifting landscape, the dominant paradigm of the cultural sector has changed from high culture vs. mass entertainment to large and broad vs. small and niche.

Given the changes noted above, the notion of a centralized “cultural policy” in the U.S. is essentially obsolete. The arts have never had much of a stronghold in the policy arena, but the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 was born out of a time when top-down, ambitious social and cultural policy goals were the norm. With the subsequent rise in power of global corporations and special interest groups however, government is now “more likely to find itself brokering transactions between contending interests than setting its own agenda.” Nevertheless, the lack of an entrenched cultural bureaucracy and special interests has its advantages. As Stern and Seifert see it, their absence may make it easier for the cultural sector to innovate and be integrated into other areas of policymaking.

The Current State of the Literature

Stern and Seifert divide current research on the economic and social value of the arts into two main categories: creative economy literature and community-building literature. In addition, there is an emerging third category that looks at the negative effects of culture-based revitalization; however, this literature has largely been ignored by researchers who tend to focus on the first two categories.

The first wave of interest in economic development and the arts began with a 1983 study by the Port Authority of NY and NJ that calculated the economic impact of the arts based on nonprofit expenditures and cultural consumption. Similar studies soon followed and contributed to the formation of the first “cultural districts.” A second strand of creative economy literature focuses on creativity’s role in an area’s overall economic productivity. Over time creative economy scholars have expanded the definition of the cultural sector to include both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors; the oft-cited Richard Florida has a particularly broad definition.  Stern and Seifert choose two bodies of research for more in-depth examination: the Center for an Urban Future’s economic impact study of New York City creative industries and Ann Markusen’s work on the economic role of artists. The Center for an Urban Future suggested that policymakers should begin to look at the arts as an economic sector and take bold steps to help neighborhoods working toward permanent cultural development. Markusen focused on the “hidden contributions artists make to regional economies,” concluding that the unique contribution of artists provides an “artistic dividend” to economic development.

Geography is another important factor in the economic development of the arts.  A 1996 study of the Los Angeles design industry by Allen J. Scott suggested that firms choose to be in close geographic proximity to one another because doing so encourages efficiency, innovation, and process improvements. Stern and Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project applied these ideas to Philadelphia, eventually leading them to the concept of “cultural clusters” or “natural cultural districts” that take into account both production and consumption and both economic and social lenses of impact, all at the neighborhood scale.

In contrast to the research on the economic benefits of the cultural sector, studies focused on community building and culture tend to focus on grassroots and community engagement practices. The bodies of work Stern and Seifert examine in depth are Maria Rosario Jackson’s work with the Urban Institute’s Arts and Culture Indicators Project, Alaka Wali’s studies of informal arts in Chicago, the Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley studies of immigrant and participatory arts, and SIAP’s own work on metropolitan Philadelphia. The Urban Institute’s initial study made suggestions for a “conceptual framework” for research and measurement in the field that would include a broad definition of culture. A later report catalogued “initiatives to integrate culture into broader indicators of metropolitan well-being.”

These studies also began to define the “unincorporated,” “participatory,” or “informal arts” to describe cultural activities that take place outside of traditional institutions. Alaka Wali’s Informal Arts project assembled 12 ethnographic case studies of informal arts activities in the Chicago metro area. The report concluded that informal arts strengthen the entire arts sector, bridge social boundaries that sustain inequality, and build community assets.  Wali followed up on Informal Arts with a study for the Field Museum that looked at cultural, social and artistic practices in the Chicago-area Mexican immigrant community, concluding that “through engaging in informal arts…, Mexican immigrants are creating significant social resources, promoting economic participation, developing civic skills, and reaching out to non-immigrants.”

The Silicon Valley studies, by Pia Moriarty and Maribel Alvarez, sought to place the informal arts into local community context and existing models of cultural production. They introduced the concept of “bonded-bridging” (in-group bonding that supports out-group connections) to the literature, and found that despite informal arts practitioners’ “modest and concrete” goals, a “facture [between formal and informal arts contexts] runs through the Valley’s self-identified ‘cultural community.’”

Despite the considerable volume of research on the cultural sector, Stern and Seifert still feel that the potential negative effects of urban revitalization represent a significant gap in the literature. Without closing the door to new evidence, they argue that the “empirical documentation of art-based gentrification is not particularly strong” and suggest the connection between arts-based urban revitalization and gentrification has been overhyped to date. By contrast, Stern and Seifert maintain that economic inequality in the creative sector is a much more pressing, and well-documented, issue. In fact, their study of artists in six American cities “between 1980 and 2000 found that artists were consistently among the individual occupations with the highest degree of income inequality.” Many of the high-paying jobs in the creative sector require advanced schooling, creating a lack of opportunity for residents who have education equivalent to a high school degree or less.

An Ecosystem-Based Approach

SIAP proposes a new way of thinking about community-based revitalization in the creative sector that integrates both economic and social perspectives on the arts which they term the “neighborhood-based creative economy.”  Stern and Seifert see this framework as providing a potential path toward activating the cultural economy of urban neighborhoods, further integrating local residents with the regional economy and civil society.

In SIAP’s conception of the community cultural ecosystem, nonprofit arts organizations must share the “cultural opportunity provider” role with other entities including street festivals and performances, for-profit cultural firms like dance academies or movie theaters, and non-arts community-based organizations. This is not to say that nonprofits cannot still play an important role beyond serving as direct-service providers. They are also fiscal sponsors and networking agents between regional entities and creative sources; additionally, they often open their physical space to smaller groups. Overall the community cultural ecosystem is interdependent, no matter if the arts organization is a for-profit, nonprofit or “informal” artistic entity.

To provide a quantitative counterpart to this theoretical notion of the community cultural ecosystem, Stern and Seifert constructed a matrix for Culture and Community Revitalization called the Cultural Asset Index. SIAP identified four cultural asset measures–nonprofit cultural organizations, commercial cultural firms, individual artists, and regional participation rates–and localized each of these measures to block groups within the Philadelphia region. Using a factor analysis, Stern and Seifert were able to reduce these four measures to a single variable (a “cultural asset score”) that explained 81% of the variance in the four measures. Then, through regression analysis, they developed an equation to model predicted cultural asset concentrations in Philadelphia based on per capita income, % non-family households, and distance from the city center. Finally, they identified neighborhoods that had higher-than-expected cultural asset scores based on those inputs. One of the purposes of this analysis was to integrate SIAP’s work with the Market Value Analysis methodology of their project partner, The Reinvestment Fund, which resulted in some of the findings reported elsewhere in this summary. Stern and Seifert suggest using this information in various other ways, such as classifying areas strong in cultural assets as cultural districts; targeting workforce development efforts towards low-income, culturally rich areas; and targeting social inclusion interventions towards low-income, culture-poor neighborhoods.

There is a natural tension between the creative economy and community-oriented ideas of cultural revitalization: whereas the latter seeks to lift up currently marginalized elements of the population, the economic approach tends to concentrate resources on “the most visible and profitable aspects of the creative sector.” Unfortunately, the bulk of the discussion and research on the value of culture to society seeks to justify investment solely through an economic lens and valorizes “creative” workers at the expense of everyone else, potentially exacerbating economic inequality. Due to the substantial support labor required by creative occupations, Stern and Seifert encourage policymakers to explore untapped workforce development opportunities that may be lurking within the creative economy.

Despite some promising findings from the research overview, Stern and Seifert end on a pessimistic note, cautioning that more research is needed before policy decisions can be based off of SIAP’s linkage of cultural engagement to community revitalization. They do argue forcefully that in a rational world, policymakers would limit their investments in large-scale cultural projects whose primary purpose is to serve tourists, given the lack of evidence to suggest how low- and moderate-income individuals can benefit from such initiatives. Nevertheless, the authors acknowledge that a number of factors play into policymaking decisions regarding culture and revitalization, and admit that even the promising evidence of social benefits SIAP documented likely isn’t compelling enough or on a large enough scale to garner the support to push through substantive policy changes. 

Policy Briefs and Community Prospectus

While the literature review forms the center of the Culture and Community Revitalization project, SIAP bolsters it with a set of policy briefs to highlight practical applications of its findings. The first policy brief, “From Creative Economy to Creative Society: A social policy paradigm for the creative sector has the potential to address urban poverty as well as urban vitality,” synthesizes much of the literature review and makes a full-throated case for a neighborhood-based approach to cultural development focused on social inclusion rather than economic prosperity. Stern and Seifert advocate for a revitalization strategy that is “both place- and people-based—that is, it should be grounded in a given locale but have active connections with other neighborhoods and economies throughout the city and region.”

The policy brief recommends that policymakers move away from the centralized planned cultural district model that has been in vogue for some time and instead “identify grassroots nodes as leverage points for public, private, and philanthropic investment” to create sustainable, multi-faceted forms of culturally based redevelopment opportunities.  Focusing on smaller-scale cultural clusters and resources would better address the concerns of “winner-take-all markets,” the relegation of much creative activity to the informal economy, and displacement as a result of gentrification.

In their second policy brief “Migrants, Communities and Cultures,” coauthored by Domenic Vitello, Stern and Seifert use immigrant communities in Philadelphia as a case study for the ways in which the informal arts sector can help build important community ties.  Philadelphia’s rapidly growing, ethnically and economically diverse immigrant populations are also home to diverse forms of cultural expression, but they don’t tend to generate relationships with established cultural organizations. In spite of this, the arts can serve as a connective force that can help immigrants adapt to their new surroundings and form social connections in their new communities.  Due to a stronger immigrant presence in the informal arts sector, cities will need to better research how these newer forms of cultural expression can be better utilized to improve the lives of immigrant communities.

“Cultivating ‘Natural’ Cultural Districts,” the  third and final policy brief, introduces the concept of “natural” cultural districts, which are neighborhoods or areas in a city that have “spawned a density of assets— organizations, businesses, participants, and artists— that sets [them] apart from other neighborhoods.” Because these hubs are naturally occurring and build on pre-existing assets, they  offer advantages over cultural districts planned entirely by the city. Stern and Seifert write that the latter “only occasionally are economic successes; most require high, on-going subsidies and effectively feed contemporary cities’ growth of economic inequality.” Stern and Seifert suggest that cities can encourage the development of “natural” cultural districts by attracting private investment; focusing on “quality of life investments” such as regular trash pick-ups, and more green space; pursuing workforce development policies that help young people gain entry into the creative sector; and gathering more data and background information about how these cultural clusters work.

Finally, the community investment prospectus provides a framework for the for-profit and nonprofit sectors to consider modes of investment in arts and culture to facilitate the establishment of vibrant communities. Authored by The Reinvestment Fund’s CEO Jeremy Nowak, “Creativity and Neighborhood Development: Strategies for Community Investment” calls for broadening  “the notion of who…should be part of planning, policy, decision-making and financing related to this field” as well as “top-down and bottom-up strategies that will expand the resources available.” The investment prospectus is accompanied by a case study detailing how a mixture of private and public investment transformed the Crane Arts Plumbing Company’ building in Old Kensington Philadelphia from an industrial space to a true arts hub in the neighborhood. The building now houses “37 studios for different artistic mediums, rooms for three arts organizations, and space for community events.”

ANALYSIS                                                                   

Overall, Stern and Seifert present a comprehensive scan of the current state of the work on urban revitalization and the creative economy. Unlike many other studies on the subject, Stern and Seifert have created a quantitative methodology that allows users to quantify cultural activity in specific locations. Their research highlights some areas that need further study and emphasizes some theories that have the potential to truly change the way policymakers and practitioners view the relationship between culture and economy and even how the cultural sector can be organized and operationalized.

That said, there are some weaker points of the study that need more clarification or further research to drive home the ideas Stern and Seifert really want to promote. One of the main themes of SIAP’s work is the positive social impact of cultural activity, but Stern and Seifert seem to waver between emphatically making this point and stressing the need for further study. In addition, the authors don’t fully weigh the meaning of gentrification and related negative impacts of culture-based revitalization, and neglect to make constructive suggestions for further inquiry.

Does culture truly contribute to local economies?

One of the main highlights of the Culture and Community Revitalization project is the Cultural Asset Index. Most research on the arts’ economic and social effects hasn’t attempted nearly as much depth or specificity in showing the relationship between cultural density and other indicators. Stern and Seifert were able to build upon The Reinvestment Fund’s Market Value Analysis methodology to demonstrate that a concentration of cultural assets can be connected to a rise in real estate value. SIAP’s methods to identify rich concentrations of cultural assets in unexpected places could potentially be really empowering for neighborhoods and residents. By uplifting the cultural value in diverse areas, the Cultural Asset Index and its associated correlations can help people within and outside these areas to understand how culture shapes their communities for the better. However, it is unclear exactly how SIAP calculates the index, which could hamper efforts for those unfamiliar with the concepts to understand how it works.

Stern and Seifert conclude that the benefits of creative clusters are not only about economics but also creating and strengthening social bonds across different types of networks. Through its work in Philadelphia and beyond, SIAP is attempting to create empirical methods that show how community arts and the informal arts contribute to the social and economic landscape of cities. A significant weakness of the community-building research cited in the literature review is that the studies take practitioners’ subjective impressions of neighborhood impacts at their word without trying to measure them quantitatively. An example of a more quantitative approach is SIAP’s earlier work establishing a connection between community culture and child welfare in Philadelphia—low-income block groups with high cultural participation were more than twice as likely as comparable block groups to have low truancy and delinquency. More importantly, in original research completed for the Culture and Community Revitalization project, Stern and Seifert found that block groups with high participation rates were twice as likely to undergo economic revitalization, defined as “above average poverty decline and population gain,” a finding supported by further analysis using real estate market classifications from The Reinvestment Fund.  SIAP posits that the correlation between cultural engagement and poverty decline is connected to the cross-geographical/class/ethnic pollination that occurs in cultural hubs. However, Stern and Seifert have not yet been able to clearly attribute these changes to cultural engagement or identify the specific mechanism that causes that change. One possible explanation, supported by the research in the literature review, is the increase of a neighborhood’s “collective efficacy” – its residents’ ability to imagine and work towards positive change.

The authors also postulate that cultural engagement leads to broader civic engagement, but admit that there is little data that can provide linkage between the two.  Part of the “social role” of cultural engagement is defined as the ability of formal and informal arts organizations to attract attendees from outside the local community, helping urban residents experience different parts of their city. Unfortunately, a “lack of comparable data on other forms of community engagement”  to back up the claim that the arts serve as a connective tissue for the social improvement of communities  weakens the case that the benefits of cultural clusters can be seen in social outcomes as opposed to economic outcomes. In spite of this, the original research SIAP has done thus far has uncovered some promising indicators that deserve further exploration.

Much of the data collected is specifically tied to place—namely Philadelphia—making it hard to extrapolate the findings to the nation as a whole. In their analysis of cultural clusters, Stern and Seifert speak to the way that neighborhood-based cultural ecosystems localize the production and consumption of their products and how that contributes to economic stabilization and revitalization. Since much of their reporting focuses on Philadelphia at the turn of the millennium, it is difficult to know whether there were conditions specific to the Philadelphia economy that contributed to their findings or if these were more universal trends. That said, since Culture and Community Revitalization was completed in 2008 SIAP has undertaken studies of other cities, namely Baltimore and Seattle.

Does the idea of “natural cultural districts” resonate with grassroots arts organizations?

Stern and Seifert do a great job of cataloguing the benefits of “informal” cultural participation. For example, they dedicate one of the policy briefs entirely to exploring how the informal arts help connect immigrant communities to services and networks in their new environments. Depending on the intended audience is for this set of research, Seifert and Stern could be providing a great amount of assistance not only for interested researchers who are not specialists in the field, but for advocates and staff of community-based organizations as well. However, the way the report is organized makes it difficult for me to envision the same community-based organizations they uplift in the reports being able to effectively use the research in their work. However, if this is not their intended audience, who are they trying to influence? Do they see this report as a way to help practitioners advocate for the importance of their contributions to their local landscapes?

What role does gentrification play?

Although rising real estate values are a positive outcome on the surface, especially in economically depressed or distressed areas, they do not necessarily bring rising income levels or job prospects to neighborhood residents. While these changes can benefit longtime residents of a developing creative cluster, it is only a benefit to those who actually own property and can manage the subsequent rise in property taxes. Many times, the smartest option for these types of residents is to sell their property (if they even own it in the first place), which could disrupt the neighborhood’s population dynamics and character—low-income residents are not going to sell property with an increased value to other low-income individuals who simply cannot afford the rising price of their real estate. If SIAP’s “natural” cultural districts do not create jobs that are widely accessible to existing residents of the area but eventually drive up the cost of real estate, the question emerges: how truly beneficial are these creative clusters to the average person? Moreover, how do the economic and demographic shifts in these clusters change the nature of the cultural assets that are produced?

Overall, the authors were largely dismissive of the effects of gentrification and its relationship to the arts in their literature review. However, Stern and Seifert do not provide a clear understanding of how they are defining gentrification for the purposes of that assessment, or specific examples of research that failed to show a displacement effect. Instead, they assert that there is not enough clear information about gentrification for them to truly consider it as a factor in their research. This struck me as an odd claim, especially given Stern’s background in U.S. social history and his research on racial inequality. This is a disconnect that continues throughout their body of work.

Stern and Seifert draw a connection between cultural clusters and both economic inequality and rising real estate costs, yet they treat these shifts as wholly separate from the broader issue of gentrification. My personal understanding is that economic inequality and expensive real estate are considered prime contributing factors to gentrification. Since Stern and Seifert do not acknowledge the relationship between these phenomena, it would have been helpful for them to provide the reader with a clearer understanding of what they mean using terms like gentrification or neighborhood stabilization instead of assuming universal understanding of these terms.

IMPLICATIONS

Regardless of whether or not the strategies SIAP promotes are the best ones to employ, they are definitely some of the most influential theories out there. Joan Shigekawa, the Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Jeremy Nowak, the Interim Director of ArtPlace, were both involved with the organizational entities that funded and collaborated in the Culture and Community Revitalization project. Prior to her term at the NEA, Shigekawa was the Associate Director for Foundation Initiatives at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the study. Nowak is the co-founder and former CEO of The Reinvestment Fund, one of the lead partners in this work. As a result, they’ve begun to explore some of the ideas SIAP has developed about the creative economy into the institutions they now run.

How has work on culture and urban revitalization progressed since the study was published?

In my research, it has been difficult to find models of community revitalization using cultural clusters that do not tie into some, if not all of the theories that are covered in this series of research studies.  Stern and Seifert’s research on local production and consumption, as well as their emphasis on the social benefits of creative placemaking, are deserving of policymakers and advocates’ attentions.   Curiously, at the end of Culture and Community Revitalization’s literature review the authors seem to downplay the role of natural cultural clusters in enhancing urban revitalization, stating that in spite of the correlations between culture, social engagement, and economic improvement, these correlations “do not produce direct-enough benefits to generate enthusiasm among those who actually determine the fate of cities.”

Yet, as previously mentioned, two large philanthropic entities are in the midst of executing their own round of funding based on the idea that cultural assets can improve communities socially and economically. Nowak’s ArtPlace is a collaboration between foundations to put “art at the heart of a portfolio of strategies designed to revitalize communities.” Prior to heading up ArtPlace, Nowak helped it get off the ground as president of one of its original funding partners, the William Penn Foundation.  ArtPlace makes grants in all 50 states and has awarded over $42 million to different organizations thus far. The NEA’s Our Town program, begun under Shigekawa’s tenure as Senior Deputy Chairman of the agency, explains its grantmaking objective as providing funding for “creative placemaking projects that contribute toward the livability of communities and help transform them into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core.” Notably, both funding entities have supported SIAP and TRF’s latest collaboration in partnership with the City of Philadelphia, an interactive data portal called CultureBlocks, specifically designed to bridge the gap between cultural assets and City Hall in the name of community revitalization.

All of this philanthropic activity does beg the question: if natural cultural clusters already exist and are improving their communities, is it really necessary for the public and private sector to get involved? Observing the trajectory of the ArtPlace and Our Town initiatives will help bear this question out.

Are there better models out there?

As pointed out in a previous Createquity piece on the arts and gentrification, there are some really innovative artist and community-driven projects focused on neighborhood revitalization and stabilization across the country. These projects include Project Row Houses in Houston, the work of Theaster Gates Rebuild Foundation on the South Side of Chicago, and the Watts House Project in Watts, CA. Though these projects have been subject to their own criticisms, they do seem to provide an alternative to both completely “natural” cultural cluster development and the completely government-initiated cultural district approach. That said, the aforementioned projects have all been implemented within the past decade—it is still too early to truly determine how deep of an impact they will make, both locally and nationally. Will another innovator be able to combine the work of the artist/community developers and the theories promoted by Stern and Seifert? Is that even the path that should be taken or is it best to leave “natural” cultural clusters alone to develop according to their own ethos?

Additional Reading:

• For more information on the concept of “natural” cultural clusters
• CultureBlocks website
• Local NBC news affiliate on the launch of CultureBlocks

Awaiting Gentrification in Crown Heights – photo by Jeff Chou

It seems that you can’t read an article about New York City in any news source, whether it’s Gawker or the New York Times, without hearing the buzzword “gentrification.” But what do people mean when they toss this word around and how does it look to the people living in affected areas? Why do people draw a connection between artistic hubs and gentrification? Though gentrification is a catch-all term used to describe a range of interrelated outcomes, it is generally connected to changes in an area’s culture and character, demographics, the real estate market, and land use.  Due to a long history of rampant racial inequity in U.S. housing and public policy, the term is also closely associated with a larger idea of “a miscarriage of social justice, in which wealthy, usually white, newcomers are congratulated for ‘improving’ a neighborhood whose poor, minority residents are displaced by skyrocketing rents and economic change.”In recent years, two neighborhoods in New York City, Crown Heights and Harlem, have undergone dramatic physical, cultural and demographic changes. Both neighborhoods are attracting new residents along with businesses that cater to their tastes. You only have to walk down the streets of either these two neighborhoods to see that the process of gentrification is well underway, if not almost complete. In recent months, New York Magazine and the New York Times have published articles about the city’s reinvigorated real estate market, especially in areas like Harlem that even ten years ago were still seen as areas that needed civic investment and redevelopment if they were to appeal to mainstream middle- or upper-class tastes.

The massive transitions taking place in Harlem and Crown Heights are just as closely tied to economic status as they are to race. Sociologist Sharon Zukin defines gentrification as a process of spatial and social differentiation that results from the influx of educated, middle-class people into low-income areas. The form of urban gentrification seen over the last half century differs from previous incarnations because of the type of cultural capital these new urban dwellers bring with them. The new agents of gentrification seek out the same characteristics that made previous generations flee urban areas, namely distinctly urban attributes like diversity, walkability and historic significance. While these new urbanites may not always be economically well-off, they are drawn to the aesthetics of what they see as the “authentic” city, but inevitably their surroundings are eventually molded by their own presence.

Watching the process of gentrification unfold in New York City may be an opportunity to learn from arts-based community revitalization efforts in places like Watts, CA; Houston, TX; and Chicago, IL, and give policymakers, practitioners and residents an opportunity to envision an inclusive future for their community. Although both Crown Heights and Harlem have experienced an exodus of many of their black residents, blacks still maintain a tenuous plurality in most parts of these neighborhoods, indicating that while there is a threat of increased displacement, there may also be opportunities for those remaining to take an active part in the reshaping of their communities.  Will Crown Heights and Harlem fall prey to the oft-discussed negative consequences of gentrification? Or is there still opportunity for these neighborhoods to retain a connection to their original inhabitants?

Why Crown Heights and Harlem?

Both Harlem and Crown Heights (and more broadly, Brooklyn) have their own cultural currency tied to a heritage that has dominated much of U.S. popular culture over the past twenty years. These neighborhoods are synonymous with defining artistic movements in black culture like jazz and hip hop, art forms that have had a global impact. The connection these two neighborhoods have to cultural milestones such as the Harlem Renaissance and the early work of Spike Lee attracts new residents eager to build upon the past and contribute to a new phase of development in their own way.

Brooklyn racial demographics, 2000, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center 

Brooklyn racial demographics, 2010, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center

In spite of the fact that more and more young white New Yorkers are moving to the neighborhood of Crown Heights, a majority of residents are distinctly not part of the wealthiest tier of society.  Crown Heights is not the kind of place like Williamsburg or DUMBO that gets highlighted in discussions about the new wave of New York’s vibrant arts scene. There is plenty of existing grassroots arts activity from practicing individual artists, community based organizations, and community-based arts projects, it is still difficult for local cultural organizations based in Crown Heights to garner enough funding and support to work with under-resourced communities, with dueling priorities like crime and education. That said, the changing demographics of the area, as well as its proximity to attractions like the Brooklyn Museum and the Barclays Center and the resulting increase in real estate value, has attracted the attention of traditional and untraditional creative placemakers.

Upper Manhattan racial demographics, 2000, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center

 Upper Manhattan racial demographics, 2010, courtesy of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center 

Although Harlem has a more well-established cultural brand and presence than Crown Heights, it too is becoming a hub for creative industry and the creative class, albeit in a different form. Tour buses constantly drive through Harlem, giving visitors a chance to view iconic landmarks like the Apollo Theater or visit the Studio Museum in Harlem. Over the past three years, Harlem has gained two independent multi-use creative arts spaces, MIST and ImageNation, started by long-time Harlem residents or advocates. These organizations are helping to shift the perception that change in previously distressed communities has to come from the top down. Instead, they demonstrate that culturally-based organizations can uplift and strengthen the creativity that already exists in a mutually beneficial way.

For all of the discussion of gentrification and displacement, it seems that many authors and researchers approach the issue from the frame of high-income whites displacing low-income people of color. What happens when high-income people of color become part of the process of redevelopment and reinvestment? The presence of MIST and Imagenation in Harlem highlight the nuanced dimensions of gentrification and confront misconceptions about what the process entails, who the drivers are, and how established residents play a part in the redevelopment of their neighborhood.

What Role Does The City Play?

Entire books have been written about New York City’s public policy, city planning, and their relationships with the arts and gentrification. Today’s New York has a unique relationship with gentrification because the constant hunt for refuge from the city’s high cost of living, paired with the city’s concentration of wealth, makes for some combustive elements.

In September 2008 the New York Times ran a brief update on a redevelopment project, titled Mart 125, which would include 67,000-square-foot space for a cultural and commercial complex across the street from the Apollo Theater.  Mart 125, an urban revitalization plan originally conceived nearly 20 years earlier in 1986, encountered delay after setback after delay until the Bloomberg administration issued an RFP to reinvigorate the project in 2008. As the Times article notes, arts organizations that met a threshold of financial stability and community involvement would get preference in the process of becoming a selected tenant. One of the selected occupants of this space was ImageNation, a small nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to “establis[h] a chain of art-house cinemas, dedicated to progressive media by and about people of color.” As part of executing that mission, the organization sought to create a gathering space for the community that could also serve as an affordable visual and performance arts venue.

Headed by Moikgantsi Kgama, a long-time Harlem resident with roots in the independent filmmaking community, ImageNation had been searching for a permanent home for its frequent events almost since its inception in 1997. The organization and its staff needed the room to expand and live up to its goal of becoming a go-to place for art-house cinema. In a recent interview Kgama noted that Mart 125 seemed to be the perfect opportunity for ImageNation to capitalize on the growing community reinvestment in Harlem. By the turn of the 21^st century the more commercial aims of Mart 125 were coming to fruition, with new outposts of Starbucks, H&M and American Apparel opening up on the strip of 125^th Street between Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X Boulevards.  The city and its various development agencies seemed poised to make good on their commitment to provide space for local cultural organizations. ImageNation and other organizations were strengthened by the rigorous RFP process and collaborative relationships with various city agencies, which asked them to meet tough benchmarks related to fiscal and organizational management to equip them for long-term success. Then the 2008 financial crisis descended upon the nation, the city’s priorities shifted and the community-based arts organization focus of Mart 125 stalled. Kgama and the staff of ImageNation remained determined to develop space in Harlem, along with other organizations like My Image Studio Theater Harlem (MIST). Both organizations opened space in Harlem in 2012, years after Mart 125 had come to a virtual standstill.

Today, MIST and ImageNation join a cohort of creative organizations run by people of color that are contributing to Harlem’s legacy as a creative hub for the city. These organizations are intentional about how they fit into the community and what role they should play in Harlem’s artistic ecosystem. Not surprisingly, they appear to be embraced wholeheartedly by the community’s new and old residents. ImageNation not only screens films and provides gallery space for up and coming artists, they also host engaging community events such as an attempt to create the world’s longest Soul Train Line, in honor of Don Cornelius, and to draw attention to Mental Health Awareness month.

In May of 2012 the New York City Economic Development Corporation issued a request for construction bids to resume redevelopment and attempt to continue on with the Mart 125 project. In spite of the delays with the city-sponsored community redevelopment, it seems that these community based organizations have been able integrate themselves into the neighborhood in ways that respect the integrity of Harlem’s long cultural history while contributing to the neighborhood’s evolution.  Would these organizations have been established in their current forms without the push for gentrification and development from the city? It is hard to tell. What is clear is that ImageNation and other local arts organizations have been able to capitalize on the interest in the “new” Harlem in order to gain access to the space they need to serve their community.

What Role Does the Private Sector Play?

In Crown Heights, the connection between gentrification and creative placemaking has been driven more by private sector dollars than by civic investment. Crown Heights is not connected to a specific cultural moment like the Harlem Renaissance, but it is increasingly being cited in articles about gentrification in New York City. Though there are established organizations in the community that use the arts as part of their programming, Crown Heights has attracted two large-scale creative placemaking projects that have met very different fates. While one has received a large amount of private financing derived from sources outside of the community, another, a brainchild of Crown Heights residents, has floundered.

Brooklyn’s recent resurgence as a cultural destination has been buoyed in part by the various enterprises of Jonathan Butler, creator of the website Brownstoner and co-creator of the very popular Brooklyn Flea. In 2012 it became public that Butler and his business partners were planning a large-scale development project in the heart of Crown Heights. The project being proposed is a mixed-use development that will provide space for artists and food vendors from the Brooklyn Flea to create and sell their wares. Unlike his contemporaries in Harlem, Butler epitomizes what many envision when they think of gentrification: white, wealthy, and attracted to the “potential” of under-resourced neighborhoods. Through his personal connections to Wall Street, Butler was able to raise seed capital from Goldman Sachs to fund his newest venture. This has given Butler and his partners the freedom to “seek input and support” from city agencies and politicians, without being completely dependent upon bureaucratic maneuvering to complete the project.  Instead of the drawn-out process that stalled Mart 125, Butler has been able to close on this $30 million project and is already in talks with potential tenants. Contrast this with the experience of the small arts organizations in Harlem, or the more recent attempts of a group of artists in Crown Heights who have been unsuccessful thus far in their attempts to purchase a building in the area for a similar purpose as Butler and his partners.

Although Butler has been able to breeze past the bureaucratic red tape and ecure space for his tenants, long-term residents of Crown Heights are wary of the project, seeing it as a harbinger of higher rents and changing demographics. Indeed, Crown Heights has had a high influx of white, upper income residents according to the 2010 census. There are also few signs that Butler or his private sector partners are looking at this as an opportunity to engage the diverse communities currently living within Crown Heights. On the day Butler announced the building purchase, Brownstoner posted a publicly available survey of potential tenants asking where interested businesses and business owners were currently located. However, questions about race or income levels, which would directly speak to the economic and social tensions that this project uncovers, remain unasked. In more recent reports it appears that tenants will be handpicked by Butler and his investors, maintaining continuity with the brand his previous ventures have established, regardless of how that affects the current community.

According to Ms. Kgama of ImageNation, it is difficult for small arts organizations that are led by or serve people of color to succeed because they often don’t have the fiscal backing or stability to compete for larger funding opportunities. At the same time, as Kgama points out, in rapidly gentrifying areas “it helps” for the organization to be led and staffed by people of color, so long as it is reflective of the surrounding area. Although there are a diverse range of experiences within every ethnic group, more often than not organizations led by people of color are more responsive to the wants and needs of minority groups, thereby making their host communities more receptive to their presence.

This also suggests that instead of a top-down approach, the needs of the community will be reflected in the programming showcased by the “gentrifying” organization. So far MIST and ImageNation seem to be embraced because their leaders made a conscious decision, reflected in their mission, to be reflective of and responsive to the cultural legacy of their host communities. It remains to be seen if Butler will take an inclusive approach to his new project, or if he is even concerned with avoiding perception as a malignant gentrifier. If he is, there are a few organizations in Harlem that he can ask for tips.

Gentrification – photo by Michael Daines

Impetus

“Artists as the ‘shock troops of gentrification’.”

That’s a quote by art historian/critic Rosalyn Deutsche included by Creative Time in a recent email invitation to its upcoming summit on the “contributions and complicity of culture in the development of 21st century urban space.”

And here’s an excerpt from Project for Public Spaces’ article, “All Placemaking is Creative” published last month (emphasis mine):

Placemaking…is a vital part of economic development. And yet, there has long been criticism that calls into question whether or not this process is actually helping communities to develop their local economies, or merely accelerating the process of gentrification in formerly-maligned urban core neighborhoods. We believe that this is largely due to confusion over what Placemaking is, and who “gets” to be involved. If placemaking is project-led, development-led, design-led or artist-led, then it does likely lead to gentrification and a more limited set of community outcomes.

Project for Public Spaces is a NYC-based nonprofit that advances placemaking (without the creative modifier). Its article makes a few good points, most importantly that placemaking should be an inclusive process and that there is not a singular “community,” but rather, pluralistic communities. But I winced when I read its damaging mischaracterizations of artists’ roles in placemaking, which ironically undermine its call for inclusivity. It implies that artists’ place at the community development table comes at the expense of other voices being heard. I got the sense that it dismissed artists as privileged others, as opposed to the “regular people” who should be shaping placemaking processes. It seemed to lump artists with developers and planners in terms of power and clout. All are harmful mischaracterizations.

The PPS article and shock troop quote propelled me to coalesce some of the thoughts that have been swirling around my head about why we perceive artists as gentrifiers, where those bleed into misperceptions, and how to learn from both.

The Bigger Picture

It’s a new phenomenon for artists to have a place at the table of community development. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and ArtPlace have, collectively, invested $41.6 million in creative placemaking projects in just two years. This is an impressive amount of resources and the momentum is exciting. However, it’s still a drop in the bucket when one considers all of the dollars for community and economic development in this country. By way of comparison, in 2010 and 2011 the federal government invested $240 million in just one grant program (HUD Sustainable Communities). Happily, in 2011 HUD took the unprecedented step of including arts and culture in Sustainable Communities grants, one result of the creative placemaking frame. But consistently considering arts and culture within community development efforts is still far from common practice.

The scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal still shape what neighborhoods look like, who lives where, residents’ access to good education and employment, and what homes are worth. The fates of swaths of neighborhoods are out of residents’ hands; banks have foreclosed on large percentages of properties. Sketchy lending and a demand for mortgage backed securities means ownership is not vested with the people living there, but rather with countless remote and untraceable investors who own “toxic assets.” Cozy sweetheart deals between politicians and developers, forged in the name of economic development, are still common. When land-use decisions do include public participation, middle-class homeowners and whites are more apt to show up and speak up at meetings than low-income renters and people of color. Non-English speakers are often forced to rely on impromptu translators or aren’t even in the room because the announcement flyer wasn’t in their native tongue. These are the kinds of placemaking inequities we should challenge and change, instead of turning artists into scapegoats.

When we talk about issues of power, social inequities, or “the politics of belonging and (dis)belonging,” as Roberto Bedoya so eloquently frames, I want us to remember that artists, on average, have low incomes, and that they are not all white. The NEA’s Artists and Arts Workers in the United States (2011) reveals that musicians, dancers and choreographers, photographers, and other entertainers’ median salary is under $28,000. Despite artists’ high levels of educational attainment, the average salary for all artist occupations (including architects) is just over $43,000. Over twenty percent of artists are racial/ethnic minorities. And these statistics are only for people for whom being an artist is their “primary” job.

We have an unfortunate tendency in the U.S. to view artists as special/different/other. Larry Gross likens it to artists being on a reservation or special island in his On the Margins of Art Worlds. As early as elementary school, teachers single out a few students with god-given talent from the apparently uncreative masses. This is a cultural construct. In Native American cultures, art is an integral part of life, not a separate vocation/occupation. In their Native Artists: Livelihoods, Resources, Space, Gifts (2009), Markusen and Rendon point out that there is no word for art in Ojibwe or in many tribal languages.

One wonderful role that artists play in dominant U.S. culture is that of the provocateur, and for that, yes, they do need a bit of distance to see things and make critical commentary. But that certainly does not mean they are by default elitist, snobs or more creative than thou. They are of the community. They are some of the regular people that proponents of inclusive placemaking, like PPS, should wish to involve. They happen to have unique skill sets and when they’re game to apply them for the common good via placemaking, we should embrace and nurture their efforts.

The Antitheticals

Hennepin Avenue Re: Model led by visual artist Ta-coumba Aiken as part of Plan-It Hennepin’s Creating Urban Visions workshop. Photo by Mark Vancleave, 2012.

Recently in Minneapolis, I witnessed how a team of artists from Tom Borrup’s Creative Community Builders used movement, song, writing exercises, and sculpting to draw out participants’ visions for Hennepin Avenue. The “regular” people at the meeting both seemed to have more fun and contribute richer and more nuanced ideas than I have witnessed in typical community planning meetings. The planning process for the cultural district also harnessed teenagers’ creativity. It empowered them to canvas the avenue to suss out public space (and its absence), interview people, and document through video.

As executive director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, Roberto Bedoya puts his money where his mouth is—supporting projects consistent with his public call for more emphasis on issues of social inequities within the creative placemaking policy rhetoric. In the Finding Voice program, for example, refugee youth generate stories and images through print publications and art projects at the mall and bus stops. These forms of expression help make their lives visible and affirm their place in Tucson’s civic fabric. In another example, artist/architect Bill Mackey worked with dozens of collaborators on Worker Transit Authority. In an exhibition of mock planning projects created by a mock planning authority, Tucson residents engaged in three weeks of dialogue on issues of land use, infrastructure, and transportation.

In the Dorchester neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side and increasingly in cities across the country, Theaster Gates asks impertinent questions about the way things are and invents alternatives—he calls it art, and gatekeeper establishments like MOCA (Los Angeles), the Whitney Biennial, and Armory Show (New York) agree. He turned an abandoned two-story house into a library, in part to thumb his nose at city officials who claimed there weren’t enough resources to expand that level of services into the neighborhood. He looks for and exploits all the tie-ins and synergies he can find. Black Cinema House, for instance, converts a small abandoned Dorchester home into a neighborhood space for screenings and conversation. Master builders and educators employed local residents in the deconstruction of the old space, providing job skills. Black Cinema House will also ultimately provide live/work space for film-and media-based artists of color.

The artists involved in these kinds of initiatives are deeply motivated by concerns for social justice and equity. They often come from the neighborhood they seek to benefit or other strong ties may fuel their commitment.

Dorchester Projects Library by artist Theaster Gates. Photo by Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, 2012.

The Agnostics

Other artists have no interest in placemaking at all, and that’s also a completely valid choice. They may be traditional object makers or present works of theater, dance, or music in conventional venues. Those works of art also bring society joy and beauty; they inspire us or make us question f***ed up stuff.

Some artists might rehab a building as a studio or residence, because they just need an affordable place to live and work. They spruce it up and add value. They may be good neighbors, but have no interest in opening up their homes and workspace for frequent community events.

Untangling Culpability

But the role of artists as gentrifiers is, unfortunately, deeply entrenched in our collective popular imagination. People intuitively feel artists are attracted to down and out neighborhoods and can invest sweat equity, money, and artist juju into properties. They’ve heard about the SoHo effect and how artists are often victims of processes they set into motion; they get priced out of the very neighborhoods they helped to turn around.

Through my work, I’ve learned that it’s not so simple. Since the 1970s, thousands of American and European urban neighborhoods have been gentrified without artists involved, often by developers, often with public funding, chiefly to young professionals and to suburban retirees wishing to live in the city. Ann Markusen points out that gentrification is a function of generalized pressure on urban land markets—i.e. in NYC, every rich person in the world has to have an apartment—and that it does not occur in most small towns and in urban neighborhoods in vast portions of many cites.

Here are some of the ways the story varies in cities with weak real estate markets. In Lowertown, St. Paul, I documented artist space initiatives that spanned a fifteen-year period and were part of an overarching affordable housing strategy. I found few red flags for gentrification-led displacement beyond dislocating vagrants that sheltered in the abandoned buildings themselves. The neighborhood is more racially and ethnically diverse than before the artist spaces, and, for better or worse, still has quite high poverty levels. In Philadelphia, Mark Stern and Susan Seifert have documented fascinating community benefits that occur from “cultural clusters” (or concentrations of cultural participants, nonprofit arts organizations, commercial cultural firms, and resident artists). They find that these neighborhoods have higher levels of civic engagement, increased population and housing values, and decreased poverty rates, with little evidence of ethnic displacement.

Even with the most notorious example, SoHo, the story is more complicated than artists suddenly making the area have cachet and driving up prices all by their lonesome. In her seminal Loft Living, Sharon Zukin maps a system of government officials and real estate and banking interests. She tells the story of how they turned to live/work zoning and marketing of the bohemian lifestyle as a profitable way to deal with under-utilized industrial buildings and attract middle-class individuals to the area.

The Co-opted

As the SoHo example suggests, even though “shock troops” is an overstatement of artists’ roles in gentrification, pawns may not be. The perceived link between artists and gentrification is one reason that mayors, developers, and business improvement districts “buy” creative placemaking’s potential. The policy architects behind creative placemaking have been pretty transparent about their implicit goals of attracting such non-traditional arts stakeholders to invest in arts and culture.

The merits of silo-busting aside, I have serious qualms about artists being co-opted within creative placemaking projects. Particularly as advanced by the NEA (but also by ArtPlace), creative placemaking emphasizes cross-sector partnerships. Within NEA-funded projects, an arts or cultural organization always participates, but they may not be the lead partner. Even within arts organizations, administrators far removed from artistic processes may drive institutional involvement. Unfortunately, I’ve seen the line item for artist fees get cut before other project expenses when projects faced budget constraints. Artists are used to coming to foundations and city officials as supplicants, with outstretched hands, palms up, often unaware of their value. They certainly do not rival developers in terms of political savvy or financial capital. These power imbalances permeate partnerships and collaborations. Though creative placemaking initiatives can and often do empower artists, they also run the risk of paying lip service to artist involvement or worse, even using them for nefarious purposes like the exaggerated “shock troops” of gentrification claim that has caught hold of our collective imagination.

Questions and Crossroads

How do we grapple with these issues of agency, voice, and power? Change hinges on powerbrokers, the elites—sometimes merely in that they can obstruct it. How do we prevent their active involvement from silencing, or co-opting, artists and other vulnerable or marginalized populations? How do we make sure these interests are central to placemaking efforts?

Creative placemaking encompasses a broad array of practices, and as a field we need to drill down and examine initiatives that resulted in expanded opportunities for low-income communities, people of color, and artists against those that had undesired affects of displacement. How do different types of interventions correlate with outcomes? Is displacement just a by-product of generalized pressure and larger macro-forces in the economy?

Within the realm of artist space, is artist-ownership a remedy? Artists’ equity stakes do not safeguard against neighborhood change. Even in the celebrated example of the Paducah Artist Relocation Program (KY), many artists cashed out during the economic downturn, jeopardizing its claim as an artist haven. Are models of nonprofit ownership and stewardship, such as Artspace’s, the benchmark? In those, low-income artist tenants have long-term stability, but no equity. However, the building’s artist character and affordability is retained in the long-term. To ensure that a mix of housing options remain for families with modest incomes, do artist space initiatives need to be combined with non-arts affordable housing strategies? What can we learn from land-trust models? Maria Rosario Jackson’s Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities: Reflections and Implications for the Field offers some wonderful insights that advance thinking and practice.

I repudiate the notion that artists are the shock troops of gentrification. Artists are, however, on a different front line. They are looking hard at issues of their potential complicity in gentrification. They’re some of the most thoughtful voices grappling with questions of social equity in placemaking. Through nuanced practice, they’re “making the road by walking,” to quote Myles Horton. Instead of casting stones, our challenge as a field is to listen deeply and amplify these voices.

So hooray for all that! And now to our regularly scheduled programming…

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Remember the item a while back about patent trolls? Rachael Wilkinson at the Technology in the Arts blog alerts us to a very disturbing case of a troll targeting an arts organization, in this case a theater in Connecticut for using the “Tweet Seats” concept. Looks like it’s time for arts organizations to speak up for patent reform.
• Federal arts education standards do make a difference in practice.
• Danielle Brazell of Arts for LA writes about bringing the arts into the upcoming Los Angeles mayoral election.
• Don’t miss this fantastic interview between Barry Hessenius and NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, one of my favorite people in the arts (and you’ll soon see why in the interview). Side note: I had no idea that Jamie served on the board of a group called the “No-Pants Theatre Company,” but that is just awesome.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Cultural Data Project finally has a new CEO to lead its transition to an independent nonprofit: Beth Tuttle, a consultant with METStrategies.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• One of the big trends I’ve been seeing over the last decade, and that I think we’ll see accelerate in the next, is the slow migration of low-profit enterprises with social value – think jazz venues, record labels, newspapers/journalism providers – to a nonprofit context. That trend includes independent bookstores, and this article from the Toronto Globe and Mail explains why.
• More food for thought on the economics of music streaming.
  

IN THE FIELD

• Catherine Michna has only been a blogger for two weeks, but this post on “how NOT to be a gentrifier with your theater” in New Orleans is certainly a way to make an impression.
• This is some truth right here: “[International Art English] often ‘insists on art’s subversive potential.’ Popular terms include: radically, interrogates, subverts, void, tension. Much contemporary art does have a disquieting quality, but there can be something faintly absurd about artists in Mayfair galleries playing up their iconoclasm for super-rich collectors.”
• The Sacramento Philharmonic and Sacramento Opera will merge into the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance, following a model pioneered by the Utah Symphony | Utah Opera and the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance. The article has a helpful rundown of recent mergers in the performing arts and what people are saying about them.
• Dallas Shelby at the National Arts Strategies blog: “As in politics, the key to increasing the power of your mandate is to increase the amount of stakeholders’ engagement more than they increase their expectations.“
• My Fractured Atlas colleague Tim Cynova is up at Hyperallergic discussing 7 ways to build a sustainable art career this year. (I can take credit for the “Well-Informed Arts Professional” bit.)

BIG IDEAS

• A fascinating and lengthy essay by Trevor Butterworth on Big Data and its associated necessity, Big Criticism (or as he terms it, Big Crit). Worth a read in full.
• Last month, Jacquelyn Strycker explored the artistic side of food, including the new creations coming out of the field of molecular gastronomy. Elizabeth Merritt from the Center for the Future of Museums considers another angle: the potential intersection between food and 3D printing.
• Doug Borwick offers a very helpful definitional boundary distinguishing community engagement (by arts institutions) from the more commonly-used term audience engagement.
• Bill Ivey is out with a new book (Handmaking America), and Russell Willis Taylor has the scoop.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In which all of our stereotypes about kids and music preferences are shown to be true.
• New research from the Netherlands suggests a link between practicing a musical instrument and lower blood pressure.
• We talk a lot about arts organizations needing to diversify their audiences, but that conversation is all too often painted in frustratingly broad strokes. Clay Lord is experimenting with some ways to lend a bit more definition.
• Interesting visualization and analysis of age demographics in US cities, courtesy of the Urban Institute and Atlantic Cities.
• How the Hewlett Foundation is thinking about evaluation these days (and, as Lucy Bernholz notes, a victory for transparency).
• Wow! The Foundation Center, GuideStar, and Urban Institute collectively spend close to $2 million annually to extract and upload nonprofit form 990 data into databases. A new report from the Aspen Institute argues that the government should have nonprofits fill out those forms online so that they’ll be in a database already, and then make the contents of that database publicly available.
• A new survey and report basically find that a significant portion of nonprofit development directors hate their jobs.

ETC.

• John E. Craig, Jr. explains the whys, hows, and what nexts of foundation archiving (part 1; part 2).
• What is there to say about this amazing article covering the Portland karaoke scene, other than read the whole thing? So many gems in this one, but just to whet your appetite:
  

  Portland does have dozens of karaoke bars, and over the course of six nights we did our best to visit them all. I sang Lee Ann Womack in a honky-tonk in far southeast Portland, Kanye West in a comedy club and INXS in a Chinese restaurant. I watched Emilie, my seven-months-pregnant sister-in-law, sing Melanie’s “Brand New Key” onstage at Stripparaoke night at the Devils Point, a teensy, low-ceilinged club on a triangular lot well outside Portland’s downtown, while a topless dancer worked the pole next to her. Afterward, the dancer — whose bare stomach featured a tattoo of a vividly horrible shark and the word REDRUM — gave Emilie a sweet hug.

  And…

  Chopsticks III: How Can Be Lounge is located between a heavy-equipment rental shop and a Hanson pipe factory. It’s the kind of awful nightspot where if your watch was broken, you could keep time by the diminishing height of the melting heap of ice dumped in the urinal in the men’s room. When the heap of ice read 10:00, Chopsticks III was jammed with 50 people or more: groups of women out for a night away; a dwarf with an Afro who submitted his power ballads under the stage name Micro; a group of four buddies whose Monday-night karaoke club requires them to sing any song a friend challenges them to, blind. Also, a troupe of puppeteers from a local children’s theater, their snakes, ducks and cowgirls laid carefully across a table in the back of the bar.

  This was puppet karaoke.

  And my favorite…

  Correction: January 23, 2013

  An earlier version of this article  referred incorrectly to a puppet that appeared in a show at a local karaoke club. It is known as Señor Serpiente, not Señora Serpiente.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Congratulations to Arts Marketing blogger Chad Bauman, who returns to Arena Stage as Associate Executive Director only a few months after leaving for a position at the Smithsonian. Chad had previously been Arena’s Director of Communications.
• …and to San San Wong, who is relocating to Boston to join the Barr Foundation as that institution’s first full-time Senior Program Officer in the Arts, following a turbulent last year as Director of Grants for the San Francisco Arts Commission.
• Congratulations to Doug Borwick as he transitions out of the presidency of the Association of Arts Administration Educators and  retires from his post at Salem College in order to begin a new life as an entrepreneur and consultant.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Congratulations to ArtPlace’s latest round of grantees, all 47 of them. In its second round, ArtPlace distributed $15.4 million to projects in 22 states. The press release emphasizes some of the more rural and/or unexpected recipients of the grants, and there are certainly some of those. Perhaps the most eye-popping choice is a $250,000 award to a museum in down-on-its-luck Eastport, ME – population 1,331 and a six-and-a-half-hour drive from the nearest city of more than 100,000 people.  Nevertheless, the geographic restrictions of certain foundations participating in the coalition are evident in the list of grants, more than three-fifths of which went to recipients in Alaska, California, Miami, New Orleans, the Detroit metro region, Minnesota, New York City, and Philadelphia.
• The latest numbers are in from Giving USA, and charitable donations went up 4% in 2011 (slightly under 1% in real dollars), to just shy of $300 billion – still well off the 2007 peak. Arts and culture organizations received $13.12 billion of this amount, or 4% of the total, and the trendlines were consistent with overall giving.
• We all know about artists using crowdfunding to support their work, but what about fans using it to commission artists? Andy Baio reports from personal experience.
• The New York Times runs down the various forms of emergency relief available to artists, somehow without once mentioning MusiCARES.

IN THE FIELD

• The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, despite its innovative audience development efforts, is facing a deficit this year of up to $1 Smillion.
• Is the “Emerging Leader” moniker a term of empowerment or of exclusion? Barry Hessenius argues for the latter; Stephanie Evans Hanson responds. This is a complicated subject, partly because I suspect that the idea of “emerging leaders” is more helpful to the goals of the movement than is the “emerging leader” designation for individual arts professionals. But more on this later.
• Etsy is now a certified B corporation.

BIG IDEA CORNER

• Don’t miss this six-part blog post by Center for Effective Philanthropy President Phil Buchanan giving a full-throated defense of the nonprofit sector against those who idealize “business thinking.” Phil holds a Harvard MBA, so it’s not like he doesn’t know whereof he speaks.
• The Future of Music Coalition’s Joe Silveri makes the case for a global music registry.
• Lucy Berhnolz and Patrick Hussey wax eloquent on the massive potential for data to change the way we live and work.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Americans for the Arts released its long-awaited follow-up to Arts & Economic Prosperity III, and — wait a sec — the economic impact of the arts went down?! From $166.2 billion to $135.2 billion? Supporting 26% fewer jobs? It’s true. While organization expenditures remained more or less constant in 2010 (when the study was conducted) compared to 2005, audience spending dropped like a stone due to the recession’s influence. Unfortunately, the results underscore the downside of relying on this particular argument to advocate for the arts, as the economic impact narrative to date had been all about more, more, more: the arts are a growth industry, so you should support them! Now it’s, the arts are shrinking, so you should….still support them? My previous review of AEP III is here. Meanwhile, Catherine Brandt has an entertaining account of enforcing the embargo on the AEP IV results.
• In other research from Americans for the Arts, Randy Cohen details a couple of novel ways of understanding the competitive environment for arts organizations in a region through the Local Arts Index: millennial share and the four-firm concentration ratio.
• Which neighborhoods in the US are gentrifying the fastest? Here is one estimate by the Fordham Institute, which names such surprising cities as Oklahoma City, Chattanooga, and Roanoke VA among the leaders. But Matt Bevilacqua at Next American City takes issue with the methodology of that analysis, which uses an increase in the share of white, non-Hispanics as a proxy for gentrification.  Bevilacqua makes the case that in certain cities such as Washington DC, people of color can be the agents of gentrification as well. While I don’t disagree with Bevilacqua’s point, it underscores the need for a clearer sense of what we actually mean when we invoke the g-word. Because honestly, my sense from hearing lots of people talk about this issue over the past few years is that most have a pretty clear picture–some might say stereotype–in their minds of what gentrification looks like, and to them it looks like  “white people moving in.” Rightly or wrongly, it seems like Fordham’s proxy measure is pretty faithful to this idea.
• Fascinating: some university researchers are turning to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find psychology test subjects and survey respondents, in order to avoid the “WIERD” (from Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, Democratic societies) bias inherent in using college students for that purpose. There’s even a whole blog about using experimental methods on crowdsourced populations.

ETC.

• This beautiful Father’s Day tribute from Rocco Landesman brightened my day when I read it, as did the photos of Fred Landesman’s gorgeous paintings. Well worth a read.