GIA Blog

The first week (theme: practice) of a four-week focus on Arts Education is wrapping up with follow-up questions. See the latest post at http://blog.westaf.org/2011/07/arts-education-blog-forum-follow-up.html.

Starting Monday, the focus shifts to field building, with a new panel including

Please join us next Tuesday, August 2, at 2:00 EST/11:00 PST for Beyond Cash: Supporting Individual Artists through Promotion, Validation, and Recognition, a web-based presentation by Irene Borger, Jayson Smart, and Ute Zimmermann, moderated by Amber Hawk Swanson.

About this webinar:
For arts grantmakers that want to support individual artists through means outside of cash grants, this presentation provides a perspective on why artists consider the promotion and validation of their creative process just as important as receiving grants. The panelists will offer ideas, suggestions, and feedback on how artists can be empowered through means outside of financial assistance and the need for such services.

"The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from 2009."

Here's the report.

Today Barry Hessenius poses the third and final question of the first week in a month-long examination of Arts Education. Today's question: What is the role of artists and arts organizations in the wider arts education paradigm?

The rest of the week will allow for discussion on the three questions already posed and their responses. Be sure to join in. The focus of next weeks discussion will be “Field Building” with an all-new panel of respondents.

Keep up with the discussion at Barry's Blog.

The White House Champions of Change blog features statements from advocates of Arts Education this week. Among the featured advocates is Aaron Dworkin, a keynote speaker from the 2010 GIA conference in Chicago. Here is the statement from the White House on Arts in Education:

From Christopher Levenick at PhilanthropyRoundtable:

For the next four weeks, Julie Fry, Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program for The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, will join Barry Hessenius on his blog for an ongoing discussion on arts education and the myriad issues and challenges facing the field in moving arts education forward. The discussion begins today with an introductory post.

In a post for the NEA blog, Rainey Knudson, founder of the fantastic and now ten-years-old Texas visual art blog, Glasstire, addresses the following (difficult) questions:

• Why does art criticism matter?
• What is the key role of the arts reporter in promoting greater art understanding?
• Has the role of the critic changed—or should it change—given the increasing democratization of arts coverage/rise of the citizen journalist?

The redesigned Form 990, Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax, has been the subject of much discussion since the IRS released it in 2007. As the exempt sector and practitioners have been adjusting to the new filing requirements, areas of confusion have been identified. Earlier this year, an IRS official reported filing errors in approximately 1% of redesigned Forms 990 filed electronically during 2010. Common errors include failure to file Schedule O, Supplemental Information to Form 990, and failure to complete required lobbying details when a Sec. 501(h) election has been made.

Cultural industries are economic powerhouses and states have the data to prove it, according to a new analysis from the National Endowment for the Arts. Drawing on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Arts and the GDP: Value Added by Selected Cultural Industries is a new NEA research note that examines the value added by three selected cultural industries: (1) performing arts, sports, and museums; (2) motion pictures and sound recording; and (3) publishing (including software). Combined, these three cultural industries contributed a total of $278.4 billion to the U.S. economy in 2009.