Talking turkey on the arts – and don’t forget the survey

I wrote not long ago about the Ohio Arts Council ’s regular efforts to sound out constituents across the state on their community successes and problems and organizational and artistic needs, in order to better serve them.

Though the OAC has a great rep for being particularly conscientious about that sort of thing, it’s not alone. In spite of the widespread perception – pervasive since the American culture wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s – that civic and political officialdom is generally anti-arts, many private organizations and government agencies have made it their business in the last decade or so to find out what’s undermining our local and national arts-and-culture sectors and do something about it.

Leveraging Investment in Creativity (LINC) especially comes to mind. The mission of this 10-year-old New York City-based group is to make the work and lives of American artists easier by researching communities, finding out what resources are and are not available to artists and then offering support – grants, information and idea-sharing – to help those communities provide a better climate for artmaking.

Americans for the Arts does in advocacy what arts councils and groups such as LINC do in financial and infrastructure support. Americans for the Arts makes the case for art and arts education nationwide, spreading the word about their value, keeping arts issues in front of national and community leaders and working to improve support for the arts among the public and elected leaders. 

They can do their work a lot more effectively when they have input directly from members of the arts sector. So, leaders of arts organizations, you can help by filling out the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Network survey about current professional-development needs and trends. Both novice and experienced leaders are welcome to participate.

The only way the American public will ever develop a more widespread and lasting appreciation for arts and for creativity in general is if those of us who believe it’s important keep speaking up. We need to untiringly remind our fellow citizens that those two things are among the best of what humanity has going for it – they’re means to the changed and better world in which we all want to find ourselves. 

So on Thursday, I’ll wish a happy Thankgiving to all the people everywhere who are using their imaginations, their powers of expression and the skill of their hands to enrich, inform and improve our lives. 

People like you.

Pulling down another wall

I spent nearly all day Friday in meetings that the Ohio Arts Council held in Cleveland to find out what was on the local arts and culture community’s mind.

This is something the OAC does regularly in  towns of all sizes across the state – it meets not just with artists and arts organizations, but also with funders, local agency leaders and the general public whose tax money is put to work by the council to support beneficial  arts activities. For decades under the leadership of Wayne Lawson and currently under the executive direction of the capable Julie Henahan, the OAC has done what most businesses seldom make the effort to try: gone directly to the people who are or could be affected by its services and products and ask them for their thoughts and ideas.  

These meetings are not for carefully selected focus groups. They’re welcome-all events aimed at different sectors that the OAC believes it needs to hear from. Participants are asked broad questions about what’s right and wrong with their communities, what they need, and what else the council could be doing to serve them.

What impressed me the most, however, was not the fact that the OAC carried out three such meetings at different Cleveland locations, but that Henahan and her staff made honest efforts to dig below the usual topics and known approaches and get their constituents to think creatively about improving the community – the whole community, including education, business, infrastructure and government,  because cross-pollination of ideas makes promisng solutions likelier.  

This process is a rare and effective thing to do. Difficult, too. Inviting people to be creative means asking them to think hard and embrace change – two acts that many people shrink from. When appealed to for ideas and solutions, people generally get no farther than what they’ve already heard about,  because it can be scary and exhausting to delve further. Trying to get around widely held assumptions and break through old, deeply entrenched systems can be tougher than hammering through thick concrete . It’s even worse when everyone around you shares the same philosophies and methods. 

What all of us, even the OAC, need to do much more of is adding people from different industries and sectors to our creative efforts. There are patterns we don’t yet see, connections we have not yet made, visions we have not yet experienced that will come from having scientists consider art and artists consider corporate structure and business experts consider social issues and social workers consider technology.

We have to free ourselves from the traditional and dare to push aside the merely adequate, no matter how safe and sensible they may seem. We can do better for ourselves than we’re doing. All we have to do to find the courage to refuse the easy, familiar answers. 

And that will be less frightening the more help we enlist from people with talents and perspectives different from our own. As Peter Friedman notes today, having all the answers isn’t the key. The key is asking questions that lead to new possibilities.

Are we satisfied with the world and ourselves? Of course not. Then let’s pull down the walls between our particular disciplines and open our minds to the whole of human imagination.