Thoughts from the Inaugural Aspen Arts Strategy Group
By Erica Sheftman
“The arts should be legitimate participants in a larger conversation with society.”
- Rocco Landesman, Chairman, The National Endowment for the Arts
Center: Rachel Goslins (Executive Director, President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities) and Arthur Bloom (Founder, Musicorps). Photo by Erin Baiano.
In his welcome remarks at the inaugural Aspen Arts Strategy Group last week, Aspen Institute Arts Program Director Damian Woetzel framed the Citizen Artist mission as part of a larger need for a paradigm shift in the arts, “from needing to giving.” Rather than saying the arts need more support, Woetzel continued, “let’s ask, how are the arts giving to society? How do the arts enhance all manner of development and progress in this country?”
Melody Barnes, Former Domestic Policy Adviser to the White House, was invited to open the session and similarly addressed the ways that Citizen Artist efforts can fit into larger national efforts to reinforce and create strong communities. Barnes cited the need for an “investment of resources and an alignment of systems and institutions ….A highly functioning society requires that we effectively harness all the tools and ideas we have, including those of artists and the arts.”
A discussion of the role of city and government followed naturally, punctuated by three key voices: Kate Levin, Gary Steuer and Olga Garay-English, Chief Cultural Officers in their respective cities (New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles). Other sessions on Day 1 included “Funding Citizen Artist Efforts: Creating New Models” and “Community Organizing: Mobilizing Artists and Communities to Engage.” Some of the challenges addressed in these institution-based discussions included a need for a reallocation of funding; a need for more artist representation in government and local commissions; outdated training in higher education and conservatory programs and subsequently, a need to develop artist skill sets to encourage and leverage civic engagement. Laura Zabel, Executive Director of Springboard for the Arts, identified an “informational” problem as a fundamental barrier to connecting the resources of artists with communities that can benefit from them, and summed up the greatest challenge for Citizen Artists as the need to “find even small ways of matching artists and neighborhoods, and provide both an invitation and a charge to the artist-community.” Commissioner Levin spoke of the need to identify the Citizen Artist “deliverable” for society at large: “The most highly valued systems are designed to understand and solve problems, and provide a relatively reliable deliverable.”
Sessions on Day 2 provided insights into artist-initiated models. The day started off with a presentation by Assistant Concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Yuan-Qing Yu, who has taken her music into children’s hospitals; Kiff Gallagher of MusicianCorps and Arthur Bloom of MusicCorps in turn spoke of their work serving and rehabilitating veterans and the disabled through music. In the afternoon, executive and artistic leaders from some of the most prominent arts organizations in the world — from Lincoln Center to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra — discussed the role of organizations in providing a framework conducive for Citizen Artist Activities.
The Strategy Group ended with a power hour on Education and the Arts, focusing on the efforts of artists in the classroom. Praise for Yo-Yo Ma and his work with the Silk Road Project highlighted a discussion which ranged from identifying best practices to developing an agenda for the creation of new systems and easily replicable “playbooks,” which would allow schools all over the country to more easily adopt the methodology associated with Silk Road and other arts-in-education projects such as the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities’ Turnaround Arts Initiative (which both Ma and Woetzel have helped spearhead).
Perhaps the phrase which stuck most came from Ma, who expressed that it is time to reimagine the notion of art for art’s sake: “We need art for life’s sake.”
