A new report from The Paul G. Allen Foundation examines cultural organizations in the Pacific Northwest that have succeeded in the face of economic turmoil and change. Bright Spots Leadership in the Pacific Northwest is the product of a six-month exploration by Helicon Collaborative and builds on Dynamic Adaptability, a series of conversations among arts leaders held in Seattle over the last two years.
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LA County Arts Commission's Arts for All program as received support from The Boeing Company, W.M. Keck Foundation and The Carl & Roberta Deutsch Foundation in the amount of $674,200 to provide professional development training designed specifically to the needs of teachers in eleven school districts in the LA metro area.
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From Kristie Pearce at The Windsor Star:
What do most people think of when they discuss great civilizations?
Quebec MP and heritage critic Tyrone Benskin says art. "When we look back at history and look at all the great civilizations—the Egyptians, the Byzantines, the Phoenicians—we don't sit there and talk about their economic plan," he said at an information session Saturday at the Artspeak Gallery on Wyandotte Street East.
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From Carl Franzen at Talking Points Memo:
Kickstarter is having an amazing year, even by the standards of other white hot Web startup companies, and more is yet to come. One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribue over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million.
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From Mark Swed at the Los Angeles Times:
Along with baseball and beauty pageants, classical music is one of the country's greatest passions. In the capital, Caracas, superstar Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel is mobbed wherever he goes. Classical music teeny-boppers run up to him for autographs when he walks off the podium at concerts. The state-run music education program, which is known as El Sistema and from which Dudamel emerged, is the most extensive, admired and increasingly imitated in the world.
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From The California Arts Council newsroom:
Craig Watson, the newly-hired Director of the California Arts Council, and Bob Booker, Executive Director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, encountered each other at a conference in San Francisco. These two friendly rivals made an almost-ridiculous bet: they challenged each other to a race. A 10K race, no less. Each man vowed that his arts agency would be the first to reach ten thousand “likes” on Facebook—although both were starting at around the 4,500 mark.
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The Wallace Foundation, with Dallas-based nonprofit Big Thought, has launched the website Creating Quality which intends to provide information, tools and other resources to evaluate and improve the quality of arts education and creative learning in schools, after-school programs and summer learning opportunities.
Based on a quality improvement process developed and pioneered by Big Thought in Dallas, one of the nation's leading institutions working to deliver arts education to children, the Creating Quality website houses resources to: engage stakeholders, define quality teaching and learning, assess the quality of programming and improve education for all children.
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On February 14, 2012, the National Endowment for the Arts hosted a day-long series of panels and presentations to examine the latest trends, current practices, and future directions for arts learning standards and assessment methods. In addition to moderated panels of experts, the roundtable featured a presentation of the NEA's latest research report, Improving the Assessment of Student Learning in the Arts: State of the Field and Recommendations.
The entire event is now available on a series of videos, available at the NEA website.
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Arts advocacy from William Lehr Jr, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and AFTA Board Member, in The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, PA:
In the face of difficult economic realities, Gov. Tom Corbett recently described his administration’s 2012-13 fiscal plan as “both lean and demanding.” Hard times require public officials to make the most of every asset and to adopt policies that maximize the state’s recovery potential. The arts are a proven part of that mix. As a citizen member of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, I laud Gov. Corbett for recognizing this fact and recommending that funding for the PCA hold steady at about $9 million.
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A new Smithsonian project, Oh Freedom! offers a new introduction to the Civil Rights movement through the unique lens of Smithsonian collections. Drawing connections among art, history, and social change, Oh Freedom! provides educators with tools to help students re-imagine and re-interpret the long struggle for civil rights, justice, and equality in fresh ways.