Fractured Atlas

Arts Administrator Residencies-Is There A Need?

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I am not quite sure what drew my eye to it but Fractured Atlas did an interview with the founders of the Philadelphia Art Hotel this January. I don’t know why, but the project just looks and sounds a like a cool idea.

Personally, if I were a visual artist, I would probably tend toward the residencies in rural settings which is where a lot of them are located. Ready access to the Philadelphia art scene is not to be undervalued though.

I would probably sell my children into slavery to participate in the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

It is probably fortunate then that I am not a visual artist. And I don’t have kids either. That is probably better since they have a performing arts program and I would still love to work there for the washrooms alone!

I don’t really talk about artist residencies too much. Perhaps because there aren’t too many for arts administrators. If you check the residency search tool at the Alliance of Artistic Communities website, administration is not even a search option. The only place I am aware of that offers one is The Studios of Key West which I wrote about 18 months ago.

I start to think that people like Michael Kaiser are correct when he talks about how few training opportunities there are to make people good arts administrators. There aren’t many opportunities for them to take a retreat and do research. Though to be fair, residencies for arts managers isn’t really part of the ethos. Arts administrators don’t get granted long periods of time to hone their skills. I don’t know if there is a market for offering residencies to them. How many administrators would ask for the opportunity? Most would say they don’t have the time. Kaiser talks about starting his day at 4 am which pretty much reflects the trend for many arts administrators.

One might say the Kennedy Center’s Art Management Fellowships are a sort of residency for arts managers. It combines practical work experience around the Kennedy Center with classes on relevant topics. And I believe they provide a $20,000 stipend to support yourself which is really pretty decent compared to what I was paid to intern. Though since the fellowships are for mid-career administrators,they would be bringing much more to the table than an intern would.

In any case, I would imagine the days there are just as long and involved as the position the arts manager left to become a fellow. That doesn’t give a lot of time for reflection and thinking about what the future of the arts might be and how one can restructure their organization to move forward to acknowledge these changes.

This summer I waswoolgathering a little about taking advantage of low real estate prices in Detroit to help grow an arts community there. I wonder if I was being too narrow in my vision and should have been thinking of including opportunities for arts managers to cultivate their skills too since there are so few opportunities.

Waiting For Tickets And Healthcare

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This weekend I happened upon a few websites and stories which I felt were interesting enough to expound upon. However, under the harsh light of Monday, they didn’t really excite me much any more.

There were two tidbits I liked that explain themselves well enough without any help from me.

First was a letter reprinted on Producer’s Prospective by Ken Davenport from a woman who expresses her amazement that tourists go to NYC and stand online at the TKTS without an idea what any of the shows are about. “They were going to buy tickets and they had budgeted the money, so they were going to spend it. It didn’t really matter on what.”

She makes some suggestions about why tourists might not completely trust the young people who provide those in line with information and how things can be better handled. Probably some lessons there for all of our ticket office operations.

The second thing I wanted to point out in case it got lost amid all the other static on the topic is that Americans for the Arts was joined by a coalition of 20 arts organizations in advocating the federal government for better health care for artists.

We call on Congress to pass:

* A health care reform bill that will create a public health insurance option for individual artists, especially the uninsured, and create better choices for affordable access to universal health coverage without being denied because of pre-existing conditions.
* A health care reform bill that will help financially-strapped nonprofit arts organization reduce the skyrocketing health insurance costs to cover their employees without cuts to existing benefits and staff while the economy recovers. These new cost-savings could also enable nonprofit arts organizations to produce and present more programs to serve their communities.
* A health care reform bill that will enable smaller nonprofit and unincorporated arts groups to afford to cover part and full-time employees for the first time.
* A health care reform bill that will support arts in healthcare programs, which have shown to be effective methods of prevention and patient care.

One of my earliest blog posts was about artists exchanging their skills in a hospital for health care. The rancorous debate raging about health care should concern a lot of people because the plans being discussed in Congress represent the best hope for artists to get health care since Fractured Atlas came on the scene.