Thank you to the many people who have been blog contributors to, and readers of ArtsBlog over the years. ArtsBlog has long been a space where we uplifted stories from the field that demonstrated how the arts strengthen our communities socially, educationally, and economically; where trends and issues and controversies were called out; and advocacy tools were provided to help you make the case for more arts funding and favorable arts policies.

As part of Americans for the Arts’ recent Strategic Realignment Process, we were asked to evaluate our storytelling communications platforms and evolve the way we share content. As a result, we launched the Designing Our Destiny portal to explore new ways of telling stories and sharing information, one that is consistent with our longtime practice of, “No numbers without a story, and no stories without a number.”

As we put our energy into developing this platform and reevaluate our communications strategies, we have put ArtsBlog on hold. That is, you can read past blog posts, but we are not posting new ones. You can look to the Designing Our Destiny portal and our news items feed on the Americans for the Arts website for stories you would have seen in ArtsBlog in the past.

ArtsBlog will remain online through this year as we determine the best way to archive this valuable resource and the knowledge you’ve shared here.

As ever, we are grateful for your participation in ArtsBlog and thank you for your work in advancing the arts. It is important, and you are important for doing it.


Sahar Javedani

Partnerships: Envisioning Our Interdependence

Posted by Sahar Javedani, Jul 26, 2011 1 comment


Sahar Javedani

Sahar Javedani

As Director of Educational Programming at Pentacle in New York City, I am constantly seeking opportunities to partner with organizations that share our mission of educating students on career opportunities in the performing arts through our “Behind the Scenes” program.

Last year, we welcomed a new relationship with Exploring the Arts, Tony Bennett and Susan Benedetto’s nonprofit charitable organization. We have our long-standing relationship of eight years with Frank Sinatra School of the Arts (Exploring the Arts’ original partner school) to thank for providing the foundation for this new partnership.

I believe that we've created a successful model of arts education where the collaboration of a school, funding partner, and arts education provider can come to the table with a common goal of better preparing students for entering the creative workforce through hands-on and experiential learning.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Susan Benedetto, co-founder and board president of Exploring the Arts to share her perspective on cultivating relationships with new partner schools and arts education providers:

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Mr. Ian David Moss

The Critical Supporting Role of Curation in Making Innovation Possible

Posted by Mr. Ian David Moss, Jul 26, 2011 0 comments


Mr. Ian David Moss

Ian David Moss

Through the work of the [Emerging Leaders Council] Emerging Ideas Committee this year, I’ve become acquainted with a wealth of new approaches to old problems and exciting combinations of existing models about which I was previously unaware. You’re seeing some examples of them on the Blog Salon this week, and we’ll be sharing more on this space as the year goes on.

For every strong example of innovation we highlight, however, I’m sure there are five more that we missed. Not because they were not among the ones we chose, but because they were never even brought to our attention.

Part of the nature of being “under the radar” is that it’s hard for people who rely on conventional information sources to find you. The five young arts professionals on our committee set out at the beginning of the year to identify novel, smart projects that weren’t getting attention from the field as a whole. We used what resources we had at our disposal – most notably, our connection to the 30+ local Emerging Leader Networks around the country – but inevitably, our ability to “spot” innovative ventures is determined to a significant extent by those ventures’ visibility.

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Tiffany Barber

You Can Go Home Again - The Arts in Oklahoma City

Posted by Tiffany Barber, Jul 26, 2011 15 comments


Tiffany Barber

Tiffany Barber

I was born and raised in Oklahoma City and I grew up dancing. When I decided to get serious about a performance career, I enrolled in the only performing arts magnet high school at the time and majored in dance. Which led me to New York City where I earned a BFA in Dance Performance at Fordham University/The Ailey School. Then, I abruptly quit and moved to Los Angeles.

Coast to coast and back again, I returned to Oklahoma City a year after obtaining my Master's degree in Public Art Studies from the University of Southern California. The recession hit California hard and the arts sector dwindled. Instead of slaving away at Starbucks, I took a job as a dance educator in my hometown.

I hadn't lived in Oklahoma City for almost ten years, so my first project once I returned was to reacquaint myself with the arts scene. I went on a series of informational interviews with some of the city's dynamic arts leaders and nonprofit managers, and finally found my balance – I would teach dance by day and moonlight as an arts writer and organizer by night.

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Shelby Morrison

Door-to-Door Fundraising

Posted by Shelby Morrison, Jul 26, 2011 2 comments


Shelby Morrison

Participants in the Door to Door campaign

Readers! Hello there – my name is Shelby Morrison and I’m currently the Marketing and Communications Manager for Raw Art Works in Lynn, MA. RAW is a community based youth arts nonprofit led by art therapists with the mission to ignite the desire to create and the confidence to succeed in underserved youth. In short, our kids use a wide variety of materials and media to communicate “what’s really goin’ on” in their lives.

To paint a quick portrait of the landscape, RAW is located in downtown Lynn, a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse city with a bustling population of 87,000. Despite Lynn's ocean front location just nine miles north of Boston, the city struggles economically compared to its affluent neighboring towns. Lynn's crime, poverty, teen birth and high school dropout rates are more than twice the state average. There are over thirty gangs in Lynn that are actively recruiting youth as young as elementary school.

As a nonprofit, our sustainability lies in successful fundraising, and for us, successful fundraising lies in the storytelling of our kids art and the emotional connection our donors make to those stories.

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Ryan Hurley

Enhancing Arts Education with Innovative Ideas

Posted by Ryan Hurley, Jul 26, 2011 6 comments


Ryan Hurley

Ryan Hurley

Hello cyberpeople. My name is Ryan Hurley and I am a part-time educator and writer, and full-time Program Coordinator for an arts education organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin called Arts @ Large (A@L). I’m excited to share some of the things that we are doing in Milwaukee and read about the emerging ideas blooming around the country.

Arts @ Large works with school communities in Milwaukee, which often lack basic access to art and music education, to develop comprehensive arts programs in collaboration with students, teachers, staff, afterschool providers and parents. At each of our 20-25 school sites we develop a team with the above mentioned community members to develop and direct a multi-faceted arts program which includes arts-integration training for teachers, multidisciplinary artist residencies, access to art and music supplies, and opportunities for field trips into the community.

Our goal is to empower each site to use the arts to enhance the academic curriculum and the creative climate. The academic connection is essential not only because we feel it is important to enhance classroom learning through the arts but also because of the limited amount of time teachers are allowed for creative exploration due to some of the overwhelming mandates put onto school communities.

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Robbie Q. Telfer

Introduction to the Encyclopedia Show

Posted by Robbie Q. Telfer, Jul 26, 2011 2 comments


Robbie Q. Telfer

Robbie Q. Telfer

Hi, the internet! My name’s Robbie Q. Telfer, and I’m a performance poet and live event producer from Chicago.

The two biggest projects I am currently in charge of implementing are the annual Chicagoland youth spoken word festival Louder Than a Bomb and the monthly literary variety show the Encyclopedia Show. Both events are intensely rewarding, constantly challenging, and deeply exhausting endeavors.

The Encyclopedia Show was created by myself and longtime collaborator Shanny Jean Maney in December 2008 in part as a response to the adult performance poetry movement getting bogged down in cliquey cheerleading and egotistical self-indulgence.

Essentially, Shanny and I saw that there was this huge international community of trained performance artists who, after years of competing in poetry slams, were beginning to itch for new artistic challenges that had ostensible goals grander than “convince five strangers to give me high points in an intentionally absurd competition.”

Oh, that’s a fine goal for a while, but it would be akin to playing Apples to Apples every weekend for your whole life. They’re fun games and all, but there are so many more artistic possibilities if you just change up the rules.

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