Readings

Alternate ROOTS is a coalition of artists and cultural workers in the Southeastern USA; addressing racism and other oppressions has been integral to our mission for a long time. At our 2004 Annual Meeting this past August a panel of ROOTS' founding members discussed the function of ROOTS as a cultural continuation of the civil rights movement - beginning with our founding at the legendary Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee.

The Chicago Dance Mapping Project (CDMP) was conducted by Dance/USA over a period of eighteen months through 2002 "to capture a census of dance activity" in the six counties of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Although the research coincided with the San Francisco and Washington, D.C. needs assessments described in the winter 2004 (Vol. 15, No. 1) Reader, the Chicago research was even more broadly inclusive of diverse dance entities and was originally intended to be reported and used as a database.

What roles will arts and cultural organizations and funders play in the November 2004 election?

One effect of attacks on the leading agencies supporting cultural pluralism in the not-for-profit sector, which began with the Reagan administration and continued through the Clinton presidency to the present day, has been to elevate the U.S. commercial arts at the expense of the not-for-profit arts.

Through the ages artists with disabilities have been important to our history and culture. Beethoven was deaf, Van Gogh was mentally ill, El Greco was visually impaired. For the most part we do not associate them with their disability. We celebrate their lives for the gifts of music and art that they left in our midst.

Earlier this year, John C. Barsness, executive director, Montana Arts, attended the Creative Clusters conference in Brighton, U.K., and agreed to write about it for the Reader. A few definitions from the Creative Clusters Web site http://www.creativeclusters.com may be helpful in advance.

Creative industries: In a very literal sense, the creative industries, and the artist-entrepreneurs at the heart of them, are the manufacturers of the information economy. Cultural industries are:

The full text of this article is not yet available on this site. Below is a brief excerpt.

These remarks were presented at the Art Museum Development Association Conference at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on April 23, 2004. They are presented here with permission from John Killacky.

Keeping dreams alive in this period of draconian change is daunting, but I am a hopeful person. This is not the time to merely work harder to make things better. We need to adapt and work differently.