Public Art

Between 2006 and 2008, the Social Impact of the Arts Project, a research group at the University of Pennsylvania (SIAP), collaborated with The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a community development financial institution, on an investigation of the creative sector's potential contribution to neighborhood economic and community development.

Danny Newman, who died last year (2007) at the age of eighty-eight, was a major post- World War II patron of the arts, but his contributions were not personal checks. Rather, they lay in helping arts companies—theaters, orchestras, dance groups, operas—build strong, committed audiences, providing the sound financial basis they needed to survive and flourish. His major tool was the promotion of subscriptions, a wide-ranging effort embodied in his book Subscribe Now! Building Arts Audiences through Dynamic Subscription Promotion.

2008, 326 pages. Published by New Village Press, PO Box 3049 Oakland, CA, 94609, 
(510) 420-1361, www.newvillagepress.net

Jaime Cortez was an arts and culture fellow at the San Francisco Foundation for two years. At the end of his fellowship, he and the other outgoing fellows were asked to read a prepared farewell statement to the board and staff of the foundation. Following is his closing presentation, given on July 9, 2008.

2007, 44 pages. Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, 2233 University Avenue West, Suite 355, St. Paul, Minnesota, 55144, (651) 251-0868, www.mncitizensforthearts.org

http://mncitizensforthearts.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/interioronlyfinal.pdf

2007, 16 pages. Americans for the Arts, 1000 Vermont Avenue, NW, 6th Floor, Washington, D.C., 20005, (202) 371-2830, www.artsusa.org

2008, 328 pages. Published by University of California Press

Arts and education grantmakers at an historic gathering in Santa Fe in October of 2007 agreed on the need to forge a new vision for public education in the United States and to collectively explore how the arts can help shape and realize that vision.

Convened by Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education, more than 100 foundation representatives met formally for the first time under the aegis of their two affinity organizations to debate and discuss the role of the arts in education.

Crossing Borders and Boundaries was the theme of the GFE Conference in 2007, and shortly after the GFE and GIA conferences and the Arts and Education Weekend, I left for a trip to Asia including visits to Thailand, Cambodia, and Hong Kong. The GFE conference underscored the fact that one of the most important skills needed now is to be globally literate, which is pretty much being neglected in schools at the moment.

According to some, "the word twain has its origin in the Old English twegen, meaning two. The phrase never the twain shall meet was used by Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack-room ballads, 1892: 'Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.'" Kipling uses a colonial lens to bemoan the lack of commonality and accord between the British and the indigenous East Indian. Until my recent trip to New Mexico I often felt that same lack of accord between arts funders and education funders.