Art(ist) Education

Fractured Atlas Has Found Me!

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Fractured Atlas has my home address. I am not sure how they got it, but I have my suspicions. (I’m looking at you Western Arts Federation and Americans for the Arts.) The reason I know this is I received a small pamphlet in the mail this weekend letting me know about Fractured Atlas’ services to artists. My assumption is that this is part of Fractured Atlas’ effort to have a more nationwide reach. While they do have membership across the U.S., the vast majority of their members are on the East Coast, especially around New York City.

As I am wont to do when I see them offering something I like, I am encouraging people to check out their services. The pamphlet says their goal is to support artists, arts groups, arts administrators and other creative types “in the business aspects of your work–through access to insurance, funding, education, technology, and more.”

They have designed the pamphlet like one of those choose your own adventure books to direct you through a survey of their services. The first page directs you either to a page on fiscal sponsorship and insurance, two of the basic services Fractured Atlas has offered since they formed. Here is a look at the center pages of the pamphlet.

Click Image to Enlarge

Fractured Atlas has been demonstrating this sense of fun a fair bit lately. Take for example their espionage themed blog posts about two of their research fellows working on their open source arts administration software ATHENA. It’s a little strange, but a far more interesting read than posts discussing how they analyzed the current market needs and their methodology.

Wait a minute, maybe I am not taking their spy stories seriously enough! Maybe their research fellows are much better than I anticipated and that is who found out where I live! If I turn up missing in the near future, start the questioning with Adam “the Hutt” Huttler.

Speaking Art to Power

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Tonight we hosted a retirement party for one of the art professors on our stage. We were sort of the victims of past success. About 7-8 years ago, a professor had her retirement party on stage and it fired the imagination of the art professor. But this woman has had a 40 year history with the school which is no insignificant thing so when she asked us to host it back in August, we found a date we were dark for Nutcracker and penciled her in.

There were a lot of other art professors and some of her former students getting up to talk about how she impacted their lives and what the experience of taking her class meant to them. One woman had sustained an injury that prevented her from continuing her work in healthcare and she went back to school to study art and ended up winning some awards thanks to what she learned.

And the best part of it all was that the governor was sitting there the whole time. The retiring professor (who is not at all retiring personality-wise) was a long time friend and supporter of the governor since before either of them moved here. She supported him when he started running for office nearly 45 years ago and stood behind him on his first run at governor this past year. I knew he was coming, but I expected him to be in and off to another event. Instead, he stayed the entire night, got up, spoke about the value of the artist in society, signed his first proclamation as governor commending her and sat right back down.

The night unfolded essentially just as I had it should in my post yesterday when I advised talking about the value of the arts over and over again in front of decision makers or get them to talk about you. I have never had something I suggested in a post manifest itself so quickly and without so little effort on my part. Though it will likely still be hard going from this point forward, I will take the gift.

Alec Baldwin Hates NPR and Turning STEM into STEAM

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If you have been listening in on the public radio fund drives occurring the past couple weeks, you probably heard Alec Baldwin issuing various over the top threats about pledging to your public radio station. If you haven’t some of his greatest hits are collected on the KPLU website. In the first, he channels his character from 30 Rock and in a later one, reprises one of his speeches from the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross. Not included is an extremely frank, but very funny bit he did on This American Life this weekend. I have been trying to find it to no avail. If anyone has a link, send it my way.

Alec Baldwin has come a long way since his first appearance on NPR. (Warning, double entendres)

In other news, I got in to work just as the President’s Council on the Arts and Humanities started a live streaming chat this morning. Chuck Close, Margo Lion, George Stevens, Jr. and Damian Woetzel were talking about the place the arts have in the US and what can be done. You can watch the archived video here if you missed it. There was a simultaneous chat on the White House Facebook page so you could watch and discuss at the same time. (And let me just say, apropos to yesterday’s entry, as I listen to the archived video I realize how much I missed while trying to stay abreast of the comments.)

Chuck Close seemed to carry the day among commenters with his dismay/disgust with the lack of the arts in schools. He mentioned, as he often does, that the arts gave him hope in school and he credits the arts with keeping him out of jail. After the subject how the focus of education is on STEM courses, someone in the chat suggested it be changed to STEAM to include the arts.

It got me thinking that acronym would really lend itself to some good slogans. – STEAM drives America’s Productivity and Creativity; STEAM Powers The Economy. Not the most imaginative perhaps, but I am sure the products of STEAM education can generate some inspirational ones. It provides a good shorthand to use during advocacy because it binds the arts in with concepts in which many policy makers are already intellectually invested in advancing.

What Does The Lizard Represent?

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So a few changes around the blog today. I sent a few pictures of the objects on my desk to Inside The Arts fearless leader, Drew McManus to be used to spiff up the blog header and give it a new look. I sent a picture of my copy of Peter Drucker’s Managing the Non-Profit Organization among other things. Drew said the other pictures didn’t come out right, but I suspect he just felt I was getting full of myself and trying to make myself look deep and important so used the old lizard instead. (I also sent him pictures of the yo-yos and Wheel-O that also sit on my desk, but perhaps he felt that gave the wrong impression.)

But since we tend to be a little misanthropic about the state of the arts from time to time here on Inside the Arts, I also suspect that maybe the lizard and the “Culture Dinosaurs” album cover may be a sign of things to come.

With that in mind, I am about to introduce a topic reversing past statements about how the arts should be positioned.

In the past, I have argued that the value of the arts should not be spoken about in terms of prescriptive benefits – listening to Mozart will make your kids smarter being one of the more famous claims. But we can’t entirely deny that the arts are deeply steeped with pretty much every element that make us human – history, storytelling, movement, music and memory. As such the arts are a vehicle for just about every theory and idea Carl Jung espoused from archetypes to collective unconscious and can constitute an important therapeutic tool.

Psychology Today has had a series called The Healing Arts running on their blog over the past year. Every couple weeks since February, art therapist Cathy Malchiodi has been doing a countdown of her top 10, “Cool Art Therapy Interventions.” She is down to number three so presumably the top two will be coming in the next month or so. Among those therapies she has listed are mask work, mandala making, family sculpture making, photo collages and visual journaling. You can see pretty quickly how some of these activities could help a person express themselves better or introduce calm and focus. Asked to guess what activities might be helpful, I would likely mention these at some point.

Something I would not have listed because it seems so basic is Creating Together. Except for those artists who crave a solitary existence, I don’t think many in the arts would deny that part of what draws them to the arts is the collaborative experience. Even if you don’t achieve some sublime synchronicity while working with others or interacting with audiences in your daily experience, the communal act, even when simply fooling around, can bring something to each participant. About a year ago, I talked about the possible influence of high emotional satisfaction being a possible motivator for involvement in the arts. That, or something closely related, may also contribute to the therapeutic usefulness of the arts.