Community engagement. What is it? How do you do it? What will you get if you try? These are questions (or variations of questions) I get when I bring this topic to the table in most corners of the arts establishment. Some (but by no means all) elements of the big box arts infrastructure are under the impression that community engagement (developing substantive relationships with "unusual suspects" outside of any specific effort to sell tickets) … [Read more...]
Civic Practice
Michael Rohd, the Founding Director of Portland (OR)'s Sojourn Theatre has recently posted an extremely thoughtful reflection on community engagement and theatre: The New Work of Building Civic Practice. As I've said before, I am aware of the danger of echo-chambering in the blog world, especially in this case since the things he says sound so much like my rants. But, as in the past, I simply can't help myself. Mr. Rohd identifies the central … [Read more...]
Change
Given my background in the "classical" music world, I have been for some time an admirer of Greg Sandow's blog, Sandow, although I will confess that I have not subscribed to it. That has changed. Mr. Sandow is in the middle of a series of posts addressing the need for transformation in the music industry that, in spite of the fact that I have been saying many of the same things here, I could not have said better myself. I try (unsuccessfully) … [Read more...]
First Contact
Several weeks ago at the Association of Arts Administration Educators' Conference in California, I had the pleasure of attending a plenary session/performance by Luis Alfaro. He is a "renowned . . . performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist;" a MacArthur Fellow–a truly brilliant one. But one story he told had a brief phrase that gave me mental whiplash. He was talking about an encounter at a box office he had had and … [Read more...]
Museums Engage
The number of articles I have posted on the American Association of Museum Conference is indicative of the merit I found in much that went on there. This one, reporting about the panel on which I served, will (I think) be the last one. The panelists included Prerana Reddy (a contributor to Building Communities, Not Audiences), José Rodriguez from the Queens Museum of Art, and Michael Christiano (former Director of Education at SECCA and now … [Read more...]
Signs of Engagement
While I'm on a roll with posts dissecting the meaning and nature of engagement (Engagement Is, Audience Development “vs.” Community Engagement, Audience Engagement-Community Engagement), I've got some more issues to raise (or repeat). I have made much of the fact that substantive community engagement (as opposed to audience engagement) is extremely rare among established arts organizations. In an effort to stave off arguments about that, here are … [Read more...]
Audience Engagement-Community Engagement
[Note to new readers: This is a very old and widely read post. In the interest of providing up-to-date information about thinking on this topic, you can find updated definitions of terminology related to community engagement and related arts management tools on the ArtsEngaged website here.] OK, I lied. I said I wasn't going to post while in Singapore, but I worked on this on the way here and I can't make myself wait. Last week, Karina … [Read more...]
The Magic of Small Groups
In early April, as part of Americans for the Arts' Emerging Leaders blog salon, Gregory Burbage posted an article on small group organization in mega-churches and the lessons to be learned from them: Group Therapy in the Arts. The point he was presenting is that huge churches (the one he cited has a membership of 24,000!) organize (and grow) themselves through the establishment of small support groups unified around interests or age. This is a … [Read more...]
Art Forms and Engagement
WARNING: This post will most interest community engagement geeks like me. In Not (Exactly) about El Sistema, I introduced the notion that the nature of an orchestra (separate from the content of the music performed) was an important factor in its effectiveness as a tool for transforming young people's lives. That provides me with a good segue to consider whether individual art forms might be particularly well-suited to specific types of … [Read more...]
Process and Product
Most arts and community engagement workers at some point (if not frequently) make the case for the process being at least as important as the product in this field. This is heard so frequently as to have become a truism, even if little discussion of the idea takes place. And discussion is important because, in the context of professional arts genres with origins in the European upper class tradition (the vast majority of professional arts in … [Read more...]