Malcolm Margolin, founder and publisher of Heyday Books in Berkeley, California, served as guest editor for the 2007 conference essays published in the GIA Reader, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 2007. He attended the conference as an observer, and provided these remarks at the final plenary session.
Arts and education grantmakers at an historic gathering in Santa Fe in October of 2007 agreed on the need to forge a new vision for public education in the United States and to collectively explore how the arts can help shape and realize that vision.
Convened by Grantmakers in the Arts and Grantmakers for Education, more than 100 foundation representatives met formally for the first time under the aegis of their two affinity organizations to debate and discuss the role of the arts in education.
Like Juan Estevan Arellano, Stanley Crawford is a writer and a farmer. He also has taken on the strenuous responsibility of serving as a mayordomo for an acequia (an irrigation ditch system) in northern New Mexico. Readers of Crawford's Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico learn how social ties and shared civic values are sustained alongside a series of ditches and floodgates that draw water from a river for distribution to agricultural fields. We include a brief excerpt.
As we were recruiting writers for this issue of the Reader, we learned that John Rockwell was retiring from his position as arts critic for The New York Times. It was all too tempting to ask Rockwell to reflect on the arts as he has chronicled them through his career. His response was to address the relationship between culture and classboth in history and in the presentraising questions about patronage and access, and the differences across classes in the kinds of art that are supported and accepted.
Jeff Chang is widely known for chronicling the story of the hip-hop generation through his book Can't Stop Won't Stop and the recent anthology Total Chaos. In this Taos Journey essay, Chang looks back at the legacy of the multiculturalism movement of the 1960s and '70s; at the last several GIA conferences, grantmakers have gathered to discuss their concerns about crises in important culturally specific organizations formed during that period.
Changing media policy has affected and will continue to shape how art is made and distributed, whose voices are heard, and who has access to those voices. To take an angle on this multifaceted subject, we invited two articulate media experts into a conversation about their workwork that has profound implications for artists and for social justice activists. Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition, interviews Loris Taylor, executive director of Native Public Media.
