• The Detroit Institute of the Arts, having convinced residents in three counties to pass a property tax supporting the institution in exchange for free admission, is facing a lawsuit on the basis that the deal doesn’t include special exhibits.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Richard Dare, the head of the Brooklyn Philharmonic (previously profiled here on Createquity) and controversial blogger, has taken the top post at the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.
• Glenn Lowry, the famously well-compensated director of the Museum of Modern Art, has been elected to the board of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

IN THE FIELD

• RIP Orchestra Nova, a 29-year-old chamber orchestra in San Diego.
• Ouch: the locked-out St. Paul Chamber Orchestra recorded a nearly $1 million deficit last season, its first in a decade. Looks like Sarah Lutman got on the lifeboat just in time.
• The Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University is hosting what looks like a bangup creative placemaking symposium on April 12. And Man About Town Michael Hickey reports on a creative placemaking panel he moderated in New York City.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Interesting and entertaining perspective on collective impact and the need to support direct-service and backbone organizations simultaneously, with response by FSG’s Emily Gorin Malenfant.
• More examples of transparency in action: Kevin Bolduc and the Center for Effective Philanthropy are revamping their flagship product, the Grantee Perception Report, in response to feedback from customers – and blogging about the process.
• Peter Singer (author, The Life You Can Save) on donating to the arts:
  

  “Philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious,” he writes in his book.

  He has heard two counterarguments repeatedly since the book came out in 2009. One points to the work that, say, art museums do with disadvantaged children. “I can see how that would be a worthwhile thing to do,” he said. “I’m not sure how well it compares with saving kids from dying from diarrhea or malaria.”

  Then, there are the crumbling buildings again. “I’m certainly not suggesting that when the roof of the Met starts to leak that you don’t repair it,” he said. “But I would not give a penny to the Met to buy another painting.”

BIG IDEAS

• Clayton Lord (can I still call you Clay?) is upping the ante with a couple of recent blog posts about support for the arts at the federal level, including this lovely graph showing the NEA’s appropriations history in real and nominal dollars along with percentage of the budget and party in control of the White House and Congress. It seems that who has the House of Representatives may be a bigger driver of the NEA budget than previously acknowledged. Be sure to check out Clayton’s analysis of framing vis-a-vis the charitable deduction as well.
• Meanwhile, the “new models”/future of the arts discussion is flaring again, with a post by Michael Kaiser spurring another round of response by Diane Ragsdale and Adam Huttler, and lots and lots of discussion in the comments.
• Watch a museum exhibition go up before your eyes (in slow motion) at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Also: Attendance is not the only measure of demand, museum version.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), an annual survey of arts training program graduates, has published “Painting with Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of an Arts Degree,” a supplementary report on the 2010 survey results by Danielle Lindemann and Steven Tepper.
• Maribel Alvarez offers a review of Maria Rosario Jackson’s latest for LINC, “Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities.”
• The James Irvine Fund has released a report on the its Arts Innovation Fund grants (undertaken under its previous program strategy last decade), conducted by Slover Linett Strategies. The report is accompanied by a nifty tablet-friendly interactive highlighting key findings.
• The Future of Music Coalition is leveraging its Artist Revenue Streams data to engage in some mythbusting regarding how musicians make (or don’t make) money.
• Arts education data in Los Angeles shows a complex picture of trends over the past 15 years.
• Wow. Did you know that more than half of the US patent lawsuits in 2012 were brought by “non-practicing entities” – also known as patent trolls? These companies obtain patents with no intention of actually using them for inventions, but instead to “threaten young companies with lawsuits as soon as they obtain funding; or hamstring older companies, forcing them to divert cash into costly licenses for absurd patents rather than pay for costly defenses in uncertain, patent-friendly jurisdictions.” Good to know for anyone (such as Richard Florida types) relying on patents issued as a measure of innovation. Yuck.
• As mentioned here previously, the Twin Cities is currently suffering a symphony drought, with both the Minnesota and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras shut down in the midst of labor strife. This probably isn’t the most empathetic response imaginable, but my first thought upon reading the headline “Orchestra fans getting restless” in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was, wouldn’t this be a great natural experiment for measuring the value of orchestras to a community? I mean, you don’t realize how much you appreciate something until it’s gone, right? The evidence presented in the article suggests that some audience members are finding substitutes (“a few classical groups have noticed a spike in ticket sales”), but a substantial number are staying home. Independently organized concerts by locked-out members of the Minnesota Orchestra are selling out quickly, though obviously in an environment of substantially reduced competition. I could imagine all sorts of possibilities – a rare economic impact study that actually takes into account opportunity costs, for example, or a more scientific survey of orchestra subscribers to find out what they’re doing with themselves at night.

• “Kansas arts agencies have been on hold several months, waiting for a clue as to how state dollars allocated by the 2012 Legislature might translate into an economic boon to arts programs.”
• The recent public arts funding update had some grim news from the UK. Here’s one possible reason: an annual study reports that donations to charity fell by a whopping one fifth in 2011-2, though the eye-popping numbers have come in for some scrutiny. Whether true or even just a little bit true, politicians’ assurances that private giving would make up for cuts to Arts Council England and other public bodies have seemingly turned out quite empty indeed.
• Isaac Butler makes some very good points on the copyright implications of the news that Disney is buying Lucasfilm for over $4 billion:
  

  What this means is that Disney is hoarding up the closest thing 20th and 21st century culture has to folk tales and mythology, and locking them up in a safe where we can’t touch it without getting sued. As artists, we should be deeply troubled by this.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Victoria Hamilton has moved on from her post as founding executive director of the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Why we need arts policy: multi-millionaire financial mogul, founder of a mysterious firm that makes its money executing high-speed trades to exploit market arbitrage opportunities, has left his day job to focus instead on establishing “free art schools in Anguilla, the Dominican Republic, Pennsylvania, Sri Lanka and Thailand” to teach poor students the craft of photorealistic painting. Said donor thinks this is going to “change the art world” and is developing luxury hotels to put alongside the schools.

IN THE FIELD

• It’s not just nonprofits that have suffered from Hurricane Sandy; Broadway’s losses are estimated at $8.5 million (Book of Mormon still sold out though). Things are rapidly improving in Chelsea, though they are not out of the woods. The Art Dealers Association of America, the New York State Council on the Humanities, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Lambent Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts have all stepped up to help out, and there is a more general New Jersey Recovery Fund as well.
• Cool post from CEOs for Cities listing ten (relatively) simple creative placemaking ideas aimed at enlivening city streets. And Toronto-based Artscape has developed an online toolkit for DIY creative placemaking (h/t Greg Baeker, via Thomas Cott).
• It seems like there’s recently been a spate of articles plumbing the depths of musicians’ finances to a level we rarely see. Franz Nicolay (indie rocker, formerly of the Hold Steady, briefly a coworker of mine) has always been remarkably open about such matters, and a recent blog post of his lays out exactly how much he made (and didn’t) during his years of highest public profile and since.

BIG IDEAS

• I was totally going to write a post-election blog post that was all like, “are arts organizations the Republican Party of the creative economy?” and then Trevor O’Donnell went and did it for me.
• Michael Kaiser has caught a fair amount of flak from arts managers of my generation before, but I suspect they’ll be pleased with this column of his.
• More evidence of Nina Simon’s awesomeness: she’s designing a You Can’t Do That in Museums summer camp (tagline: “You Can. We Will.”) to be held in Santa Cruz next July.
  

  This camp will be a 2.5 day event at which participants work in teams with pre-selected permanent collection objects to create an exhibition full of intriguing, unusual, risky experiences. If you’ve ever wanted to design an object-based exhibit that really pushed the boundaries, this is the event for you. Registration will be $150 and by application only. We will also offer a half-day series of workshops on July 10 for a wider audience for $50. Yes you can sleepover at the museum to heighten the insanity and reduce the cost. No you don’t have to be a museum professional to participate. Yes you can apply now. Please do.

• And here’s Nina’s TEDxSantaCruz talk on opening up museums (with her own as Exhibit A).

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Last year, I went to the Independent Sector conference on scholarship from the Ford Foundation and had a great experience learning from my peers across the nonprofit space. I wasn’t able to attend this year, but Nonprofit Law Blog’s Gene Takagi went and brings us this report in two parts.
• National Arts Strategies is posting a bunch of videos in connection with the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Leaders – interviews with the young leaders themselves, as well as more established folk like Diane Ragsdale.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Is there a link between creativity and mental illness? A new study suggests yes, but this fantastically thorough analysis by Keith Sawyer urges skepticism of the results.
• The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation has released a report recapping a 2011 convening called “Strengthening the Bones.”
• Phil Buchanan speaks the hard truth: “For Markets For Good to result in meaningful change, a big part of the emphasis must be foundations stepping up and supporting the development of good, credible data and robust nonprofit performance management systems.”
• The Foundation Center has re-launched IssueLab, a repository for research of all kinds within the nonprofit sector.
• The first studies funded through the NEA Art Works: Research program are starting to come out. Here’s one about the link between arts participation and civic engagement in the 2002 General Social Survey. As always, correlation does not equal causation.
• Maria Rosario Jackson’s latest (and, presumably, last) publication for Leveraging Investments in Creativity explores artist-driven spaces in marginalized communities.
• Guy Yedwab demonstrates how it’s possible to create useful graphs from Fractured Atlas fiscal sponsorship data. Good call too to create budgets in the same format that you’ll have to report them in (for most people, this is the Cultural Data Project or something like it).

Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structures for U.S. Artists (2003), an Urban Institute publication authored by Maria-Rosario Jackson, Florence Kabwasa-Green, Daniel Swenson, Joaquin Herranz, Jr., Kadija Ferryman, Caron Atlas, Eric Wallner, and Carole Rosenstein, sheds light on the economic and employment situation of individual artists in the United States following the cessation of NEA funding to individual artists in 1995.  The report reflected several years of research, which included interviews with artists with arts leaders in nine cities, a national poll on attitudes towards artists, and expansion and analysis of a new NYFA Source database, in partnership with the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

Investing distinguishes itself by “providing a new and comprehensive framework for analysis and action, which views the support structure for artists in the United States as a system made up of six key dimensions of the environment in which an artist works:”

1. Validation: The ascription of value to what artists do.
2. Demand/markets: Society’s appetite for artists and what they do, and the markets that translate this appetite into financial compensation.
3. Material supports: Access to the financial and physical resources artists need for their work: employment, insurance and similar benefits, awards, space, equipment, and materials.
4. Training and professional development: Conventional and lifelong learning opportunities.
5. Communities and networks: Inward connections to other artists and people in the cultural sector; outward connections to people not primarily in the cultural sector.
6. Information: Data sources about artists and for artists.

This is a helpful framework for further research on artists’ conditions in any given region, and also marked a new understanding that it is not be enough to simply restore cuts to funding for artists.

Some especially salient findings and recommendations in the report are as follows:

1. Individual artists are undervalued by society, in comparison to art itself. Artists’ societal contributions are not well understood, documented, or publicized—but if they were, it might be easier to make the case for allocating resources to individual artists.
2. Individual artists feel overshadowed and neglected by large urban institutions, and are frequently left out of arts-based urban planning initiatives.
3. There is a perceived inequality of opportunities for artists (such as exhibitions or awards programs) based on factors such as race/ethnicity, and art form.
4. An artist’s career spans multiple markets and disciplines: this is especially important when assessing artists’ needs.
5. Many artists face the economic uncertainties of irregular employment, lack of health insurance, and lack of affordable work or living space.
6. Training in the practical side of working in the arts, and in specialized or hybrid fields like arts education/community work, is limited. Training should be expanded and diversified.
7. Grants and awards need to be more accessible, equitable, and relevant for artists. An “information clearinghouse” with data on resources, and the capacity to support further research, would be helpful.
8. Various arts organizations, arts councils, and artist networks are meeting some of these artists’ needs described above, but these organizations need strengthening.
9. It is also important to cultivate stronger networks of people from both arts and non-arts fields advocating for artists’ needs.

Investing was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and supported by consortium of 37 other funders, some of whom were committed to acting upon the findings of the research. Therefore, the study is notable for having led directly to the development of several concrete initiatives to increase support for artists:

1. A new NYFA Source online database allowing artists and other users to access customized, up-to-the-minute information on awards in all arts disciplines 24 hours a day
2. The Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) initiative, a ten-year national initiative to improve the conditions for artists working in all disciplines. LINC funds, researches, and aggregates information about three core areas identified as key artist needs in the report: Creative Communities, Artist Space, and Health Insurance for Artists.
3. Investing is also cited in the development of the United States Artists (USA) grant making program, which gives unrestricted $50,000 grants to artists in all disciplines.   

Investing in Creativity did raise several critical questions for me: first of all, whether it is problematic to build a case for increased support for individual artists so heavily on the idea that artists benefit society, when there was little research to back up this claim.  I also believe that Investing pinpoints many challenges in the employment system for artists, yet never suggests that an entirely new system is needed. Instead, the implication is that conditions for artists can be improved through better information-gathering, networking, and training.

Whether or not the fundamental situation for artists has changed significantly since this report’s publication, Investing at least paves the way for more dramatic changes by suggesting ways in which the existing nonprofit sector can be better equipped to meet artists’ needs.

Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structures for U.S. Artists (2003), an Urban Institute publication authored by Maria-Rosario Jackson, Florence Kabwasa-Green, Daniel Swenson, Joaquin Herranz, Jr., Kadija Ferryman, Caron Atlas, Eric Wallner, and Carole Rosenstein, sheds light on the economic and employment situation of individual artists in the United States following the cessation of NEA funding to individual artists in 1995.  While not the first study on individual artists, it distinguishes itself by “providing a new and comprehensive framework for analysis and action, which views the support structure for artists in the United States as a system made up of six key dimensions of the environment in which an artist works.” Commissioned by the Ford Foundation and supported by consortium of 37 other funders, the study is notable for having led to the development of several concrete initiatives to increase support for artists, among them a comprehensive NYFA Source database and the Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC) initiative.

SUMMARY

The report begins with the premise that artists bring value to society, but “the public often views the profession of ‘artist’ as not serious. The way artists earn a living may seem frivolous, and artists are often seen as indulging in their own passions and desires which bear no relation to the everyday experiences of most workers. This too contributes to a devaluing of the artist as a citizen with the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else.” Investing asserts that artists should receive the same consideration and benefits as any other professionals.

Background and Methodology

 Investing in Creativity reflects several years of research, including:

• Case studies of artists in nine cities (the primary source of data), featuring interviews with more than 450 people. The cities–Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C–were selected based on their large populations of artists, as well as the interest shown in the study by funders in those cities.
• A corresponding rural inquiry with two components: interviews with artists, arts administrators and funders operating in rural areas in California; and the convening of conferences of artists, arts administrators, funders and community leaders in rural areas in Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Maine, California, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina.
• Expansion and analysis of an of a comprehensive database – NYFA Source – that provides national and local information on awards and services for artists, through a partnership with the New York Foundation of the Arts.
• A national poll of attitudes toward artists in the United States as well as site-specific polls in case study cities. This poll addressed additional issues related to demand for what artists do and how they are valued (or not) in our society.
• Advisory meetings with artists, leaders in diverse sectors of the arts, and researchers. The study authors attended various conferences and professional meetings for artists, vetted preliminary research findings at conferences, and continually investigated research in related areas.

Investing considers geographic location the primary framework in which to assess the supports available to artists –i.e., what is available in the artist’s local community.  Recognizing that the cultural sector “doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” parts of the study also examine the arts in non-“arts” settings. For the purposes of the study, “artists” were defined as “adults who have received training in an artistic discipline/tradition, define themselves professionally as artists, and attempt to derive income from work in which they use their expert artistic vocational skills in visual, literary, performing, and media arts.”

Key Findings

One of the most important conclusions of Investing was that simply restoring cuts to government funding would not be enough to improve artists’ overall conditions. Instead, the research identified six core elements of an artist’s support structures:

1. Validation: The ascription of value to what artists do.
2. Demand/markets: Society’s appetite for artists and what they do, and the markets that translate this appetite into financial compensation.
3. Material supports: Access to the financial and physical resources artists need for their work: employment, insurance and similar benefits, awards, space, equipment, and materials.
4. Training and professional development: Conventional and lifelong learning opportunities.
5. Communities and networks: Inward connections to other artists and people in the cultural sector; outward connections to people not primarily in the cultural sector.
6. Information: Data sources about artists and for artists.

Investing in Creativity is broken into chapters on each of the six elements, each one describing in detail past research, current conditions, and future recommendations for each area. Rather than summarize each section individually, I will present what I see as the most salient themes in the overall findings:

Individual artists are undervalued by society, in comparison to art itself: while 96% of Americans value art in their communities and lives, only 27% value artists. This statistic is cited constantly in subsequent articles referencing this report.

Individual artists feel overshadowed and neglected by large urban institutions. Even institutions meant to serve local communities may not offer sufficient presenting or employment opportunities for local contemporary artists. Furthermore, “a general observation in all…cities was that on many fronts New York City sets the standards for critical review,” sometimes at the expense of developing a “local artistic heritage.”  The authors urge the cultivation of stronger regional support systems.

Individual artists are frequently left out of arts-based urban planning initiatives (which tend to emphasize “large institutions and the traditional artist-audience relationship”): “Our review of city and cultural plans revealed that they tend to focus on the physical infrastructure of presentation venues –often to the neglect of artists’ contributions and needs.”

Artists’ societal contributions are not well understood, documented, or publicized, partly because of the inability of busy arts administrators to engage in reflective practice around this topic.  Investing makes frequent mention of “the various ways in which artists contribute to society – as community leaders, organizers, activists, and catalysts for change, as well as creators of images, films, books, poems, songs, and dances” but acknowledges a lack of substantive data to back up these claims.   Investing implies that if artists’ social and economic contributions were better understood and documented, it would be easier to make the case for supporting individual artists in various areas—for example, why artists need affordable workspace space as much as other low-income or “at risk” populations.

There is a perceived inequality of opportunities for artists (such as exhibitions or awards programs) based on factors such as race/ethnicity, and art form. For example, “several artists of color felt that large organizations seek them out only during designated times – such as Black History Month or Cinco de Mayo,” and folk artists and artists working in new media/technologies felt that mainstream galleries do not have structures in place for exhibiting their work. The study comments that “demographic, artistic, and career-stage diversity are not well served through mainstream awards, arts criticism, and media coverage.”

An artist’s career spans multiple markets and disciplines: “Artists do their work – sometimes simultaneously, sometimes over the course of their careers – in and across various parts of the arts and other sectors.” The report compares artists’ experiences across the nonprofit, commercial, public, and informal arts sectors. For example, the nonprofit sector is more conducive to risk-taking than the public or commercial sector. The sectors also interact; for example, artists may pursue more lucrative commercial work to support their more experimental nonprofit work.  Furthermore, many artists contribute to non-arts fields like health and education, but this so-called “hybrid” work often goes unnoticed and lacks clear evaluation criteria.  

Networks are extremely important in artists’ career advancement and support. Networks are, in fact, key to obtaining almost every type of resource in the six categories. While peers and “intermediaries” such as agents were most often mentioned by interview participants, partners outside the arts community are also essential arts advocates (such as anthropologists who ascribe value to immigrant artists’ work, or local sheriffs supporting artist-in-prisons programs). Partnerships with professionals in fields like real estate development or city planning can be especially valuable to artists, since artists usually lack the knowledge and skills to advocate for themselves in those arenas.

Many artists face the economic uncertainties of irregular employment.  Some of the report’s findings on artists’ employment and material supports—that artists make little income from their creative work, juggle multiple part-time jobs to support themselves, and lack decent health insurance coverage in relation to the national average—are no surprise.  Access to affordable work and living space is one of the major struggles. Contrary to popular belief, however, there is “little evidence that artists get a ‘thrill’ from risk-taking, or that they underestimate the extremely long odds of winning the jackpot of commercial success.” Rather, “artists feel an inner drive or calling to become and remain working artists, whatever challenges they may face.”

Grants and awards need to be more accessible, equitable, and relevant for artists. The report’s section on funding aggregates data on the different types of competitive awards offered specifically to individual artists, through a partnership with the New York Foundation of the Arts’ Visual Artists Information Hotline (which was to become NYFA Source). This section contains the most comprehensive quantitative data, as summarized in the tables below:

As seen in the above charts, this analysis identified clear discrepancies in awards available to artists; for example, “the small number of awards available to artists making work that does not neatly fit into categories based primarily on Western European standards is a problem.” Awards are also unevenly distributed according to artistic discipline and geographic region.

Many artists choose not to participate in the awards process, citing the difficulty of applying, the unlikely chance of winning, or the feeling of exclusion.

Training in the practical side of working in the arts, and in specialized or hybrid fields like arts education/community work, is limited in traditional universities. Training for artists should not be limited to artistic skills alone, but should encompass business skills and specialized skills for the “hybrid” sector. Especially notable is the fact that “unlike programs in law, medicine, and business, arts training institutions often do little job-matching and placement of their graduates.”

Various arts organizations, arts councils, and artist networks are meeting some of these artists’ needs described above, but these organizations need strengthening. In each of the six categories, the report cites some examples, in different cities, of helpful organizations and resources. However, programs that serve individual artists’ needs are vulnerable to funding cuts. Furthermore, sometimes organizations offer professional development for artists outside the scope of their regular programming, in a way that is not sustainable.

Investing in Creativity concludes with several “priorities for action”:

• Encourage better public understanding of who artists are, what they do, and how they contribute to society. This involves moving beyond an “art for art’s sake” argument for individual artist support.
• Strengthen artist-focused organizations that are already addressing the critical functions and deficiencies the study has identified.
• Establish broad-based networks of stakeholders at national, regional and local levels and convene those who are already working to improve artists’ support structures.
• Create an information clearinghouse that brings together existing research and data and can capture new information. Partner with university departments and policy research organizations doing similar research in all the fields identified as important.
• Strengthen the capacity of artists to advocate on their own behalf for the many crucial aspects of their support structure.
• Cultivate existing and potential diverse markets for what artists do and make—especially hybrid markets.
• Encourage changes in artists’ training and professional development to better address the realities of the markets in which they operate.
• Strengthen the awards and grants system by making the application process less cumbersome and more responsive to different artists’ needs.

The report ends on a hopeful tone, suggesting that its findings will “help to illuminate the condition of artists as well as promote the creation of a more comprehensive and robust environment making possible their contributions to society.”

ANALYSIS

Investing in Creativity provides a comprehensive summary of previous research on artists, new findings, and current gaps in our knowledge. It also suggests new ways to approach researching individual artists. Investing is thorough because of its research not only on what artists think, but on how artists are perceived by others. Because it was a multi-city study, encompassing not just diverse urban communities but rural regions, Investing has the capacity to highlight similarities and distinctions between different regions, and identify nationwide trends.  As I will discuss shortly, Investing also led to the development of some concrete initiatives to help artists.

Despite these strengths, one of my main critiques of Investing is its failure to provide more detail on how the research was carried out. For example, while the report describes “fieldwork through more than 450 extended interviews with artists, arts administrators, arts funders, critics and media representatives, and selected persons outside the cultural sector, and in 17 focus group discussions around the country,” it does not provide any information on the selection of these groups. Similarly, the report lacks detail on how the national poll on attitudes about artists was distributed, and who actually filled it out (and whether the respondents can be considered a representative sample). At the least, appendices in the report showing the poll and focus group questions would have been helpful.  Instead, the figures and charts from NYFA Source data are the most comprehensive quantitative information provided.

The framework for understanding and meeting artists’ needs is arguably the most helpful result of this study, as well as its emphasis on the overlapping spheres in which artists function. For example, recognizing that artists may work in more than one arts (or non-arts) sector is the first step for training artists in more viable career paths, or for building the types of services and networks that are appropriate for artists’ varied careers. The framework itself can be used in any geographic region in the future, to assess ability to attract and retain artists, and to identify opportunities for improvement.

The suggested action steps for arts organizations in the report are rather general, though the authors claim that they are not aiming to make a comprehensive set of recommendations. As I will explore in the “Implications” section, most of these suggestions have to do with strengthening access to opportunities for artists through better networking, cross-sector partnerships, information-sharing, and training, rather than radically altering the system of artist funding and employment.

The report was designed for its findings to be disseminated and funneled into concrete actions through continued partnerships with the funders and arts leaders in the different geographic regions of study. In this respect, it was remarkably successful, perhaps one of the most successful arts research initiatives in history. Three outcomes in particular—the expansion of the NYFA Source artist opportunities database from the New York Foundation for the Arts; the creation of the ten-year grantmaking and research initiative Leveraging Investments in Creativity; and the birth of the United States Artists grantmaking program—show a study whose impacts are still being felt long after its original publication.

Expansion of NYFA Source

According to NYFA’s website, NYFA Source originated as a phone service, the Visual Artist Information Hotline, founded in 1990. When this hotline caught the attention of the Urban Institute in 2000 during its research for Investing, UI collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Arts Management and Technology to create the new NYFA Source online database. According to the NYFA Source website:

The new database was conceived with several new features in mind. First, it was expanded to include programs serving artists working in all disciplines. Second, it was built as an online database allowing artists and other users to access customized, up-to-the-minute information 24 hours a day. And finally, it was built to enable funders and researchers to acquire information about patterns and trends in artists’ support…Today, NYFA continues to research and update information in NYFA Source…Additionally, as part of NYFA Source’s ongoing development, UI will regularly produce analytical reports about the patterns of support represented in the database. These reports will enable the arts field to monitor trends over time.

NYFA.org, which includes NYFA Source, is an essential resource for artists and organizations today, with information about more than 8,000 opportunities and resources available to artists in all disciplines. NYFA.org, much more than just an online awards database, is now functioning as what the report’s authors might consider an “information clearinghouse” convening a “broad based network of stakeholders.” As its website suggests, NYFA Source is also used for research purposes, to allow the continued monitoring of opportunities available to artists. According to Investing’s  principal investigator Maria-Rosario Jackson, the Urban Institute did a follow-up assessment of NYFA Source in 2009, which verified its continued suitability for research.

Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC)

Investing led directly to the creation of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a ten-year national initiative to improve the conditions for artists working in all disciplines. LINC funds, researches, and aggregates information about three core areas identified as key artist needs in the report: Creative Communities, Artist Space, and Health Insurance for Artists.  According to Jackson, many of Investing’s 30+ funders, in particular the Ford Foundation, were committed in advance to “doing something about the results of this study,” though they left this open, based on what the study would reveal.

Reports/findings published since Investing, available on LINC’s website, illuminate examples of Investing’s recommendations put into practice. Most notably, the 2010 publication “14 Stories” summarizes the impact of LINC’s Creative Communities program in fourteen different cities.  The programs, run by local arts nonprofits usually in partnership with non-arts agencies, are all providing a broad range of services for artists, strengthening training, networking, and material support opportunities.

One example is Cleveland’s CPAC – the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. In a region striving to retain a vibrant artist community in the face of economic depression and unemployment, CPAC used its $190,000 LINC grant to found Artrepreneur, which sought to “treat artists like entrepreneurs.” In partnership with COSE, the Council of Small Enterprises, Artrepreneur morphed into the COSE Arts Network.  “Over the course of three years, nearly 500 artists have either joined COSE outright or been reclassified as artists within the existing membership.”  In exchange for annual dues, COSE helps artists access things like discounted health insurance, business and marketing workshops, and networking events.

LINC also conducts periodic research in target areas. One main area is health care; in 2009 LINC commissioned Helicon Collaborative to design and conduct an online survey of artists, administered through 40 different artist service organizations across the United States. Another study was conducted in 2010, forecasting the potential impact of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) on artists. Both studies also incorporated general data on artists’ employment. The findings in this report imply that artists’ overall insurance and work conditions have not changed substantially since Investing’s publication in 2003.  For example, “artists who earn from 21%-80% of their income from their artwork are those most likely to earn under $20,000 a year…and are likely to have inadequate health care.” The report goes on to describe changes that could occur under PPACA and the crucial role of arts service organizations in equipping artists with information and assistance.

Whether or not artists’ conditions have fundamentally changed as a result of LINC’s work, it is commendable that Investing resulted in a structure for continually updating research in core areas, especially as new federal policies have arisen. Unfortunately, LINC’s 10-year run is slated to end in 2013, so this banner will need to be taken up by someone else if it is to continue beyond next year.

United States Artists Grants

Investing in Creativity highlighted the importance of large, unrestricted grants: “Many respondents told of the life-changing impact of a large fellowship and, more generally, of the relief from constant fund raising that a large grant provides…As well as remarking on the value of large grants, many respondents made the related point that they value grants of long duration, because they provide some relief from the uncertainty of having to continually piece together a living. Specifically, respondents indicated that they want multi-year funding.” This particular element of Investing is cited in the development of the United States Artists (USA) grant making program, which gives unrestricted $50,000 grants to artists in all disciplines.

IMPLICATIONS

Despite the commendable efforts and increased awareness that resulted this study, the report itself raised a few important questions for me:

Is it problematic to build a case for increased research and support for individual artists so heavily on the idea that artists benefit society? 

Investing claims at its outset to be more focused on “artists’ contributions to society” than previous studies (and makes the broad recommendation that such contributions need to be better understood), but the report doesn’t offer many ideas for how to conduct such research—most of its statements about artists’ contributions seem to be assumptions or generalizations. The study is much stronger in its analysis of the working conditions, material supports and training available to artists.  Though the purpose of Investing was not to develop a methodology for studying artists’ societal impact, is it dangerous to put so much emphasis on investing resources in an area that may not be easily researchable? There is a sort of chicken or egg dilemma in this report: the researchers seem to be relying on the “value of artists to society” argument to justify putting time and money into researching how to serve artists better—including researching the very question of why artists should be valued.

As an example: the chapter about artist space states, “In response to the question of why artists should get special treatment [around affordable space] when others are dealing with similar issues, for example, the case often rests on the assertion that artists are somehow special and intrinsically valuable to a community. This entitlement argument does not resonate particularly well with city planners when there is no hard evidence to back it up.” The report goes on to say,

The social impact argument that artists contribute to various aspects of community improvement such as social capital and civic engagement, crime prevention, youth development, and education is potentially the most persuasive to people who are already stakeholders in a community or potential stakeholders.  But it cannot be made very strongly as yet because the contributions of artists are not well documented but rest largely on anecdotal evidence.

While the report does not offer any specific formulas for how to measure the contributions of artists, it suggests ways that the public can interact with and understand artists better, such as arts education and open studio programs.

I agree with the authors’ assessment that artists make important contributions to communities and deserve to be valued and treated as productive citizens. But I would also worry about this type of argument resulting in a bias toward supporting artists whose work has more obvious “functional” benefits, i.e. artists who teach youth, or create projects that generate a lot of tourism revenue in obvious ways.

To what extent does the report advocate for a radical overhaul of the current system?

Investing in Creativity pinpoints many challenges in the employment system for artists, yet never suggests that an entirely new system is needed. Instead, the implication is that conditions for artists can be improved through better information-gathering, networking, and training.  But should we still only be “training” artists on how to get by in an employment system that is fundamentally flawed?

Investing mentions, in passing, some past government programs that provided more stable artists’ employment. For example, many older artists interviewed for this study lamented the end of the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) of the 1970s. CETA opened up many new employment opportunities, even though “it was not an explicit arts-directed program.” I found myself wishing for more discussion of how CETA operated, and whether the United States government could institute something similar today, perhaps even a discussion of the WPA programs for artists of the Great Depression.  Investing does not seem to call for a major shift in federal policy toward artists; instead it is primarily focused on strengthening local communities.

Arguably, the advent of social media, crowdfunding, and other recent, market-driven technological developments have had more impact on the way artists do their work than the policy-driven interventions coming out of this study. The report could not have anticipated the widespread use of social media platforms among artists in the years following 2003, but at least it highlighted the importance of online information resources like NYFA Source.

Another recurring theme in the report is that while there are some good awards and service organizations available to artists (for example, Creative Capital in NYC, CellSpace in San Francisco), they are not distributed proportionately to the number of artists in need. Even if artists were better trained in accessing resources, would there be enough to go around?   For example, if the award application process were made even more accessible to artists across the board, would this just mean that more artists would apply and competition would be even steeper?

I was especially intrigued by the question, posed briefly by the report, of how artists can be better trained for sustainable employment, i.e. through university-level programs in more specialized fields like community arts—and how organizations can tailor mutually beneficial jobs towards artists. Some of the report’s most compelling personal accounts are from artists whose  “day jobs” (even those completely unrelated to the arts) are actually favorable to their creative development.  For example, teaching jobs where school administrations encourage integrating art into the classroom. Other artists find inspiration for their artwork’s content in mundane service industry jobs. This “day job” discussion has interesting implications for the field: for example, what if arts organizations designed more staff positions for artists that allow them to both work steadily in a teaching or administrative capacity, and receive things like health benefits and workspace in exchange? Should all artists be trained in more lucrative professions that can be done side by side with their artistic work? Beyond a limited number of unrestricted grantmaking initiatives, could there be other programs that pay artists to do creative studio work without a tangible end product?

Based on my own observations of artists, and current debates around artists as a creative labor force (for example, those raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement), it seems like the fundamental situation for artists has not changed significantly since this report’s publication—artists still face issues like underemployment, lack of affordable space, and the burden of grantwriting to support their non-commercial work. Nevertheless, Investing at least paves the way for more dramatic changes by suggesting ways in which the existing nonprofit sector can be better equipped to meet artists’ needs.

Further reading:

1. LINC’s recommended research reports
2. Maria-Rosario Jackson, Revisiting Selected Themes from the “Investing in Creativity” Study, The Urban Institute, 2009
3. NEA Cultural Workforce forum, Friday, November 20, 2009 (which featured Jackson as a presenter)
4. NYFA’s website contains up-to-date information about NYFA Source, as well as other listings helpful to artists, and recent articles about the business side of the arts that are helpful to all types of individual artists.
5. Createquity, On the Arts and Sustainability

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Congress has agreed to put aside consideration of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) through the end of the year, but the bill isn’t necessarily dead. Arts and technology commentators have begun to be more vocal in their criticism of the bill, which would, among other things, sanction pre-emptive takedown requests for intellectual property infringement, create an “intermediary liability” for website hosts, and essentially hand over enforcement for all of this to the entertainment industry. It’s that last provision which creeps me out the most; I’m not a copyright anarchist, but I am most definitely against the foxes running the henhouse.
• More on droit de suite legislation, which took effect in the UK on January 1. The policy compensates artists whose works are sold by future owners. As reported last month, similar legislation is under consideration by the United States Congress.
• Interesting interview with the head of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, an intermediary organization based in Lebanon that is funded by the Ford and Open Society Foundations as well as donors in Kuwait and the Netherlands.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Leveraging Investments in Creativity has hired Candace Jackson, an arts consultant, as its managing director. LINC is heading into its final phase of operation, and its concluding work will focus on evaluating its grants and putting out additional research publications.
• The Urban Institute (which has a notable track record of research in the arts) has a new president, Sarah Rosen Wartell.
• Arena Stage’s New Play Institute is splitting up, with two key staff members leaving the organization and taking the program’s media and technology projects to Boston’s Emerson College. More on the transition from David Dower.
• Some strange staffing shenanigans are afoot at the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, but if the article is to be believed, they will be hiring a deputy commissioner and five program directors among other positions.

IN THE FIELD

• An heir to the Walmart fortune has opened the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, a community of 35,000 people located two hours away from the nearest large city. The museum apparently has amassed nearly a billion dollars in assets in just five years, mostly funded by the Walton Family Foundation. It offers free admission to the public and is located within walking distance of downtown Bentonville, which happens to be the location of the world headquarters of Walmart. The museum has raised eyebrows on the east coast for buying up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art for its collection and getting into a legal battle with the Georgia O’Keefe Museum over its attempts to purchase a 50% stake in a collection at the financially troubled Fisk University in Tennessee. But from where I sit, it’s a gigantic infusion of money for the arts in an extremely underserved part of the country…hard to argue too much with that.
• Opera Boston, the second-largest opera company in the region, is shutting down due to a $500,000 funding gap, mere months after it won a Pulitzer Prize with composer Zhou Long.
• Ballet San Jose has announced a unusual partnership with American Ballet Theatre that involves implementing ABT’s training curriculum in the local ballet school and performing works from ABT’s repertoire. Officials claim the arrangement is “not a merger,” however.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Blair Benjamin has published the results of his self-evaluation of the Assets for Artists program in Massachusetts. Speaking of Blair, his second annual “headlines you missed” feature is worth a laugh. My favorite: “Alice Walton’s Plan to Demolish and Replace Her Brand-New Museum with a ‘Super Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’ Promises Wider Selection and an Even More Unbeatable Admission Price”
• Robert Flanagan, a Stanford professor who wrote a report on the economic health of symphony orchestras back in 2008, has expanded that research into a book. Sarah Lutman has the details.
• I’ll sign on to this: “We need a national consensus policy to guide our research efforts into the decade.  As good as our research is, and as capable as our researchers are – it is basically piecemeal.  We need an over-arching policy as to what we need to know, on what timeline and to what purpose.  And we need at least some modicum of cooperation so we can pursue research in some linear pattern.  Somebody please convene a national summit to deal with our currently all over the map research efforts.  At least create ways  researchers (can and will) talk to each other on some regular basis.”

ON GIVING

• PhilanTopic has a thought-provoking roundup of predictions for 2012. A couple that stuck out for me:
  

  In fact, we’d be surprised if there isn’t at least one [Occupy Wall Street]-related protest at a high-profile philanthropic conference or event in 2012. (And the folks in Davos can pretty much count on it.)

  [E]xpect to see calls for greater accountability in philanthropy emerge as a movement in its own right in 2012. Adopting the slogan “private dollars for public good,” a social media-empowered generation of young Americans will use the cheap and ubiquitous tools at their disposal to push for more diversity on foundation boards, more transparency in foundation decision-making, and more democracy in the allocation of tax-advantaged philanthropic resources.

  I hope they’re right.

Grand Rapids LipDub – photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.

• Judilee Reed, formerly the executive director of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, joins the Surdna Foundation as director of its Thriving Cultures program. With Reed’s departure, LINC – which was designed from its inception in 2003 as a ten-year program – begins the process of counting down the clock. I suspect it’s no accident that the funder collaborative that makes up ArtPlace, which shares many of its participating foundations with LINC, is gearing up just as LINC is winding down.
• Helena Fruscio is the new Creative Economy Industry Director for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, replacing Jason Schupbach, who had become Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts last year. Fruscio was formerly director of Berkshire Creative; you can read an interview with her here.

ON PHILANTHROPY

• Lucy Bernholz points us to a database of online giving marketplaces. And explains why asking philanthropists to fund core public services (like roads and bridges) is a very bad idea.
• This Q&A with ArtPlace director Carol Coletta represents the clearest explication of that initiative’s goals and strategies that I’ve yet seen. Kudos to Regina Mahone for asking some good questions.
• Hey, remember the $3 million program-related investment that Artspace got from the Ford Foundation? Well, that’s nothing compared to the $24 million in tax credits it just landed for its PS109 project with El Barrio in East Harlem, New York City. And how’s this for impact?
  

  While named above, one last shout out to ArtPlace, which provided the final philanthropic investment before our tax credit application was reviewed.  Without ArtPlace’s timely and significant support, our application would almost certainly have been denied.  As such, it is also fair to say that ArtPlace’s [$1 million] investment was essential to securing an additional $24 million investment in the arts.

• What? A private foundation actually asking its constituents what its program strategy should be?

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• In addition to Createquity’s Grantmakers in the Arts coverage, there’s also Mike Henry, Marete Wester, Pam Korza, Emily Peck, and the official conference bloggers, Barry Hessenius, Richard Kessler, and Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer. A number of videos from the conference are now online as well.
• Marete Wester reports from the National Arts Policy Roundtable in Aspen, CO.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture has released an economic impact study on the local music industry.
• The NEA has a new research report out on artist workforce statistics.
• Whoa! The Gates Foundation is funding the Pew Research Center to conduct a new three-year study on public libraries to the tune of $1.4 million. That’s some expensive research!
• I liked these lists of “intrinsic” benefits of arts education from Elliott Eisner, Lois Hetland, and Ellen Winner, via Americans for the Arts’s Kristen Engebretsen. One that I don’t see fully articulated on either list is the ability to question the assumptions and frames of conventional thinking. I became deeply aware of this during my experience in business school, where most of my classmates did not have a meaningful background or experience in the arts. While they could run rings around me creating discounted cash flow statements, I often sensed a discomfort around ambiguity and alternative frames.
• Great blog post from GiveWell demonstrating how labor-intensive evaluating impact (even without engaging in any primary data collection) truly is. The implication being, of course, that “rating agencies” that don’t put in this kind of time aren’t truly measuring impact.

IN THE FIELD

• Rosetta Thurman has a thoughtful series about four types of nonprofit leaders we need now. Meet the True Believer, the Ruthless Innovator, the Ambassador of Diversity, and the Courageous Advocate. Rosetta also has a sharp new blog theme to complement her sharp intellect.
• On the Art Works blog, Scott Provancher shares some of the background behind the new local crowdfunding platform, Power2Give, that his Arts & Science Council of Charlotte-Mecklenberg has developed.
• National Arts Strategies has been on fire lately. Fresh off the first meeting of its 100 CEOs, the capacity building organization released, in collaboration with the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University, this list of 21 must-reads for arts managers covering topics like leadership, strategy, and organizational culture. Any first-time executive director should definitely take these home. And even better, earlier this month NAS announced that its Business of Arts and Culture seminars will be name-your-price starting in 2012, with National Arts Strategies covering any shortfall in program costs.
• Speaking of all-but-free leadership training programs for arts professionals, the Rockwood Leadership Institute is looking for applicants for its Fellowship for Leaders in Arts and Culture. Hurry up – nominations close November 2!
• Michael Kaiser brings up a good point in discussions of culturally specific organizations:
  

  Individual donors are the bedrock of American arts funding, giving more than 60% of the money received by arts organizations. Yet the average African American, Latino, Asian American or Native American arts organization receives less than 10% of its funding from individual donors.

  To me, this is more evidence that structural inequities in our society are at the root of inequities in cultural budgets. During one of the sessions I attended at GIA, Eugene Rodriguez from Los Cenzontles spoke of how difficult it was to cultivate individual donors for his Latino cultural center serving San Pablo, CA. What with the vast disparities in wealth between white households and black and Latino households, culturally specific organizations have had to either make do with fewer resources or rely on the generosity of white people (or foundations controlled by white people) in order to get by. It’s hard to see how that changes without more wealth creation in communities of color.

• Can’t stop listening to/watching the treasure trove of jazz performance videos from the avant scene in New York City featured on Search & Restore’s new website. This is music that’s always deserved a wider audience but, for so long, has lacked the institutional support or grander vision to make it happen. Props to S&R’s Adam Schatz for taking things a step in the right direction.