This week I was talking about an upcoming performance collaboration and a board member asked me “are we presenting or producing?” In that moment, I realized that I wasn’t 100% sure how to answer. My notion of producing comes from the world of theater where producers negotiate with the director to choose designers, actors, venue, technicians. That’s fine if you are investing in one or two projects a year. But what if your goal is to produce 10 or 20 or 50 projects, in order to help cultural communities achieve creative and financial success? Would you want to manage every detail, or would you want to empower those artists and producers by providing a platform that would help them succeed?
Platform programming. This framework—a combination of artist honoraria, subsidized rental rates and lots of hands-on technical, production and marketing support —is a highly customizable and scalable model for collaboration that gives communities and artists creative control. CONTINUE READING ]
Me at The Firebird, 2005
The other day I was speaking with a friend who is going to London and I told her about Punchdrunk and their performance of The Firebird Ball in 2005, which is on my list of Top Ten Arts Experiences of All Time, made all the better by the fact that the reason I bought a ticket in the first place was somewhat obligatory. My boss’s niece was in the play and it was mostly sold out … which is why on my last night in London I found myself taking the tube to Brixton and shivering in an alley with a group of around 20 people waiting to be let into a warehouse. Those of you who haveand family in the theater know that an audience of 20 outside a warehouse is not unusual, so I had no expectations whatsoever.
posters taped to easel in dark alley ... what to expect?
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In the shadow of federal funding cuts there has been a spike in online dialogue about how we communicate the value of the arts, including some excellent essays by Howard Sherman and Arlene Goldbard.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t thinking about arts funding this morning when I stumbled on this article by Lauren Story, “The Evolution of Private Label: Assessing Retailers’ Strategic Motives.” But if you participate in your organization’s strategic thinking about program development and outreach, it’s a worthwhile read. Why? Because the big challenge retailers are facing (shoppers are making fewer trips, cutting spending) is identical to the challenge faced by those of us in the arts (participation is down, so is revenue).
As someone who works in community-based art, I’m hesitant to use the word “private” in any way lest it be seen as elitist, inaccessible, unappealing. But “private label” is an industry term which refers to a brand not owned by a producer but rather by a retailer who gets goods from a manufacturer and offers them under its own label. There are some obvious parallels to the arts if you are a presenter, service provider or simply working more and more collaboratively.
In brief, some takeaways from the article: CONTINUE READING ]
And I need you to be better than me
And you need me to do better than you.
—Know Better, Learn Faster by Thao With The Get Down Stay Down
Over a week has passed since the 50th Anniversary Summit of Americans for the Arts, and what a whirlwind week it was. Back at SOMArts Cultural Center we closed out an amazing turnaround year. We more than doubled our gallery attendance, revived our intern and volunteer programming, launched a website, renovated our lobby and office spaces, invested in long-overdue equipment upgrades, fought to protect our city funding, and lived to tell about it. And yet, in many ways we are just catching up. There’s so much to do and it feels like the more we succeed, the more people we connect to who have urgent needs and high expectations. Such is the life of a thriving nonprofit.
At the AftA convention, I connected with peers who had similar stories. We’re all exhausted. So we sat in the audience and listened to panels talk about new models, veering between skepticism and hope.
I came to convention still stubbornly hanging on to the idea that a “new model” was a structure I could study and apply to my organization—that magical combination of for-profit innovation, technology application and nonprofit altruism.
I left convention having reached the conclusion that we need to stop treating “new model” like a noun, in panels or anywhere else, when what we’re talking about is changing the system. We’re asking how we can achieve dramatic organizational change necessitated by the factors mentioned above, but succeeding via thoughtful communication and a process of enrolling (vs. influencing) stakeholders in one’s vision.
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