Blog Posts for Cultural Planning

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.

The Slave Galleries Restoration Project Case Study

Summary: 

The Slave Galleries Project was a collaboration between St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum to restore and interpret the two slave galleries located in the church—cramped rooms where African American congregants were segregated during the nineteenth century. Over a year’s time, guided by two dialogue professionals experienced in intergroup relations, community preservationists first talked among themselves about issues of marginalization on the Lower East Side. 

The Slave Galleries Project illuminates issues of...

Arte es Vida Case Study: The Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

Summary: 

Arte es Vida is an ongoing program of the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center in San Antonio. Supported by Animating Democracy from 2001 to 2003, Arte es Vida addresses issues of cultural equity and democracy, examining “the role of artistic and cultural expression in a society that inherits the deep wounds, economic and political disparities, and continuing practices of injustice that are the legacy of cultural domination in the United States.” It explores cultural grounding—the concept that a strong sense of selfhood and identity, as rooted in creative expression and...

African in Maine Case Study: Center for Cultural Exchange

Summary: 

The Center for Cultural Exchange’s African in Maine aimed to build culture and community by assisting three newcomer African communities in Portland with developing cultural programming that would represent  their respective cultures and people. Dialogue occurred first within each of the Sudanese, Congolese, and Somali groups and second between individual African groups and the wider, white community of “Mainers.” The project aimed to address how cultural representation (or misrepresentation) can impact public perception of refugee communities and aimed to...

American Composers Orchestra Case Study - Coming to America: Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant Voices

Summary: 

Coming to America: Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant Voices was a project of the American Composers Orchestra (ACO), exploring civic dialogue within the field of classical orchestral music.  Spanning ACO’s 2000–2001 season, the project centered around chamber music concerts and informances at schools and cultural centers in New York City, bringing immigrant and refugee composers and their music into communities, and immigrant and refugee communities into concert settings.  Through dialogue, the project sought to link the music of four immigrant or...

Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)

Summary: 

Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a Skid Row-based theater organization, founded and directed by artist John Malpede. LAPD has distinguished itself by its longstanding commitment to making change in L.A.’s Skid Row community, particularly regarding the homeless, through theater-based civic engagement work. As part of Animating Democracy’s Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative, LAPD and Urban Institute senior researcher Maria Rosario Jackson engaged in research to develop a foundation to recurrently identify, monitor, and assess the cultural infrastructure of the...

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