UMKC Innovation Center Artist Inc. Programming, is seeking an Associate Director Program/Project Operations. This position is the chief administrator of the suite of Artist INC.programs and is responsible for the program’s consistent achievement of its mission and financial objectives. Artist INC programs are delivered through a collaborative partnership of the Charlotte Street Foundation, ArtsKC-Regional Arts Council, and the UMKC Innovation Center. The Director position and program offices are housed in the UMKC Innovation Center. Artist INC programs include the original Artist INC Live eight-week seminar that focuses on professional development and business training for emerging and mid-career artists; two speakers’ series that connect artists with national and local experts in arts entrepreneurship; the Artist INC website where artists can find the resources they need to shape their careers and grow their businesses; Artist INC Online, a web version of the live training seminar that significantly broadens geographic access to the groundbreaking program; Artist INC’s official blog PushingTheFlywheel, a digital resource destination for the local artist community; Artist INC II, an advanced project-based seminar available to all Artist INC Live alumni; One-On-One Strategic Planning sessions with Artist Peer Facilitators; and Artist INC Community Trainings that provide hands on training and support to communities in the Mid-America Arts Alliance six-state region so they may offer their own community’s sessions of Artist INC Live.

Deadline: May 27. This job is based in Kansas City, MO and compensation starts at $52,700.

Senior Consultant and Associate Consultant (two positions), TRG Arts

TRG Arts is a results-driven consulting firm that helps arts and entertainment organizations achieve increased, sustained revenue and loyal patronage. Our firm counsels some 1,200 client organizations – orchestras, arts centers, museums, festivals, Broadway presenters, opera, dance, and theatre companies – across North America, and now extending abroad to Australia and the UK. Informed by data, TRG consultants and analysts guide growth to achieve results. TRG’s ongoing study of patron transactions and behavior informs understanding of arts and entertainment consumers—who they are and how they invest their time and money. TRG applies that knowledge to each client situation, using data to craft strategy and find the most actionable means for each client to optimize revenue, and increase and sustain loyal participation.

No deadline, but the Senior Consultant position was posted a while ago.

Manager, Program Support (Education, Creativity and Free Expression), Ford Foundation

The Manager, Program Support is a composed and effective project manager, decision-maker, and implementer who functions as a key partner in the Office of the Vice President (OVP). The primary responsibility of this position is to initiate, develop, and manage strategic and tactical activities that optimize and support the work flow of the Vice President. The ideal candidate will possess the ability and confidence to initiate and move forward projects and related work independently on behalf of the Vice President, partnering with program and non-program directors, peer groups and colleagues across the foundation to identify and implement action items that maintain effective operations.

No deadline. Basically you would be working for the person at Ford who oversees all of its arts funding, among other things.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Who should be the next chair of the NEA? Barry Hessenius and Ray Mark Rinaldi trot out some possibilities.
• Penn Hill Group, which is working with Grantmakers in the Arts on federal arts education policy, has published a report that “provides an initial analysis of the people, process, politics, and policies that are crucial to the consideration of federal education and job training policies in the next Congress and Administration.”
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who’s had an uneasy relationship with the city’s arts community, has been kicked out of office by a judge for a minor corruption charge. The judge’s decision is pending appeal.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jeremy Nowak, the head of the William Penn Foundation who had joined from The Reinvestment Fund only a year and a half ago, has left due to “differences in approach” with the foundation’s board.
• Congratulations to Susie Surkamer, new executive director of South Arts.
• The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, which supports arts and culture in the Phoenix, AZ area, has named Clarin Collins research and evaluation officer.

IN THE FIELD

• Take that, Roger Ebert: video games are art! New York’s Museum of Modern Art announced recently that it is buying up 14 classic games for inclusion in its permanent collection, including Tetris, Pac-Man, and Myst. If it’s good enough for MoMA, it’s good enough for me. Too bad advances in technology are disrupting video game store economics.
• Probably the most thorough English-language overview of the music scene in China that you’re going to find.
• I’m scratching my head a bit wondering how a midlevel employee who didn’t work in the finance department of the Woodruff Arts Center was able to embezzle $1.5 million out of the organization over a five-year period without anyone noticing before now. That’s a lot of per diems to lose track of.
• Who earns nearly $1 million a year for an arts organization and is still a relative bargain? Hint: he’s Venezuelan and directs a major orchestra. Culture Monster’s Mike Boehm runs the numbers.

BIG IDEAS

• The new issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review has a look back on lessons learned from the early years of impact investing.
• A deeper look into Google’s super-high-speed broadband experiment in Kansas City. If you care about infrastructure (and I imagine most Createquity readers do), you should read this.
• This epic article by Emily Badger on the Miller brothers’ experiment in crowdfunding real estate development is well worth the time invested.
• More from the Americans for the Arts Scaling Impact blog salon: Victor Kuo reflects on a collective impact effort in Cincinnati involving my sometime partner in crime arts funding, ArtsWave; Joanna Chin offers a very good wrap-up.
• Are management consultants worth the money? A thoroughly entertaining Freakonomics podcast investigates.
• Kris Putnam-Walkerly considers the role and rise of design thinking in philanthropy.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Slightly old news, but here goes: The NEA is partnering with the Bureau of Economic Analysis to measure the contribution of the arts to the national GDP. The arts were already counted as part of GDP, but we didn’t have a good way of isolating their contribution – the relevant figures were only counted once every five years, and categories were unhelpfully broad (combining performing arts with sports and recreation, for example). The main short term significance of this, as I understand it, is that it will be a boon to researchers doing economic impact analyses of the arts and creative industries. Congrats to the NEA research team on making this happen – I know they’ve been working for a while on it. Meanwhile, more recently, the NEA updated its very helpful “How the United States Funds the Arts” publication for 2012.
• Does Generation Y have unrealistic expectations about how much money they’ll be inheriting from their parents?

• The National Endowment for the Arts has spearheaded the formation of a new coalition of private funders to support its creative placemaking agenda. Called ArtPlace, the collaboration features Carol Coletta as its fearless leader, and has the backing of such significant national funders as the Ford, Knight, Kresge, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations. Grants and a $12 million loan fund are administered through the Nonprofit Finance Fund, a nonprofit lender and financial consulting organization. ArtPlace has already made a set of 34 grants in “record time” totaling $11.5 million to a range of projects in the Our Town vein (including one to Coletta’s former employer, CEOs for Cities, in an cool-looking collaboration with GOOD Design.). Thankfully, after a closed-door process for this first round, ArtPlace is opening up next year’s grants through a letter of inquiry which is due November 15. Coletta has more at the Art Works blog.

PHILANTHROPY

• A couple of weeks ago, Sean Stannard-Stockton asked a seemingly innocent question: who should be the Hewlett Foundation’s next president? I was surprised to see Sean wrote a follow-up in which he shares that “emails I’ve gotten from very senior members of the philanthropic community – people whose opinions I respect very much – suggest that my hosting this discussion is far more controversial than I might have guessed.” Apparently, according to these Very Senior People (none of whom, Sean notes, are Hewlett employees), speculating about who might ultimately be the driving force behind the distribution of hundreds of millions of tax-exempt philanthropic dollars a year should be off-limits to plebes who are not on the Hewlett Foundation Board. Thankfully, Sean elected not to listen to this silliness and has gone ahead and published the suggestions that have come in, which include some very interesting names.
• Speaking of Hewlett, Emiko Ono will be the new Program Officer for the Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, replacing Marc Vogl. Ono was Director of Grants and Professional Development for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
• Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has announced a first-of-its-kind “Initiative on Impact Investing.” Officials at the school’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) will be developing a new course, case materials, and working with practitioners to explore impact investing in more depth in an academic setting.
• Ouch: the Center for Effective Philanthropy reports that community foundation leaders are far less strategic in their work than their rhetoric would suggest. In particular, “CEOs who are strategic in their donor work focus explicitly on how donor contributions will benefit the community. In comparison, nonstrategic CEOs focus on how donor contributions will continue to flow to the foundation.”

IN THE FIELD

• After a decade of planning and building, Kansas City’s $326 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts has opened – one of the last products of the performing arts building boom of the 1990s-2000s.
• Doug Borwick, the Association of Arts Administration Educators president who has a new blog on ArtsJournal called Engaging Matters, writes a love letter to the much-missed Community Arts Network.
• And here’s an inside look at Yerba Buena’s personalized membership program, YBCA: YOU, with more from Borwick.
• Words I’d never thought I’d write department: congratulations to Philly’s Mural Arts Program, which landed a cover story…in AAA New York Car & Travel magazine!
• Composer Nico Muhly offers an insider’s perspective on the byzantine restrictions faced by orchestral composers seeking access to recordings of their own work.
• Sally Gaskill, who runs the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project at Indiana University, interviews Angela Myles Beeching, director of the Center for Music Entrepreneurship at Manhattan School of Music, about preparing musicians for careers outside the academy.
• And speaking of professional training degrees for artists, excuse Poets & Writers magazine for trying to give people some sense of how to choose a creative writing MFA program. According to an angry group of writing faculty, the fact that the rankings take financial aid too heavily into account is enough to break out the pitchforks.

THOUGHT BUBBLES

• A very interesting interview with John Kreidler about his cultural policy simulation game, Medici’s Lever.
• Cool true-life story of the birth of an internet meme, conceived by the arts blogosphere’s own Chris Ashworth.
• Clay Lord offers a rare look at the neuroscience of audience response to theater.
• Arlene Goldbard offers her vision of how the arts could play a role in a new stimulus.
• Plagiarism appears to be on the rise in the internet age, even among doctoral students: a study of 120 dissertations in psychology turned up instances of plagiarism (defined as using 10 or more words from another source verbatim without attribution) in a shocking 80% of them. If even the future teachers are plagiarizing, what does that mean for the long term trend?
• Surprise, surprise: when you raise prices 60%, you might lose some customers.
• Two months ago, shoemaker Converse opened up a free recording studio in the ultra-hip neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The New York Times spends a day there talking to the artists taking advantage of the service. A competitive process is used to identify musicians, and as with Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love” (see below), artists are chosen “less for their talent than for their viral energies — their presence on MySpace or Facebook, their hustle in pursuing their careers.”
• I found this live improvised playwriting experiment between Neil Labute and Theresa Rebeck kind of cool, despite the hokey setup.
• I’ve never understood why anyone would want a tattoo, but it seems buyer’s remorse is at an all-time high. Unfortunately, tattoo-removal-seekers are finding that it’s not so easy to turn back time.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In connection with the Artist Revenue Streams project, Future of Music Coalition and the Field are co-hosting (along with a boatload of other organizations including Fractured Atlas) a workshop for musicians on “accounting for creatives” in NYC on Monday, September 19. Check the link for info.
• Nice to see an organization that just released a research report (the Center for Effective Philanthropy, in this case) openly discussing how response bias might have affected the results. We need to see more of this kind of transparency in reporting research results.
• I was intrigued to hear of the formation of a new music research and composition e-journal series on the Social Science Research Network database, led (mostly) by Boston University faculty.
• Andrew Taylor points us to a new book by the Curb Center’s Steven Tepper on protest and the arts.
• Two economists estimate the “psychic value” of a work of art (as distinct from its investment value) at 28% of its overall price.

LOOKING BACK

(the following are some “retro” links from the past 12 months that for one reason or another didn’t make it into the around the horn wrap-ups the first time around.)

• Joshua Phillips lays out a very serious and detailed proposal (and justification) for a public policy game show.
• It’s not too often that I see a coherent conservative case against arts funding, but here’s an example for those who might be curious. Main arguments: the evidence of the arts’ economic impact is flimsy, and government funding makes for worse art.
• It was hard to suppress a wry smile upon learning that Leona Helmsley’s precious dog Trouble, to which she left $12 million in her will (disowning two of her grandchildren in the process), has passed away. The funds held in Trouble’s trust have reverted to Helmsley’s charitable foundation, which is one of the largest in the world.
• Wondering where our nation’s sudden income inequality came from? Since 1992, super-wealthy Americans’ effective tax burden has plummeted by more than a third. Over the same time period, the effective tax rate for all taxpayers has dropped only 6%.
• Is subway pop-up theater the new flashmob-chorus/dance/opera-in-a-mall?
• I found this quote worth mulling over, from the NYTimes Magazine’s writeup of Kickstarter last month:
  

  I sat in on a meeting where the [“Projects We Love”] newsletter picks were made. During the half-hour or so Strickler and the team discussed the choices, I was struck by how often they talked not about the projects but about the pitches. “His video is so boring.” “What are the rewards?” “Why is this cool?” They were focused on the project ideas through the filter of “the Kickstarter project” as a form. “We have values,” Chen told me, and they boil down to prizing creators who respect its proc­ess. They favor creators who think through the rewards for backers, get the word out and engage an audience. In other words, the process doesn’t shape the aesthetic. It is the aesthetic.

As part of my independent study on public policy and the arts, I’ve been reviewing a significant amount of literature on the potential of artists and arts organizations to serve a revitalization role in so-called “transitional” neighborhoods and communities. While many studies show a clear relationship between the presence and density of nonprofit arts organizations and various indicators such as property values, population growth, and poverty decline, the directionality of the causal link has not yet been firmly established. Furthermore, even if it can be determined that the arts have this impact on communities, the abovementioned positive results tend to be confounded by troubling side effects of neighborhood growth, including increased income inequality, racial and ethnic tensions, and in some cases physical displacement. The extent to which these negative impacts can be mitigated remains an open question for those working in creative community development.

For many years, the standard approach to creative community development was, essentially, to stick a giant performing arts center in the middle of downtown to draw tourists and suburbanites (and their dollars) into the city. One of the first examplars of this strategy was New York City’s Lincoln Center, for which Robert Moses cleared a 13-acre city “superblock” that had housed 1700 families and 380 businesses. If anything, the trend has only accelerated, with major performing arts centers having debuted in places like Philadelphia, Omaha, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Madison, and Miami in the past decade, and another one in Las Vegas on the way.

Unfortunately, I haven’t come across much empirical analysis of the effectiveness of these cultural institutions on revitalization of their surrounding areas. The evidence that does exist appears to be mixed. Though Lincoln Center can arguably be viewed as a success story, due to the transformation of its neighborhood in the 47 years since it opened, development by way of these “cultural palaces” suffers from significant downsides. For one thing, without further thought and investment toward guiding the surrounding neighborhood in a positive direction, these beautiful monuments to culture can turn into imposing, inaccessible behemoth structures that cater only to the car-driving rich. Since lively pedestrian traffic is the lifeblood of cultural districts, such a result signifies a missed opportunity to bring the investment to its full potential. Kansas City is trying a more comprehensive approach, pouring well over a billion dollars into downtown redevelopment this decade. The anchor developments, which include the Power & Light District (operated by the people behind Baltimore’s Inner Harbor complex) and the $413 million Kaufmann Center for the Performing Arts, are augmented by a number of other cultural facilities and commercial tenants. Yet this strategy isn’t perfect either; the tight, top-down control of the Power & Light tenant mix has resulted in what some critics term a “sameness” that saps some of the fun out of the place due to overcommercialization.

One “cultural palace” that seems to have worked out rather well is North Adams’s Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA. Backed by a $35 million investment from the state, the well-regarded museum had a dramatic effect on its surrounding community in just a few short years. In a 2006 study entitled Culture and Revitalization: The Economic Effects of MASS MoCA on Its Community, economist Stephen C. Sheppard and colleagues showed that in the three years following the facility’s opening the city saw significantly increased property values (within 1.7km of the museum), hotel tax receipts, total employment, and average salary per employee along with modest improvements in the number of small businesses in the city. It’s possible that, as a smaller city in a rural part of Massachusetts, North Adams was a more appropriate fit for a top-down investment strategy than most.

Rather than pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a few city blocks, some culture theorists instead advocate the cultivation of so-called “natural” cultural districts. These organically-occurring neighborhood hotspots for cultural activity are associated with numerous positive trends in their surrounding communities, as impressively documented by Social Impact of the Arts Project’s Mark Stern and Susan Seifert. In their 2007 brief on the subject, Stern and Seifert showed that block groups in the metropolitan Philadelphia area in the top quartile of cultural provider density were four times as likely as block groups in the bottom quartile to see their population increase and poverty decline during the 1990s. By defining a “cultural asset index” based on four measures of artistic activity in a neighborhood, the authors additionally demonstrated that 83% of the neighborhoods that showed significant improvement in real estate markets from 2001-2003 also scored highly on the index.

Supporting “natural” cultural districts will tend to take the form of subsidizing artists more so than high-profile arts organizations. One of the most common methods of doing this is by establishing live/work spaces for artists, of the kind that Artspace is known for developing. The problem with these “natural” cultural districts is that the gentrification often associated with them can be hard to rein in, especially in already-hot urban real estate markets. The rapid development of New York City neighborhoods, particularly Williamsburg, has forced the displacement of longtime residents and more recent artist immigrants alike. In addition, an influx of artists in a neighborhood does not necessarily bode well for relations between the artists and existing residents. A study examining two developing neighborhoods in Oakland, CA looked closely at these issues. The 23rd St. and Telegraph Avenue district suffers from both rapid gentrification and a lack of integration between the neighborhood’s old and new residents. Meanwhile, in the nearby Village Bottoms neighborhood, a community organizer named Marcel Diallo is trying to create a “Black Cultural District” by buying up properties and making them available to African-American “founding buyers” at a discount, thus heading off the problem of displacement. Can organic, bottom-up developments like these really be guided intentionally toward positive ends? To the extent that successful examples may exist, they have not yet shown up in my review of the literature.

Another tension arises when considering who should benefit most from creative community development. Two studies, Mapping Cultural Participation in Chicago and the Philadelphia and Camden Cultural Participation Benchmark Project, focused strong attention on some of the poorest neighborhoods in their respective cities, neighborhoods nearly bereft of cultural providers and with hardly any local participation in the city’s flagship cultural institutions. Yet the researchers found that while the symphony, art museum, and repertory theater have trouble reaching these residents, the few organizations that actually conducted activities or were based in those neighborhoods were much more likely to engage them, especially if their programming was culturally specific. To put this in context, remember that many mainstream cultural institutions worry themselves sick about reaching “diverse audiences”—it’s like the Holy Grail to them. This research suggests that they aren’t likely to get very far so long as they’re located in hoity-toity neighborhoods and showcase predominantly dead white male artists.

That information is all well and good to know, but can it be translated into action? Artists do seem to have an at times unfortunate tendency to want to cluster around people who are like themselves—alike, certainly, in terms of artistic focus, but also in terms of educational background and, seemingly, racial and ethnic heritage. This clustering means that even “natural” cultural districts, if supported in place, are going to tend to privilege neighborhoods that are relatively well-off compared to the poorest districts in the city. For this reason, I wonder if it is realistic to hope that truly neglected communities can be “saved” through the arts, or at least the arts alone. Indeed, economic development goals for the arts would seem to be in some conflict with community revitalization goals, in that an economic development strategy aimed at wealthy suburbanites and tourists will tend to build on the already-strong assets of the city rather than invest in neighborhoods that have a long way to go.

Though the arts’ value-generating and revitalizing effects have been ably documented in several instances, there does not appear to be a clear formula for capturing the benefits of arts-based community development while leaving the drawbacks behind. Nevertheless, in light of the materials I’ve read and the conversations I’ve had to date, I do have a few concluding thoughts and recommendations:

• More research is needed to place the merits of arts-based development in the context of alternative strategies. It’s nice to know that MASS MoCA adds (theoretically) $14 million to the local economy each year, but how much would the equivalent number be for a sports stadium? Or a subway system? Or an equal investment in biotechnology? While there is undoubtedly research out there on each of these subjects, I haven’t yet found any studies that do this kind of comparative analysis with the arts.
• Out of all of the various measures of community prosperity, the arts seem to have the strongest relationship with real estate values. This, at its core, is a good thing – a clear demonstration of the arts’ power to create economic value for all residents of a community, whether or not they actively participate in arts activities. This argument should be very compelling for advocacy purposes.
• Rising real estate values have differential impacts on property owners and property renters. All of the concerns about gentrification and displacement essentially come down to ownership and self-determination. If community residents have an active role in welcoming artists to a neighborhood and are positioned to benefit financially from rising values, rather than having to pay more for the same space without any input into the process, in theory gentrification should not be an issue. Sadly, such a utopian vision seems to have few, if any, antecedents in real life.
• One way in which artists can help is by taking the initiative to forge more active relationships with longtime community residents. Artists don’t do themselves any favors in the advocacy department by remaining within cocoons of like-minded souls, tempting though that may be. Small steps like communicating with the neighbors in one’s apartment building or getting involved in local politics can go a long way toward combating negative perceptions and stereotypes.

Further reading:

• Anthony Tommasini, Lincoln Center: Mixed Reviews (New York Times, May 8, 2009)
• The Reinvestment Fund, Crane Arts: Financing Artists’ Workspaces
• ERA Architects et al, A Map of Toronto’s Cultural Facilities: A Cultural Facilities Analysis
• Webb Management Services, Demand Analysis for New Small-Scale Cultural Facilities in San José