{"id":4670,"date":"2016-09-07T23:24:23","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T03:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/engage\/?p=4670"},"modified":"2016-09-07T23:24:23","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T03:24:23","slug":"gard-foundation-symposium-our-communities-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/engage\/2016\/09\/gard-foundation-symposium-our-communities-day-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Gard Foundation Symposium\u2013Our Communities: Day 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GardToday marked the beginning of The Robert E. Gard Foundation’s gathering at the The Johnson Center at Wingspread’s conference center outside Milwaukee. Announced here earlier this year<\/a>, Our Communities: A Symposium on the Arts <\/em>is a reflection on the state of arts\/community connections on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Gard’s The Arts in the Small Community.<\/em><\/p>\n

To begin, tonight featured introductory welcomes by Roger Dower of the Johnson Foundation, George Tzougros of the Wisconsin Arts Board<\/strong>,\u00a0 and Jane Chu, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Mr. Dower challenged the group to encourage the world of the arts to “listen” to the communities they serve, noting they “sometimes just don’t get it” and to imagine how different the work might be if it were informed by representatives of anti-poverty programs or children’s mental health providers. Mr. Tzougros noted that the Gard Foundation was not focused on the past but was conceived to carry the principles of arts\/community connections forward. Ms. Chu pointed out the central role that Robert Gard’s work played in expanding the vision of the NEA to include rural communities and smaller urban areas, acknowledging that Gard held that the arts were for everyone, <\/em>a vision that encouraged the NEA’s emphasis on support of the arts on the local level.<\/p>\n

This was followed by Maryo Gard Ewell’s keynote on The Arts in the Small Community<\/em><\/strong>. Ms. Ewell provided a history of Robert Gard’s work as it pertained to the origins of the 1966 research report and its subsequent impact. [The full text of her presentation will later be available on the Gard Foundation website.] It is impossible to condense the essence of Gard’s thinking to a few sentences. However, some of the most important ideas are:<\/p>\n