Skip to main content

Post AftA12

What a phenomenal weekend at the Americans for the Arts annual conference, held in beautiful San Antonio, TX. I have so many anecdotes, stories, lessons, and meetings I want to process and share.

It's been over 15 years since I've flown anywhere, 16 since I've worked a conference, and--unless you count a layover in Dallas when I was 8--I've never been to Texas. This had felt very magical, at times surreal, and I've had to think of it as my debutante ball in the arts administration world. The weekend had made me question what my path is and what the next steps are I need to take.

I will share many of the stories and insights soon, after I've had a chance to reflect and, well, unpack (miracle of modern technology: writing this on my phone in an airport). For now, I just want to thank the folks who were instrumental in making this weekend happen:

*Megan Cornett, director of Marketing, Admissions, and Communications for the graduate programs at Goucher,
*Katja Hill, who bravely tackled the box office while I was gone,
*MariaLaura Leslie, my networking partner and famous colleague,
*Kim and Dulcie, my Goucher table cohorts,
*Kristina, my link to brisket and beer,
*Ramona, the most perfect program director and the big picture thinker to my detail planner,
* and the most spectacular Liz, my AA fairy godmother and mentor.

Yeah, the music played me off stage a while ago. I'll say more later.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Art vs Low Art

“The masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” - -The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936 Is there any more contentious question in the art world than the concept of “high” versus “low” I like venn diagrams. And shouldn't art really be in the middle?  art? Who gets to judge? What are the parameters in which to judge? There is no standard definition for either concept and personal explanations range from simple to incredibly complex. One common theory about how to explain the difference is high art is “popular” and low art is “unpopular”, that is, appealing (or not) to many people. This also links to another version of the difference: that high art fosters the widest connection between people while a smaller subsection enjoys low art. This is in direct contradiction, though, to the idea of low art being part of mass culture (raising yet another question of “is art culture” or merely a com...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pass the Collection Plate, Please.

Various sizes of buildings, with some sort of seating arranged in rows, facing a slightly raised platform. may have curtains around the platform. people --primarily men-- take the platform to orate to the audience seated before them. A plea for donations is made at some point, either before or after the show, which may have music and will definitely have directives masked as stories on how to be a human in this day-and-age. children will be seen, maybe, but definitely not heard. the men in charge will believe they have been given a special gift for leading this particular group of people. and the people, for whatever reason, will also believe this. and this group of people will believe that their building and person and each other are completely different and somehow better than all the other exact same groups around their town/city/county/state/nation. If theater wants to be treated as church and church as theater, then both are getting exactly what they have been setting up for the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Death & The Theater

I was listening to a recent episode of the Tim Ferris podcast and the guest, happiness scholar Arthur C. Brooks, was discussing death meditations. And the little lightbulb in my brain turned on with the thought, "We need to talk more about death in theaters." I know, I know, that seems like an illogical statement because it feels like we're always talking about the death of theater. This whole summer has been filled with articles and op-eds from across the country about how large regional theaters are dying in major cities. But that's not the kind of death Brooks was talking about, and in reality, it isn't death these articles are complaining about, either: they are trying to stay alive in a “E’s just resting” fashion, to find some kind of life-support for the theaters, to keep them going, receive new money from new audiences or donors, new shows, new gimmicks to draw more or different people in the door. Anything to keep from dying. We don't talk about death...
Post a Comment
Read more