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.



Do You Know Charm City? (Part One)

Posted by , Jan 29, 2010 0 comments



Baltimore's Inner Harbor

Leading up to Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit in June, we will be previewing our host city Baltimore and all it has to offer in a series of blog posts entitled "Do You Know Charm City?"  The first post comes from our host, the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts. 

This is our Baltimore: more than two hundred small neighborhoods that are as quirky and individual as the people who live in them; restaurants with award-winning food recognized by James Beard himself and the foundation named in his honor; art museums and galleries; historic buildings and breathtaking architecture; cultural attractions such as the National Aquarium, the Maryland Science Center, Fort McHenry, and the Great Blacks in Wax museum; high-end boutique shopping and kitschy thrift stores; art movie houses and live theaters; sports arenas that are home to the Orioles, the Ravens, and the Blast; and nightlife—from local bands of every genre to our own symphony orchestra.

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Tim Mikulski

Survival of the Innovative: FEAST and the evolving model of community-supported arts funding (from Arts Watch)

Posted by Tim Mikulski, Jan 27, 2010 0 comments


Tim Mikulski

by Joanna Chin, Program Coordinator, Animating Democracy

According to the recently released National Arts Index, one third of arts groups are not making their budget.

The downturn in the economy, combined with the Index’s clear results, has shown that when giving dries up, an alarming number of arts groups are slowly pulled into financial starvation. This unsurprising revelation, now rooted in the Index’s data, leaves the field in an interesting predicament: Do we beg for more money to support a clearly failing subsidy model? Do we follow the suggestions of others who say to let financially weak nonprofits die?

A Darwinist at heart, I was happy to stumble upon an article in Next American City revealing that perhaps a more optimistic alternative exists: adapt and survive. We, as artists, pride ourselves on being creative but, as business people, still cling to old paradigms of audience engagement or follow a step behind widely popular trends (e.g., social networking).

However, organizations such as FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics) in Brooklyn, NY, and Sunday Soup (a program of InCUBATE) in Chicago, illustrate the possibility of breaking away from government/funder aid with their innovative application of community-supported arts grantmaking.

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Roland Kushner

Help Us Find the Missing Data!

Posted by Roland Kushner, Jan 27, 2010 0 comments


Roland Kushner

What an adventure! When Randy Cohen and I started putting the National Arts Index together in 2005, we had little sense of how expansive it would become. At first, we hoped to find about 25 or 30 national and annual measures of arts and culture activity that we could report on annually. We knew of a few national service organizations that kept what we thought were pretty good and robust measures of annual activity in their fields – think symphonies, opera, and theatre. We knew of periodical studies by the NEA and the Census Bureau, as well as some measures at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Urban Institute. When we got going, we thought we could cobble these together into a pretty good annual picture of arts and culture in the U.S. over time.

These turned out to be only a fraction of the data that we ultimately found, as you can see in the full Index report on this site. Our final report, with 76 indicators, really shows a more diverse and multi-faceted system of the arts in America, one that we knew was there, but had not been able to get our hands around. No surprise: there are so many dimensions to the arts system: people, groups, institutions, artistic disciplines, artistic genres, businesses, nonprofit, and government, products, services, experiences, jobs, volunteers, and so much more. Not only “no surprise,” but also “no problem”: we wanted the Index to be as inclusive as possible, so we were happy to find all of the different measures.

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Jennifer Novak-Leonard

Indicators that Tell a Broad Story of the Arts

Posted by Jennifer Novak-Leonard, Jan 26, 2010 0 comments


Jennifer Novak-Leonard

At a time when the arts and culture community’s understanding of itself is shifting away from traditional conceptions of “arts participation” (i.e. attendance) and focus on publicly-supported business models, creating an empirical index such as the National Arts Index (NAI) is a daunting task. The challenge is that many arts-related data sources are anchored in conventional conceptions of the sector.  Consequently, the NAI makes huge steps forward by including both for- and non-profit indicators, by including indicators of personal participation, and by shedding light on lesser-utilized data sources (see pages 131-134 of the report).

The arts and culture sector seems to be moving toward a broader, more holistic, understanding of itself – one that spans a larger swath of the ‘cultural ecology’ – including professional arts, participatory practice and cultural literacy.  The cultural ecology framework developed by John Kreidler and Philip J. Trounstine in their 2005 Creative Community Index report (page 6) is a simple and elegant depiction of the cultural system. As we in the field continue to develop this broader self-definition, participatory practice and cultural literacy will need to be characterized at the same level of detail as indicators currently included in the NAI.

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Mr. Alan S. Brown

Using the National Arts Index to Start New Conversations

Posted by Mr. Alan S. Brown, Jan 26, 2010 1 comment


Mr. Alan S. Brown

As Bill Ivey says, “policy accretes around bodies of data.” If we can develop commonly-accepted metrics for characterizing cultural vitality, then we stand a better chance of influencing policy. You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score. And, if you are filling a void of scorekeeping, then you get to shape the rules for scorekeeping, which means you can change the conversation.  I see the National Arts Index (NAI) as a major step forward on a longer pathway of developing a set of generally accepted standards for assessing cultural vitality in communities, regions and the country. The Urban Institute has already done a lot of forward thinking about the topic, which you can read about here. What matters the most, however, is not the data itself, but the conversation that happens around the data and the extent to which the NAI can be used to galvanize discussion amongst people who can actually change policy.

When the NAI was discussed at the Grantmakers in the Arts conference back in October, it was interesting to see how some people immediately looked through the list of the 76 indicators to see what was included and what was not included. For example, one person pointed out that the NAI includes just one indicator of arts creation (i.e., “participation in music making, painting, drawing, and/or photography”). There are no indicators, for example, of the numbers of people who sing in choirs, or who compose music on GarageBand, or who belly dance.  Those types of data points simply aren’t available, or would cost a lot to generate. But what is the cost of not including them in the national conversation about cultural vitality? This is the risk associated with any aggregate measure like the NAI.

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