Team Projects
The second half of the Fellowship will explore our work’s context through the following lens: Creative City, Arts & Enterprise, Cultural Equity and Regenerative Practices. We’ll develop a common language and explore multiple perspectives on these topics, with the goal of working in teams around these topics to create a project (product/event/research) as the culminating learning experience. Please track your notes using the hackpads provided here in the greenroom.
2015-16 Areas of Interest
The Creative City
We will begin by exploring the utopian idea of the creative city, where artists and arts organizations are viewed as critical components of a healthy ecosystem. We’ll ask what role the arts sector can play in “civic creativity” or “cultural strategy” that creates “social wealth” and helps shape public sentiment, city planning and policy. We will also discuss the robust migration of the technology community from Silicon Valley to San Francisco and Oakland and the effect it’s had on the non-profit and commercial arts sector. Could we have predicted the challenges? How can we move forward? Can a revived social logic, balancing independence and interdependence cultivate resilience for artists, arts and culture workers and arts organizations?
Arts & Enterprise
This month we will look at the virtues and drawback of pairing arts and enterprise. What is an entrepreneurial mindset? Is an entrepreneurial approach detrimental to the arts community? Can enterprise support the freedom to create or does it slowly corrode our character and slim content? We will discuss how arts organizations are using traditional models such as subscriptions in innovative ways as well as new social motivated business models such as Laurence Lessig’s hybrid entities and Henry Chesbrough’s open business models.
Cultural Equity & Regenerative Practices
Almost 43% of California residents speak a language other than English at home, a proportion far higher than any other state. Additionally, no single racial or ethnic group forms a majority of California’s population, making the state a minority-majority state. How can arts mangers advance the conversation on cultural equity? Is it about engaging new and diverse participants, providing more support for community arts, tacking institutional or systemic marginalization or rethinking creative placemaking strategies? How can we make the arts more sustainable? What can we do as individuals to renew our energy and passion? What can we do as a network to support each other? What can we do as leaders of programs and organizations to encourage a healthier arts ecosystem?
