Shelby Morrison

Hello again! It’s been so exciting to participate in this blog salon; to connect, to engage, and to exchange.

Writing and thinking about innovation is interesting. I think on an individual level and an organizational level, I/we haven’t always sought out to be “innovative” and much as we’ve strived to be “creative.”

The two concepts tend to go hand-in-hand, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an innovative idea that wasn’t creative, and vice versa. It’s a hard thing to constantly strive toward innovation and creativity. Sometimes these things just happen – that magic “Aha!” moment.

Those moments seem to come from having a conscious approach to the way we do our work; a conscious approach to considering the goals, outcomes, objectives, and constituents. Some solutions are simpler than others, and these are our favorite innovations.

June Rogers

Reading the blog entry by Stephanie Evans Hanson that focused on the beginnings of new methods through close observance of our conversations reminded me that changes employed by Fairbanks Arts Association (FAA) on the issue of art-for-sale at fundraisers started with conversations.

One of my previous posts told of FAA’s new direction for art auctions and our concern about the value of an artist’s work in local galleries and the success that was realized with the new direction. However, we’ve gone a step further and paid heed to suggestions from two of our members, each bringing the same suggestion from two different cities – an art sale by lottery.

One person had attended an event in Denver and the other had attended a similar event in San Francisco. The event is simple and focused – art is for sale. The innovation that puts a spin on the event is offering the work for sale through lottery. (In Alaska we need a gaming permit from the state to conduct this event so check on your state requirements before embarking on this idea.)

Robbie Q. Telfer

An important principal to the Encyclopedia Show is diversity. I had mentioned earlier diversity of artistic genre – we try to get not only poets, but solo performance artists, visual artists, creative nonfiction and fiction writers, musicians, comedians, live animals, experts on the topic, jugglers, etc…

Demographic diversity is also extremely important to us. We have youth perform in every show, as well as people coming from as many different communities as possible – and in hyper-segregated Chicago, that might mean more. A larger goal of our show is to replicate all human emotions, so we’re trying to bring in all humans.

The key to diversity, though, is not to tokenize people from outside my demographic (white guy), but to try honestly to understand the values of the different communities I am pulling from and featuring only excellent representatives.

It makes for a bad show if you don’t care how the non-white guy’s pieces turn out just because you feel guilty about institutionalized racism. Also, tokenism is infantilizing and deeply insulting.

Naomi Natale

Last September, I went to East San Jose Elementary School here in my hometown of Albuquerque, NM. While there I spoke with over 200 fourth and fifth grade students in six classes.

For the three weeks before I visited, the students had been studying “virtues” under the guidance of their teacher, Amy Sweet, who heard about One Million Bones, loves the project, and wanted to bring it into her classroom.

Together we began the lesson by asking the students about their virtues — which ones they possess, which ones their friends possess, etc. — and asking what acts they do that show them off. We then asked the question,  “How do we find the virtues in people that we don’t really like?”

All of us together decided that virtues are very much like bones, that though we cannot see them we know that they exist and that they make us who we are. We also decided that EVERYBODY has virtues just like EVERYBODY has bones. And then we began the process of art-making.

Angela Harris

I read Robbie Telfer’s insightful post about the tie between the arts and entertainment. I am reminded of a conversation that I recently had about the effect that So You Think You Can Dance and similar commercialized entertainment has had on the dance community.

For many years, I was so frustrated with how dance was being portrayed on television. I disliked the judges’ comments. It would irritate me that the show would highlight those dancers that could do tricks and entertain the crowd by kicking their leg to their head, instead of the technically trained dancers.

I feared that the new interest by the general public in these shows would make audiences under-whelmed if they were to experience a live concert dance performance and not see back flips. If this trend was taking over the public’s perception of dance, would other artists begin conforming? Would we in jeopardy of losing the artistry of our discipline?

But, after numerous questions from the general public, such as, “Do you watch So You Think You Can Dance?" and "What do you think of Mia Michaels choreography?" I realized that not only could this show be a teaching tool and an opening to dialogue about dance, but it could be a great promotional tool to get audiences to see live dance performances.