Advocacy

It Ain’t Easy Being Public Art

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I think Art in Public Places staff for any community have one of the most difficult jobs in the arts, particularly when it comes to public perception of the job they do.  While everyone accepts that not every work of art will be appreciated, the fact that public art installations are visible for years in places hundreds, if not thousands, of people pass each day makes them the subject of daily comment, often repeatedly by the same people.

Not to mention there are birds pooping on them, too

While some pieces become the source of enormous pride, local identity, and tourism (i.e. Cloud Gate in Chicago), and others generate a mixture of pride and bemusement (here’s to you, Blucifer), in some cases it seems you can’t win for trying.

That seems to be the case in Annapolis, MD where all three options for a traffic circle the Art in Public Places folks posted for feedback got panned.   Maybe it is the location that is cursed or the local residents who are particularly critical. The new sculpture is meant to replace one installed in 2011 that fell prey to termites.

…meant to evoke the ribs of a ship in a nautical town. Even [artist] Donovan admitted it could also be compared to whale bones on a beach or a brontosaurus-sized rack of barbecued ribs.

Among the comments people made for the submissions included noting that two of the options looked like hand of people coming out of graves. (Apparently, there are some cemeteries in the vicinity). Another said one of them looked like drowning people reaching for a lifeline. One commenter said one piece looked like it belonged at the entrance of a retirement village in Boca Raton. One piece was likened to a condom.

There were also the inevitable comments about the whole endeavor being a waste of money.

There is a rule in surveying that you should never ask for feedback if you aren’t prepared to act upon the responses. So the question is what the public places art commission intends to do with the comments they received. One option is to reject the finalist pieces and go back back with a solicitation for proposals. Another option is to ask the artists to make changes to their work in response to the comments.

A former commission member addressed the latter option:

“If you take a public comment to reconstruct an artist’s vision, then you are basically attacking the integrity of their art,” said Genevieve Torri, a former commission chair who represents the area around the circle. “It’s up to the artists. This is their vision.”

Competition Among Donor Advised Funds Is Constricting Charitable Giving

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I am always interested in news about how donor advised funds (DAF) are operating. On the whole, their use hasn’t gone as intended and they have reduced, rather than increased or incentivized charitable giving.   A few weeks ago Vu Le linked to an article that examined how the differences in the way DAFs are promoted is an indicator of whether they are distributing or sequestering funds. (emphasis original)

National sponsors that spend more time talking about donor benefits on their websites have more assets, take in a much higher proportion of noncash contributions, and pay out grants at much lower rates than sponsors that spend more time talking about charitable giving.

[…]

But our analysis predicts that a hypothetical national sponsor with a strong emphasis on charitable grantmaking on their website would pay out at 53 percent, while a hypothetical national sponsor with a strong emphasis on donor benefits would pay out at just 2 percent. And those lower payout rates have ripple effects when it comes to the buildup of assets: Our model predicts that the highly charity-focused sponsor would have assets of just $34 million, whereas the highly donor-focused sponsor would have assets of $2.7 billion.

Something to note is that the analysis focuses on national sponsors of DAFs rather than regional and local sponsors. The author of the piece, Helen Flannery, notes that since national sponsors tend not to have the specific focus, whether it be geographic region or cause, they often need to work harder to make a case for people to arrange their giving through them. Flannery seems to suggest that the those that tout financial benefits to the donor are able to make a more compelling case than a more charitably focused sponsor without a specific focus.

Flannery calls for a more specific evaluation and regulation of DAFs on an individual basis rather than looking at the aggregate giving of sponsors since the really generous ones tend to make the parsimonious ones look better due to averaging.

The analysis we present in our paper quantifies this phenomenon. It measures the degree to which sponsors have financialized what was originally intended to be a nonprofit instrument, and it measures just how intense the competition has become among the very largest DAF sponsors in this country.

Public Comment Praise Takeover Helps Renew Denver Guaranteed Basic Income Program

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Long time readers will be aware that I have been keeping an eye on guaranteed basic income programs in different communities, especially those that are designed to benefit artists.

Recently Denver agreed to renew their program for a second year to benefit unhoused groups. The pilot program had provided funding in different increments to people as part of an attempt to study what approaches were most effective.  I am unclear about whether they have settled on a standard amount to distribute as they move into the second year.

What caught my eye in a Vice article on the topic was the discussion of how the different advocacy groups went about lobbying for the continuation of the program, reversing the new mayor’s rejection of a proposal to renew the program.  Other groups looking to advocate for basic income programs, whether specifically for artists or not, may be able to learn from the Denver groups’ approach.

A coalition of about 20 groups advocated for the funding, including SEIU Local 105, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC), Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and Center for People With Disabilities. Advocates attended weekly city council meetings for 12 weeks wearing the color green (for money) and using the public comment period to praise the program.

“The Denver Guaranteed Income Coalition worked together to rally outside the Colorado state capitol, execute a 40-person public comment takeover at a city council meeting, send hundreds of emails to newly elected Mayor Johnston and city council members, and phone bank which resulted in over 2000 calls to Denver residents and subsequently dozens of calls to city council members,”

Creativity To Change How We Experience Health Care

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If you missed it last week, NPR reported on a recently published book about the need to inject creativity to make the practice and interaction with medicine a more empathetic experience.  Among the examples cited are artist collectives who raised money to pay medical bills and forgive medical debt by creating works of art out of medical bills which they sold, (or in at least one case, immolated).  The piece also mentioned design changes like creating gentler sounds for medical devices so that patients weren’t constantly jarred by harsh beeps around them.

The author of the book Emily Peters mentioned that while it seems like medical professionals are very much in control of their environment, they actually feel quite powerless.

 Physicians and surgeons and health care administrators and people who, to me, seem very, very powerful, [they] feel very powerless. And so the book came about as thinking about power and change. And then I realized that artists have this unique intersection where they are very powerful, they bring a lot of the things that were missing in health care, trying to build a better future.

She cited a couple examples of color choices in medicine which may seem like long established traditions or having emerged from research, but are really just arbitrary decisions someone made that caught on. Peters assumed the white coat ceremony had roots that extended back to the medieval period but was really the result of a Chicago doctor deciding in 1989 that students weren’t dressing professionally enough.

Same thing with the advent of the medical green, [the ubiquitous color of medical supplies]]. There’s a spinach green that came from a surgeon here in San Francisco, just working to try to reduce eyestrain, but that became very standard in medicine. And then there’s also a minty green, that a color theorist in Chicago just decided that that was the color for health care, that minty green was going to save us all and was going to look so beautiful.

When people were asked what colors they wanted to see in hospitals, they responded with neon purples, reds and oranges rather than the assumed soothing pastels. Peters suggests that LED lights would allow the colors of spaces to be customized to suit those occupying them. She also discusses a chapter in the book about how puppetry is being used to train medical students.

As I read the article, I was hoping there would be more recognition/initiatives to involve creative folks in the design of medical environment. I haven’t spent much time in hospitals, but there are a lot of repetitive sounds that get on my nerves so anything that mitigates things like that and improves other environmental factors and interactions would be welcome. More than that, it would be good to have the contributions of creatives to health and medicine recognized beyond just treatment and therapy for the sick and infirm.