The 15th Annual WESTAF Cultural Policy Symposium, co-hosted by the California Arts Council and Frank Gehry Partners, will be available online via a live stream. Creativity and Innovation in Public Education: Areas of Need, Mechanisms for Change will take place on March 4, beginning at 8:45am PST, when arts and policy experts will gather at architect Frank Gehry’s studio in Santa Monica, California for a thought provoking symposium addressing critical issues facing the arts and education. A series of six sessions will follow throughout the day.
GIA Blog
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Arlene Goldbard reports from the Staging Sustainability 2014 conference, recently held in Toronto:
In her concluding keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, Adrienne Goehler exhorted conference attendees to support a “basic income grant” as a universal right. She put it succinctly: the current system forces overproduction in all realms, even art. The current system of grants for artists, inadequate in so many other ways, operates almost exclusively on a project basis, forcing artists who seek support to think in terms of novelty and output rather than allowing adequate time for work to evolve and emerge organically.
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From Jon Wojciechowski, writing for HowlRound:
My marketing director, Alicia Grasso, and I conceived a photographic tableau to illustrate the often hidden costs of producing professional theater. We pulled key figures from our annual budget—expenses we wanted to illustrate—and chose key members of our staff and Resident Intern Company to participate. Cape May Stage was producing Freud’s Last Session at the time, so we opted to stage the photograph on that show’s set. We even seated Dr. Freud himself (Equity actor Joel Rooks) front and center.
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Professor Ann Collins Johns at the University of Texas at Austin was just as peeved as many people were about President Barack Obama’s knock on art history majors. So she did what any self-assured art historian would do and wrote a letter to Obama on January 31, shortly after the President’s remarks, and sent it using the White House website. Then came the surprising part: Obama responded with a handwritten note on February 12.
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GIA President & CEO Janet Brown, writing for ARTSblog:
I’ve been a community arts developer for over 26 years. Most of that time was spent working in rural communities in South Dakota and the Great Plains. Moving back to South Dakota after a stint in New York City and San Francisco, I became increasingly aware of how people passionate about the arts impact rural and small communities making certain that art is a part of the lives of their children and their neighbors. Community arts councils, community theatres, visual art galleries, community choruses and bands...all defined the word “community” for me.
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The Ford Foundation announced today the election of Lourdes Lopez to serve as a member of its Board of Trustees. Lopez, who will be the first artist to join the foundation’s board, is the artistic director of Miami City Ballet, chairwoman of Miami City Ballet School, and a strong proponent of arts education and the transformational power of arts and culture to improve lives.
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The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History will host its 2014 Museum Camp with the theme of social impact assessment, Wednesday July 30 – Saturday August 2, 2014. The goal of the event is to develop creative ways to evaluate the work we are all doing to build and transform our communities by bringing together teams of diverse people from across many disciplines in shared learning and doing around research and social impact. The museum has partnered with Fractured Atlas to produce the camp.
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Today, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Dr. Jane Chu as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. President Obama said, “Jane’s lifelong passion for the arts and her background in philanthropy have made her a powerful advocate for artists and arts education in Kansas City.
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From Judy Woodruff at PBS Newshour:
North Carolina mandates that all elementary school students have equal access to art instruction, but enforcement of the law appears inconsistent across the state. Special correspondent for education John Merrow reports on two elementary schools' different approaches to arts education and the effects on student performance.
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Phillip Kennicott raises some questions about public subsidies and privilege in The Washington Post.