Arts Intranet

Lex Leifheit

“And I need you to be better than me

And you need me to do better than you.”

—Thao With The Get Down Stay Down, “Know Better, Learn Faster”

Over a week has passed since the 50^th Anniversary Summit, and what a whirlwind week it was. Back at SOMArts Cultural Center we closed out an amazing turnaround year. We more than doubled our gallery attendance, revived our intern and volunteer programming, launched a website, renovated our lobby and office spaces, invested in long-overdue equipment upgrades, fought to protect our city funding, and lived to tell about it.  And yet, in many ways we are just catching up. There’s so much to do and it feels like the more we succeed, the more people we connect to who have urgent needs and high expectations.  Such is the life of a thriving nonprofit.

At convention, I connected with peers who had similar stories. We’re all exhausted. So we sat in the audience and listened to panels talk about new models, veering between skepticism and hope.

I came to convention still stubbornly hanging on to the idea that a “new model” was a structure I could study and apply to my organization—that magical combination of for-profit innovation, technology application and nonprofit altruism.

I left convention having reached the conclusion that we need to stop treating “new model” like a noun, in panels or anywhere else, when what we’re talking about is changing the system. We’re asking how we can achieve dramatic organizational change necessitated by the factors mentioned above, but succeeding via thoughtful communication and a process of enrolling (vs. influencing) stakeholders in one’s vision.

Danielle Brazell

I run a local arts advocacy organization in a small fishing village on the west coast that’s home to 10 million people, 88 cities, and 81 school districts in a geography that spans thousands of square miles.

Yes, my little fishing village (aka Los Angeles) is massive!

Our advocacy approach has been high-tech/high-touch advocacy approach and is focused on three critical issue areas:

•    Arts Education
•    Cultural Economy
•    Civic Engagement

Within this context, I constantly ask the question: How can we connect more people to advocate for the arts in their community? I think the answer lies somewhere between community organizing and community development.

created by the New York Neo-Futurists

No Flash? Watch here on iPhone or iPad.

When I first started working with the New York Neo-Futurists, our artists-in-residence for the 2010 Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit, I had no idea what to expect from their culminating performance on Sunday, June 27. I was familiar with the structure of their work from seeing “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” a couple of times, and knew about ordering of the “menu” of short plays. I even anticipated some on-stage chaos. But It was the content I was worried about.

The Neos were tasked with synthesizing thousands of voices, opinions and ideas bounced around over the course of three days in Baltimore into 10 short plays crammed into a 20 minute window. And I wanted at least some of the plays to be a meaningful reflection on the future of the arts (in line with the conference theme). That was a big challenge to place on anyone’s shoulders, even six young, hilarious theatre gurus who create small plays to perform at random order on a weekly basis.

It all had me a little nervous.

Sally Gaskill

My first convention was in 1983 or 1984 in Hartford, when the then National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies met with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. (Those were not only the pre-digital years, but the period when the acronyms – NALAA and NASAA - were more in alignment.)

I was a fresh-faced community development coordinator for the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. I remember what a rush it was to meet people like me from all over the country.

We did communicate back then – there were telephones, and we actually wrote letters and posted them in the mail – but there sure wasn’t Facebook or Twitter to keep us in touch with each other by the minute. So meeting up at convention was a big deal.

As the years have passed, I have been a frequent attendee of these annual meetings. Americans for the Arts has always been my home, because my work in arts administration has been grounded in community arts.

Valerie Beaman

Last year at the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in Seattle, funders and arts organizations alike were in a panic about the economy and draconian cuts in arts support and services.

This year in Baltimore, while the economic picture remains challenging, clear progress was evident as funders and arts organizations discussed new ways of adapting and shifting models. It’s all about collaboration and the blurring of lines between private and public, for profit and nonprofit, high art versus populist art.

This past year, the Obama administration brought in film artists to help brainstorm on a solution for capping BP’s gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Rocco Landesman, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, talked to cabinet leaders asking how can the arts help with their problems, which developed into a partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development  and the Department of Transportation.

Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange is working with the U.S. Navy on a huge arts-based learning project. And Peter Sellars, stage, film, and festival director, wants to know why shouldn’t artists bring their creativity to bear on solving the ills of the California prison system. Why not, indeed?