Arts Research

David B. Pankratz, principal investigator and project manager, Celia O'Donnell, research assistant

2001, 80 pages. California Arts Council, 1300 I Street, Suite 930, Sacramento, CA 95814, 916-322-6555.

2001, 120 pages. The Rockefeller Foundation.

Kristin G. Congdon, Doug Blandy, and Paul E. Bolin, editors
2001, 203 pages, National Art Education Association, Reston, Virginia, 703-860-8000.

221, 160 pages, $20. RAND Distribution Services, 877-584-8642, fax: 310-451-6915, order[at]rand.org

In The Performing Arts in a New Era, the Rand Corporation takes on the daunting task of mapping the performing arts sector in the United States. The report was released in July 2001, as part of the Pew Charitable Trust's cultural initiative, "Optimizing America's Cultural Resources," which attempts in part to build a research capability for the arts that will inform and shape national and local cultural policy.

At the Fund for Folk Culture (FFC), we have been working with Laurel Jones and Morrie Warshawski of the Bay Consulting Group (BCG) to survey the range of private support for the folk and traditional arts and investigate opportunities for increased private support in this cultural sector.

Allen Ginsberg begins his essay "Meditation and Poetics" with this paragraph: "It's an old tradition in the West among great poets that poetry is rarely thought of as 'just poetry.' Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness, or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with the phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it. Poetics isn't mere picturesque dilettantism or egotistical expressionism for craven motives grasping for sensation and flattery.

At the annual GIA conference last fall, a group of twenty or so participants gathered together for a roundtable session devoted to funding individual immigrant and traditional artists. Organized by staff or board members of the Bush Foundation and the Flintridge Foundation, the roundtable session provided one of the first opportunities for foundation program officers engaged in this type of support to share information and to identify common concerns and strategies to meet them. And, indeed, common concerns and themes did emerge in the discussion.

We are at a new turning point in the field of aging. The past twenty-five years have witnessed two major conceptual shifts that have fundamentally influenced the course of research, practice, and policy deliberations.

Cultural Policy Research was the topic of two breakfast roundtables at GIA's 2000 conference in Minneapolis. A combination of scheduled presenters and other participants gave brief summaries of current research underway. The cumulative impact of hearing about so many projects at the same time inspired Reader editors to want to share the reports with our readers. This overview does not pretend to be exhaustive, but rather is a snapshot based on roundtable participation and the ability of the following report contributors to respond quickly to our invitation. We extend many thanks to them.

Co-sponsored by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS and the National Association of Artists Organizations, Friday, October 13, 2000, the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, California