Maryo Gard Ewell

Robert E. Gard, with additional contributions by Maryo Gard Ewell, Robert L. Lynch, and Michael Winslaw. Edited by Maryo Gard Ewell with Clayton Lord and Elizabeth Sweeney. 2016, 128 pages, Americans for the Arts, Washington, D.C.

The 1960s was a time of ferment and creation on so many fronts. In the arts, we note explosive growth in the number of significant professional arts institutions as well as countless locally based arts organizations, from chamber orchestras to theater companies; the birth and growth of culturally specific arts groups and arts centers; the creation of arts groups in support of, and arising from, the civil rights movement; the rapid increase in the number of community arts councils, especially in small cities; the birth of Community Arts Councils, Inc.

In 2006, the Wisconsin Arts Board (WAB) looked back at the five towns that participated in the first "access" grant funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in the late 1960s. This was a seminal rural arts development program managed by the University of Wisconsin's Office of Community Arts Development at the College of Agriculture. The WAB study included interviews with elderly local artists, archival documents, a survey conducted in 1973 and replicated in 20052, and conversations with some of the field's earliest practitioners.

July 2004, 76 pages. The Community Arts Network

Download: The State of the Field of Community Cultural Development: Something New Emerges from the Community Arts Network.

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