As Program Manager, Ariani Huguenin provides support for Cathedral Arts Project’s (CAP) direct service programs by ensuring Northeast Florida’s teaching artists and students receive the resources and support they need. Since joining CAP in 2017, Huguenin’s portfolio of work has included volunteer engagement, family communication, logistics coordination, and teaching artist support. “Arts education starts with technical skills and leads to life skills that empower students to know their worth and think creatively to problem-solve. At CAP, we have been able to track ‘Why The Arts’ matter through student attendance, behavior, and grade improvement. Quantifiable measures are wonderful, but the greatest impact of arts education is seen in the students that wanted to give up, but persevered and learned something new.”

Over the last couple of years especially, the major national arts service and membership organizations have given greater attention to engaging diverse communities more effectively. Building meaningful dynamic and collaborative relationships with community-based partners informs programming and audience building work. Working effectively with organizations serving diverse communities has become an ever-higher priority for state, regional, and local arts agencies throughout the country. Addressing cultural equity in tangible and effective ways is critically important for all of us, including how arts organizations recruit staff and identify board candidates. With a heightened awareness in our society about these issues during this time of major social and political change, the work of organizations like the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) takes on even greater significance. Becoming more familiar with the work of ATALM (and likewise with similar organizations serving diverse organizations) gives professionals working in local arts agencies both a better understanding of key issues, as well as connections to colleagues in the Native cultural field, to help them address these crucial matters. 

In the recent Arts Marketing Coffee Chat entitled “Research & Data: What Do You Need?” I shared the process for how arts organizations can address a specific a business problem by identifying data that an organization has or needs, which can provide insights into developing an effective solution. 

Located in Camden, New Jersey, Camden FireWorks is a Black-led, community-based arts organization that works to grow, gather, and invest in artists and artists-to-be in the Camden community. Executive Director Asiyah Kurtz is an applied anthropologist with 20 years of experience in leadership of private, nonprofit, and public sectors. “As a young arts organization, we had previously only relied on volunteers to teach our open studio workshops for our first five years of operations. With the support of our Board, one of the changes I made this year was to pay a meaningful wage to teaching artists for their time, labor, and talent. If I have anything to do with it, there will be no starving artists in Camden.” 

It is important for cultural leaders and individual artists to know the work of organizations elevating Native artists. This is of special urgency given the current challenges faced by local and regional arts agencies: Leaders in the cultural sector simply must have a broader understanding of social and economic justice issues. As our field does more to support civic engagement and informed public dialogue about these key issues, local arts leaders have the opportunity to assume leadership roles on the complex challenges in our communities—promoting equity, addressing the climate and other issues, and promoting civic literacy about the issues we face. As arts administrators and managers, it is not enough to be informed about the issues—we need to know how to communicate effectively with broader, more diverse publics that we serve. Local arts agency leaders must understand these issues on ever deeper levels as they develop meaningful competitive grant review processes and find effective ways for arts organizations to take central roles in public discourse. 

Art-making seeds a certain bone-deep faith in one’s instincts, a deeply grounded sense of comfort that frees one up to try new things. Developing one’s artistry is an exercise in taking risks and living to tell the tale. Mistakes aren’t only tolerated, they’re expected. Built into the artistic process is the act of rough-drafting, rehearsing, reframing, “take-it-again-from-the-top”-ing. The voice will crack at some point as we seek our sweetest, most vulnerable sound, and our foot will falter occasionally as we attempt a new pirouette. Producing meaningful art means that we’ve given ourselves space to experiment, iterate, fall and fail and get up and try again. The opportunity to correct flies in the face of an educational system predicated on the right/wrong binary of standardized testing. It’s radically freeing to look beyond that binary, and creative confidence is the byproduct. With creative confidence in place, anything is possible for our students.

ASSEMBLY for CHINATOWN was launched in collaboration with A+A+A Studio to build outdoor dining spaces at no cost to Chinatown businesses. We design, source materials from Chinatown vendors, and construct Department of Transportation (DOT) compliant dining barriers for restaurants. Artists beautify and personalize the space for the restaurants with the help of volunteers who come (socially distanced) together in a help-a-thon to sand and paint the wood barriers. The mural project came into play with our first artist, Kat Lam, who reached out to ask if we wanted her to paint one of the barriers. Her style matched with the business owners, so we moved forward. She contributed her vision as a muralist and we decided to do that for all the barricades to enliven the space and the neighborhood. People want to be part of this community project. Painting is such a gratifying way to work together. Whenever the volunteers walk by, they feel ownership and want to patronize the business. 

Founded in 2008, with start-up funding of $10 million from the Ford Foundation, NACF supports Indigenous artists, culture bearers, and Native-led arts organizations through fellowships and project funding. Betsy Theobald Richards (Cherokee), who served as Ford’s Program Officer in Media, Arts, and Culture from 2003 to 2010, provided key leadership in establishing NACF. Other Native leaders and artists were involved from the get-go: the civil rights lawyer Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), poet and musician Joy Harjo (Muscokee-Creek), museum director and artist Elizabeth Woody (Yakama Nation Wasco descent and Citizen of Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs), and singer, artist, and educator Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree First Nation of Canada), among others. It’s powerful to have such dynamic and creative national and community-based leaders setting the stage for NACF’s work. The organization is currently in the early stages of developing a major cultural facility and new headquarters: the Center for Native Arts and Cultures in southeast Portland, Oregon, with a vision to create a “vibrant gathering place” for Indigenous artists as a convening ground for cultural ceremonies and celebrations; as an incubator for Native artists to create; and as a venue for presenting contemporary exhibitions and performances, workshops, and seminars.

No one living in New York last spring will forget the tension and the morbidity that enveloped the city when COVID-19 hit. In that period, all I heard were sirens and birds—an eerie silence for a metropolis that “never sleeps.” My roommates and I fully dealt with contracting the virus that April—from extreme fatigue and chest pressure, to headaches, fever, and the loss of taste and smell. In this milieu, I was attending virtual classes for my Arts in Health graduate certificate program, and observing my savings dwindle as work contracts and opportunities disappeared. While my body physically healed, feelings of uncertainty and anxiety overpowered me. Some days were an absolute struggle, but thankfully, I knew I wasn’t alone in my reaction and circumstances as many of my friends and peers were down and out. Even though all my work was canceled—including my first invitation to curate and co-produce a show in Manhattan — I knew I had to release what I was feeling.

In the wake of a global pandemic, it is almost universally understood that there are innumerable factors from the past year that have made it difficult to indulge in our favorite art forms. These challenges also have highlighted inequities in the arts sector that can no longer be ignored. In the face of these inequities, artists have begun prioritizing their platform to combat these barriers and to help change the arts sector for the better. The Color of Music Collective, or COMC, is an example of a group of artists/arts patrons who are aware of these inequities and, in turn, seek to use their online platform to engage and dismantle inequitable systems in the music industry. When asked about the origins of the Color of Music Collective, Mia Van Allen, the founder of COMC, recalled her experience as an intern working in the music industry: “As a woman of color working in the (field) it was difficult to find representation.” This experience laid the groundwork for the birth of the collective. COMC is a new organization that developed last year during the pandemic—thus their experience as a collective is unique in that their programs have always been virtual with the intent of remaining as accessible as possible.

The multi-media Atlanta-based artist Luzene Hill, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, was one of five Fellowship artists chosen by the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis in 2015 and featured in their exhibition Conversations (the other artists honored in 2015 were Brenda Mallory, Da-ka-xeen Mehner, Holly Wilson, and Mario Martinez). Certainly, the work of these artists reaches a high formal and aesthetic level, as well as being informed by complex contemporary cultural, social and political realities. Luzene Hill’s work draws deeply personal and difficult experiences related to violence against women and Indigenous cultures. In creating museum and site-specific installations, she helps her audiences understand complex issues on a deeper level. In communicating about tough issues, she also manages to create visually stunning work. During our current period of tremendous social, cultural, and political upheaval, artists like Luzene Hill bring needed attention to key issues while engaging our hearts and minds to consider more effective ways to respond to the serious work that remains to be done.

For queer-BIPOC identifying individuals, the endless and unique intersections of one’s identities can make it difficult to find yourself authentically represented in the arts. Working to carve out space for marginalized queer artists, The National Queer Theatre (NQT) elevates those who have been historically, and continue to be, underrepresented in the theater field. The NQT houses a unique initiative known as the Criminal Queerness Initiative (CQI), which focuses on highlighting the narratives of queer identifying international and immigrant playwrights—specifically, the censorship or criminalization they may face within their countries. The efforts of the artists are then celebrated in a culminating event, the Criminal Queerness Festival (CQF). In addition, they host the Criminal Queerness Lab: a (virtual) residency that seeks to elevate playwrights on an international scale by providing rigorous support in the writing and production of new work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Adam Odsess-Rubin, founder of the National Queer Theatre and the Criminal Queerness Initiative, about the initiative’s origins and the importance of conversation surrounding the varying degrees of censorship queer-identifying individuals encounter on an international scale.

Located in Morristown, New Jersey, Morris Arts builds community through the arts via arts in education programs, arts programming in the community, grants, scholarships, advocacy, creative placemaking events, and support for artists and arts organizations. Since 2012, Tom Werder has served as the executive director of the organization, directing and administering all programs, operations, and policies, supervising staff, managing the annual budget, and leading the strategic planning process. “I’ve loved my time at Morris Arts—it’s hardly possible to think that I’m in my ninth year. I think the thing I’m proudest of at Morris Arts has been to expand our presence both in our community as well as in the field. Through the connections gained with my involvement with Americans for the Arts, I’ve worked as a grant evaluator for a number of arts councils across the country as well as participating with a small group of arts leaders in advocacy work in Congress on behalf of the field.”