Arts and Community Development

The Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association, using a three-year grant from Hewlett Packard in 2001, has created the Tribal Digital Village (TDV). Using a high-performance wireless backbone, the TDV project delivers wireless broadband to community centers, fire stations, sheriff substations, Tribal administration buildings, and Tribal libraries in-and-around eighteen tribal reservations. This long-distance, point-to-point, wireless system is ideally suited to the geographically diverse area that required coverage.

2005, 36 pages. Alliance of Artists Communities, 255 Main Street, Providence, RI, 02903, 410-351-4320.

This report documents an initiative of the Alliance of Artists Communities to answer the question, "What does California look like to its artists?" Reflections and work of seven artists in different residency programs provide a snapshot of the state from a range of cultural perspectives. Engaging photographs by Kim Harrington supplement the text.

2005. Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 65 Bleecker Street, 7th floor, New York, NY 10012-2420, 212-387-7555.

This book chronicles the Warhol Foundation's five-year initiative to build capacity of thirty-one small contemporary visual arts organizations located throughout the country. This ambitious program awarded $125,000 to each organization and provided additional technical assistance according to their needs. The challenging typography, layout, and binding of the book convey a strong sense of the organizations portrayed.

It is very unusual for any urban renewal plan not to include reference to the role that arts organizations and arts buildings can potentially play in regeneration. Most recently, in Hurricane Katrina's wake, both have figured prominently in discussions about the future of New Orleans and Biloxi. But the discussions about arts organizations and those about arts buildings are curiously and uncomfortably divorced.

We live in a world of "widespread hostility toward the United States and its policies."1 This antipathy is not limited to the countries and peoples that are directly affected by the U.S. "war on terror" and its attendant pol-icies, but includes many of our former allies and fellow democracies. A friend who just returned from a year in Spain reports that she spent a significant amount of time and energy convincing people she met there that the U.S.

Artists and arts institutions rely on the free flow of information to create and distribute their work. The converging digital environment presents many new options for the delivery of specialized information to targeted audiences, and the cultural community is becoming increasingly sophisticated in deploying these tools. However, the United States is only sixteenth in the world in broadband Internet penetration, and the growing digital divide presents a challenge to the vision of ubiquitous access to high-quality images, sound, and text.

This time it was the catastrophic devastation in the Gulf States. Last time it was the 9/11 attack. Before that were the floods in North Dakota, the earthquakes in San Francisco and Seattle, and Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, and then

Each time disaster strikes — whether natural or man made — communities face inestimable emotional and economic suffering. When artists, arts organizations, and cultural institutions are affected by these disasters, the confusion and bewilderment about what to do and how to help extends very directly to us as arts grantmakers.

Can you explain, in simple terms, how you or someone you know is changed by listening to music, watching a dance performance, looking at an artwork, or writing in a journal? I’d be hard pressed to manage a coherent response.

It’s not easy to talk about how art transforms or how we are different because of it. Many who work in the arts, including those of us who do so because of our belief in the transformative power of art, lack a vernacular for communicating its impacts.

2005, 32 pages. Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley , 1153 Lincoln Avenue, Suite I, San Jose

"We have a term in our language called gW3dZadad— it is a form of wealth. It's the wealth of knowledge of culture of our peoples, our laws, our ceremonies, our songs, of the names of our ancestors...Our ancestors live today as long as we pass it down to our children.”
Bruce subiyay Miller, Community Spirit Award recipient