GIA Reader (2000-present)

Creative placemaking is electrifying communities large and small around the country. Mayors, public agencies, and arts organizations are finding each other and committing to new initiatives. That’s a wonderful thing, whether or not their proposals are funded by national initiatives such as the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town program or ArtPlace.

Right now I’m learning from a four-hundred-pound animal with the brain of a three-year-old child, as I train a Shetland pony to pull a cart. Ponies, like horses, are prey animals whose first instinct is to flee, so this can be a daunting and humbling task. Anything new is suspect, a first encounter with the unfamiliar unsettling.

Rocco Landesman spoke for the first time in the role of the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts at the 2009 GIA conference, Navigating the Art of Change. The Brooklyn convening was subtitled “The Recession Conference,” which Landesman, stating the obvious, translated as “the news is bad.” Nonetheless, he urged us to be optimistic. “Art is the most optimistic of activities.… There is grandeur in art. There is boldness. There is even, to use a very loaded word, the possibility for change, and we mortals need that.”

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   “Only Connect the Prose and the Passion” (12 Mb)

Edited by Doug Borwick. 2012, 372 pages, ArtsEngaged, Winston-Salem, NC

Edwidge Danticat. 2010, 208 pages, Princeton University Press