Lex Leifheit

… are two of my favorite things. The National Endowment for the Arts has extended the Request for Proposals for the “Art Works” logo design until March 5 due to the blizzard.

Above title is a quote from Jason Schupbach, author of thecheesefreak.com but ALSO creative economy industry director at the Massachusetts Department of Business Development, and a major mind behind affordable artist space. What is up with all of my smartest friends and associates having food & drink projects on the side? Design writer Will Bostwick also covers beer for GQ. Gritmedia designer Fran Duncan (responsible for the Echoing Green website, which I love) started Plate to Plate, a blog about eating locally in the Berkshires.

As if anyone needs arm-twisting to consume food, cheese and beer. But thanks, all, for lending your minds to these worthy causes. I see a goofy cheese-tasting video in my imminent future.

photo credit: Taken on a trip to London. In retrospect, I deeply regret not tasting the best cheese in the world.

For Christmas, Dan’s sister gave us a membership to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I’ve been a member of many visual arts organizations in the past (ArtSpace New Haven, Southern Exposure, Wadsworth Atheneum, Real Art Ways, and on and on) but for whatever reason this is the first one that has resulted in participation as I imagine it’s more or less intended. The membership provides us with the ability to spontaneously drop in, look around, enjoy an exhibition without feeling the need to take in the whole building. And, we get to skip the line, which is a nice perk on a rainy Sunday. I’m lovin’ it.

Today, we went to the Luc Tuymans exhibition, which Dan blogged about here.

In addition to the shows, I am also enjoying SFMOMA’s new lineup of bloggers, er, columnists. They just got started and already there’s an interesting post by Renny Pritkin about artists who’ve left town (and those who have stayed). I discovered Pritkin’s Prescription For A Healthy Art Scene on the Open Space blog shortly after moving to San Francisco last year, and it was posted on my office wall for quite a while. Glad to see that he is now an official poster, creating an interactive online space for dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, there was quite the turnout for SOMArts’s Saturday afternoon talk about politics and printmaking. Sixty-five people showed up to see the work of more than 30 Bay Area artists represented in the exhibition, and to hear the differing opinions of Art Hazelwood, Robert Flynn Johnson, Steve Lopez and Don Farnsworth. Somehow, there is a connection to be made in the tremendous (and growing) local turnout at SOMArts shows, and the response by artists and curators on Pritkin’s blog who are seeking the kind of business, finance and critical rigor that will sustain them here. The lack of posts on my own blog is due partly to a desire not to make this site an annex to my work space … but these artists’ needs, and how to support them with our limited resources, are very much on my mind.

So, over at SOMArts we’ve been doing some advocacy in the face of budget cuts to the cultural centers. We’ve been writing grants. And we have been working damn hard.

And right now, I wish there was another day to this weekend! This one was good, and too short. Thanks San Francisco, for living up to expectations once again.

(photo by Julie Michelle)

A couple of months ago, I wrote about some of my favorite San Francisco blogs … and through the magic of the interwebs, this connected me with Julie Michelle, author and artist behind i live here: sf. Julie invited to be here 90th subject, and we took a walk around SOMArts for the photo shoot. You can view the slideshow, along with my essay about discovering a community through art, here.

It is Martin Luther King Jr Day, and for that reason I woke up thinking about a work of art I saw in Austin nearly two years ago, American Dream by Kurt Mueller. Mueller was featured in a show of 20 up-and-comers at the Austin Museum of Art. The marketing materials described his work as follows:

“Imitation insinuating itself into action is the crux of Mueller’s installation ‘American Dream,’ wherein a karaoke setup transforms the experience of singing a favorite song into a restatement of a world-altering speech. As the text of Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech courses across the monitor much like a pop song, the viewer as performer finds that an everyday voice can be as effective as any other.”

For me, this work was the most memorable in the show. I was visiting Austin with Dan, the exhibition was busy that day but not crowded. I turned a corner and there it was … the karaoke machine! It was placed in the corner so that one had to step behind it, into the corner, and then there you were with your back up against the wall, in front of the microphone, looking out at the room.

The room was empty except for the security guard, a tall black woman in her 40s who was looking directly at me.

And on the karaoke screen, a crowd was cheering and a ball was bouncing and the words are racing across the screen, I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

And, in that moment, I didn’t feel like the marketing text said I would, like my “everyday voice can be as effective as any other.” I felt self-conscious, afraid to speak the words, even with the bouncing ball. I was reminded of the courage of Martin Luther King Jr, and the importance of lifting up many voices so that the right one, at the right time, may be heard.

I have been slowly adding to the list of San Francisco blogs I read on a regular basis. Because my worklife keeps me busy, I am lucky if I check my rss feed once a day (using Byline on the iphone helps a little). So I put five or six in rotation for a while, see what sticks, and add or subtract what I don’t end up reading.

This morning, I found two new sfBlogs that I am excited to throw in the mix: Bikes and the City, and  i live here:SF. ilivehere is a portrait project by artist Julie Michelle, who got her first camera in 2008 and is using it to help people tell the stories of their lives in San Francisco.

Bikes and the City (subtitled “bikes, boys y coffee”) provides a glimpse into to the bike culture here, courtesy of Meligrosa and her bicycle, Frenchie.

Six years ago, I was looking for a job on the East Coast, something that would allow me to continue directing plays and stay connected to community-based art. When the “Press and Marketing  Coordinator” position at Wesleyan came up in the job listings, I passed it by even though it was in my neighborhood, because I didn’t see myself fitting into the culture of a presenting organization at a university. I had a lot of assumptions … and one of them was that a university presenter would not be connected to the off-campus community, would not feature the kind of performing and visual artists who interest me, and if they did, they would only be accessible to undergraduates and professors.

A coworker of mine who was a Wesleyan alumnus persuaded me to take a second look at the job, and within a month I was working there, because of one person: Pamela Tatge. Pam Tatge is the director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts and the embodiment of the term “artistic administrator.” During my time at Wesleyan, she helped create the Green Street Arts Center, orchestrated a citywide dance festival which danced its way up the hill and onto campus, broke the mold of the first-year-students’ common reading program and instead co-created a residency based on the performance “text” of Bill T. Jones.

Consistently, Pam Tatge challenges convention and asks where and how art can be a more essential part of everyday life and learning. I rarely saw her press a vision onto a project that excluded the ideas of others—rather, she created structures wherein artists could work with students, cultural groups, city leaders, neighborhood families, professors and the administrative team at the CFA to launch creative endeavors that included many people, in many ways.

Pam transformed my idea of what an artistic administrator can achieve, and how universities and communities can work together—which is why I was so excited to learn that this year she was honored with the William Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence from the National Association of Performing Arts Presenters. It is always thrilling to see someone get the recognition they deserve.

And speaking of recognition, the whole Center for the Arts team—Barbara, Adam, Camille, John, Kristen, Mark—are pretty incredible. Congratulations to all!

• “We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.” (via a friend’s Facebook page, and also Alice Walker)
• Surviving a workaholic spouse (via Forbes.com)
• Tracking volunteer time to boost your bottom line (via Blue Avocado)

It’s extremely rare that I would link to a straight-up advertisment, but the Museum of Modern Art took the phrase “experience economy” to heart with this interactive schedule. Love it!

The Indianapolis Museum of Art recently posted a couple of articles about transparency, written by Chief Information Officer Rob Stein. Stein defines transparency as “the ongoing discipline of practicing radical authenticity and demonstrating to the public whatever degree of integrity and operational excellence our museum possesses at the time.”

Then he goes on to talk about what shouldn’t be disclosed, and the process–when, how and what to disclose.

It is interesting to look at these articles in the context of leadership transition. New leaders are often scrutinized on a much more macro level than their predecessors, and it can be hard to say no to requests for transparency, particularly when it is something you personally believe in.

Discussion with my “emerging leader” colleagues has revealed that we are not frightened of sharing the gritty details (as Stein puts it), but that often new leaders inherit organizations with infrastructure that was designed for the Age of Altruism and not the Age of Transparency. Becoming more transparent means changing infrastructure, and changes in infrastructure usually bring about demands for transparency.

Emerging leaders, I know you are out there … any thoughts or comments?