“Community music has a growing programme of scholarship and international projects. As a musical practice that emphasises people, participation, places, inclusivity, and diversity, those that work in the field do so across an increasing array of contexts and environments. … As a cultural and social imperative in the construction of human relationships, the analysis of hospitality through the field of community music contributes to the discourse of rethinking community as an interdisciplinary concept.” – Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research
5 Questions to Sahba Aminikia (Founder, Flying Carpet Festival)
“Sahba Aminikia is an Iranian-American composer, pianist, and educator born in post-revolutionary wartime in Iran. Aminikia first explored immersive, visceral music in a successful performance career before pivoting to artistic direction of Flying Carpet Festival, an international music festival serving refugee children in Turkey.” – I Care If You Listen
Allyship in Arts Grantmaking
“Inequality in the arts is holistic. It exists at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Grantmakers who are committed to seeing the arts thrive as an inclusive multiracial- and gender-expansive enterprise must pursue allyship at each of these levels. An ally is someone who takes on a struggle for equity that is not their own or that of their community. Allies use their privilege and their power to center the people most impacted by inequity. Allyship is a lifelong process, one that involves both personal reflection and systemic action. In the context of the arts, allyship encompasses a spectrum of strategies.” – Grantmakers in the Arts Reader
Cree Artist Kent Monkman Takes Us on a Tour of the Met to Show How Not to Depict Indigenous People
“On a walk through the Met’s galleries with Artnet News, he pointed out various works that inspired his own. But while the works in the Met’s collection tend to present an image of Native people as shrinking and doomed, while picturing North America itself as a vast wilderness ripe for the taking, Monkman offers an alternative story.” – artnet
The Most Important Decade for Movies About Black Lives
Lawrence Ware: “I’d argue that the 2010s were the most important decade for black film in America. We see dramas (12 Years a Slave), comedies (Girls Trip), horror (Get Out, Us) and documentaries (13TH and O.J.: Made in America) all being taken seriously critically, and most were successful financially. So, the question I’d like to consider is a rather simple one: What were the best black films of the past decade? Here are my answers, in alphabetical order.” – The New York Times
What the Foundry’s Melanie Joseph and Playwrights Horizons’ Tim Sanford mean to theater
“Founded by Joseph in 1994, the Foundry, which produced artistic offerings, community programs and activist conferences on issues ranging from genocide to economic inequality, created a model that proved a theater company could examine its relationship to the world while upholding the most rigorous aesthetic standards. Playwrights Horizons has been quite simply the most important crucible for contemporary playwriting in America. … But does the theater have a sensibility today? Certainly, the old taunt (Gay Whites Horizons) no longer resounds now that the programming has become more widely inclusive.” – Los Angeles Times
Who Was the Most Influential Curator of the Decade? Okwui Enwezor — And Dozens of Art-World Experts Told Us Why
As artist, activist, and writer Coco Fusco said, “Without his efforts and his vision, we would all still be operating in a racist and Eurocentric art world.” – artnet
The Philadelphia DA’s Office Has Just Hired Its First Artist in Residence. He Previously Spent 27 Years in Prison for Murder.
“Artists-in-residence programs have become popular at institutions ranging from Google to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Now, they are coming to government agencies, too. Next month, the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office will become the first agency associated with law enforcement to launch an artist-in-residence program. James ‘Yaya’ Hough, the artist chosen for the job, will be tasked with introducing a fresh dose of creative thinking to the 600-member staff — with a side of empathy.” – artnet
Blackface at the Ballet Highlights a Global Divide on Race
“In the United States the use of dark makeup evokes the painful legacy of racism and minstrel shows, in which performers darkened their skin with burnt cork to play characters that perpetuated racist stereotypes about African-Americans. But while the practice is increasingly rare in North America … it persists in parts of Europe and Russia.” And a recent Instagram post by Misty Copeland, showing Bolshoi Ballet dancers in dark makeup for a performance of La Bayadère, “[has] led to weeks of debate among ballet fans, highlighting a growing geographic divide on questions of race and representation.” – The New York Times
Highlighting the Resilience of Indigenous People Through Augmented Reality
“Through multi-sensorial installations, Alan Michelson holds genocidal colonizers accountable and affirms the continued survival of Indigenous people.” – Hyperallergic
How Rose Simpson’s lowrider is an homage to Pueblo potters
“While studying automotive science, Rose B. Simpson built a moving piece of art: Maria, a black, refurbished 1985 Chevrolet El Camino named for famed Pueblo potter Maria Martinez. … Simpson, who comes from a long line of Pueblo potters, is putting a contemporary spin on the traditional art of her ancestors.” – PBS NewsHour
Author Sarah Broom on ‘The Yellow House’ and putting New Orleans East on the map
“I felt moved and buoyed by the idea that I could write something that didn’t exist, and that there’s a little girl right now still living on the short end of the street in New Orleans East where I grew up. And I wrote it for her, so that there could be some history already in existence. And, you know, one of the striking things about New Orleans East is the way in which it doesn’t always appear on a map of New Orleans. So I wanted to quite literally put New Orleans East on the map.” – PBS NewsHour
Shuffle: Orchestrating a Diverse Classical Music World
“It’s no secret that classical music has a diversity problem. Major symphony orchestras around the country are primarily white, as are their audiences. And as these audiences continue to shrink, more conservatories and orchestras are getting serious about becoming as diverse as the cities they serve.” – WKSU (Kent, Ohio)
D.C. Trio The String Queens Wants To Change The Face Of Classical Music, One Pop Cover At A Time
“‘We’re actually modeling what we believe the musical world should be like,’ says [cellst Élise] Sharp. ‘And even [in] the people that work with us on our graphic design and our production in the studio, we try to partner with people who look like us and who have a similar message as us.’ This push for diversity goes beyond race. Reaching a wider audience also means acting as a bridge between classical and mainstream pop.” – DCist
Kent Monkman Reverses Art History’s Colonial Gaze
Monkman’s two large paintings, the first in a series of commissions for the Met’s Great Hall, “highlight the Museum as both a byproduct and beneficiary of colonizing forces, and illuminate how encyclopedic art museums perpetuate settler perspectives of history,” writes curator Randall Griffey. “In this regard, his commission is part of a larger institutional reconsideration of the Museum’s responsibility to attend more vigorously to new and broader perspectives on history and culture, as they relate to our wide-ranging collection.” – The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museums Have Yet to Embrace Augmented Reality. But Microsoft Wants to Help Them Use It as a Tool for Education and Social Justice
“A new exhibition at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle offers a window into how the tech giant hopes to fuse art and AR for the public good.” – artnet
The landscape architect who’s confronting climate change
In Los Angeles, Portland, Shanghai,. and especially San Francisco, Pamela Conrad has worked on solutions to the problems of invasive plant species, sea level rise, and earthquake readiness. And now she’s working to get the rest of her profession to pay attention to those issues. – Curbed
How this nomadic music group is bridging cultural divides
“The band Tinariwen hails from the deserts of Mali in North Africa. Its sound blends ancient Saharan instruments with electric guitars, and has earned the band devoted fans around the world. During a recent U.S. tour,however, band members experienced a darker side of America. Before a North Carolina show, they received a barrage of Islamophobic comments on social media. But as producer Ali Rogin reports, the city of Winston-Salem banded together to give them a warm welcome.” – PBS NewsHour
Cleveland Institute of Music wins $150,000 diversity grant
“The Cleveland Institute of Music has received a $150,000 grant from the Sphinx Organization, to launch an initiative for graduate students of African American and Latin descent, young professionals and junior faculty.” – The Strad
Traditions and Trailblazing With Nathalie Joachim
“Currently Joachim is riding a wave of success for her album Fanm d’Ayiti (Women of Haiti), which The New York Times called ‘an evening-length artistic exploration of matriarchy, drawing Haitian folk and popular traditions into the world of contemporary classical music.’ The reverse could also be said, that contemporary classical music is being drawn into Haitian folk and popular traditions. Either way, it is a cross-pollination and celebration that prompted Steve Smith of The New Yorker to write, ‘No more joyous chamber-music collection has arrived this year.'” – San Francisco Classical Voice
A Powerful Chamber Opera Reveals the Complexity of Contemporary Hong Kong
“In the 70-minute chamber opera Mila, Hong Kong playwright Candace Chong Mui Ngam has come together with composer Eli Marshall to tell the story of a Filipina woman named Mila who has traveled far from home to work as one of the thousands of so-called ‘domestic helpers,’ sometimes referred to as FDWs (foreign domestic workers).” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Composer Gabriel Kahane on Marrying Social Justice With Contemporary Classical Music
“I’m a politically minded person and have spent a lot of time thinking about poverty and income inequality. The idea of tackling this subject matter in the context of a symphony orchestra, which optically tends to be perceived as an institution that caters to people of privilege … I didn’t know exactly how to attack it. What I did was to treat homelessness and housing insecurity as symptoms of broader systemic inequality, and to try to implicate the audience in the story that I was telling and to really kind of hold their feet to the fire.” – Portland Mercury
“Porgy and Bess” and the Legacy of Black Opera
“Black opera singers are now cast in a wide range of roles and great operas written by black composers have gained more recognition. Yet, Porgy and Bess has maintained its cultural status as the pinnacle of black opera, despite being written by and composed by white men and women — George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose and Dorthy Heyward. Dr. Jason Oby, the chair of the Department of Music at Texas Southern University and the artistic director for the Houston Ebony Opera Guild, joined The Takeaway to discuss Porgy and Bess and the legacy of black opera singers and composers.” (audio) – WNYC Studios
How Philanthropy Can Get Smarter About Risk Management
“Donors are often confused about the appropriate levels of social risk and reward they should target in their philanthropy. They tell us they should bring the same risk aversion to philanthropic decision making that they display in their personal investment decision making. This is wrong. … Foundation officers and endowment managers too often prefer exceedingly safe grants and investments because of misapplied principles, biases, and concerns about their reputations.” – Stanford Social Innovation Review
Equity in Music Education: Cultural Diversity in the Music Classroom—EMBRACE the Challenge
“Teaching middle school choral music in a culturally diverse middle school in Hawaii resulted in new knowledge about welcoming the challenges posed by diversity to the benefit of both students and educator. Concise strategies described in this article are applicable to any music program.” – Music Educators Journal