Arts Intranet

Robbie Q. Telfer

An important principal to the Encyclopedia Show is diversity. I had mentioned earlier diversity of artistic genre – we try to get not only poets, but solo performance artists, visual artists, creative nonfiction and fiction writers, musicians, comedians, live animals, experts on the topic, jugglers, etc…

Demographic diversity is also extremely important to us. We have youth perform in every show, as well as people coming from as many different communities as possible – and in hyper-segregated Chicago, that might mean more. A larger goal of our show is to replicate all human emotions, so we’re trying to bring in all humans.

The key to diversity, though, is not to tokenize people from outside my demographic (white guy), but to try honestly to understand the values of the different communities I am pulling from and featuring only excellent representatives.

It makes for a bad show if you don’t care how the non-white guy’s pieces turn out just because you feel guilty about institutionalized racism. Also, tokenism is infantilizing and deeply insulting.

Participants in the Door to Door campaign

Readers! Hello there – my name is Shelby Morrison and I’m currently the Marketing and Communications Manager for Raw Art Works in Lynn, MA. RAW is a community based youth arts nonprofit led by art therapists with the mission to ignite the desire to create and the confidence to succeed in underserved youth. In short, our kids use a wide variety of materials and media to communicate “what’s really goin’ on” in their lives.

To paint a quick portrait of the landscape, RAW is located in downtown Lynn, a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse city with a bustling population of 87,000. Despite Lynn's ocean front location just nine miles north of Boston, the city struggles economically compared to its affluent neighboring towns. Lynn's crime, poverty, teen birth and high school dropout rates are more than twice the state average. There are over thirty gangs in Lynn that are actively recruiting youth as young as elementary school.

As a nonprofit, our sustainability lies in successful fundraising, and for us, successful fundraising lies in the storytelling of our kids art and the emotional connection our donors make to those stories.

June Rogers

Reading the blog entry by Stephanie Evans Hanson that focused on the beginnings of new methods through close observance of our conversations reminded me that changes employed by Fairbanks Arts Association (FAA) on the issue of art-for-sale at fundraisers started with conversations.

One of my previous posts told of FAA’s new direction for art auctions and our concern about the value of an artist’s work in local galleries and the success that was realized with the new direction. However, we’ve gone a step further and paid heed to suggestions from two of our members, each bringing the same suggestion from two different cities – an art sale by lottery.

One person had attended an event in Denver and the other had attended a similar event in San Francisco. The event is simple and focused – art is for sale. The innovation that puts a spin on the event is offering the work for sale through lottery. (In Alaska we need a gaming permit from the state to conduct this event so check on your state requirements before embarking on this idea.)

Tiffany Barber

I was born and raised in Oklahoma City and I grew up dancing. When I decided to get serious about a performance career, I enrolled in the only performing arts magnet high school at the time and majored in dance. Which led me to New York City where I earned a BFA in Dance Performance at Fordham University/The Ailey School. Then, I abruptly quit and moved to Los Angeles.

Coast to coast and back again, I returned to Oklahoma City a year after obtaining my Master's degree in Public Art Studies from the University of Southern California. The recession hit California hard and the arts sector dwindled. Instead of slaving away at Starbucks, I took a job as a dance educator in my hometown.

I hadn't lived in Oklahoma City for almost ten years, so my first project once I returned was to reacquaint myself with the arts scene. I went on a series of informational interviews with some of the city's dynamic arts leaders and nonprofit managers, and finally found my balance – I would teach dance by day and moonlight as an arts writer and organizer by night.

Shelby Morrison

Hello again! It’s been so exciting to participate in this blog salon; to connect, to engage, and to exchange.

Writing and thinking about innovation is interesting. I think on an individual level and an organizational level, I/we haven’t always sought out to be “innovative” and much as we’ve strived to be “creative.”

The two concepts tend to go hand-in-hand, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an innovative idea that wasn’t creative, and vice versa. It’s a hard thing to constantly strive toward innovation and creativity. Sometimes these things just happen – that magic “Aha!” moment.

Those moments seem to come from having a conscious approach to the way we do our work; a conscious approach to considering the goals, outcomes, objectives, and constituents. Some solutions are simpler than others, and these are our favorite innovations.

Ian David Moss

Through the work of the [Emerging Leaders Council] Emerging Ideas Committee this year, I’ve become acquainted with a wealth of new approaches to old problems and exciting combinations of existing models about which I was previously unaware. You’re seeing some examples of them on the Blog Salon this week, and we’ll be sharing more on this space as the year goes on.

For every strong example of innovation we highlight, however, I’m sure there are five more that we missed. Not because they were not among the ones we chose, but because they were never even brought to our attention.

Part of the nature of being “under the radar” is that it’s hard for people who rely on conventional information sources to find you. The five young arts professionals on our committee set out at the beginning of the year to identify novel, smart projects that weren’t getting attention from the field as a whole. We used what resources we had at our disposal – most notably, our connection to the 30+ local Emerging Leader Networks around the country – but inevitably, our ability to “spot” innovative ventures is determined to a significant extent by those ventures’ visibility.