Literary arts

Last year AEA Consulting developed the working paper “Critical Issues Facing the Arts in California” for the James Irvine Foundation. Since its release, the report has generated extensive conversations and responses, both within and beyond California. GIA invited Adrian Ellis, principal of AEA Consulting, to offer further thoughts on the current state of the arts in the United States.

In the weekend leading into the 2007 Taos Journey conference, members of Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education will spend two days together in Santa Fe seeking better understanding of one another's priorities in arts and education—finding common ground. In the spirit of building this bridge between education and the arts, we sought an educator rather than an artist, a practitioner rather than a researcher, to write about arts education.

Early in our research on New Mexico, we were encouraged to look at its crops and cuisines for insight into how different cultures in the state have both come together and retained distinct traditions over centuries. In reading, we came across Ancient Agriculture, a text by Gabriel Alonso de Herrera that first appeared in Spain in the sixteenth century and later traveled from the old world to the new, influencing how agriculture is practiced in New Mexico today.

As conference co-chairs, neither of whom has lived in New Mexico, we were told that the story of art in New Mexico is a story of place, that the region—its landscape, its convergence of cultures, its sacred spaces—defines what and how art is made. We turned to a number of New Mexico artists and writers to give us their inside views of this remarkable region. Among them is Chrissie Orr, a transplant from Scotland, who makes work informed and formed by New Mexico's physical environment.