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 Thanks to advocacy by the LA and SF arts communities, the bill has been withdrawn.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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

IN THE FIELD

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

INTERVIEWS, CONVENINGS, AND CONVERSATIONS

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

RESEARCH CORNER

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

Selected by MovieMaker magazine as one of the 'Top 25 Coolest Film Festivals,' Cucalorus Film Festival screens over 150 independent and international films.

North Carolina is known nationally for its extensive network of local arts agencies, featuring 84 local arts councils in a state with 100 counties. One county, however, is conspicuously absent. The 10^th most populous county in the state, New Hanover County on the southern coast, has not had an arts council since 2002. The leaders of the county seat of Wilmington asked the North Carolina Arts Council (the state arts agency) for help. The Arts Council then asked for help from someone else—the North Carolina Folklife Institute.

You might ask, what do folklorists have to do with the founding of an arts council? The answer lies in cultural asset research.  Before establishing a new organization, the North Carolina Arts Council wanted to research what cultural assets were present in the area and what particular challenges were facing the arts community.  And according to Kate Prescott of the market research firm Prescott and Associates, this kind of exploratory research is best accomplished through qualitative methods such as interviewing. Folklorists, as it happens, are some of the best trained interviewers out there. They also have a particular advantage when it comes to arts research: folklorists are trained to seek out and recognize creativity in all forms, especially that which comes from people who don’t consider themselves “artists.” By working with folklorists, the North Carolina Arts Council and community leaders in New Hanover County were rewarded with a vivid picture of the arts in their area that went far beyond numbers, bringing to life the personalities and groups that make the community unique.

The Process

Folklore research in some ways mimics folk art itself. You start off with a solid foundation or template, and then “go with the flow.” Sarah Bryan of the North Carolina Folklife Institute, along with Sally Peterson, Folklife Specialist at the North Carolina Arts Council, were selected to head the cultural asset research project. First, they conducted document research about the arts in Wilmington, tracing the city’s arts heritage to the late-18^th-century founding of Wilmington itself. Then they moved on to the city’s current arts assets, starting with stakeholders from various disciplines referred to them by arts leaders in Wilmington. To make sure they were hearing from everyone in the region, including artists working outside the established arts infrastructure, members of immigrant groups, and artists working in new media, they grew that list organically through their fieldwork.

Fieldwork can be both structured and unstructured. Structured fieldwork is a simple matter of ending interviews with the question, “Who else do you think we should talk to?” Unstructured fieldwork is exploring an area through any means possible. Ms. Bryan gave examples of unstructured fieldwork such as attending festivals and talking to people, perusing community bulletin boards, and shuffling through the stacks of business cards at gas stations and talking to the attendants. Ms. Bryan made one of her discoveries while at a red light—the car in front of her was emblazoned with “DragginFly Entertainment”, which turned out to be a gospel recording studio specializing in a new genre of gospel music, “holy hip hop.” This process of starting with a group recommended by people in the community and growing the list organically through informal conversations and observations lends authenticity to the interview process and encourages inclusion of artists outside the established infrastructure.

Likewise, interview questions in folklore research have a similar structure of following a template. In this study, there were two topics covered in all of the interviews—opinions about the nature and health of Wilmington’s arts community, and the interviewee’s own experience in Wilmington as an artist or someone working to support the arts. However, the questions themselves weren’t prepared; rather, the interviewer had topics in mind and questions arose as part of the natural flow of conversation.

The final component to the research process was a survey of largely open-ended questions made available to the entire community. In total, 180 responses were collected from interested citizens, artists, arts board members, volunteers, arts participants and arts administrators. They survey covered essentially the same topics as the interviews and ensured a broader community imprint on the study.

The Results

After eight months of research and fieldwork, Ms. Bryan and Ms. Peterson along with the North Carolina Arts Council staff came out with three reports: “Report on the Arts Resources and Cultural Traditions of Wilmington and New Hanover County,” the public survey results, and “Recommendations for Forming an Arts Council in Wilmington and New Hanover County” (all of which can be found here).

The report on arts resources, in particular, brings all of the cultures and traditions and personalities of New Hanover County to life. It reveals a varied history of organized cultural events at the town’s oldest theater, Thalian Hall, originally built in 1759. It also turned up an incredibly rich African American cultural history, from Jonkunnu “carnival”-style festivals, to young black women who were pioneers in vaudeville and opera, to gospel music and the new “holy hip hop” genre. The area is not only known for bluegrass, but duranguense, the Mexican version of country western music. There is a large Latino population in New Hanover County (many from the province of Oaxaca) who celebrate traditional holidays such as Tres Reyes or “Three Kings,” and still engage in traditional arts forms such as painting and embroidery. Being a coastal town, residents are experts in boatmaking and oyster-shucking. And  it’s not just traditional southern food that’s served here—the diversity of the community means that Latino (especially Oaxacan) and Greek food are also available. Finally, over the last forty years, Wilmington has become a popular place in the film industry because of its variety of architecture, locations, and low cost of doing business.

The public survey results reveal some overarching themes. Wilmington is attractive to creative workers due to its existing local arts scene, affordability, and proximity to water (both the ocean and the river), which many artists cite as inspirational to their work.  The city faces challenges, however. While Wilmington is a haven for early and late career artists, it loses mid-career artists who have to move away to find work. In addition, being a small community with limited resources, artists and organizations openly admit to struggling with competing amongst themselves instead of working together.  Residents have clear ideas of what they want an arts council to accomplish for the city. They believe that their arts assets are economic assets, but that they haven’t fully been realized as such. They want an arts council that can turn their local culture into dollars for the city. The survey also reveals a strong desire for public art in the city.

The recommendation report pulls everything together into a guidebook for what the new arts council should look like and how it should function. Incorporating feedback from the interviews and the survey, it advises that the arts council should concentrate on three core areas: securing funding, recruiting experienced staff, and building relationships both within the arts community and with other key stakeholders. It also recommends to “strike while the iron is hot” by forming a council within the next year and a half.  It provides a set of beliefs to guide the new council, as well as a budget for the first year.

The Benefits

Wayne Martin, Senior Program Director for Community Arts Development at the North Carolina Arts Council, explains the benefits that came from using folklorists in this project.

• Authenticity

“By having folklorists trained in interviewing, we got some really eloquent statements that we were able to quote exactly. The results of the research were in the words of residents, which was a different tone than when other consultants would come in and write about a place. We were confident that the assets they reported on were valued by those in the community, lending an air of authenticity and connection we hadn’t had from other reports.”

• Community Engagement

“The work itself was a great community engagement tool. The interviews and conversations engaged the community at a deeper level than other projects.”

• Identifying artists outside the infrastructure

“Folklorists are trained to seek out and recognize creativity in a variety of forms. While it’s easier to just engage with artists and arts organizations, you leave out a big segment of the community who can bring a lot of depth in terms of artistic assets.”

• Identifying Community Culture

“Folklorists understand how artistry is a window onto a community. They are able to articulate how the art that is produced there reflects the values of that community and makes it distinct.”

Moving Forward

After a two year process and eight months of research funded by a $15,000 contract, an arts council for Wilmington and New Hanover County is around the corner. The city has already agreed to appropriate funds for the council if the county takes the first step.  This month, there will be a County Commission meeting to decide that.

Folklorists aren’t usually asked to conduct this kind of cultural asset research, but the method shows great promise. Mr. Martin says that the North Carolina Arts Council has already shared their work on this project with their counterparts in Kentucky and adds that they would be happy to share with others.

Imagine the possibilities, though—what else can folklorists help us with? Stay tuned for more about how folklorist research can interact with more than just traditional arts, and can become a tool for cultural advocacy, tourism and business councils, and region-specific grantmaking institutions.

Special thanks to Wayne Martin and Sarah Bryan for their help in preparing this post.