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Arts Administrator Residencies-Is There A Need?

March 9, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

I am not quite sure what drew my eye to it but Fractured Atlas did an interview with the founders of the Philadelphia Art Hotel this January. I don’t know why, but the project just looks and sounds a like a cool idea.

Personally, if I were a visual artist, I would probably tend toward the residencies in rural settings which is where a lot of them are located. Ready access to the Philadelphia art scene is not to be undervalued though.

I would probably sell my children into slavery to participate in the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

It is probably fortunate then that I am not a visual artist. And I don’t have kids either. That is probably better since they have a performing arts program and I would still love to work there for the washrooms alone!

I don’t really talk about artist residencies too much. Perhaps because there aren’t too many for arts administrators. If you check the residency search tool at the Alliance of Artistic Communities website, administration is not even a search option. The only place I am aware of that offers one is The Studios of Key West which I wrote about 18 months ago.

I start to think that people like Michael Kaiser are correct when he talks about how few training opportunities there are to make people good arts administrators. There aren’t many opportunities for them to take a retreat and do research. Though to be fair, residencies for arts managers isn’t really part of the ethos. Arts administrators don’t get granted long periods of time to hone their skills. I don’t know if there is a market for offering residencies to them. How many administrators would ask for the opportunity? Most would say they don’t have the time. Kaiser talks about starting his day at 4 am which pretty much reflects the trend for many arts administrators.

One might say the Kennedy Center’s Art Management Fellowships are a sort of residency for arts managers. It combines practical work experience around the Kennedy Center with classes on relevant topics. And I believe they provide a $20,000 stipend to support yourself which is really pretty decent compared to what I was paid to intern. Though since the fellowships are for mid-career administrators,they would be bringing much more to the table than an intern would.

In any case, I would imagine the days there are just as long and involved as the position the arts manager left to become a fellow. That doesn’t give a lot of time for reflection and thinking about what the future of the arts might be and how one can restructure their organization to move forward to acknowledge these changes.

This summer I waswoolgathering a little about taking advantage of low real estate prices in Detroit to help grow an arts community there. I wonder if I was being too narrow in my vision and should have been thinking of including opportunities for arts managers to cultivate their skills too since there are so few opportunities.

Art(ist) Education, Leadership, Management Philosophy, State of the Arts

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Green Papers-Not What I Thought They Were About

March 8, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Due to the imminent failure of my refrigerator’s compressor, I don’t have as much time to devote to the old blog as I had hoped.

With that in mind, I wanted to direct people’s attention to Americans for the Arts’ efforts at creating a conversation around green papers on topics of importance in the arts. Given the whole push for environmentally friendly activities, I initially thought a green paper was essentially an attempt to issue a white paper on good conservation practices.

It turns out, a green paper is actually a policy document similar to a white paper, only less binding. Who knew? I mean, there are ribbons of every color for every cause, I thought this was a similar attempt.

In any case, Americans for the Arts’ are making a big effort to have substantive conversations on many topics across the next year. In their definition:

“Green Papers are short, easy to read, visions of the future meant to inspire a nationwide dialogue on the future of the arts. As a way to celebrate the successes of the past 50 years in the arts field, Americans for the Arts has collected Green Papers from a variety of national arts service organizations and peer groups representing different perspectives and disciplines.”

Currently their topics include:

The Future of…

* Art Therapy
* Artists’ and Arts Organizations’ Preparedness and Emergency Response
* Artists’ Residency Programs
* Arts and Disability
* Arts Education
* Arts in Healthcare
* Arts Learning for Children/Youth
* Community Arts Education
* Cultural Democracy
* Dance Education
* Leadership for the Arts
* Jazz
* Preservation
* Private Sector Support for the Arts
* Public Art
* Public Voice in Arts Advocacy
* State Arts Agencies
* Strings
* Symphony Music
* Digital Infrastructure for the Creative Economy
* Theatre
* Urban Municipal Arts Agencies

They want people to get involved and contribute to the conversation. I wonder if they also need people to lead the conversations. You can’t tell from the list here, but there are no links to pages for Art Therapy, Arts and Disability, Jazz, State Arts Agencies, Symphony Music and Theatre. I don’t see a call for leaders, though I certainly may have missed it. Most of the Green Papers were rolled out on February 16, perhaps the leaders for the unactivated sections weren’t immediately available to discuss those areas.

I also am curious to know why there is someone leading Strings but not Symphony Music and why there is a Dance Education category, but no Dance. Guess I have to stick around, read and ask these questions.

Oh yeah, and where is the paper on environmental sustainability in the arts! 😉

New Initiatives, Terms and Ideas

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Info You Can Use: Employee or Independent Contractor

March 3, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

As usual, the folks at the Non-Profit Law Blog provide some useful links. I will quickly point out a short piece about the Senate has recently passing a jobs bill that will provide incentives to hire and keep employees.

The measure would exempt private employers, including nonprofit groups, from paying their share of Social Security taxes for employees they hire through the end of 2010. The new hires must have been out of work for at least 60 days.

They would get an additional $1,000 bonus if they kept the employee on the payroll for a full year

I had heard about this a few weeks ago, but it never occurred to me that this would be a real boon for the non-profit world where a little savings can go a long way. I wish I could remember where I heard it, but I was listening to a radio show where one of the panelists said he wished the money going to public works was directed to non-profits because you could create hundreds of non-profit jobs for every construction job created.

The main of what I wanted to discuss is examining the employment status of people who work for your organization. According to Jessica R. Lubar, a lawyer at Venable LLP, the IRS is undertaking a study of employment tax compliance. They will be focusing on three areas: worker classification, fringe benefits and officer compensation.

What I wanted to point out specifically was the issue of worker classification. I know of a number of organizations that call those who work for them independent contractors so that they don’t have to attend to any of the tax withholding details. However, if the IRS doesn’t call them the same thing you do, there could be a lot of trouble.

“A worker is considered an employee if the employer exercises the requisite amount of control over the employee under common-law principles. Over the years, the courts and the IRS have articulated certain factors that are considered in making that determination. The IRS organized the factors that are considered into three categories: (1) Behavioral Control – whether the business has a right to direct and control how the worker does the task for which the worker is hired; (2) Financial Control – whether the business has a right to control the business aspects of the worker’s job; and (3) Type of Relationship.”

If you have made a mistake in classifying an employee as an independent contractor, there is an opportunity to rectify that situation and obtain relief from the penalties of that mistake. Lubar outlines these in the entry. You would obviously want to consult a lawyer because I am already confused by the first of the three requisite criteria–not treating a person like an employee. That seems to me to imply you have been treating the person like an independent contractor which means you are in the clear.

Perhaps the distinction is in whether you contractually had the right to behavioral and financial control but never enforced it thereby treating someone as if they were an independent contractor when technically they were not.

Guess that is what the lawyers get paid to tell us.

Info You Can Use, Leadership, Management Philosophy

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Trash Talkin’ About The Arts

March 2, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

First it was Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art wagering paintings on the outcome of the Super Bowl. Now I hear Dallas and Ft. Worth are talking smack about which of them has better cultural assets.

Please people, art is only demeaned by using it as a prop in a bet or a gauge of greatness. Oh. Well, actually I guess that is where a great deal of it obtains its value from.

I think a lot of us would be pleased to have our communities talking about how much better the arts and culture are here than in the next place over. There are sports rivalries from high school to professional levels and the fear/pride of someone else getting there first got us to the moon. Without evoking the old “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we…” trope, cultural rivalries may be something to inspire locally.

You wouldn’t want to compare yourself to New York City, because as evidenced by the end of the Dallas-Ft. Worth piece, you can’t compete with them for culture or condescension. But it could be mutually beneficial to get into a friendly rivalry with a similar municipality/county/town across the state or across state lines. Something that drives both locations to make progress against the other–but also celebrate the other’s successes, perhaps begrudgingly.

In the best of worlds, both locations might advocate for funding for the other, writing letters on their behalf. Because of course, the other guys may be more uncouth, but they are still a sight better than places X, Y and Z. If they were distant enough from each other not to overlap their audiences, some of the organizations could block book the same artists and then quiz the artists about whose theatre was nicer, whose audiences were more enthusiastic, etc. Done good naturedly, it could make artists excited to visit the other location. If the story about Philadelphia area theatres sharing the same production is any indication of the future, attempts at oneupmanship may just add to the fun.

My technical director does a version of this with the technical director at a partner organization. They send the company members to do strange things to the other one. He even has me holding up groups’ departures until he can instruct them in proper execution.

Everybody wins if both communities invest themselves in the rivalry. In addition to getting people excited about what might be coming and how they might top the other guys at their own game, it also gets people looking around for something of value to boast about in their community. Soon you get around to boasting about the quilts in all the bed and breakfasts having been created by a local artist whose quilts appeared in a show at the Smithsonian. Then you start to realize just how great it is to live where you do and how many extraordinarily talented people you never knew you had has neighbors.

General Musings, State of the Arts, Terms and Ideas

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