Public Agency

The so-called new economy, driven by an explosion in technological innovation and new communication tools, has especially affected California's San Francisco Bay Area, where web-based start-ups are overabundant and everything seems to be preceded by an "e". Perhaps because of their innovative nature, technology firms often locate offices in marginalized neighborhoods or abandoned industrial zones. At first this trend seemed to revitalize former nadirs of economic activity with new neighborhood restaurants, cafés, and other service-oriented businesses.

National Arts Stabilization (NAS) offered the first course in its executive education program in 1997. Originally called Strategic Leadership in a Changing Environment, Strategy is a three-day seminar that, according to the NAS website, provides arts leaders with "a framework for understanding how to:

- analyze the competitive environment,
- identify alternative strategies, and
- integrate mission and strategy."

Texas is much in the news today. Its environmental record and education reforms are bandied around as political hot potatoes in this year's presidential race. So what has George W. Bush, governor of the state, done for the arts in Texas? Basically, he has kept arts funding stable in the state budget. On a more personal level, the Bushes received the first two state arts affinity license plates (Texas's arts license plates are the most popular affinity plates in the state) and have agreed to serve as co-hosts of the Texas Medal of Arts event in spring 2000.

2000 reprint edition, first published in 1992, 296 pages, paper. Arts Extension Service Press, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, ISBN 0-275-94054-3

The remarkable growth of the online sector in recent years can be assessed in many ways — from the rapidly expanding number of wired households (over half are now connected to the Internet) to the sheer explosion of content on the World Wide Web (which now encompasses over a billion pages). Data traffic exceeds voice traffic on the nation's phone lines now, and far more email messages than postal letters are sent every day.

2000, 122 pages; Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), Denver Colorado, 303-629-1166.

In each issue of the Reader we intend to include at least one piece in the voice of an artist. Here we've chosen to reprint writer Irene Borger's interview with choreographer Joanna Haigood, from Force of Curiosity, Borger's interviews with past recipients of the CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts. It is published here with Borger's permission.

Summer 2000, Issue 19, 60 pages. Published by Arts Research Ltd, 52 Norland Square, London, W11 4PZ, Tel: +44 (0) 20 7229 2710; Arts Research Digest, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, Tel: 44(0) 191 227 3894.

2000, 61 pages; published by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, 250 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10177-0026, 212-551-9100.

We've all seen them, or worse, even written them: proposals and papers that promise to empower targeted entities to promulgate comprehensive cutting edge paradigms and strategies through proactive collaborative linkages based on intensive learnings and extrapolations that impact at-risk populations through best practices.

A Report on the Ford Foundation Initiative
Edited by Mindy Levine

1999, 64 pages. Developed by New England Foundation for the Arts, edited and published by Arts International, ISBN 0-9676467-0-7, 212-674-9744