Music
Last year AEA Consulting developed the working paper “Critical Issues Facing the Arts in California” for the James Irvine Foundation. Since its release, the report has generated extensive conversations and responses, both within and beyond California. GIA invited Adrian Ellis, principal of AEA Consulting, to offer further thoughts on the current state of the arts in the United States.
Read More...In the weekend leading into the 2007 Taos Journey conference, members of Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education will spend two days together in Santa Fe seeking better understanding of one another's priorities in arts and educationfinding common ground. In the spirit of building this bridge between education and the arts, we sought an educator rather than an artist, a practitioner rather than a researcher, to write about arts education.
Read More...The design of GIA's 2007 conference is based on one used in 1993 for a conference in La Jolla, when papers published as the book Alternative Futures fostered lively discussion. We've invited back two authors from that 1993 publication, consultant M. Melanie Beene and conductor Michael Morgan, to revisit themes from their earlier pieces. We reconnected these two particular writers with their shared story in mind.
Read More...For decades the prolific Jack Loeffler has attended to the sounds of New Mexicosounds from nature, conversation, song, and storytellingwhile also hanging out with its legendary iconoclasts and characters. Loeffler's extensive recordings, chronicles, and transcriptions have contributed to the revival of the traditional music of New Mexico. We invited Loeffler to steep us in the place through his medium of sound.
Read More...As conference co-chairs, neither of whom has lived in New Mexico, we were told that the story of art in New Mexico is a story of place, that the regionits landscape, its convergence of cultures, its sacred spacesdefines what and how art is made. We turned to a number of New Mexico artists and writers to give us their inside views of this remarkable region. Among them is Chrissie Orr, a transplant from Scotland, who makes work informed and formed by New Mexico's physical environment.
Read More...As we were recruiting writers for this issue of the Reader, we learned that John Rockwell was retiring from his position as arts critic for The New York Times. It was all too tempting to ask Rockwell to reflect on the arts as he has chronicled them through his career. His response was to address the relationship between culture and classboth in history and in the presentraising questions about patronage and access, and the differences across classes in the kinds of art that are supported and accepted.
Read More...Jeff Chang is widely known for chronicling the story of the hip-hop generation through his book Can't Stop Won't Stop and the recent anthology Total Chaos. In this Taos Journey essay, Chang looks back at the legacy of the multiculturalism movement of the 1960s and '70s; at the last several GIA conferences, grantmakers have gathered to discuss their concerns about crises in important culturally specific organizations formed during that period.
Read More...Classical opera is a glorious but expensive enterprise that is thought by many to be so caught up in traditional methods and structures that it cannot adapt to changing times. Not so at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, under the recent and widely discussed leadership of Peter Gelb. Here, GIA member Russell Willis Taylor, president and CEO of National Arts Strategies, interviews Gelb about his approach to leadership, and his ambitions for the Met.
Read More...When I started DJing back in the early '70s, it was just something that we were doing for fun. I came from “the people's choice,” from the street. If the people like you, they will support you and your work will speak for itself. The parties I gave happened to catch on. They became a rite of passage for young people in the Bronx. Then the younger generation came in and started putting their spin on what I had started. I set down the blueprint, and all the architects started adding on this level and that level. Pretty soon, before we even knew it, it had started to evolve.
Read More...Re-imagining Orchestras: A forthright report on the mixed results of one foundation's efforts
Stan Hutton
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