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This post is part of the series, Future of the Field: Cross-Sector Creative Placemaking Series.

This post is part of the series, Future of the Field: Cross-Sector Creative Placemaking Series.

This post is part of the series, Future of the Field: Cross-Sector Creative Placemaking Series.

As cities increasingly use data to help shape policy and identify service gaps, what does this mean for arts and culture? The topic often generates skepticism around identifying metrics that capture the impact of the arts. But as the creative sector continues to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, data will be increasingly critical to shape policy, establish more equitable and inclusive practices, and affirm the importance of arts and culture as a public service well into the future.

This session spoke to me deeply from my own experience deployed this year in my local public health department’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Whether it was being yelled at by angry people during the early days of limited supply and restricted eligibility, the unrelenting and thankless demands of countering disinformation and overcoming distrust, the highs of contributing to saving lives, the lows of confronting your own personal and institutional shortcomings, and the destructive self and interpersonal dynamics that can emerge under extreme stress…I got a small taste of the demands facing healthcare providers, demands that were heightened by the Covid crisis.

Community-based art from my vantage point sounds a lot like community organizing.

The projects described by artists Chemi Rosado Seijo, Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón, and Edgardo Larregui make me think of the possibilities that emerge at the edges between creative disciplines, in service and collaboration with communities. These art projects were incubated by professional artists in dynamic partnership with residents, democratizing the arts among marginalized communities, uplifting and nourishing community life, and sparking the possibility for new solutions small and large.

I love traditional and folk art for its intimacy. My most treasured art, the only ones I have in my home, are a pair of Oaxacan tapestries I bought from a family of Indigenous weavers in the village of Teotitlan del Valle. We sat together in their home—which was also their workroom with wooden looms and stone mortars and pestles for grinding indigo and cochineal dyes—and spoke of the symbolic meanings of designs representing the elements of earth, water, fire and water, and the cycle of birth and death. In house after house in this village, Zapotec families maintain their way of life and sustain their local economy with weaving and selling their art.

Years later, these tapestries adorn my altar and are beloved companions of my spiritual practice. They are an intimate, daily reminder of the connective power of cultural and traditional arts. As Maribel Alvarez said, these are “practices, rituals, and ordinary overlooked aesthetics that have to do at the end of the day with living in beauty.”

An elevator. Train tracks. These two settings were sites of profound trauma and historical significance in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The elevator where a young black man bumped into a white woman one hundred years ago in Greenwood, setting off events that became the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The train tracks dividing the Black part of town from the white, that were also the path Greenwood’s survivors followed on foot to escape the killing of hundreds of residents and the burning and destruction of their district known as Black Wall Street.

In 2021, the elevator and the train tracks also became art. They were both art installation and storytelling projects that emerged from the Greenwood Art Project. The initiative, funded through the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge, was a partnership of Bloomberg with the City of Tulsa and the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission to add a cultural component to the centennial commemoration.

How can mid-level leaders identify what is within their power to change when they don’t hold the top position? How can they develop their own management skills to lead with equity at the center?

The status quo in most institutions’ leadership and organizational development efforts is that all too often “executive coaching” is reserved for top leaders and periodic, one-off trainings for everyone else. This makes the coaching initiative being pioneered by NAS and Barr Foundation all the more visionary and cutting edge, with its focus on making coaching more broadly accessible and its strategic targeting of mid-level and emerging leaders within arts organizations.

The stories we tell ourselves matter. Starving artist. Dying in poverty or hitting the jackpot of stardom. Impractical artist, not able to pay rent or bills, much less know anything about credit associations or portable benefits. Only the winners have worth and take all.

I was drawn to the preconference session We Do This to Free Us: Artists and the Solidarity Economy on artists and the solidarity economy having lived with an artist for 15 years, and having flirted with my creative writing dreams for longer than that. Ultimately, the government job with its healthcare and pension won out for me, and attempts at fitting writing into the margins happen less and less these days with the demands of motherhood and working for an employer. He, on the other hand, continues as a gig worker, musician and creative—a path that can be by turns liberating, terrifying and inspiring.