A $200,000 grant to the Columbus Museum of Art will oversee the restoration project of the home of Columbus-native artist Aminah Robinson, part of a greater effort to preserve Robinson’s home as the future site for artist residencies.

Artist director Patricia Barker embarked on planning this season to challenge the narrative that an all-women-choreographer year was rare. Barker wants to normalize this, showcasing that it is “just as easy to hire a woman as a man.”

Newsweek recently published an opinion article that looks at the role artists could play if they had access to data and tech infrastructure to make cities more liveable: "A smart city should be designed to solve for not just infrastructure needs, but for what kind of city citizens want to live in."

For the past decade or so, there’s been a renewed emphasis on arts education. When many schools reduced or did away with extracurricular courses such as band, dance, and visual arts, one effect seen was students less engaged and less likely to hone skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and creativity.

Implicit bias and other structural impediments mean that we open fewer doors to girls, students of color and kids from low-income and rural communities. When they don’t engage deeply in STEM, we all lose. But the arts have always been a haven for the otherwise marginalized, and arts education connected to STEM can open many possible doors. 

ArtsEd Tennessee is three years into an effort to become a one-stop shop for lawmakers who need perspective on whether proposed bills may adversely impact arts education. This advocacy effort is advancing through a partnership with Americans for the Arts and the CMA Foundation.

Art museums are open to visitors, but are they welcome and accessible to all? To answer this, museums are becoming more aware of solutions to make artwork available to patrons with disabilities.

The awards, initiated in 2011, aim to promote the best practices of public art construction from across the world and enhance urban art and culture standards. The awards ceremony collects the world's best practices and opinions for the reference of Shanghai's development. 

Music teachers in Milwaukee argue that music is a core subject on par with history and social studies, and that every student should have access to high-quality, sequential instruction — including the opportunity to read music and play an instrument — as part of a well-rounded education.

Though arts budgets in Philadelphia have not recovered to their pre-”doomsday levels,” every elementary and middle school in the city now has some amount of arts resources and schools with 300 students or less are given an extra $50,000 to help support the needs of their students, including arts related funding.

State law currently only requires high schools to provide art classes — one credit — though many local school districts have arts requirements for elementary and middle schools. A group of arts educators called the Kentucky Coalition for Arts Education is pushing for the bill, called the Arts Education Equity Act, ahead of next year’s legislative session. A similar version of the bill was proposed but never received a hearing this year.

Drawing on 589 responses from female-identifying designers and production personnel, the study found two key obstacles faced by these groups: gender discrimination and lack of support for working parents.

Located in the Inwood neighborhood, the Immigrants Research and Performing Arts Center will “deliver state-of-the-art cultural space in Northern Manhattan, providing a permanent home to honor the vibrancy and history of immigrant contributions to our cultural fabric.”

The report reflects a longitudinal study of student growth in three elementary schools with regular arts integration programs across the state over the past three years, and looks at multiple key skills and knowledge points of the students including student self-image, engagement in learning, vocabulary development, and writing skills. 

New Jersey has become the first state in the nation to provide universal access to arts education for all public school students. All New Jersey public schools provide some form of arts education and every student that attends a public school in New Jersey has the opportunity to participate in arts education programs as part of the regular school day.

A study released through the Houston Education Research Consortium shows that expanding arts education in schools helped students in a few ways: boosting students’ compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students’ scores on writing tests.

The Haslam 3 Foundation, funded by Cleveland Browns owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam, is donating $4.5 million for education programs at three of Cleveland's most prominent arts organizations. The largest of the grants, for $2.5 million, will go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Receiving $1 million each are the Cleveland Orchestra and Playhouse Square.

For the past 23 years, Sphinx has helped increase the number of Black and Latinx classical musicians in U.S. orchestras from 1.5 percent in 1996, to 5 percent in 2019. The Detroit based organization supports musicians of all levels through education and access, artist development, performing artist programs, and arts leadership. 

While school is out for summer, some New York City public school students are taking part in a summer arts intensive. And Tuesday, they got to perform for actor Taye Diggs—a star of Broadway and the big screen. Diggs was in New York for the annual AdoptAClassroom.org donation drive and made a $100,000 donation to the city arts programs.

The state Legislature added $75 million to Oklahoma classrooms, which will start flowing into school this fall. "This is good for kids and it’s something that goes well for academic achievement in the future," said Joy Hofmeister, Oklahoma's state superintendent.

DIAVOLO, a Los Angeles-based dance company, has made it a mission of their Veterans Project to utilize their unique style of movement as a tool to help restore veterans' physical, mental, and emotional strengths through workshops and public performances in communities all around the country. Earlier this year, the Veterans Project expanded to a national program, bringing the initiative to Kansas State University.

A survey conducted in New York City revealed that the city’s arts and cultural nonprofits are still failing to reflect its surrounding community’s diversity. The report finds that while people of color make up two thirds of New York’s population, two thirds of its arts administrators are white. The study examined institutions large and small throughout the city’s five boroughs.

A new report identifies that the work of female artists is greatly outperforming the work of male artists in repeat auction sales, indicating a shift in women’s share of the art auction market in the next decade.

Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and other cultural institutions hope to preserve and recognize these publications and rich stories by making content accessible to the public and future generations. 

In a bold resolution on June 20, the Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) urged art museums to end their longstanding practice of employing unpaid interns. 

In a huge win for advocates of arts education, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has signed into law a bill to create a State Seal of Arts Proficiency to be affixed to diplomas of graduating public high school seniors who demonstrate completion of a rigorous arts study based on state standards.

The Summit is a result of new standards for fine arts education in the state including dance, media arts, music, visual arts, and theater. The standards, which are voluntary, focus on artistic processes rather than academic testing.

New York City’s P.S. 55 Benjamin Franklin in the Bronx recently announced a partnership with the nonprofit hip-hop outreach Windows of Hip-Hop and luxury watchmaker Bulova to build the first-ever recording studio within a New York school, along with creating a hip-hop curriculum.

Kerry Freedman of Northern Illinois University’s School of Art and Design received the award in recognition of her commitment to scholarship, leadership and service.