International

Crossing Borders and Boundaries was the theme of the GFE Conference in 2007, and shortly after the GFE and GIA conferences and the Arts and Education Weekend, I left for a trip to Asia including visits to Thailand, Cambodia, and Hong Kong. The GFE conference underscored the fact that one of the most important skills needed now is to be globally literate, which is pretty much being neglected in schools at the moment.

It's a long plane ride from Los Angeles International Airport to Nairobi — twenty-four hours in the air, and you get there two days after you started. I arrived with a couple of extra boxes containing books — theater books of all kinds, textbooks, and play scripts. On the label I had boldly printed their destination: Ford Foundation East Africa Office, Rahimtulla Tower, Nairobi, Kenya. Perhaps because of this address — either that or the literature — I was able to pass through customs without paying the duty for which Kenyan Customs is notorious.

New Year's Day, 1980, found Arlene Goldbard living in Washington, D.C. monitoring and reporting on our nation's de facto cultural policy. The fact that Arlene was doing this says a lot about the leadership role that many of us were counting on the federal government to play in leveling the field so that our many U.S. cultures would have an equal chance to express themselves, to develop, and, inevitably, to cross-pollinate. It was a substantial and beautiful vision then, and remains so today.

Artist Rene Yung's presentation of this paper generated lively discussion at a forum of the Arts Loan Fund of Northern California Grantmakers, in October 2006. It was written just as Arlene Goldbard's new book, New Creative Community, was published. Although Yung refers to an earlier publication (Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, by Don Adams and Gold-bard, 2001), she touches on many of the same themes discussed by the authors of "The Art of Social Imagination" (page 27 in this Reader) and reveals how the ideas have been adopted by an artist in practice.

Over the past forty years, several hundred legal frameworks have been established for cooperative action by governments on ecological issues — treaties such as the Biodiversity Convention, the Climate Change Convention, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. How do these relate to art?

Outreach

February 1998, appx. 40 pages, Arts International, 809 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017, 212-984-5370, fax 212-984-5574, ainternational[at]iie.org

New England Builds Communities through Culture

Building Communities through Culture (BCC) fosters and encourages community-building projects in New England by linking arts and non-arts partners in select areas in the region. Established in 1995 as an initiative of the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), BCC is supported by The Boston Foundation, the Fund for the Arts, and a 1997 NEA grant of $200,000 for Leadership Projects in Underserved Areas.

Last summer, Simon Schama invited me to be a judge of the PEN/Hemingway award; I accepted. All through the fall, I diligently plowed through the piles of novels that were sent me, looking for originality, passion, and poise; for vision, economy, coherence, resonance. I tried to give myself over to the books, to accept their many different ambitions, rather than relying on personal preferences for, say, complexity of tone or that lovely quality that Italo Calvino calls lightness.

The following article is adapted from "The World in Pieces: culture and politics at the end of the century," from Focaal no. 32, 1998, pp. 91-117. It is published here with permission from the author.