Inspiration, Effective Dialogs, Catalytic Thinking, and Cultural Policy Consequences
Support for the Arts
Several of our students from Southern Utah University’s Arts Administration program made the journey to Washington, DC for this year’s National Arts Advocacy Day and they returned inspired by what they saw, heard, and experienced. The message they brought back was one of optimism about the future of support for the arts in America. I have provided a link to an Americans for the Arts press release on Darren Walker’s keynote address on March 20, 2017. This speech can be a good class discussion topic.
Having a dialog with audiences
The article in the Arts Professional about a successful audience engagement at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, England could be used as a case study and class discussion topic. The “Audience Manifesto” and the method used by the Royal Exchange Theatre seemed to me to be a good tool for developing deeper connections with its audiences.
Asking Catalytic Questions
While not arts-focused, I want to share with you an opportunity to make students aware of the “bigger picture,” so to speak. The history section of the Creating the Future website provides a helpful overview the organization’s work. It notes that “Creating the Future was founded by Hildy Gottlieb and Dimitri Petropolis in 2011. Rooted in two decades of Hildy’s research, idea development, and experimentation, Creating the Future is now a collection of people around the world, putting that thinking into action, and bringing out the best in everyone around them.”
The reason I am bringing this initiative to your attention is that I believe that arts managers and leaders need to be engaged in discussion at the highest level about the future. Arts organizations and artists are creating and inventing the future through the programming they do every day. The process of asking catalytic questions should also include artists and arts leaders from around the world.
Cultural Policy Makes a Difference
The congressional budgeting process and the future of the NEA will play out over the next few months in a very public forum. However, we can also use this funding debate to help our students learn more about the details of cultural policy making in the USA. The recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the “Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program” created in 1975 helps provides an example of a cultural policy that has had a significant impact over the last 40-plus years and at very little cost.
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Darren Walker Gives Inspiring Nancy Hanks Lecture
Tuesday, March 21, 2017, Americans for the Arts, News Room
Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, delivered the Americans for the Arts 30th Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy entitled “The Art of Democracy: Creative Expression and American Greatness.”
On the eve of National Arts Advocacy Day in the Concert Hall of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Darren Walker inspired arts advocates with unique perspectives on the absolute need to maintain a federal investment in the arts. As the head of the second largest foundation in the nation, he also put to rest the notion that private sector funding can make up for cuts in federal funding or even serve the same role government plays in supporting the arts in America.
A dialogue with the audience
Arts Professional, March 25, 2017
Amanda Dalton is Director of Engagement at the Royal Exchange Theatre.
In a bid to listen more to its audiences, Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre launched a collaborative project that resulted in an ‘audience manifesto.’ Amanda Dalton shares the surprising results.
Working in the round, here at the Royal Exchange, we often speak of the intimacy between audience and performer that the theatre space creates – demands even. We speak of ‘exchange’ and ‘our audiences’, but who are they and what do they really want and get from theatre? What might we learn by really listening to audiences? What could this teach us about why people don’t engage with theatre, as well as why they do?
Isn’t it the case that the audience is usually seriously under-represented in conversations about theatre and the future of the art?
“We started to think about how we might begin a different kind of dialogue with audiences that wasn’t rooted in the usual quantitative feedback questionnaires or vox pops.”
Full article: http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/dialogue-audience?mc_cid=1e465705d1&mc_eid=1a1932085a
LINK to Audience Manifesto file:
https://www.royalexchange.co.uk/897-audience-manifesto/file
Creating the Future
Hildy Gottlieb, March 27, 2017 – eJournal – Creating the Future
What questions actually make things worse?
The 3 Questions at the core of the practices of Catalytic Thinking are simultaneously simple and powerful. They are the questions at the heart of every movement for positive change that has ever happened in our world. They are at the core of every teaching, in every tradition, because we have known for many millennia what brings out the best in us.
LINK to e-newsletter: http://creatingthefuture.org/e-journals/2017-2/questions-that-bring-out-the-worst-in-people/
Creating the Future: Our Mission:
A ten-year experiment to bring out the best in as many people as possible, in as many human systems as possible, through the questions people ask in their day-to-day lives. http://creatingthefuture.org/
Trump budget cuts could shut great art out of museums
San Francisco Chronicle
By Charles Desmarais, March 20, 2017 Updated: March 21, 2017 9:34am
If there were a federal effort that cost taxpayers virtually nothing, yet generated hundreds of millions of dollars to benefit American families, wouldn’t it be cited as a model of efficiency in government? As it stands now, the Trump administration has proposed to shut down such an enterprise.
The Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program was created with bipartisan support in 1975, in a law signed by President Gerald Ford. Little known outside the administrative offices of major American museums, the program is at risk if the National Endowment for the Arts is eliminated, as proposed in Trump’s budget plan released last week. Without it, exhibitions like the current “Monet: The Early Years” at the Legion of Honor and “Matisse/Diebenkorn” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art might never have been possible.
LINK: http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Trump-budget-cuts-could-shut-great-art-out-of-11015643.php