Info You Can Use: Artists U

Springboard for the Arts recently profiled Artists U, an artist lead, artist centered professional development and planning project.

The project started in Philadelphia and has spread to Baltimore and South Carolina. Since they train artist facilitators to lead workshops elsewhere, their sessions may be coming to a location near you.

Artists U grew out of founder Andrew Simonet’s observation that:

“I went to so many [professional development workshops for artists] when I started out and so much of it was useless,” Simonet says. Workshops were often run by arts professionals, not artists, who didn’t understand or address the real struggles that artists face.

After attending a Creative Capital Foundation development workshop, Simonet “says he was “blown away” by “how wrong artists are in their vision of the world.” So one of the focuses of the training sessions and part of the Artists U website is to change the thinking and practices which undermine artists’ efforts.

The website also has a free to download book, Making Your Life As An Artist which addresses these issues in greater depth.

I have only generally skimmed the book thus far, but a section that immediately caught my eye was suggestions on reframing the way you discuss your work so that it will be engaging rather than alienating to most human beings. This is an area in which every artist and arts organization needs to evaluate their practices.

Take a look..

modern dance
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figurative
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Paint Your Way To A Better You!

Some time back I was involved in a project that put me a table with folks from the local YMCA.

I was interested to learn that at the time, the YMCA as well as other athletic facilities were trying to develop memberships by offering starter rooms,

“where people can work out under specific direction with a small group of others with whom they share some connection (gender, age, ethnicity, weight).

These rooms and others like it (i.e. aerobics studios) no longer have mirrors in them. There used to be a focus on monitoring ones form and thus the mirrors. Many people didn’t want to see how bad they looked in the mirror so out the went. There has also been a shift in focus from fitness to well-being.

Once people have been working out for awhile and refined their physique and technique, they move out under their own motivation into the familiar bigger room with the mirrors where they can monitor their form and progress.”

Back when I first wrote this entry, I was trying to think of some small group programs that might replicate the same general dynamics for the arts. Since then, I have had some fun ideas, but have been faced with the problem of finding a compelling argument for people to participate in them.

Even with a lot of public messages about exercise being good for you, gyms see interest taper off after 3 months. There aren’t similar general messages about the value of the arts (2 hours a week -just 30 minutes every other day!) that motivate people to even aspire to make a resolution to participate or create.

Law of Conservation of Artistic Energy

Seven years ago, I made a blog post that included Scott Walters’ ideas about actor training, Seth Godin’s idea about “conceptual dip” and my observations that history shows us that the manifestation of the performing arts go through transitions.

As I re-read the post, I thought about Braddock, PA mayor John Fetterman quoting former Senator Alan Simpson who said it takes around seven years to effect significant change.

To my perception, in the last seven years there hasn’t really been significant change in the way arts students are educated. Nor does it appear the arts community has made much progress powering through the conceptual dip or started to transition to a new manifestation.

I think most everyone agrees the time for these things to occur is nigh. I read a whole lot, but still these changes may have escaped my notice. If the change hasn’t started, is it the case of there not being enough unity of will to make it happen?

We Need CRM Software To Manage Our Relationship With Our Own Creativity

Dallas Museum of Art Deputy Director, Robert Stein recently made an argument about the value of museums, and by extension, the arts, as a counter to philosopher Peter Singer’s suggestion that philanthropic giving to the arts means that many more people are fated to remain disabled.

I was actually surprised to learn that Singer is a philosopher because it seemed to me that he was making clearly erroneous assumptions that those giving to the arts aren’t also giving to health and social causes as well. Likewise, it is incorrect to assume that absent the opportunity to give to the arts, all those only giving to that cause would choose to support health and social causes instead.

Indeed, I admittedly always assumed that given the choice between healing the sick and feeding the poor and funding the arts, the sick and poor would tend to win out. The fact Singer was essentially implying arts and culture held a greater allure for philanthropists made me wonder if there were appealing elements of arts and culture I was overlooking and needed to exploit more.

Now just because I find Singer’s approach to be weak doesn’t mean that arts organizations don’t have work to do in communicating their value. Stein’s piece is involved and makes a number of compelling arguments about how arts institutions need to position themselves and their value to the community.

In fact, I have ultimately decided to break up my original post and address different portions of Stein’s piece over the course of two days.

I was most drawn to the following concept:

Consider what could happen for a moment if Museums were able to document — like universities do — our creative alumni? With the technology currently at our disposal, why are we only so focused on patron management systems (CRM by another name) that track the money people donate to us? What if we focused instead on keeping a catalog and evidence of the creative imprint our audiences are exposed to and the impact they make on the world. Such a catalogue could effectively illustrate the museum’s imprint on the formation of creative ideas and creative professionals and their resulting innovation across a multitude of fields. This alumni creativity database could be a proof-text for the role of museums in the formation of creativity and a boon for fundraising linked to this important outcome.

This idea that arts organizations really needed to be assembling a database of cultural experiences as sophisticated as that in a customer relationship management system shook me because really, those experiences are the true assets of our organizations and many arts organizations allow their connection with them to dwindle once they pass.

We cross reference giving and attendance history, know where people like to sit, how they like to be addressed and what their social and professional relationships are. Many arts organizations can pull that information up in moments and spit out a report or mail merged letter tailored to a person’s interest.

But our creative record is often contained in banker boxes and file cabinets that we have to sift through for hours in order to derive any value from it. How many people can pull up the program, images, video, interviews, notes by the creative team/curators and feedback from event attendees in a short period of time?

We make statements about putting the art and artist at the center of our work, but do we really cherish and reflect on what we have done the way a child cherishes a favorite teddy bear and the way an adult wistfully remembers that teddy bear? Or is the work filed away alongside expense reports and tax returns and only pulled out for grant reports and anniversary displays?

Near the end of his piece Stein says,

Only by measuring and counting the difference we make in people will we live up to our potential to change lives. Without it, we risk being relegated to the periphery of contemporary society as mere treasure houses for the wealthy in need of a tax-break.

If we give up on the idea that we can know for sure that our museum makes a difference, then Peter Singer is right, we’re not worth supporting.

He is referring to a commitment to investigating the impact work on outsiders that experience it. But it occurs to me that there might be an element of “if you want someone to love you, you must first love yourself,” in all this. Maybe only by making the totality of our creativity, past and present, central to our focus can we really convince the world of our organization’s value to them.