Design / architecture

Research on Performing Arts in Communities

November 12, 2009 by Steve

We may go to the opera, live theater, or the symphony, but we don't stop to really think about how much these performances can mean to our daily lives and to our communities. Those performing arts organizations have been concentrating on this issue for years.

Reggae to Rachmaninoff

November 12, 2009 by Steve

2010, 72 pages, The Urban Institute, 2100 M Street NW, Washington, D.C., 20037, (202) 833-7200 http://www.urban.org

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Reggae to Rachmaninoff (397Kb)

The Arts and the Small Community 2006

November 12, 2009 by Steve

Arts Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Americans for the Arts are happy to announce the republication of the landmark 1969 book, The Arts in the Small Community, by Maryo Gard Ewell and Michael F. Warlum. The new guide stays true to its original roots and mission set forth by Wisconsin's community arts pioneer Robert Gard, but has been thoroughly updated to address contemporary examples in the realm of community arts.

Changing Schools Through the Arts

November 12, 2009 by Steve

This book offers insight into how to establish the arts in schools and use them as a vehicle for school renewal at the same time. The author makes a convincing case for the important role of visual arts, music, dance, drama, and architecture in educating our youth.

284 pp, paperback (1990, Americans for the Arts)

Grassroots and Mountain Wings

November 12, 2009 by Steve

This timeless resource helps identify and define the philosophical foundations and practice principles of community arts development. It captures and shares the creative and pioneering efforts that drive the movement and provides insight and expertise for people working in rural and small communities.

135pp, paperback (1992, Center for Community and Cultural Studies, Columbia College)

Why Arts?... Why Arts!

April 30, 2009 by admin

Many of the feature articles in this issue offer tools for responding to GIA Executive Director Janet Brown's call to speak up, to not sit silently in the back but to stand up and illustrate or make the case for why arts and culture matters.

How Can the Arts Become Central?

April 30, 2009 by admin

In the past two years, several prominent foundations at national, regional, and local levels have appointed new presidents. Such leadership transitions are likely to increase in the years ahead in keeping with the larger generational shift in the nonprofit sector. Very few of the new foundation leaders are likely to come from the arts sector, and many will have had little direct experience with our field.

April 30, 2009 by admin

When presidents and CEOs of foundations try to balance a range of equally justifiable social agendas, where are the arts? Sponsored by GIA, six foundation leaders spent a day and a half together discussing just this topic in the summer of 2008. The relevance of their conversation and the preliminary conclusions they drew are perhaps even more urgent today than they were then, as foundations face increasingly serious questions of priority.

What Is Civil Society?

April 30, 2009 by admin

In The Place of the Arts in Multi-focus Foundations, Bruce Sievers writes that the rationale for supporting both the arts and the nonprofit sector as a whole is integrally linked to their capacity to advance pluralism, promote voluntary action, accommodate diversity, and champion individual visions of the public good. “Civil society,” Sievers notes, is increasingly the accepted concept to describe this sphere of social action.

April 30, 2009 by admin

As we, individually or collectively, set out to make a case for the many ways the arts have relevance in today's world of economic turmoil and change, it's helpful to be clear what we mean by terms like “art,” “culture,” and “industry” and also to understand what the same terms might mean to others. The words we use are telling. Their use has a history that says much about where the work we call “art” resides in our collective lives from one period to the next.