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In my last post, “Click,” I wrote about awakening to a disconnect between arts organizations and their communities. There has been little in the arts infrastructure that has encouraged commitment or relationships that went beyond the bounds of the arts establishment. And yet boundary-busting has been the norm in the community arts movement–a grassroots movement focused on community betterment largely unheralded in the arts world. That’s a topic for many other posts. What is heartening is the level of commitment to community that is seen increasingly in relatively traditional arts organizations. I am planning a series of posts, called Winds of Change, that highlight such work.
I’ll begin, because of its timeliness (and its ease), with Nina Simon’s recent post on her blog, Museum 2.0. On July 27 in Public Service, Advocacy, and Institutional Transformation, she discusses finding commonalities between Homeless Services of Santa Cruz County and her own Museum of Art and History. I cannot, of course, say what she said better than she said it. A central observation informing their discussion was,
Both of our organizations are classically seen as insular organizations that serve specific, closed audiences–homeless people in her case, cultural elites and students in mine–and we’re both trying to demonstrate that our institutions not only have value for the whole community but also opportunities for everyone to get involved in a meaningful way.
She points to the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, the American Visionary Art Museum, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art as examples of museums (two of them art museums) that see their core role as being closely connected to the well-being of their communities. For me, a telling quote from near the end of the post is
[H]ow many institutions are really aggressively transforming their work away from service to a narrow band of audiences to community-wide advocacy work? These museums work differently. They have different goals they are shooting for.
How many indeed? A key question is, “How many need to be?” Does every arts organization need to have a community engagement agenda? That probably depends upon the framework for the word “need.” I suspect that on a practical level, a viable future for arts organizations is going to have engagement as the only road to sustainability. Marketing, fundraising, and advocacy for arts-friendly public policy are all dependent upon serious and deep engagement. On the philosophical level? . . . Let’s have that conversation another day. In the meantime,
Engage!
Doug