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Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

With a country “on the brink” does it matter if your arts venue is shuttered?

June 2, 2020 by Diane Ragsdale 22 Comments

By Singlespeedfahrer – Own work, CC0

In three short months Americans have shifted from tuning into the daily drama surrounding the democratic primaries, to daily Covid-19 briefings and debates over whether or not lives matter more than money, to now 24/7 coverage of the protests erupting across a reported 350 cities in the US (as of June 2) in the aftermath of the horrific killing of George Floyd—an act that has quickly become emblematic of systemic racism and the longstanding and escalating hatred, violence and injustices toward people of color in the US and in particular black people.

News commentators are characterizing the present moment as a “tipping point”—a country “on the brink,” unable to contain or carry the collective grief, anger, humiliation, fear, and desperation that so many are feeling. It is profound that performing arts venues and museums are dark at a moment when so many are clamoring for their thoughts, emotions, embodied pain, and voices to be expressed and heard by others. While our first impulse may be to mourn that many arts venues are darkened, I find myself sincerely wondering to what extent it matters that “flagship” cultural institutions in this country cannot put on tonight’s Show.

Had theaters, performing arts centers, museums and concert halls still been open—how much of the planned programming would have mattered in the context of 100,000 people dying of Covid-19? How much would have mattered in the context of last week’s unjust killing of a black man in Minneapolis and the paranoid hostilities against another in Central Park–and the injustices that have continued to mount since then?

I hear from nearly all corners of the arts sector that there is “no going back to normal” with the accompanying recognition that something fundamental needs to be redesigned in our systems to make them more equitable, healthy, and sustainable. If this is the case, it matters which arts organizations survive the next two years and which go away. It also matters greatly how arts organizations are defining their short-term and long-term crises and goals.

Since March 18th or so I’ve had the opportunity to share some reflections here and there on the pandemic. I’ve included links to these at the end of this post, which is aimed at synthesizing and developing some of my thoughts, as I continue to shelter-in-place in my Jersey City sublet and start week 12 on pause. Mine is but one voice among hundreds at this moment weighing in on this topic. I hope if folx see things differently they will raise counter-points in the comments or share links to their own ideas (or ideas of others) so that my thinking can expand and be tested.

One caveat: There are cultural organizations that are providing extraordinary value to their communities right now. This is post is highlighting areas of concern and future posts will highlight bright spots.

I.

To transcend the pandemic, purpose must transcend the box.

Still from KSTP Video

The pandemic shuttering has revealed the extent to which mission and venue are conflated for many nonprofit cultural institutions and the extent to which institutions are essentially in Show Business.When Broadway went dark I assumed it would only be a matter of days before many if not all other nonprofit stages in the US would go dark. What I didn’t expect was that cultural institutions would put themselves into a kind of programmatic hibernation—some until next spring—ostensibly, in an effort to preserve cash. Not only are shows cancelled (leading to lost gigs for many artists) but commissions are drying up, teaching artists are being laid off, and education programs are being suspended, as well. (Not everywhere but at plenty of places–including some rather well endowed institutions.)

Many organizations have simply replaced live shows with online shows (whether performances, galas, or discussions). Given the messaging that tends to bookend these online offerings many clearly are designed to Spur Donations Now, Reinforce the Institutional Brand, and Deliver on a Promise to Subscribers & Donors (so they return next year)–rather than, say, to support the economic welfare of artists (whose compensation may be minimal), to bring forward a piece that speaks to the moment, or to genuinely experiment with the intersection and integration of liveness and online platforms. (There are exceptions including e.g. Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need To Talk About? at The Public Theater, which appeared to do all three of these things quite well.)

It is telling that these are a few of the gnawing questions I keep hearing cultural leaders ask:

  • “When can we get back into the theater?”
  • “What would safe social distancing look like in the concert hall / theater / museum?”
  • “What’s the post-pandemic economic model?”

Here are some different (and I would argue more interesting and essential) questions posed by independent curator Carmen Salas in a recent Medium post:

In a world where we are already confronting critical interconnected challenges: climate change, the refugee crisis, food scarcity, system collapse, etc. I think it is essential that we continue asking these questions: what is the role of art at a time of social transformation? Why do we make art, for whom and does it make sense to continue using the same formats and materials? What should art be focusing on and what difference can it make? How far can artists go in social transformation without renouncing their role as creators/artists? When does it stop being art? Can the art world provoke and drive social transformation, a shift in values, making us rethink our relationship to material culture? Can it reveal new definitions of what progress means? Without doubt, the current situation leads us to question/rethink/reimagine the way art institutions, art practices and artists operate.

If one were to deconstruct any given cultural institution and look with fresh eyes at its assets, technologies, resources, networks, relationships, capabilities, forms of knowledge, artifacts, and symbolic capital how might it be of greatest value in the Now and in the Future?

Here’s one possibility imagined by Salas and posed in that same piece:

I had a dream last night. In my dream, our cities, communities and the natural environment are the museums and galleries of tomorrow. In my dream, the traditional exhibition spaces and art objects (material objects) no longer exist, and artists, cultural agents and creative practitioners collaborate with citizens, communities and professionals from other sectors (scientists, farmers and politicians) to design better systems and to co-create activities and programmes that encourage creativity and bring about social change.

Salas’s vision is quixotic if cultural institutions cannot imagine a fulsome purpose in the world that transcends putting on shows in their spaces–in large part because mission and venue have become so closely coupled they are now inseparable if not conflated.

II.

Art could lead now and reshape our institutions for the future. So why are artists being kicked to the curb?

Screen shot of Hyperallergic website. Full article here.

Back in March the journal Artivate wrote to those of us on the editorial board to ask if we’d like to share some Covid reflections. In mine I riffed on a video by Liz Lerman talking about cultivating a Toolbox Mentality and a Guardian article by Rebecca Solnit reminding us that this pandemic is going to reveal the strong, weak, and hidden in our society. My takeaway from these two:

  1. Now will be a time of rampant grassroots experimentation; if we’re lucky some of what we land on will lead us to develop new “tools” that will help us forge our way into the future (even if some experiments will essentially lead to coping mechanisms that help us sustain the status quo).
  2. We need to pay attention as this pandemic can reveal a great deal (e.g. our strong bits, weak bits, hidden bits, and seemingly solid but hollow bits)–if we are open to learning from it rather than merely vanquishing it. Among other things we may learn to discern the difference between these two types of experiments.

God help us if, instead of approaching this time with deep listening and moral imagination, we end up with “change strategies” that emerge from senior leadership, propped up by a consultant, who set out to determine what’s best for everyone and then push out their ideas to the rest of the staff–who will then be expected to get on board, even though the new strategies are not, it turns out, actually in their best interest. (For more on this I highly recommend the Adam Kahane book Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust).

If arts institutions want to be relevant and responsive to the culture change, and if they want a mechanism for re-shaping themselves, they would be wise to begin by working in deep collaboration with artists (and others, as well, as I explore in the next section). Art leads. And yet artists are, for the most part, cut off from institutions at this moment that is demanding experimentation, observation, negative capability, courage, and empathy.

I was deeply saddened and frustrated, but not at all surprised, that actors, musicians, directors, and designers lost gigs and saw two-thirds of their income dry up overnight. I have been writing for the better part of the past decade about the ways that arts institutions have kicked artists to the curb over the past four decades (e.g. here and here). However, I was dumbfounded by cultural institutions who decided to suspend their education programs or lay off their teaching artists while holding on to a stable of marketing, development, or production types.

Teaching artists have not only personal relationships in communities but particularly valuable skills for this moment. They provide us with the means to share with one another what it means to be human; they give us tools to create joy and make meaning; they create scaffolds of learning all manner of things including, and through, an artistic practice; and they are great cultural translators, facilitators, mediators, and guides. If I ran a cultural institution right now, I’d be trying to hire as many artists as possible—and teaching artists and community-based artists, in particular—to help me understand how the institution might re-imagine itself and respond to the Now and re-build for the Future.

Now is the moment to care for the artists on whom cultural institutions depend—first for their welfare and second for their capacity to keep working, if desired. Now is the moment to develop covenants with artists, rather than contracts with Force Majeure clauses, and to take whatever resources remain from grants or donations intended to support cancelled productions and re-purpose them as, e.g., unrestricted artist grants. Now could be a time for artists to think, undertake research, plan, practice, experiment, document, reflect, read, learn, network, collaborate, design, build, write, develop new skills, care for the archive, flesh out a business plan (perhaps with some technical assistance from a larger cultural institution), or even relocate to a city with better prospects, to start anew.

III.

Governance must be addressed if we really want a better future for all. So do we?

Flyer for an event launching a new graduate minor at The New School in Creative Community Development. Photo from Marty Pottenger.

For all the talk about wanting to see the sector re-build in a manner that will leave it healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable, I haven’t yet heard much talk about re-vamping governance structures, policies, and practices. Many have been pushing for a revival of the W.P.A. and, like others, I have been thinking a lot about workers movements and, in particular, cooperatives.

On a hunch I Googled worker cooperative and 501c3 and landed on the page for the Sustainable Economies Law Center, which calls itself a Worker Self Directed Nonprofit (basically worker coop meets 501c3), and which seeks to help other such entities come into existence with training and a range of resources. Here’s a recent article on the growth in cooperatives this past decade, now primed for a significant bump as a result of the economic crisis stemming from Covid-19 and tens of millions of disenfranchised workers.

A couple key takeaways from browsing this overview page, which includes a one-hour webinar (which I recommend):

  • Every member of the organization is compensated equally for their work at a level that relates to the regional living wage (lawyers make the same as everyone else) and everyone works 30 hours per week and has a flexible work schedule and time off policy;
  • They have a decentralized governance structure in which all workers have the power to influence the programs in which they work, the conditions of their workplace, their own career paths, and the direction of the organization as a whole;
  • They work closely with an advisory board made up of a diverse cross-section of representatives working in community and designed to create an additional layer of accountability to other organizations, movements, and communities they exist to serve;
  • They have a traditional board that meets regularly that ensures that there is compliance with the mission, hires and fires leaders, sets policy, and approves the budget; and
  • They are fully transparent about their finances and operations.

On its website, SELC quotes a review of The Revolution Will Not be Funded edited by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective. The passage conveys the major downside of the traditional nonprofit governance model for those who want to change the world, for real:

The nonprofit system has tamed a generation of activists. They’ve traded in grand visions of social change for salaries and stationery; given up recruiting people to the cause in favor of writing grant proposals and wooing foundations; and ceded control of their movements to business executives in boardrooms.

UTNE Reader, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: It’s Time to Liberate Activists from the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Here are just a few of the benefits SELC has discovered with its model:

… [W]e’ve found that giving our staff significant decision-making power and autonomy has made us 1) more effective at advancing our mission to create more just and resilient economies, 2) more accountable to each other and our community, 3) more resilient and adaptive to change, and 4) more fun and empowering to be part of!

Imagine that!

I am inspired and intrigued by this model and actively learning more.

In contrast to SELC, establishment cultural institutions tend to operate with a traditional hierarchical nonprofit governance structure that is loose, unaccountable to stakeholders, and designed to serve the special interests of: institutionalized philanthropy with their carrots and sticks, donors who serve on the boards of institutions, corporations and industry partners, and (not always, but often enough) the personal interests of their leaders who amass enormous top-down decision making power and quite often a correlating exponentially higher salary over time. All the while artists responsible for the actual substance and content of the mission and staffers on the front lines who are working round-the-clock running the programs and interfacing day-to-day with those the institution exists to serve have little autonomy, collective decision-making authority, or capacity to influence the direction of the institution.

And this dynamic shapes and is shaped by inequities in the sector overall, which are revealed in our hourglass-shaped, winner-take-all cultural sector comprised of a small number of giants at the top, thousands of lightly institutionalized entities in the bottom, and an exceedingly fragile and vital, often undervalued, middle that connects the two.

It is being predicted that we could lose a significant number of cultural institutions in the coming months and years. We should care greatly which institutions endure and the values and material practices for which they are carriers. As institutions approach or achieve collapse there is great potential for new, more equitable governance models to be explored within the existing 501c3 corporate form.

This is a critical time to re-think not only these issues–the role of art in society and the business that cultural institutions are in, the link between mission and venue, the relationship of artists to institutions, and governance structures more generally–but also growth in the sector (how it is defined and where it is taking us exactly), the natural lifecycles of cultural organizations (i.e. why permanence is an unquestioned goal in the nonprofit arts and culture sector in the first place), and the relationship between the economics, aesthetics, and ethics of institutions.

More to come on these over the next few weeks.

Stay safe, stay awake, and thanks for reading.

***

Here are the links to recent Covid-19 related reflections:

  • My Artivate reflections, on p. 5-6 of Arts Entreprneurship Internationally and in the Age of Covid-19 by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez and Neville Vakharia in the Spring 2020 issue.
  • My May 1, 2020 appearance with fellow AJ blogger E. Andrew Taylor (The Artful Manager) on The Morning(ish) Show co-hosted by Tim Cynova and Lauren Ruffin over at Work. Shouldn’t. Suck.
  • My conversation with Liz Lerman, Brett Cook, and Meklit Hadero for the YBCA series, “Alchemy of the Reset.”
  • My conversation with Australia-based Bec Mac for her Artist Survival Series.
  • And I had a great conversation with Johann Zeitsman, back in May, for the Arsht@Home series ArshtTalk.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Comments

  1. Richard linzer says

    June 2, 2020 at 5:51 pm

    Diane, in light of the current crisis Annie and I have prepared a 17 page manual for arts organization on fully secured borrowing. Over the years, this approach has worked for hundreds of nonprofit organizations, by shifting the power dynamic and control to nonprofit organizations from the bankers and bureaucrats.

    We have also developed a separate manual for individual artists. If you would like a copy of either or both, they are available for free. Just let us know.

    Meanwhile, state arts agency in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are sponsoring a free webinar on June 10th to present the concept of fully secured borrowing.

    Reply
    • Jerry Yoshitomi says

      June 3, 2020 at 7:07 pm

      Congratulations to Annie and Richard Linzer for their outstanding work in this field! Much to be applauded!

      Reply
      • Lisa Thrower says

        June 4, 2020 at 1:03 pm

        Would love to share this manual. How could I access?

        Reply
    • Diane Ragsdale says

      June 4, 2020 at 1:57 pm

      Hi Richard, thanks so much for mentioning your manuals. I would love to read both. Are there URLs you might share? Or downloads? I’d love to read them and another reader has requested to read them, as well.

      Hope you are well! Thank you, again!

      Diane

      Reply
    • Sabra Williams says

      June 22, 2020 at 10:03 pm

      I’d love a copy. How can I get one please?

      Reply
  2. Gordy Ohliger says

    June 2, 2020 at 7:40 pm

    I am a humorous musical entertainer. on the west coast. All venues are closed. All festivals have been cancelled. My booking calendar has been erased. I have asked my friends in the business, and it is the same across the board. One friend rents staging, tents, seating, and sound across the US, all has been cancelled, he sits in his kitchen.
    I am glad I was able to have my career when it was possible.

    Reply
  3. Tom Arvetis says

    June 2, 2020 at 8:13 pm

    Hi Diane.
    Until recently, I ran a theatre for young audiences program housed in a settlement house in Chicago. The pandemic exposed the financial vulnerabilities of the parent organization and our program was decimated. I am still on staff but what the future holds is very uncertain.
    I know your research and perspective is largely focused on arts and culture institutions. I’m interested in how the same challenges you illuminate (lack of transparency, top down governing structures, disparity of income and power between front-line staff and administrative leadership, etc.) are also plaguing not-for-profits in the social sector. In my experience, the settlement house movement is a close cousin if not immediately related to the culture sector because these are institutions built on the strength of the community they serve.
    I’m wondering if you could point me to resources you trust that might provide some insight into the social/human services sector as it relates to these same issues. I totally get it from the cultural perspective. As the AD of a TYA theatre, I’ve immersed myself in that perspective for years. But now that the parent organization is ailing and leadership is showing it’s limitations, I feel like I need more perspective to better understand how to be useful.
    Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

    Reply
    • Diane Ragsdale says

      June 2, 2020 at 8:30 pm

      Hi Tom, thanks so much for reading and writing. If you do not know the blog NonprofitAF I highly recommend it. It explores many of the same issues but from a social sector standpoint: https://nonprofitaf.com/. Also, the organization SeaChange Capital Partners has some really smart resources regarding the financing of social sector organizations and mergers, etc. https://seachangecap.org/who-we-are/. You may want to check out some of the resources on the ArtPlace America website, particularly those for community development orgs: https://www.artplaceamerica.org/questions/community-planning-development and resources at policy link: https://www.policylink.org/. Philanthropy News Digest often has articles on governance of nonprofits. I suspect the Independent Sector would also have information that would be valuable. Finally, there are writers like Michael Sandel (What Money Can’t Buy), Lester Salamon (The Resilient Sector), and the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Giridharadas. Hopefully other readers will suggest, as well. If I think of anything else I will repost. Thanks, again, for reading & taking the time to comment.

      Reply
      • Tom Arvetis says

        June 2, 2020 at 8:34 pm

        Thank you, Diane. Nearly all of those resources are new to me. I’m eager to dig in. I have read WINNERS TAKE ALL and found it incredibly helpful. Thank you, again!

        Reply
        • Jerry Yoshitomi says

          June 3, 2020 at 7:13 pm

          Mr. Arvetis:
          One of the concepts that might be helpful is ‘Grassroots Fundraising’. I know that you’ve changed many lives through your work over the years. The internet provides the opportunity to ‘reach back’ to ‘look forward.’

          I’d be pleased to send some resources to you if you’d like to email me at meaningmatters@gmail.com

          Reply
  4. Jerry Yoshitomi says

    June 3, 2020 at 7:21 pm

    Diane:
    Thank you for your continuing insights. I read you blog post yesterday evening and dreamt about it last night.

    I think about these times as ‘liminal space’. Your blog post suggests that it’s now time to consider what parts of our work we take into the future and what do we leave behind? What values are even more important today and what values are less important.

    I am thinking about how we might measure the Cultural Health of America going forward. Is it the number and size of institutions? No, it’s on the impacts that we’re having on people’s lives.

    I was shocked to see the decisions of museums to layoff teaching artists as the ‘first to go.’

    Thank you for all that you’re doing.

    Reply
    • Diane Ragsdale says

      June 3, 2020 at 8:12 pm

      Jerry, so good to see you in this “space” and I hope you are faring OK. Thank you for reading, commenting in response to the post and other comments, etc. Grateful as ever for your wisdom. Yes to “impacts”versus “number and size of institutions” … A critical shift that is overdue in the sector. So, how do we level the playing field so that the impacts of a community-based organization are as significant as (if not more significant than) the numbers delivered by the largest institutions? That is the challenge and it requires public and private funders and donors and many others to change their goals and methods of evaluating progress towards them. Much to think about there. Thanks for that and thank *you* for all you are doing.

      Reply
  5. Tom says

    June 3, 2020 at 8:16 pm

    Diane,

    I would appreciate your thoughts on exactly for whom we are trying to preserve theatre and the arts, and towards whom we should pivot. The NEA’s Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts has consistently indicated that the arts serve primarily a demographic that is white, economically well-off, and well-educated. On the ideological scale, the arts serve an overwhelmingly liberal demographic. In this critical moment, how best can we examine and use the data provided by the NEA to best serve a much broader demographic? I fear that it will be as difficult to break up “Big Art” as it would be to break up Big Banks, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big You-Name-It. Thanks in advance.

    Reply
    • Diane Ragsdale says

      June 3, 2020 at 10:09 pm

      Hi Tom, your comment hits right at the center of the target. I believe this is what we are being invited to dismantle, re-imagine and re-build. If COVID is finally what challenges big institutions in a way that they have not been challenged, and if at the same time community based cultural orgs (that are reaching beyond the upper middle class educated white 3% that participate in the offerings from establishment institutions) start to be recognized as more relevant, essential, vital, equitable, sustainable, healthier, then is there an opportunity to catalyze this necessary shift? It feels like a long-shot because the big institutions have had dominance; but I’ve not felt a moment in the past 25 years when it seemed more possible to imagine funders, donors, governments, and the general citizenry coming to a newfound appreciation for these smaller, community-based orgs. And the big guys may continue and we will need some of them to continue … and some may maintain the status quo … but I believe some will change. Some already are changing. I know this is an incomplete answer. I really appreciate your question. It is one I think about a lot. Thanks so much for reading and weighing in.

      Reply
      • Jerry Yoshitomi says

        June 4, 2020 at 3:38 am

        When I suggest looking at the ‘cultural health of the nation’, I’m hoping that the researchers among us might create metrics that would help measure access and availability of the arts in neighborhoods, just as we now are looking at food desserts and access to health care. We’ve been building too many ‘hospitals’ without thinking about what the patients need.

        As we think about what Federal, state, and city cultural agencies might look like, they might only be making grants for interventions in under-served communities, not to build more institutions. Robert Reich’s ‘secession of the successful’ written over two decades ago suggests that the wealthy have built private non-profit organizations to ‘educate, provide medical care and entertain (Reich’s word)’ the elite.

        We must create new measures upon which our work is judged. And maybe those measures should be suggested from within communities.

        Reply
  6. Isaac Walters says

    June 9, 2020 at 1:21 am

    Diane,

    I love the idea of cooperative arts organizations. It reminds me very much of the ensemble theatre model, a movement that has been growing across the country. When you discuss artists engaging with their communities I think of Cornerstone Theatre in LA or the Bloomberg Theatre Ensemble in Pennsylvania who are not only creating great art, but also radically changing their governance structures compared to traditional regional theatres. Check out the Network of Ensemble Theatres at http://www.ensembletheaters.net/ to find more examples.

    Reply
    • Diane Ragsdale says

      June 9, 2020 at 4:09 pm

      Isaac, thanks so much for this link. I was not aware that ensemble theater were changing their governance structures. However, the semblance between them and the cooperatives also struck me. I know e.g. that some ensembles have always paid everyone in the organization the same amount. Hope you are doing well and thanks for the nudge to check out what’s happening over the NET.

      Reply
  7. Alexis Frasz says

    June 12, 2020 at 7:00 pm

    Diane, thank you for this insightful piece. I’m so glad that you highlighted cooperatives, as I think they have transformative potential not only as a different way of organizing capital but as a way of shifting understanding of power and ownership. We’ve had the fortune to work with the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) on their new initiative, AmbitioUS https://ambitio-us.org/investments/, which funds SELC, as well as the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, The Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Ujima Project and Common Future. What we found in doing this research is that many cooperatives ALREADY include many people who self-define as artists, and yet it isn’t a organizational form that is widely used within the arts sector itself.

    This initiative was the follow up to our 2016 report on trends and conditions for artists (also with CCI and the NEA)), which showed that the arts suffer from the same structural and systemic issues facing larger society—low wages, high levels of debt, inequities in distribution of resources and a concentration of wealth and assets, rising rents and costs, a lack of worker protections, and more. In the words of Laura Zabel, that “what artists need is an economy that works for everyone”–health care, stable income, universal child care, education, worker protections, affordable housing, and so on.

    Rather than resigning ourselves to returning to a more contracted, impoverished version of the arts system (and economic system) we had, which we know was not working for a majority, what if we used this opportunity to reimagine something better? Its possible that once-fringe ideas (universal basic income, wealth taxes, relocalizing supply chains, true safety nets) might now be on the table… Another good resource for ideas about alternative futures is https://thenextsystem.org.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. With a country “on the brink” does it matter if your arts venue is shuttered? | Meisner Acting Tips says:
    June 3, 2020 at 3:24 am

    […] I hear from nearly all corners of the arts sector that there is “no going back to normal” — that something fundamental needs to be redesigned in our systems to make them more equitable, healthy, and sustainable. If so, it matters which arts organizations survive the next two years and which go away, and it matters how arts organizations are defining their short-term and long-term crises and goals. – Diane Ragsdale […]

    Reply
  2. When to Stop? My essay in “A Moment on the Clock of the World” in the context of Covid-19 & Black Lives Matter | Jumper says:
    June 10, 2020 at 6:20 pm

    […] of cultural institutions in the coming months due to Covid-19. As I began to argue in last week’s post, we should care greatly which institutions persist and the values, cultures, and practices they […]

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  3. Newsfeed: WHEN ARTS ECOLOGIES, GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY COLLIDE – Scapegoat Garden says:
    June 11, 2020 at 2:22 am

    […] With a country “on the brink” does it matter if your arts venue is shuttered? (Arts Journal, June 2, 2020) […]

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  4. Newsfeed: THE BODY, MOVEMENT, ARTS ECOLOGIES, AND MULTIMODAL UPRISINGS AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF WHITE SUPREMACY, RACISM AND ANTIBLACK VIOLENCE – Scapegoat Garden says:
    June 12, 2020 at 1:22 am

    […] With a country “on the brink” does it matter if your arts venue is shuttered? (Arts Journal, June 2, 2020) […]

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Diane Ragsdale

Diane Ragsdale is an Assistant Professor in the College of Performing Arts at The New School, where she also serves as Program Director for the MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship. Alongside her post at the New School Diane teaches on the Cultural Leadership Program at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada and teaches a workshop on Cultural Policy at Yale University for its Theater Management MA. She is also a doctoral candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam (in the Netherlands), where she lectured 2011-2015 in the cultural economics and sociology of the arts programs. Read More…

Jumper

White's Tree Frog

About 20 years ago, when I was in graduate school, I came across the following poem: When an old pond gets a new frog it’s a new pond. I think the inverse also may be true. I’ve often been the new frog jumping into an old pond. Since 1988, I’ve worked in the arts in the US in various roles … [Read More...]

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Recent Comments

  • Richard Linzer on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Diane, the free manuals that we have created on fully secured borrowing for arts nonprofits, other nonprofits, and individual artists…” Jan 11, 20:48
  • Jon Catherwood-Ginn on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Diane and Jerry – thank you so much for your thoughtful responses to my question! Excellent points regarding the opportunity…” Oct 13, 21:08
  • Jerry Yoshitomi on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Thanks to both of you for your thoughts. One of the great opportunities available through electronic communications will be the…” Oct 6, 01:20
  • Diane Ragsdale on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Dear Jon, thanks for your comment and great question! I’d also be curious what others reading the post might think.…” Oct 5, 09:20
  • Jon Catherwood-Ginn on On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now: “Thank you for this, Diane! A fantastic piece. As an extension of your analysis of the interplay among economics, ethics,…” Oct 2, 20:41

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Irvine asks: Is there an issue in the arts field more urgent than engagement? My answer: Yes.

A couple weeks back the Irvine Foundation launched an online Q&A series, Are We Doing Enough?—aimed at “exploring tough questions about engagement … [Read More...]

A Q&A on the Beauty Class with Students from the SAIC

Recently, I received an email from a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, preparing for a seminar on Arts Organizations in Society. … [Read More...]

It’s creative; but is it beautiful? (My talk at the Pave Symposium on Entrepreneurship and the Arts)

In May, I gave a talk at the Pave Biennial Symposium on Arts & Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. The theme of this year's conference … [Read More...]

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A Few Things I’ve Written

"Surviving the Culture Change", "The Excellence Barrier", "Holding Up the Arts: Can We Sustain What We've Creatived? Should We?" and "Living in the Struggle: Our Long Tug of War in the Arts" are a few keynote addresses I've given in the US and abroad on the larger changes in the cultural environment and ways arts organizations may need to adapt in order to survive and thrive in the coming years.

If you want a quicker read, then you may want to skip the speeches and opt for the article, "Recreating Fine Arts Institutions," which was published in the November 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Here is a recent essay commissioned by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts for the 2011 State of the Arts Conference in London, "Rethinking Cultural Philanthropy".

In 2012 I documented a meeting among commercial theater producers and nonprofit theater directors to discuss partnerships between the two sectors in the development of new theatrical work, which is published by HowlRound. You can get a copy of this report, "In the Intersection," on the HowlRound Website. Finally, last year I also had essays published in Doug Borwick's book, Building Communities Not Audiences and Theatre Bay Area's book (edited by Clay Lord), Counting New Beans.

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