Skip to main content

Thesis Teaser #2

Abstract


Title of Thesis:                                   Courting the Community: Promises and Realities of New Performing Arts Centers in Small to Midsize Cities

Degree Candidate:                            Devra L. Thomas

Degree and Year:                              Master of Arts Administration 2014

Major Paper Directed by:                Robert Wildman

                                                            Welch Center for Graduate and Professional Studies

                                                            Goucher College


            The widespread construction of large-scale performing arts centers in order to revitalize downtowns has proliferated across the U.S. over the past twenty years. The economic research into the impact on the local arts ecosystem already established in these communities is slight. The goal of this thesis was to examine the arts ecosystems in four small and midsize cities located around the country that had recently completed such a revitalization project and determine what impact had been made on the various nonprofit performing arts organizations.
            Research conducted includes a review of each city’s building process and arts ecosystem, interviews with both the performing arts center management and nonprofit arts organization affiliates, and evaluation of financial data in public IRS 990 forms. After contextualizing the present-day concern by examining the history of competition within theater in 20th century America, there follows the actual repercussions of revitalization within these four cities and an exhortation to broaden the discussion among the new larger ecosystem.

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

Is your theater building a community? Or is it just putting on shows?

I asked in a Facebook post in 2011: "Theater is about connections. How do administrators facilitate this connecting? How do theaters (as an entity) ensure this connection continues happening, time and time again?" Strengthening these connections is what makes a theater resilient, what makes the theater ecosystem resilient.  Even before Covid forced theater closures, our local ecosystem lost several long-standing organizations due to life happening (people moved, people aged and retired, etc.). Add the normal ebb and flow of creatives coming together for some number of shows and then going on to reassemble in different configurations. New groups crop up, some grow, some provide fodder for a completely different way of making art.  Nonprofit theater cannot build itself in the same way as for-profit theater. The very heart of the nonprofit mission is community-mindedness. For-profit theater by its very nature will follow a path of least resistance to earning as much profit as ...
Post a Comment
Read more