Richard Stein

When government support is reduced or non-existent, when philanthropic support wanes due to the sagging stock market, and when corporate support is increasingly tied to direct shareholder interests, the local arts agency funding model is in jeopardy.

Unlike the organizations we serve—the producers and presenters of art—arts services organizations don’t typically incite passion for the cause the way a love for Mozart, Mondrian, or Mamet will. The major gift model of cultivating members up the ladder into large donors is far more difficult when your product is a grantwriting workshop as opposed to an opera production.

A trending topic in recent years is “social enterprise.” The term means something slightly different to different people. It often reflects the creation of a for-profit company to serves philanthropic goals.

Social enterprises may also be adjunct funding mechanisms to traditional nonprofit organizations or agencies. One of the biggest examples of this in the arts world is the California Arts Council.

When its general fund allocation was eliminated by the state legislature (except for the $1 million required match to its National Endowment for the Arts block grant), the council was forced to rely entirely upon the proceeds from selling its “arts license plate,” designed by famous California pop-artist Wayne Thiebaud, and introduced in 1994.

Nancy Glaze

Valerie Beaman asked all of the Blog Salon writers several question prompts regarding the intersection of arts and business. The following are my answers to a few of them:

How can the arts best convince the corporate world of their value to business?

Half of the residents in Silicon Valley view themselves as artists and participate in either formal or informal arts activities regularly. Silicon Valley’s residents are incredibly diverse and the region is home to the largest proportion of arts and culture organizations focused on ethnic or cultural awareness among comparable regions in the United States.

Those who work in technology are interested in learning about other cultures and connecting with their own. The nature of the more than 650 arts and culture organizations as well as the diverse workforce seem a natural fit and a win-win for arts groups and businesses that want to engage and enlighten employees.

Creating partnerships between the arts and the private sector within a framework of diversity and cross-cultural understanding supports an authentic need that springs naturally from the way we do business here and who is in the workforce. Silicon Valley is viewed as a global technology leader and is the birthplace of innovations and inventions that have changed the world.

Michelle Mann

As the former Director of Corporate Social Responsibility at Adobe, employees often shared with me their passion for giving back. More than just helping at the food bank once in awhile, they sought to spend time in the nonprofit sector, to make a difference.

Recently, I’ve had an opportunity to do exactly that and I’d like to share with you my experiences and view of the arts from a corporate perspective.

For the past six months, I have been a loaned executive to 1st ACT Silicon Valley, a catalytic organization whose mission is to inspire leadership, participation, and investment at the intersection of art, creativity, and technology.

Adobe’s former CEO, Bruce Chizen, had been a founding board member of 1st ACT in 2007 and the Adobe Foundation has supported the organization’s efforts to increase the vibrancy of Downtown San Jose (Adobe's headquarters) and support the arts ecosystem.

Erin Harkey

Started in 2002, as an alternative to mainstream gallery culture, High Desert Test Sites (HDTS) explores the connections between site, art and life.

Situated in the desert communities surrounding Joshua Tree, the biannual event produces a series of site-specific installations in the Mojave Desert. Belonging to no one and everyone at the same time, each project’s life cycle is inextricably linked to the site itself.

Intrigued by this year’s roster of artists, I ventured with a friend on a two-hour road trip from Los Angeles to check it out.

The map to the sites we picked up at the HDTS headquarters instructed us to “drive forever” on Route 62. To help us find our way, we relied on the tracks of the cars before us, the unreliable GPS on our phones, and the occasional hidden HDTS sign with a quiet arrow. As we drove, we were fascinated with the number of deserted buildings.

Caron Atlas’ post about People’s Potlucks inspired me to write about my own experiment in food, community, and art, Feast of Words: A Literary Potluck. Co-founded with Irina Zadov, Feast of Words is a monthly event where people come together to eat, write and share.

Feast of Words is one year old, and since the beginning it has simultaneously been about bringing communities together and expressing, creatively, what sets them apart.

It was a spontaneous idea—Irina had hosted a dinner party where people shared their creative work and was looking for a “third place” that combined art making with the comfort of a shared meal. I had been attending literary readings, looking for one that was a good fit for SOMArts, which is a multidisciplinary arts space and cultural center.

Tatiana Hernandez

People have looked to the arts to help define their communities and create a sense of place for generations. So, why are we so excited about creative placemaking today?

Perhaps it has something to do with context. In this digital world, many are reexamining the fundamental nature of “community” and our relationship to place. We now know, based on findings from the Knight Soul of the Community report, that social offerings, followed by openness and aesthetics explain why we love where we live. What does that tell us about the essential importance of our connection to place?

“Vibrancy” is popping up as a way of describing the intangible nature of a neighborhood’s character. Here are three projects working to help define a sense of place in each of their communities:

Philadelphia has a strong tradition of mural work, and thanks to Mural Arts, artists and residents continue to come together to help define “home.” As part of their Knight Arts Challenge project, Mural Arts brought two Dutch artists, Haas&Hahn, to North Philadelphia to live, work, and engage the community around a large-scale mural that will span several blocks of Germantown Avenue.

Erik Takeshita

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. We have a responsibility to those who will come after us.  

These simple yet powerful concepts have been echoing in my head the past few days in New Mexico where I participated in a roundtable discussion held at the Institute of American Indian Arts sponsored by the Open Society Foundations, First People’s Fund, and Arts and Democracy Project. The people I met and the stories I heard reinforced the power of the arts – and more importantly culture – in transforming our communities.

Six case studies were presented at the roundtable: KUYI Hopi radio (Hopi Nation), Jikaat Kwaan Heritage Center (Alaska), Penn Center (South Carolina), Tamejavi Festival (Central Valley, California), STAY Project (Appalachia) and Cornerstone Theater (Los Angeles).

Despite the differences in geographic location, populations or medium, these exemplars all shared common elements: they were place-based, holistic approaches that engaged both youth and elders, and, perhaps most importantly, put culture at the center.

Place-based: When in New Mexico, it is obvious that place matters. This is, of course, true everywhere. Place informs who we are, how we act, our thinking, our relationships. Place is more that just a setting, but rather is an active participant that informs what can and should be done.

The Los Angeles County Arts Commission was recently awarded a grant through the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town initiative to produce a cultural asset map in the unincorporated community of Willowbrook, CA.

Located just south of Watts and west of Compton, Project Willowbrook: Cultivating a Healthy Community through Arts and Culture will capitalize on the county’s over $600 million investment in health services and infrastructure. This includes the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Medical Center Campus Master Plan and the Wilmington Streetscape Plan that will link the campus to the nearby Rosa Parks Metro Station.

The arts commission and primary project partner LA Commons will use community engagement activities to identify artists, organizations, programs, and artworks, with the understanding that “art” and “culture” should capture both the formal and informal ways that people engage, this information will be compiled in a final report. The report will provide recommendations on long-term, sustainable strategies that will integrate art into development and achieve overall community objectives.

Emily Peck

The theme of this year’s Grantmakers in the Arts Conference reflected the big challenges facing arts funders and also arts organizations. The changes in demographics and changes in technology are issues that are being confronted across the country.

It seemed appropriate to gather for these conversations in San Francisco, a city in close proximity to the technological advances coming out of Silicon Valley and a state which became a majority minority state in 1999, about 42 years before we will become a majority minority country.

That last fact came from the keynote speech by Dr. Manuel Pastor, professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Dr. Pastor successfully managed to make census data entertaining and relevant as he addressed how California and the rest of the country will need to address shifting demographics in order to stay relevant. The ideas presented in his speech resonated throughout the conference as funders reflected on how to address these changes in their grantmaking.

The James Irvine Foundation has been keeping close watch on these changes and the impact of these changes on the arts organizations they fund. In a breakout session, Arts Program Director Josephine Ramirez provided an inside look into how the Irvine Foundation evolved their arts funding guidelines to better address the needs of arts organizations and the community. Here is a video that does a great job illustrating the foundation’s arts funding priorities:

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

Over the last few years, I’ve blogged here about our arts education advocacy efforts in San Diego with the San Diego Unified School District. I am the co-founding chair of the San Diego Alliance for Arts Education (SDAAE) which officially launched in May 2010 (although our collective grassroots advocacy work began a year earlier).

As chair of the SDAAE I have been very clear about the approach I want to take in leading the advocacy work that we do. While I believe that public comment and letter writing are important components of advocacy, I am also an evangelist for developing a working relationship with those to whom you are directing your efforts.

In this case, it’s our local school board. We have always carried the message to them that we want to be partners in supporting arts education and that we are available as a helpful resource for them. As a result, members have called when they have decisions to make or proposals to craft that they know will affect outcomes in the Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) Department.

Most recently, the school board asked community members to assist with what they call “Tiger Teams.” These teams are essentially efforts to get new information and an outside perspective about way that various district departments do business.

Cornelia Carey

Nearly a month has passed since Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene blew up the East Coast affecting 17 states and territories from the Virgin Islands to Maine.

The deep river valleys of New York and Vermont were among the most severely impacted. And just as those communities were beginning to dig out, Hurricane Lee caused another round of flooding in parts of Pennsylvania and New York.

Further, drought fueled wildfires had homeowners, businesses, and firefighters scrambling for control earlier this month in Texas. In Bastrop County, TX, alone 34,068 acres burned with 1,553 homes destroyed.

Needless to say, it’s been a busy time for those of us who work as emergency responders. While Montpelier, VT, where the CERF+ office is located, narrowly missed devastation, experiencing the disaster from the front lines has been a humbling and heartbreaking experience for our staff.

Recently, Laura Scanlan, director of state and regional partnerships at the National Endowment for the Arts organized a conference call for all of the states and territories affected by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. The news coming out of the states and territories, with the exception of Vermont and Puerto Rico (and with a few states not on the phone) is that arts organizations fared relatively well.

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

I'm a consultant in San Diego who specializes in capacity building for nonprofit arts organizations and the people who run them. I also do a fair amount of work in the realm of arts education, including currently serving as chair of the Arts Education Council at Americans for the Arts and the co-founder and chair of the San Diego Alliance for Arts Education.

It was with my "arts education hat" on that I attended a one-day symposium in San Diego called “Powering Innovation Economies” last week. One of the sessions was about the role of arts education, innovation, and the workforce.

Sarah Murr (my fellow blogger/Boeing's Global Corporate Citizenship community investor responsible for corporate giving to the arts in Southern California) was invited to be one of the panel members. Murr is well known in Southern California’s arts education community for the huge investment she’s made on Boeing’s behalf in supporting arts education in the Orange County area. She is also an active board member of the California Alliance for Arts Education.

Unfortunately, she was ultimately unable to participate and I got an email asking if I knew of someone in the local corporate community who could take her place.

As I sat there thinking about which local corporations support arts education as part of their community investment policy for strengthening workforce development, I came up empty handed.

Jaime Austin

ZER01 is an arts organization based in Silicon Valley, a place renowned globally as a hub of entrepreneurship and innovation. So lately I’ve been pondering the questions: How can the arts more visibly contribute to this culture of innovation? And how can we as an arts organization better reflect the area where we are based?

One of the main projects I work on is organizing the ZER01 Biennial. The fourth iteration of the biennial will take place in September 2012. Any organization that plans a biennial should always ask the question “why another biennial?” each time they embark on another planning cycle.

Recently, biennials are a dime a dozen. There are the longstanding biennials like Venice and Sao Paulo, and then there are a growing number of new biennials that are often used as vehicles to put non art centers on the map.

In my mind, one key to a successful biennial is that it reflects the location and history of where it is based. For example, the ZER01 Biennial in San Jose is a relatively new biennial. San Jose isn’t Venice or Istanbul or Sao Paulo. It’s the capital of Silicon Valley. Being situated here has inspired me, as the curator/organizer, to experiment with models outside of the arts so that the structure of the biennial more closely reflects the modes of operation that thrive here.

Public art sheep takes a coffee break (Photo by Jed Berk)

You’re walking to your morning coffee shop passing by the regulars sitting at outdoor tables reading and sipping coffee. But wait, something is different. A guy is seated at a table with a sheep. Not a live sheep, but a white fluffy sculptural object placed on the chair next to him. Huh?

Ahhh...the beauty, surprise, and often, humor of temporary public art in spaces where one wouldn’t normally encounter art.

Who was behind this sheep ‘spotting’ moment? The City of San Jose Public Art program - the 2011 Public Art Network Year in Review Program of the Year!

A Champion Flock of Weed Eaters created by artist Jed Berk was reported and digitally recorded  being spotted around the city of San Jose. A temporary public art project for the San Fernando light rail corridor, it was a partnership between the city and the 01SJ Biennial.

Weed Eaters was an anchor artwork on the front lawn of the Diridon Station where a makeshift ‘barn’ housed the flock of sheep and their ewe, a four foot tall ‘Mother Sheep’ complete with an internal computer sculpturally placed in her ‘belly’.

Tim Mikulski

For those of you who were able to attend our local arts education advocacy session at the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention, you know all about the work of the San Diego Alliance for Arts Education.

For those that couldn't make it to San Diego a few weeks ago, the Alliance was created as part of a statewide effort by the California Alliance for Arts Education to launch local advocacy groups.

Led by Americans for the Arts' Arts Education Council Chair Victoria Plettner-Saunders, the group has recently been attempting to restore funding to the San Diego Unified School District's (SDUSD) Visual and Performing Arts Department (VAPA). (You can read more about their efforts in an earlier post from ARTSblog or by purchasing our full slate of sessions on our Convention On-Demand site and viewing the local arts education advocacy session).

On June 21, all of their relationship-building and advocacy efforts led to a unanimous vote by the board of education that restored full funding to arts education programs for the 2011-2012 school year.

Danielle Brazell & Ramona Baker

I like to think I am a better person, smarter, my head filled with new ways of thinking, and ready to rock and roll after being surrounded by people who love and respect the power of the arts to change the world.

The truth is, I am probably heavier after all of the dine-arounds and dinners out. My card case will explode with all of the business cards I collected. My eyes glaze over thinking about where to start first.

My mother, the evolved Buddhist from Bayside, did not achieve her state of grace without believing in some basic universal truths. She would say, "Get over yourself. You are just a speck in the grand scheme of things so relax. Take one step at a time."

Thanks, Mom.

I know she meant to say something like "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," but after living in Queens you start to sound like a local.

Anyway, here are some of my impressions and images from this year's American For the Arts Annual Convention in San Diego:

Rich Mintz

I’m in San Diego this week for the Americans for the Arts Convention, which kicked off at noon today with a welcome by president Bob Lynch and a keynote address by California social-activist legend Bobby Shriver.

This is my fourth Americans for the Arts event in two years. Heading for my first (the 2009 National Arts Marketing Project conference in Providence), I was afraid I’d feel out of place. If you know me, you know I’m not exactly shy, but I’ve always been a little scared of arts people. They tend to be so sure of themselves, and bubbling over with ideas, and I’m just, you know, a businessman—on the creative end of the spectrum for a businessman, to be sure, but nevertheless…But I had no reason to worry.

One thing about arts people is that they love talking about ideas. And the ideas that might help them get more people to experience and enjoy art, or advocate for arts funding and education, or donate to support the arts in their own communities—well, those are the ideas they love talking about most of all. And it just so happens that those are the kinds of ideas we at Blue State Digital trade in, so everything worked out fine. 

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

Just as I’m preparing for a convention session about how attendees can create their own local arts education advocacy networks based on a model we’ve been using in San Diego and throughout California, I get word from a key district decision maker about their need for some information that may help them take some critical steps to avoid big cuts to the visual and performing arts department budget.

This is a milestone for our newly formed San Diego Alliance for Arts Education. We are being recognized by district decision makers for our ability to help them make more informed decisions to keep arts education in San Diego schools. While we’re not out of the woods yet, I certainly feel a victory for the role that the Alliance’s carefully planned advocacy is playing.

Leticia Fernandez Ivins

Southern California is dense with MFA programs – so dense that these artists are a cornerstone of the creative economy and help define the creative capitol that is Los Angeles.

Then, why am I not working with more (any, frankly) of this fresh post-grad crop of creative thinkers?

This is not out of ageism (and I adore the artists that I work with today), but yesterday I started to wonder how the 50+ public art programs in the region might better harness this concentration of creative talent in our own backyard?

Though graduate-level curriculum tends to be concept-based, some art professors have cleverly inserted the “art of business” into the MFA formula.

Yesterday, I lectured for an MFA course called, Graduate Professional Development.

This is the second course that I have instructed on the topic of public art history and practice to fine arts students.

To start the class, I asked everyone to state their name, current media, and either talk about a public artwork that they created or to relay a powerful public art encounter.  

Annually, the Public Art Network (PAN) Year in Review recognizes outstanding public art projects that represent the most compelling work for the year from across the country and beyond. The projects are selected and presented by a jury of three professionals who represent different aspects of the public art field, including artists, administrators, and other public art allies. New this year, the PAN Advisory Council curated the selected 49 selected projects for 2018 under five unique themes to broaden the exposure of the selected works on ARTSblog and social media, and to provide context to the works through national trends and themes that are impacting the field today.

At the forefront of the current dialogue across the nation and around the globe are questions concerning how we negotiate with the world around us to address the growing concerns of resource allocation, preservation, and climate change. The pursuit and development of the policies, systems, and infrastructure needed to provide long term sustainable solutions to these issues reaches across multiple fields from the political to the scientific and serves as inspiration to many of the 2018 PAN Year in Review projects. Though the materials, execution, and duration are all unique, these projects are unified by the role of the artist(s) in translating the collective experiences and stories of our essential ecosystems and habitats into personal narratives of site.

I vividly recall my first meeting with Isela Sotelo and Manuel (“Manny”) Prieto, the outgoing and current Executive Directors of LAMusArt. They introduced me to the issues that LAMusArt and other arts organizations face, such as the need for better engagement of Millennials and younger generations, as well as the need to build a more diverse pipeline of board leadership. Traditional board member duties have often been limited to raising large donations; however, the dynamic and evolving nonprofit arts and cultural landscape demands that arts leadership look to their boards for deeper engagement, creative thinking and problem-solving, and fresh ideas in order to grow and thrive into the future. I shared with them the desire and passion that I and other young professionals have to make a more sustained impact on nonprofit organizations, contributing new and innovative ideas and building new leadership skills—goals that many existing one-off volunteering opportunities fail to meet. From that conversation, the idea for our Young Professionals Advisory Board (YPAB) was born. 

The post-graduation years are considered a rite of passage, where emerging artists navigate crushing poverty, unpaid internships, uninformed financial decisions, and rejection in order to emerge as bona fide artists. People use words like sacrifice and bootstraps. You’re expected to work for free in order to demonstrate your work ethic and “make connections” with important people. These connections, we’re told over and over, lead to paid jobs. Just not yet. Let’s look closely at these expectations through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. In a field that is still white and male-dominated despite encouraging signs of change, those who hold privilege (economic, racial, gender, social, etc.) are better positioned to take the unpaid internships, get that one-on-one meeting with the artistic director, or convince the seasoned leader to take them on as an assistant. How can we better prepare aspiring artists from all backgrounds to enter this field?