Artist/activist/advocate Theaster Gates offers some clear and compelling (although counter to current practice) insights about how art meets place in this interview with Carol Coletta of the Knight Foundation. While many ‘placemaking’ initiatives position art as beacon and bait (bold, obvious, spotlighted, central), Gates prefers local change where the “art” is small, malleable, and quietly […]

We talk a lot in the arts about ‘organizations’ — their missions, their purpose, their operations, their business models, their relationships with communities and constituents. Organizations have boards that oversee them, and executives who operate them. It’s rather easy to think about an organization as a ‘thing’ or a material being (dare I say ‘corporeal […]

Lucy Bernholz asks a basic but useful question on her Philanthopy 2173 blog: What are nonprofits for? (as opposed to other forms of organization). She suggests that the answer used to be more clear. And she offers some emerging examples of legal or public dispute on the subject (YMCA v. for-profit health clubs, free software […]

Eleven years ago today I launched this little blog into the wilderness. I wrote stuff. I discovered smart people through comments and critiques. I shared ideas (in part to share them, and in part to make myself think clearly in a way that only writing in public can). I connected some dots.

June is conference month for the arts, and I’ve seen a LOT of plenary panels on a LOT of pertinent subjects. Common to them all has been a hope at the beginning that the session will go productively, that the temporary aggregation of intelligent people will find something useful to say, and that the moderator […]

I was honored to be part of a symposium this week co-hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project. The event drew an extraordinary group of researchers and practitioners, including many who had written defining works for my own learning journey in this field. […]

I’m part of a weeklong blogathon this week through Barry Hessenius’ blog on the definition, development, and state-of-play of “arts entrepreneurship,” an evolving frame for an ancient practice. And I’m thrilled to be exploring the subject with such smart colleagues: Linda Essig, Russell Willis Taylor, Adam Huttler, Anthony Radich, Richard Evans, and Ruby Lerner.

Many may be aware, and some may be annoyed, that I’ve been wrestling a lot with the concepts of “capital” — what it is, how it works, and what it does in the context of the nonprofit arts. The issue draws my focus for three broad reasons. First, it’s a big, recurring, juicy issue for […]

Correlations between data sets are magical things — they tell us that two variables move together, and encourage us to claim that the two are linked. Politicians and advocates do this all the time. We hear it in advertisements and read it in promotional copy. Causality claims are so much part of the chatter around […]

Director, writer, performer and puppet maker Eric Bass offers a beautiful essay on what it means (and doesn’t mean) to be a puppet performer. And his points resonate rather deeply with what it means to work expressively in the world. He disputes two myths about puppet performance: That the puppeteer controls the puppet, and that […]