Pam Korza

Flashback: 2002. Aesthetics and related questions of criticism, evaluation, and meaning in community-based arts are grist for a session at Alternate ROOTS’s 25^th anniversary Focus on Community Arts South gathering. Participants applauded the assertion that “theory and thinking are not just academic concerns.” They advocated notions of “critical generosity” and “critical intimacy” that fostered more dialogue and border crossing between artists and critical writers in order to capture the intention, complexity, and richness of community-based practices. To prevent aesthetic clichés, stereotypes, and inaccuracies, hip hop dance artist Rennie Harris added that sharing dialogue may require both artists and critics to code switch, and to understand how language intersects with power.

Americans for the Arts Annual Convention (AFTACON) regularly draws thousands of members of the arts world to one location for a whirlwind four days of workshops, recognition, plenaries, and arts excursions in some of the most incredible and dynamic cities in the country. There is never enough time to attend all the sessions I’m interested in. They all offer an insight into how art influences our economy, education, and communities – and how we visualize and interpret our world.

Congratulations and appreciation to our colleagues at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for this thoughtful, action-provoking report, Moving Arts Leadership Forward. It describes A Field at Risk. Or, to use a phrase coined by the International Futures Forum in the U.K., we have a conceptual emergency. Some key concepts from the report:

• P. 15: Failure to take into account these dramatic changes in the larger landscape could result …in decisions that inadvertently reinforce the status quo, leading to stagnation in the sector.
• P. 1: The change required is in many ways antithetical to the more traditional form of leadership that our sector currently embraces.
• P. 10: Most executive leaders express a desire to change organizational culture to be more inclusive of generational expectations, but feel they lack models and the support for doing so.
• P. 10: Increasing cross-generational leadership across the field would help it better reflect—and maintain relevance in—a continually diversifying environment.
• P. 14: No longer feasible for one leader alone to manage and respond to the increasingly complex and changing environment.

Nina Simon

Scene: a regional workshop on arts engagement. A funder is speaking with conviction about the fact that her foundation is focusing their arts grantmaking strategy on engagement. Engaging new people. Engaging more diverse people. Engaging people actively in the arts. Any questions?

One, from a museum director. The question that comes up every time, the question so big it deserves the impropriety of all caps: BUT WHAT ABOUT QUALITY?

This past June, I had the opportunity to present at the first Cultural Equity Preconference at the 2015 American for the Arts (AFTA) gathering in Chicago, IL. Over 100 people spent three rigorous days thinking about art, diversity, and their own communities. Each presentation created space for me to consider, reflect, and question. From chats over lunch about gay zombie theater to bus rides investigating the urgent need to include dialogue about ability and accessibility in social justice movements, every interaction was steeped in expansive conversations.

It’s safe to say the arts leadership landscape is changing. Given the external societal changes such as late-career professionals postponing retirement, highly-educated millennials entering the workforce poised to make meaningful contributions, and a more culturally diverse group of emerging leaders, arts organizations must recognize the urgency of these challenges and determine what structural changes or model implementations they will make to reconcile these forces impacting leadership in the arts sector.

In Moving Arts Leadership Forward, it is important for organizations not to remain stagnant. They must understand the state of the arts sector and realize that change is both imminent and inevitable. Working in stagnation will stunt the growth of the arts administration ecosystem, particularly if early- and mid-career leaders are underutilized and arts organizations are left unable to serve their constituents to their full capacity. How will these emerging leaders be able to have real impact within their organizations with limited influence in the workplace?