Creative Infrastructure

My biggest summer project is the design of two courses as part of the new Curb MA in Creative Enterprise and Cultural Leadership. The first of these, “Leadership in the Cultural and Creative Industries,” is a short one-credit course that introduces the students to the two concepts at the core of the program: 1) leadership and 2) cultural and creative industries. Choosing the right reading material for a course is always a challenge, but when it’s a course that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg but really just pointing the viewfinder to where you might find the iceberg, choosing the one best read is really hard. I have been asking colleagues, “Without thinking too much, off the top of your head, what’s your favorite book on leadership?” I got several good- and not unexpected – responses such as Collins’s Good to Great, Lencioni’s The Advantage, or Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. Ultimately, I keep coming back to the book that would be my answer to that same question, Denhardt and Denhardt’s The Dance of Leadership.

There are number of reasons I like this book, including that the authors were colleagues here at ASU, Bob Denhardt leading the School of Public Affairs during the period when I was leading the School of Theatre and Film. More importantly relative to my new class, the Denhardts use artistic practice, and especially dance, as a way of explaining leadership concepts. Very often, when leadership is taught in/for the arts, a business leadership book (like those I mention above) is shoe-horned into the arts context. This book, however, will provide an entry point for students coming into the program with an arts background to understand leadership concepts and that the work that they do as artists is itself a form of leadership.

I think I’ve just talked myself into my decision….

(Air Force photo, by Tech. Sgt. Dan Rea, public domain)

On another matter….

For several years, I’ve offered my observations of the (too many) academic conferences I attend. At the most recent, the Association of Arts Administration Educators, where I presented on both arts entrepreneurship and, on behalf of Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, readying one’s research for publication, I was elected to the organization’s board of directors. Because I don’t want to appear to have any conflict of interest between my board position and anything I might write here, I will no longer be offering up these conference “reviews” on Creative Infrastructure.

Photo from the US Army Quartermaster Museum

This Memorial Day weekend, I’ve been thinking about some images from my youth – of the Vietnam war and, especially, watching the evening news with my parents and seeing coffins of soldiers killed in action being unloaded from a plane. More than the image itself (I couldn’t find the exact one of my memory, but this comes close) was the feeling I remember sharing with my family as we sat safely in our suburban basement where a couple of years earlier we had watched a grainy image of Neil Armstrong taking one small step on our 11” black and white television. My own children have also grown up during a war – our longest – but while they know it is going on, we don’t have the shared experience of watching those killed in action return to US soil in flag-draped boxes. My children seem far more disconnected from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than I was from Vietnam. Faulty parenting may be partially to blame, but the way we experience media (and fight wars) is so fundamentally different than it was 40 years ago that that seems the real culprit. We watch TV on a screen smaller than that old B&W of years ago, with ear buds or headphones that enable people to be in the same room while listening to different soundtracks. We can choose from an almost infinite variety, almost none of which includes news from the front. When there is news, it is of a drone strike: even killing is by remote control.

To what extent are we doomed to experience all culture in this way, individually, deaf to what goes on around us in the real world thanks to noise-canceling headphones? Or, perhaps, can an arts experience, a social experience, counteract the disconnections of our time? Or, perhaps, I should just send links of war news to my kids via text message…

[For a more nuanced perspective on Memorial Day (including a salute to the two fallen soldiers that saved my father) see this http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2016/05/28/five-ways-to-reflect-and-remember-on-memorial-day/#2105a58ddf1c ]

[This essay is also posted on the Americans for the Arts blog, ARTSblog ]

There’s a line in Alfred Uhry’s play Driving Miss Daisy that has stuck with me for the last 30 years. In response to a well-meaning, but misguided (and forgotten) comment by Daisy, an elderly, White, Jewish, southern widow, to Hoke, her equally elderly Black chauffeur, Hoke replies, “How do you know what I see unless you can look out of my eyes.” I heard the play at least 50 times over several years serving as its associate lighting designer on numerous companies but that is the only line I remember today. I remember it because it is foundational to the development of my personal ethic of cultural equity. In one way or another, Hoke’s reminder that we all have unique, individual, and valuable perspectives formed by unique, individual, and valuable lives informs the way I interact with students, colleagues, board members, artists, neighbors, and all the other people with whom I interact who neither look like me nor believe what I believe.

“How do you know what I see unless you can look out of my eyes” were the words that sprang to mind unbidden when I was invited by AFTA vice president Clay Lord to comment on AFTA’s new Cultural Equity Statement and again a week later when I read about egregious statements made by the (now former) executive director of the National Association for Music Education. But an individual ethos can only go so far. We need to go up a level to organizations if we want to in turn change the system, which seems to be what AFTA and, previously, Grantmakers in the Arts, are trying to do in their public expressions of equity and inclusion policies. The GIA statement acknowledges a need to shift perspective: “Recommended solutions of the past, which have focused on diversity rather than structural inequities, have not resulted in successful outcomes in equitable inclusion and/or grantmaking.” The AFTA statement goes even further: “In the United States, there are systems of power that grant privilege and access unequally such that inequity and injustice result, and that must be continuously addressed and changed.” How, then, can we change the structures that undergird the system?

I don’t have the answer – or any answers. No one individual person can. It is only by listening inclusively and equitably to multiple diverse voices that answers can begin to surface. One voice that I “listened” to recently was Carlton Turner’s. His description of the setting for an arts leadership workshop as “a sterile windowless classroom listening to much older professors that don’t look like me lecture on business strategies, market segmentation and innovation” made me sit straight up and shout to myself “THAT’S ME AND I’M DOING EVERYTHING WRONG!” While in retrospect I understand that I’m not doing everything wrong, I can do much much better at executing the three principles Turner avows:

1. Be aware of and acknowledge local cultural practices.
2. Validate leaders who are responsible and accountable to their communities.
3. Build coalitions by actively breaking down racial, ethnic, geographic, religious, and class barriers that separate communities experiencing the same struggles. [emphasis mine]

And, if I can do better, each individual in the arts ecosystem can also do better. That’s how change happens: each individual doing better to affect change in each organization to shift the way the whole system operates. For nonprofit organizations, that change has to happen at the board level, the seat of organizational power, with individual members whose perspectives reflect the rich diversity of our world. Actively break down barriers: get rid of give/get requirements; actively recruit underrepresented board members along the dimensions not only of ethnicity but also socio-economic and ability status; involve the audience/community in programming decisions (or at least dialogue); go out and meet the people your organization serves one-on-one in their own neighborhoods; hire people whose backgrounds are different than your own; find alternative structures for including all voices; and keep questioning when and why privilege is affecting equity. I can’t see out of Hoke’s eyes, but I can help make a place for him at the board meeting so he has a voice there.