Cultural Policy

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase cultural policy? Given the GIA Reader’s audience, I imagine answers that run the gamut from dry-as-dust studies to brilliant proposals for weaving new cultural fabric.

But in my role as Chief Policy Wonk for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC), when I set out to write about our new generative cultural policy proposals in An Act of Collective Imagination: The First Two Years of the USDAC’s Action Research, I had a whole different audience in mind: people who may never have heard the phrase before.

This past January I was preparing for a youth education and empowerment program I work with in Pittsburgh called the Omega Dr. Carter G. Woodson Academy, and the research I was doing revealed some fascinating connections between the civil rights movement and philanthropy. This year has also been marked by the fiftieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and a national initiative to provide free admission for schoolchildren to see the movie Selma, which was released in December and chronicled the protests that led to the passage of that 1965 legislation.

Despite New York City’s status as the dance capital of the United States, rising real estate prices are challenging the city’s ability to serve as a creative incubator, with space — an essential resource for making dance — in waning supply. Choreographers and dancers need to work in a large open area with a sprung floor, but as real estate values climb, long-standing dance studios are being bought by developers and converted into residential or commercial spaces.

President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, 400 7th St, SW, Washington, DC 20506. (202) 682-5409, pcah.gov.

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The opportunities to connect communities through culture and to use that cultural engagement to educate one another are simultaneously compelling and challenging to cultural foundations and philanthropists. Recent reports and research provide strong arguments and preliminary insights into ways that culture can advance engagement across boundaries, both geographic and societal. But the most challenging efforts may be those intended to connect the United States to Muslim populations abroad.

February 2015, 32 pages. Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, 2233 University Avenue W. #355, St Paul, Minnesota, 55114, (651) 251-0868. creativemn.org.

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Introduction