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At the beginning of the semester, I was very excited about the prospect of partnering with a real arts organization in Charlottesville. I remember sitting there in a circle with Greg and thinking about all the ways in which The Bridge might be helped. A half-formed question was tickling the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite articulate it. It was a week or two later, when we were forming our project groups, when I realized what my question would have been: “What are your most pressing needs?” Because Greg had talked a lot about the transition to 501c3 and the impending changes in funding structures, but he didn’t specify what he would like for us to help him with. I know that he was probably just trying not to limit our ideas, but I still think that putting that information about needs out there early is important – particularly when the partner organization is so busy and has little time to work with students on something that isn’t really needed. Because of the change in funding, we had reasoned that The Bridge needed some way of getting more information about private contributors. It was unfortunate that we later found out that this wasn’t a project that The Bridge was ready to support. But it was important to me that I was producing something that Greg would actually need and use.
In any case, I remained excited about the project as we went along, but for a few weeks in March and April I became rather sensitive to the idea that CBR partners should know and understand each other well. I was kind of grappling with the thought that I was an outsider to The Bridge, as someone who hadn’t really ever attended any events there. The thing was that I didn’t want to just be a student who was working on this project for school. Somehow that seemed less authentic or legitimate. I was afraid that this “lack” of authenticity would show through to the people who I interviewed or surveyed. When thinking about streamlining The Bridge’s selection process, I especially did not want to step on anyone’s toes by telling them how to choose exhibitions for the gallery. After all, they have years of experience and artistic backgrounds much deeper than mine.
Our CBR group had two private interviews with Greg throughout the semester, and they helped tremendously with the “needs” ambiguity and my anxiety about not personally knowing The Bridge. Speaking directly to Greg, we discussed what worked and what didn’t. He directed our focus away from the funding issues and toward the exhibition programming issues. He told us that he would appreciate a set of guidelines telling the selection committee how to choose their entries. With this assurance, I was no longer afraid that I would be stepping on anybody’s toes by telling The Bridge how to select their projects.
I think this really illustrates the importance of face-to-face communication in CBR projects. Strand and her co-writers and even Dr. Botchway have told us that limited ability to communicate between researchers and community organizations is one common problem in CBR projects. Judging by my personal experience, I think that it may be beneficial in the future to give special attention to this issue.
I enjoyed reading Strand et al’s book about community based research in conjunction with Goldbard’s book about community arts. It was a good idea to read about the field of community arts while at the same time learning about how we as researchers could help them achieve their goals. All of the articles that we read on communityarts.net were very helpful in fleshing out the field of community arts and helping us students understand what it is all about. It was really useful to learn about the struggles and triumphs of various organizations as they attempted to integrate their activities with their targeted communities. It is interesting to note that their difficulties with understanding and acceptance mirror that of my own that I described above. In other words, the partnership between arts organizations and communities is similar to the partnership between community-based researchers and arts organizations. The lessons of one could definitely be applied to the other.
All in all, the topics, issues, and challenges that I have encountered in this class have been a great learning experience. I hope to take the experience with me into the arts administration field someday.
My group is meeting at the library today to work on our project. After the major upheaval of last week, we’re going to have to recollect ourselves and move forward in a direction that works. Thankfully, after Josh and I met again with Greg on Tuesday, we have a better sense of where we’re going.
At the meeting, we decided that we would set aside the contributors aspect of the project and make it all about improving the exhibition selection process. Greg says they get enough submissions, but the system for selecting among the submissions is very disorganized. He would like for us to come up with a plan for the whole selection process. I am thinking that we should design this process (articulating it through a chart, list, outline, whatever) and then use that information to revise the application if necessary, so that all of the stuff that the selection committee needs to know is right there on the submitted application.
So here is where I think our project currently stands.
What we need:
- Do more academic research (read articles) about aspects of programming for community arts. It is a shame that most of our academic research so far has focused on the issues of funding and private contribution.
- Do practical research about aspects of programming for community arts. This could involve getting in contact with organizations that are similar to the Bridge and asking them about their selection process/criteria. We should try to use at least one of the data analysis methods (survey, interview, quantitative data) that we learned about in class.
- Be able to explain how our project ties back into the topic of community organizing. Hopefully this will automatically become clear as we do 1 and 2.
What we already have:
- A copy of the old application form, which we have already used to create a draft of the new and improved version.
- A copy of Greg’s old selection criteria (see below; it’s very short)
- Lots of information on The Bridge’s culture, values, and how it tends to operate (see below). We need to marry this information with the “best practices” we discover through our academic and practical research. Doing so would allow us to design an exhibition selection process that is tailor-made for The Bridge and its mission.
So for the rest of this entry, I’m going to summarize the information that we have amassed from meeting with Greg. I have asked Chris and Josh to review this before meeting tomorrow. We will get together, split up the research, and then proceed with conducting the research. This weekend we could get together again, discuss what we found, design the selection process, and create our presentation.
(My individual research paper is still up in the air, but I am not focusing on it too much right now. I know that it will be something that ties into and extends what we find with our group project.)
Continue reading Week 14
I enjoyed this week’s seminar discussion about the relationship between culture and economic development. I especially enjoyed reading the article about LA Commons. The programs that the author described sounded really innovative and well-planned. (The Tamale carts and the BBQ-based culinary performances really stuck out to me. BBQ Adventures particularly seemed like a brilliant way of bringing out different cultural variations on a common object.) I liked that the author recognized that economic development and the development of a multicultural LA could go hand-in-hand but didn’t oversimplify by drawing a direct causal relationship from one to another. I feel that the relationship has to be pretty complex – it’s hard to draw a line between mere consumption of cultural resources and participation in exploring (creating? disseminating?) cultural resources. A lot of times they tend to go hand in hand.
LA Common’s criteria for gauging impact seems to focus more on economic development in the various minority communities. Some of my classmates thought they should try to do more to gauge the change in people’s perceptions, but I don’t think that it is necessarily wrong to focus on economic development as long as they don’t assume that changed perceptions will always automatically follow. These are very poor neighborhoods, after all. They will derive more marginal benefit from an economic boost than the “average” American neighborhood.
Now for some bad news: our CBR project took a major hit this week. After meeting with Greg last Wednesday, we went ahead and created 2nd drafts of our two products: the new Project/Exhibition Application and the Contributors’ Survey (click links to view them). I downloaded a trial of Adobe Acrobat and put together the application form using LiveCycle Designer, taking into account the things we discussed at our meeting (Josh had created an earlier version, but I made a lot of improvements for the 2nd draft). For the survey, I went in and added a few questions that pertained to the research for my individual paper. These questions were related to the “Four Types of Giving” typology that I created in class last week.
We submitted both of these to Greg (through email) for his comments. He didn’t say anything about the application, but on Wednesday, he notified us that the “board does not feel comfortable releasing the donor list.” I had somewhat expected this (and I certainly understand that it is a sensitive matter of privacy and PR), so I immediately tried plan B. I anonymized the survey by taking out the Name and Address questions and suggested that Greg be the one to forward the survey on to contributors. That way there would be no need to give us a list.
Unfortunately, on Friday night Greg replied that there would be no decision on the survey until the board discusses it at the end of the month. This certainly throws a big monkey wrench into our plans. Most of the literature review and academic research so far revolves around donors. We were concentrating our energy there because we anticipated that it would be trickier to handle. To be honest, I had felt some hesitance from Greg last week regarding this half of the project, but I hadn’t anticipated that we would actually reach an impasse like this. Our group project may have some resilience because it contains a whole other component (streamlining the application process). However, my individual paper, for which I had planned to use data gathered using the survey, is taking a pretty hard hit. I may decide to switch gears and write about something else altogether.
Arlene Goldbard wrote in her article “Overlaps, Intersections and Conflicts” that culture is “the sum-total of human ingenuity: language, signs and symbols, systems of belief, customs, clothes, cuisine, tools, toys and trinkets, the built environment and everything we use to fill it up, and the cherry on the sundae, art.” I accept the broadness of this definition, because I think that the “culture as art” definition is too narrow. I have always thought of culture as (to put it much less eloquently) the collection of everything that says something about who we are. Our clothing does this, as do our cuisine, belief systems, and language – but they have to be taken together to fully understand our culture. I am actually not sure that I agree with her argument that art is the “purest expression” of culture. I can see why she thinks that expression through commodities like clothing or belief systems like political structure may not be “pure.” With clothing, the expression is limited by practical matters like warmth and cost. A political structure may be influenced by external, global governance standards. Likewise, expression through art can be adulterated by factors such as low opportunity, low creativity, and the physicality of artistic mediums. It seems to me that there is no pure way of expressing culture – it has to be taken holistically.
In class, we discussed the idea that while culture can build a sense of community, it can also be used to divide. My experiences with one artistic community reinforce this point. I am the administrator of a web community where people around the world come together to discuss, create, and enjoy anime music videos (AMVs: fan-created music videos that use video clips from Japanese animation). This community was born from the generative ideals found in the overlap between anime fandom and remix culture. Over years, the site has generated a culture of its own. Editors critique each other’s work through the site’s “opinions” system and seek to improve the quality of their work through time and effort. Members pride themselves on ethical stances on the usage and distribution of copyrighted media – editing using downloaded footage, for example, is heavily frowned upon. The high expectations of quality and the strict code of ethics have become totems of this community. There is a long-standing rift between our community and the community of YouTube AMVers, who tend to be accused of begging for good ratings and shamelessly flaunting illegally-obtained footage. Some of our members may be dismissive or even downright hostile to new members who try to migrate over from YouTube. Only recently have we begun to realize that we have cut ourselves off from a much bigger remix community on the web. YouTube has become such a behemoth that the sustainability of our community may depend on our relationship with it in the future.
Before class on Wednesday, Josh, Chris, and I met with Greg at The Bridge in order to get his thoughts on our project. He seemed to be much more excited about streamlining the application than about the contributors’ survey. We got him to tell us more about the process for programming exhibitions, and together we brainstormed some ways in which the process can be improved to get a wider variety of entries. Greg thinks that getting the word out to more people (about the ability to propose an exhibition) would help to fulfill the Bridge’s mission of connecting diverse communities. He also gave us the contact information of someone who could advise on contributor relations.
I found the data analysis workshops this week super helpful, especially as I am not a sociology major and have somewhat limited experience in dealing with qualitative data in research. Our group is planning to use a questionnaire, so that portion of the workshop was especially informative. We will also probably incorporate some interviews into our research. I think that one tricky thing about working with Bridge contributors is the level of personal contact that is sort of expected as part of the Bridge’s culture. Interviews would fit better into that culture, but they are more logistically different to arrange. The people who we want to interview may not have time or motivation to meet with us. In addition, I am conscious of that fact that we actions could have some impact on contributor’s perceptions of the organization’s brand.
I guess what I’m getting at here is that I’m afraid of being clumsy as someone who represents The Bridge in some way. I am nervous about my own limited personal contact with the organization. This past week, I attended my first real Bridge event. I remember talking to Greg and feeling a little embarrassed that it was my first time seeing an exhibit there. The atmosphere there was very social and festive, but most people seemed to hang out in their own small groups. Within such a small building, it was hard get immersed in the environment when I didn’t really know anybody else (although I did chat briefly with someone who was my TA last semester). Somehow I am feeling that being part of The Bridge’s culture is necessary for doing a good job on this project. Maybe I am just being too self-conscious?
In any case, Chris and I met up there and scheduled a meeting with Greg for this upcoming Wednesday. We are going to bring him our rough drafts of our products and ask for his input. On Thursday, Chris, Josh, and I got together again at the library to review The Bridge’s existing exhibition proposal application. We thought of several things that could help to streamline the application process and then sketched down a rough draft of what we thought the revised application would look like. Before Wednesday, we’ll have to fully flesh out the documents and possibly design them in Adobe InDesign.
Wednesday’s data analysis workshop was a fun review of organizing and displaying quantitative data. I am, however, somewhat disheartened by the seeming dearth of raw data about arts participation that is out there. We found a really nice dataset from an NEA survey that looks like it tries to probe at the connection between people’s arts interests, arts participation, and civic participation. However, this is nationwide data. It could be a useful tool for comparison, but I would be much more interested in data that specifically focuses on cities that are similar to Charlottesville. I looked at the websites of the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Piedmont Council of the Arts, but neither of them show links to surveys or research. (Also, the VA Commission for the Arts’ website is just awful.)
This week was literature review week! Things were a little bit more formal than I expected them to be, but I think that our group presented what we wanted and needed to present. One thing that I really admired about some of the other groups was the cohesion of their projects. Mary’s group, for example, asks a simple question (“How can the Bridge gauge the impact of its outreach work?”) and packages that into a meaningful compact, meaningful product (informational document that will be distributed to funders). Sometimes I worry that our group’s project is not designed tightly enough, since we are addressing two separate “ends” of the organization: interaction with artists and interaction with contributors. Overall, we are exploring the ways in which issues of funding and programming interact with each other. I hope that we will be able to tie these two ends together cohesively.
Before class on Wednesday, Josh, Chris, and I met in the library to work some more on our CBR group project. Our goal was to hammer out the drafts of the two products we will be creating for this project: the artist’s proposal application and the contributor survey. We reviewed the Bridge’s website and discovered that they already had a proposal form! I guess we had somehow missed this section of the website on previous visits. Plus nobody, not even Greg, had ever mentioned that such a document exists.
In any case, we decided to request a copy of the form so that we can see the current state of things. The form is available through email request only. We sent the request to sara@thebridgepai.com and in addition, asked whether she had any personal thoughts on the proposal process that she would like to share. Unfortunately, Sara never got back to us. This is one aspect of the application system that we would like to address in our project. We understand that the Bridge tries to deal with people on a personal, one-on-one basis whenever possible. However, it appears from this experience that the volunteers at the Bridge don’t have the time (or whatever other reason) to respond to every proposal form request. We would like to create a digital form that artists can submit straight from the website. I know that this takes away a bit of the personal element, but it can 1) streamline the process of taking artists’ proposals, 2) create higher visibility for the possibility of getting work shown, and 3) lower the barrier-to-entry for people with ideas. Eventually we did get a copy of the current form after Josh emailed Greg. We’ll review that in the following week and come up with ideas for revisions, which we will discuss with Greg when we meet with him next week.
During our library time, we also started drafting the questionnaire that we would like to send out to contributors. In addition to asking for standard information like name, age, and address, we want to also ask contributors about their occupations, personal interests, artistic interests, and community affiliations. The goal is to help the Bridge get to knowledge it needs to build a network of valued contributors. We’ll revise and refine this questionnaire over the next week as some of the methods get more hashed out during class.
Dr. Botchway’s talk in the Kaleidoscope on Wednesday was very thoughtful and, I think, highly relevant to what we are doing in this class. She was direct and gave off a sense of experience. The characteristics of messy local projects that she listed (poorly defined expectations, limited time, time coordination, new students, community staff availability, and spotty communication) resonate with the challenges to community-based research described by Strand et al. in their book. I think the problems most relevant to our CBR projects are limited time, community staff availability, and perhaps communication. We all only have about six more weeks to pull it all together. Those of us working with empirical data will have to set a deadline for when the collection ends and when the analysis begins.
In a way, it was refreshing to hear Dr. Botchway say that poorly defined expectations are a common characteristic of a messy local project. Being students, I think we are prone to setting goals within an academic structure. “What am I going to be graded on?” somehow sounds more legitimate than “How do I help to make this organization better?” It’s not that we are overly concerned with grades; it’s just that graded expectations feel like a neat and systematic way of making good-willed intentions feel more concrete. I think it is great that for our CBR projects, we were given license to set our own expectations based on what we hope to get out of the course. These personal expectations focus and sharpen the broader goal of helping the Bridge and Gallery 5 connect with their constituent communities and applying research-based skills while doing it.
I missed class on Monday due to falling ill (sinus infection + landsickness) at the end of spring break. Fortunately, Josh and Chris filled me in on the updates about the literature presentations next week. I think the main article we will be presenting is Margaret Jane Wyszomirski’s “Support for the Arts: A Four-Part Model.” In it, she argues that the “supportive infrastructure of the non-profit arts and cultural sector included financial, social, professional, and ideational support systems” and then proceeds to develop a visual model for this support system. She considers “support” from a very comprehensive angle, drawing out patterns and distinctions. For example, she groups financial support by that which tends to be organization specific (individual donations, trust and endowments, etc) and that which tends to be allocated competitively (grants). She recognizes that social supports indirectly affects arts support through earned incomes and the allocative policies of public grant agencies. These social supports include “patterns of cultural participation, as well as incentives and barriers to such participation; voluntary action practices and affinity interest group activity; and the extent or character of media coverage, which influences information and attitudes that have an impact on opinions and behavior.” Multi-layered professional and education support pillars add to the complexity of the model. I think that this would be a great paper for the class to read due to its holistic approach.
The Strand reading this week helped me put our project into better perspective. Right now, I think we’re somewhere between steps 2 and 3 of Strand’s “Steps in a Community-Based Research Project (page 97). We have revised our research design and methods in light of Carey’s returned comments, but things are still not 100% clear. (I think?) We decided to drop the community survey portion of the project, as that would probably require time and resources beyond what we can provide between now and the end of the semester. Right now we are planning to go ahead with the application and expand the donor information card into a slightly longer survey. We want to create something that would help the Bridge collect and manage information in the future. For ease of access, it would be ideal for both of these forms to be available online, on the Bridge’s website.
The first step right now is to do the literature and similar-organization research on grants and funding. (Even though we won’t really be dealing with grants, it would be useful to learn about the grant-making process as it parallels what goes into a vetting process. Mapping the Field was a great illustration of criteria and interests that one has to balance when making decisions with limited funding.) We should have this done by the week after spring break. By then, we can start putting together our two web pages. Originally we had planned to just create the donor survey, not actually send it out, but I think now that we are going to create it as a webpage, we still probably also implement the dissemination of those surveys. Same with the application – I think that in addition to just creating it, we should also launch it and publicize its presence.
The ethics section of the Strand chapter (and our subsequent discussion in class) got me thinking about the kind of information that we’d want to ask for from Greg. We’d like to get a contact list of previous Bridge artists from Greg so that we can qualitatively assess their feelings about what goes into a Bridge exhibition/installation. Also, we want to ask them why they think their work was a good fit with the Bridge. We also want to ask Greg for a list of past donors so that we can contact them for further research. Communication with the artists and donors will have to be respectful and discreet. Greg would be displaying a lot of trust in us if he gives us that sort of information, and we should have to proceed carefully so as not to cause harm to the relationship between him and the community.
This week, Chris, Josh, and I solidified our CBR project. I’m pretty excited! :D For a while, I had been feeling a bit nervous because we had some trouble distilling our questions down to something out of which we could make a project. There were many aspects of an arts organization like The Bridge that we wanted to explore, but we didn’t know how to focus that into a single product.
We just knew that we wanted to do something that was related to the Bridge’s process for choosing exhibitions and projects. From meeting with Greg a few weeks ago and from reading other bits of information about the Bridge, it seems that their programming tends to be a little bit, well, all over the place. Greg said that he relies on friends and patrons to bring him ideas for new things to do, and I get the impression that he loves to say yes. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but with only certain people bringing up ideas, wouldn’t there be some blind spots? Also, with the upcoming funding changes and a new board that will be keeping a watch on the mission, Greg is going to have to say no to some things. So we knew we wanted to help with this process somehow, but how? I was afraid of overstepping my role. I don’t feel that our job here is to tell Greg what to take on and what to avoid. That’s his job, and it is best left to somebody with a strong artistic background.
The breakthrough came when Chris mentioned the possibility of creating an application form for Greg to use in vetting proposals. It was as if the clouds parted in my head and the sun came shining through (cheesy I know). An application would be perfect. It is a tool to aid decision-making rather than a directive that specifies which decisions should be made. And having that infrastructure there would lower the social barrier to proposing new ideas. Artists who have no personal connection to Greg may feel more emboldened to propose their installations or project ideas. Since our goal is to make sure that all external stakeholders (artists, audience, donors) are represented in the programming, I suggested that we design small surveys to be sent to key communities (audience) and donors. (More information in our group memo.) With these end products in mind, our project is now much more focused, and the way to completion is starting to become clear. I don’t know if Goldbard would approve of this – she always stresses that the process is more important than the product. But I don’t see any harm done if the product keeps the process in focus.
When all the groups shared their project ideas in class on Monday, I realized that they were all rather arts administration centric. None of them were the kind of community-based arts project that were described by Goldbard. This surprised me a little, especially with the class containing mostly Soc students and just a few Arad students. But I guess this is the meaning of community-based research. Strand et al make that really clear. Rather than helping our organizations develop specific programs, we’re adding to their infrastructure so that they will be better equipped to do program development and evaluation in the future.
I’m pretty excited about my individual project, too. Goldbard’s chapter about the dire state of development within the community arts field has convinced me that this is really something that every organization should keep an eye on. Though other groups are interested in helping with the grants, I see more potential in the private sources of funding. I want to help the Bridge figure out how to keep track of its donors, raise awareness of its funding needs, sort out partnerships, and develop mutually beneficial relationships with contributors.
One passage from the Cleveland reading this week caught my eye:
Our study of arts programs in community and institutional settings has led us to conclude that the most two most critical contributors to success have been a clear artistic focus and the high quality of the artists involved. The most successful programs have been developed by artists making art, not artists doing something else.
This passage surprised me. Aren’t understanding of the community and level of participation equally important? Cleveland insists that therapeutic or remedial benefits are “the unavoidable consequence of making art.” I understand that art is the means to that end (and as Goldbard would say, the process is as important as the product), but if we put all of our focus on the means, where is the guarantee that the end will be achieved? One can bring in a renowned artist and have him paint a mural that represents a town’s history, but without some kind of participation from the community, it could hardly achieve the goals of community cultural development.
The articles by Assaf, et al and McKnight gave many examples of artistic projects that promoted civil dialogue and community improvement. I can see Cleveland’s point in that every project had some kind of artistic product – perhaps this is what he means by “a clear artistic purpose”? If so, he must be implying that the community aspect is wrapped up within the
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Yesterday, I took a quick stroll through the neighborhood of Belmont with Josh and Chris. I had only been there once before (to visit Mas), but I knew of the neighborhood’s reputation for being a gentrified area populated by many young professionals and urban hipsters. Walking down the street, it was easy to sense to charm of the place. The colorful Victorians were aged but well-kept. The cars parked out front were also well-kept but not affluent (more Hondas and VWs than Audis or BMWs). There were also lots more sedans than SUVs or minivans, suggesting that not too many families lived here. As we reached the restaurants nestled within the neighborhood, it was easy to tell apart the ones that had been established after the gentrification. Their menu prices and atmosphere indicated places in which young professionals would hang out.
We took a quick drive through Westhaven on our way back. I did some research beforehand, and it amazed me how close the neighborhood is to student housing. Last year I lived next to Venable School, and I never knew that the projects were just a few blocks east. The Cville articles I read had described this area as the slums. Maybe it was because of all the snow blanketing the area, but when we drove through, the units seemed bare and sterile, devoid of any personality. Unlike the houses in the surrounding neighborhood, which had chairs, ornaments, and other forms of decor on their front porches, there was nothing here to mark one unit as being unique from another. The place felt more like an institution than a community. There were few cars. We didn’t see anybody outside save for three little kids meeting by the street. Google Maps had indicated a community rec center, but I didn’t see any building that was large enough to serve as such.
It seems that The Bridge’s primary (de facto) audience comes from within or near the Belmont community, but clearly the point is to forge connections with other groups of people. These two neighborhoods are so different, so how can the Bridge create an artistic connection between them that would be fruitful and fulfilling? I guess that should be left up to the organization and artist to figure out. We just want to be able to provide the data and insights that would help Greg in vetting and refining potential projects.
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For my individual paper project, I have decided to focus on the Bridge’s development (fundraising) endeavors. From working at Tuesday Evening Concert Series and reading many arts admin cases, I know that the bulk of an organization’s revenue comes from private contributions. Ticket sales don’t even compare. Grant money will probably be in sort supply due to the ongoing recession. Corporate sponsorships (especially for things like internet service) help, but they won’t cover 75% of the operating budget. Therefore, development is going to play a critical role in the Bridge’s operations at this critical juncture and into the future. In the Cville article that Carey posted, Greg says that several fundraising events last year brought in about 25% of the operating budget. I will be very interested to find out what can be done to increase this level. Besides, donors are important for many other things besides their money. They provide connections, skills, and enthusiasm. With their involvement and the Bridge’s organic character, they are likely to bring ideas of new projects and exhibits to Greg, thus heavily influencing the organization’s direction.
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