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!

Truth is, artists and administrators working together can do great things But we often approach those great things from different perspectives. And we are not the only group out there who tries to achieve great things despite vast differences (politics, anyone?). In this case, I am thinking of another group of creative, passionate individuals whose work does not always have an immediate, practical application–academics.

Clare Potter, Professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, has a blog called Tenured Radical. She has written a wonderful, nuanced post about collaboration. If you substitute the words “academic” and “professor” for artist, it is a rockin’ treatise from the perspective of a radical, demanding, respectful and compassionate artist (oops, I mean academic).

Here are the adapted highlights:

Be firm and clear when expressing objections, but don’t be abusive or accuse the administrator of bad faith out of hand.

Give people the benefit of the doubt: sometimes they lack knowledge for a reason.

Administrators are not failed artists.

You can’t always get what you want.

Administrators, like God, help those who help themselves.

The highlights don’t do her justice, and the comments are worth a read too. As Barry Hessenius would say, Don’t Quit!

Courtesy of the Berkun Blog.

• Andrew Taylor’s “Three Questions for the CEO Candidate” sparks a dialogue about the back-and-forth between executive director candidates and search committees. 
• Dominique Browning writes about John Maeda, RISD’s “new type of president,” for the Wall Street Journal. (note: link is only good for 7 days)

I think I broke one of the cardinal rules of blogging by skipping town and blogging on another site without warning. And now, I have just returned from four days in Philadelphia, where I attended the 2008 Annual Convention of Americans for the Arts.

What did I learn? First and foremost, to REGISTER EARLY. Staying at an overflow hotel makes it hard to blog, power-nap, or pace ones’ self throughout the days.

What can I use? Within hours of my Career 360 session with Dewey Schott of Next-Step Consulting, he forwarded me an article about high-functioning teams that I hope to utilize at our next staff retreat. The advance workshop on Better Program Evaluation will be useful in consensus-building with board members and teaching artists about how (enrollment numbers? student testimonials? mission relevance?) to define programming success.

Who did I meet? As Ruby Classen noted on her earlier blog, I traveled far from home to meet some people in my own backyard: Maren Brown of the UMass Arts Extension Service, Brian Hornby from New Haven’s Office of Cultural Affairs. A slightly awkward and rushed meeting between the Emerging Leaders Council and the State Arts Action Network resulted in one of my most enjoyable conversations of the Convention, when Anne Katz and I discovered that we both got early career breaks at the O’Neill Theater Center (many years apart, and many shared memories nonetheless). And, near the end of my stay, a chance meeting with Susan Pontious of the San Francisco Arts Commission revealed that the Hestia Mural, which I enjoy daily in my hometown of Northampton, was her very first public art project, in 1980.

Where will I go? Perhaps the better question is, where won’t I go? Members of the Seattle emerging leaders network were so compelling with their visions of next year’s UNconvention, I might head west in the fall for Bumbershoot or another long weekend. Tucson would be an exciting addition to my list of travels. And the Public Art Year in Review was a reminder that I should drive down to New York, see the waterfalls, and check out fellow emerging leader Marisa Catalina Casey’s new Starting Artists space in Brooklyn.

But for now, it is good to be HOME! Big thanks to everyone who made this convention inspiring, challenging, irreverent, and unforgettable.

Lex

p.s. I am also back to my “home” blog, http://www.lexleifheit.com.