Tag: arts

Fine arts, popular cultures, crafts and creative life – my definition of the #arts includes it all.

Ripping Off, or Riffing? Collaborative Consonance and its Consequences

I play word games throughout my day in pursuit of lyrical miracles. As a writer and lover of spoken word, I spin puns for fun. Words weave our wisdom stories, too. Like my friend who faced both hell and high water and sends a haiku every Thursday.

I invent phrases, too. Usually for a functional purpose, and most often in a fit of laughter. Shame I’m not quoted more often ;) Or am I?

Recently, I was challenged by the latest work from a beloved colleague making good trouble out of a phrase we invented together. #ArtsManaged

It’s the hunch that this moment is both spontaneous and aligned. As though it was meticulously planned by professional teams tending to all the things. Elegant and efficient. Bubbly effervescence bound by boxcutter utilitarianism. Polite and pragmatic. Often planned chaos.

When you leave the gallery, theatre, park, or public square wondering, how did they do that? You’ve been #ArtsManaged.

In our time at AU, students in Ximena’s class invented “all the things” as a concept, and it has flourished through arts management networks. Sherburne often had us in belly laughs and always ended up with a check. Andrew advanced ideas in the moment — sometimes in song — a generous thinking out loud we all enjoyed.

#ArtsManaged was invented at a faculty meeting, along with hilarious insider lingo. We riffed on all manner of AU brand business and how it could further bond our kickass students and beloved pro network. I left feeling cosmically on point.

Then, I was excused from service at AU, and there were uncomfortable years when we didn’t speak.

I love the moment and the memory no less. But I was uninvited to the party when I separated from the university. My connections to colleagues were severed, and also my part in the invention. Somehow, that moment wasn’t a part of my story anymore, or at least it wasn’t pleasant to remember.

Now lately, Andrew has taken the phrase #ArtsManaged to a new place on his esteemed blog. He does the blog with his not-spare-at-all time and heaps of professional integrity.

Pride and sadness mingled again at the announcement, though.

My claim on the phrase has nothing to do with intellectual property, and I resist capitalist tendencies that try to own community work. Lovely folks produce artistic work collectively all the time. The efforts are sometimes intentionally unrecognized for the greater good. An economy of friendly favors undergirds nearly all creative work. We eagerly monetize it too often.

Rather, I felt a heart ping back to that moment and the #ArtsManaged story as part of my trajectory, too.

I play strong in early stages and generative spaces, where merrily mixing it up is method. Get some laughter lit among good people. Let the language loose. Leave bits laying around like tinsel after an epic night. Found phrases to pick up, pack away, and pull out on another day. Music playing. Swaying, too. Mingling and tingling among all those neural fireworks.

It’s all good fun until someone authors the phrase.

Words get written down. A style is applied, and a meme is created. It’s both fair copyright and a socially good outcome. The phrase is alive and working in the world. Huzzah.

But the origin story is flattened in a deleterious way, too. The collective efforts of the creative studio become invisible as they enter the classroom, office, marketplace, and polis. A happy/sad memory for those who were present, and a subtle misrepresentation of creative practice. One that leans toward stereotypes of solo genius and sometimes forgets collective work.

Primarily, arts management is a practice. Like the art itself, it only matters if it happens. Yes, theories and evidence inform our work. But those are the maps, not the terrain.

A legendary leader once described us creatives as eternally restless. We have more than a simple tolerance for ambiguity. We actually love the people and places way off the map.

I used to run to my desk to start work each day. I believed I belonged to a grandly diverse tribe intent to unite the world in peace through arts and cultures. Naive, I know. But as mental maps go, simple serves me.

I leaned into creative practice when working on policy in DC, too. Trained in graphic design, visually inclined, and inspired by Edward Tufte, my years on the arts research desk produced early wireframes for what is now newly-minted federal arts policy.

Different from some truly skewed theories popular at the time, I sought out evidence of what was actually happening in society through the arts. I looked for genuine social impact in American communities. Not just the statistics we thought would raise money, but the practical charts, infographics, summaries, one-pagers that illustrated our larger purpose and function. My research showed the centrality of the arts to civic life and the integrative ways we operate in neighborhoods. The arts are uniquely positioned to cause ripple effects in society.

For most of my career, my writing has been intentionally quiet. I write policy proposals, funding justifications, and speeches for other people. Still, my exact phrases — words I strung together decades ago — persist on some prominent websites. I smiled quietly in my last job when I was briefed on my own work, uncited. One of the thrills of exchanging recognition for influence.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi made famous the realities of Flow. We know from Chaos Theory that our cultural restlessness perpetually alternates between structure and ambiguity. Like all humane development, we start in a soupy muck of information and inference, only sometimes informed by intelligence and insight. Turns out, a Comic Self may come in handy. More recently, books like Braiding Sweetgrass remind us that certain cyclical flows reflect ancient wisdoms embodied in nature.

Cultural growth is rhizomatic, following the organics of people and place far more often than urban planners care to know. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, Peter Drucker famously said. For me, it’s always both/and. Strategies within organic contexts are wiser, kinder, and better devised when we understand Why.

Gardening is inherently hopeful, though the results can be merciless. At the moment, we seem to be heliotropics in hell. There is so much to make of these ambiguous times, but social change is at a boiling point and leaders are more than stressed. It is a counter-cyclical moment when former framers ought to rest.

I’m inspired to try and fail at a slower pace, too. That’s why I wrote to Andrew from a vulnerable place with a case for enduring cameraderie. Of course, he responded in empathy.

Through a brief email exchange, we noticed where our memories of time at AU joined up and didn’t. We affirmed a mutual commitment to problem-solving on behalf of the arts management field, especially when it’s hard. He wrote this companion post.

The creative work we do together takes time to grow. A symbolic seed planted years ago is sprouting now. Rhetorical roots have taken in policy and practice. We are far more fertile a field today.

Cheers for collaborative leadership in quiet places and spectacular scenes. And, here’s to the generations of creative leaders in between.

May we all be so #ArtsManaged.

Twilight Insights in the ER

When a local corporate hospital merged their Women’s and Children’s wings, they took the opportunity to integrate the arts into both the facility design and the wellness program. This is big news in my circles. Arts and healthcare collaborators are reaching a tipping point based on five decades of practice and lab research.

My fall reading recommendation — Your Brain on Art — is a primer for everyone interested in the neuroscience behind creativity.

Dad ended up in this new hospital wing for no reason having to do with women and children. Rather, he was overflow from the regular hospital, recently discharged from an ill-informed ER experience. The culprit, me. A common UTI developing in him caught me off-guard.

He’s 88, and I’m his last born child. At 52, my professional role shifted this year from CEO to stay-at-home daughter.

On that Friday morning, I was already up early working from temporary housing, a residence hotel where Dad and I had been staying. A few weeks earlier, the roof blew off his Tempe townhome in a catastrophic weather event. Insurance moved us both down the road, and a long way from anything we knew as normal. 

I quickly settled into working from home at the hotel. When Dad’s pain crisis began, I was tucked into the grungy lounge chair contemplating the day ahead and the tennis court view from the bedroom window. Sensing I might be here awhile, I set up my own tiny C-suite.

He called my name from the other room, Anne! 

He never does this.

Stepping through the doorway into the kitchenette, Dad was doubled over in 7-level pain, unable to sit, stand, or lay down comfortably. What he described as a belly ache turned out to be an acute urinary infection combined with equipment malfunction. The mental fog resulting from serious dehydration left him only barely conscious with few words or corporeal capacities to help himself.

He was out of it the day before, but this was different. Symptoms were sudden and the pressure seemed unbearable. This was my first serious pain event with Dad. I was a novice against his medical dilemma. At the time, my strength was to be a daughter fiercely determined to help him.

That morning, I also received what would become scores of emotionally-criminal emails from work. I won’t repeat, except to say that toxifying my work climate over the next 90 days was both aim and effect. One nasty email began with, Sorry about your dad, but…

I took Dad straight to the ER and stayed overnight through the weekend. The bullying emails poured in as I watched him sleep and receive fluids, passing the hours by the alarms and alerts of his heart, lung, and blood monitors. Middle of the night intrusions built up a grief-filled gratitude for the nurses, CNAs, lab attendants, food service workers, and cleaning staff who walked through the door. Each greeted my father by name and did hard work gently.

I noticed something else, too. The mood lighting I’d set for Dad had an effect on his caregivers. They mentioned how nice the mellow music sounded. Shoulders dropped and personalities emerged. I chatted to warm the room and translated as Dad struggled to communicate through accents and cultures. All but one of his caregivers were mid-career women of color, speakers of multiple languages beyond English. 

They know what I’m doing helps Dad. As practitioners, it isn’t hard to put the arts and healthcare combinations together. An integrative environment with multiple medical, social, and neuroaesthetic tools benefits him — and it helps caregivers, support pros, and families, too. Only an industrialist would try to pull it apart.

I admire nurses, along with archivists, crossing guards, and the plant stand lady down the street. Saving the last of anything old, technical direction at critical moments, and a sense of how sustainable communities grow over time. As with nursing, humane service is the motivation and integrative care is the point.

The life-supporting collaborations in my Dad’s hospital room provided a courageous contrast to the D-league political actors exhausting themselves on my work screen. I noticed what I did for Dad out of love (and humble ignorance) and what countless professional caregivers do everyday. 

Versus… this?

I know abuse. You cut it loose. I understood, as anyone who has been derisively sneered at knows. They don’t disagree, they hate me. 

I lost that job. No newsflash there. My creative response at the time. 

Thankfully, Dad recovered, and I’ve learned even more about eldercare this year. My career was damaged and my story transformed. Revealed to me in dim hospital light – where creative practice is valued and where it is not.

Divine Discernment

Last November, I began a period of discernment. After a weird and disturbing professional experience, I was up for a personal transformation. I used the phrase period of discernment strategically to stem the tide of what next questions from well-meaning family and friends. Also, to tend to the paradoxes of my own heart. One wise colleague said, give it a year. More recently, a confidante who saw me through it weekly wondered why it was taking so long.

Paradox (creative tensions) at the center of it all.

Like, how to hold the grief of eldercare when the old guy is actually doing ok. On the one hand, he provides a daily innoculation toward the inevitable. I instinctively watch for the sleepy heaves of his chest as I move quietly through the room. Morning greetings feel profound when Dad jokes, well, happy to wake up. Yet, each day, a task requires me to imagine the times ahead when he is not.

These are the combined exercises of the mind, heart, spirit, and gut. The old management term compartmentalization has revealed its error. Those painful separations into which I was professionally groomed were never truly disambiguated. My internal intelligences weren’t vanquished by setting them aside. Rather, they coiled into powerful rages below my conscious mind. Temporarily rendered mute to my awareness, but unmistakably evidenced in my body. Reintegration requires a constant unpicking and reweaving of my relationships to others in whole context.

These paradoxes are also at the center of my cultural policy work. Thirty years ago, I was crushed to find that a prideful paucity undergirded the policy framework for the arts in American life. Listening closely to dear DC colleagues over two decades made it painfully obvious. Funding conversations rode the same racist, misogynist, homophobic, classist rails as I had experienced in business and academics.

Colonial colloquialisms masqueraded as practical advice.

It’s ultimately all about money and power. There isn’t enough for all of us. Sorry, someone has to lose for others to win. Cultures themselves must functionally compete to exist.

Grasping that was terrifying. The top cultural leaders of the land are themselves markedly inhumane in their management philosophies and practices, communication and advocacy strategies, and professional ethics. Notions of scarcity among the most privileged produce a toxic haze that invites all of us to think lesser of ourselves and our country.

It acted like cryptonite on me at times. I felt delusional, believing so deeply in the creative promise of the democratic experiment. It made for some lonely moments among beloved colleagues, too.

Closer to home, I was characterized as both naive and woke by the Arizona arts executives and appointed commissioners who targeted me last year. It felt entirely absurd at the time. For 90 days, my public persona was cast about in an undignified whisper campaign. Though I was the target, the exercise was (and still is) to mask their own acute leadership dilemmas.

One arts executive budgeted his expected grant much higher than the public panel scored the organization’s proposal. He was short on projected resources and embarrassed in front of his board. In our zoom call, he raised his voice and pounded a fist on the desk. He threatened that he would fire staff and blame it on me. Finally, he was reduced to a pleading puddle as he surmised I would not coddle his entitled emotions.

I offered several workable alternatives — cooperative efforts that could garner much more in resources for the whole arts ecosystem — including his organization’s respected work. He was white with rage. Later, he wrote a five-page diatribe, circulating it among our professional network but never sending it to me. Instead, a commissioner read an excerpt into the record at a public meeting. He accused me of being a smarty pants for suggesting we could do and be more together.

His unregulated emotions and unmanaged expectations evolved into starkly unethical (and likely illegal) actions. Within days, he generated more questions about me among my peers. He found another old dude defensive about his reputation, and out came another public letter. I was unstudied, unskilled, uncouth, and he would tell on me to the then-Governor if I didn’t get ladylike quick.

We’d been colleagues for two decades and Facebook friends for nearly as long. When I contacted him directly to understand his motivations, he blocked me. I later learned of another whisperer — a colleague whose career I’ve fostered in countless quiet ways. A final letter came from the arts advocacy organization; the one without enough cultural literacy to remove ‘citizens’ from its name.

Some creative tensions do result in breaks, unrepaired in this lifetime. Good riddance, but also a waking sadness about what they need not have done, along with delays and missed opportunities. Sorry for those who are cleaning up unnecessarily. Many talented folks stood by, avoiding accountability and defending norms. Those weedy tendrils of transactionalism are invasive in Arizona. Resources siphoned off by the undeniably fortunate — that is a grievous state.

I am turning a corner, though, as my period of discernment reaches synthesis and conclusion.

I’m reminded that in August 2022, I endured the tension headaches, stress shakes, insomnia, and digestive strain by swimming hard every day. Disorienting and reorienting myself through dives and drills that helped me physically cope with the funhouse mirrors at work.

I recall that throughout September 2022, I focused on de-escalation and asked the team to aim for a negotiated resolution. We would not move from our legal and ethical boundaries, I assured them. I was determined in the face of relentless skepticism. The short-term prospects were dire for me, but I knew we could make a crack in the concrete. We laughed together, they can‘t take away my birthday.

In October 2022, I came to grips with my fate. No less than a state HR director, two attorneys from the AG’s office, the commission staff, chair, vice chair, and board, along with five arts executives from the largest Phoenix institutions and one former legislator collaborated to remove me from the room. All haphazardly informed by the fragile egos of three white guys playing daggers with their dictionaries.

I was fired in a demeaning public session at about 3pm on October 26, 2022. By 5pm that day, my email was off. Moments later, my Facebook account was hacked. Porn was purchased with my credit card and posted on my page. Proving the fraud, reversing the charges, verifying my identity, and unlocking my account took the next three weeks.

Those days were terrifying in a different way, wondering if even more sinister attacks were aimed at me. Weeks before the 2022 election with vigilantes at voting boxes in our home district, I couldn’t be sure. I briefly felt that protective urge to cower. Luckily, it tapped my rage. A truer version of myself was set ablaze.

The markings of a leadership crucible are unmistakable. Powers begin to swirl. Polarities arise. The material of the work turns elemental, transforming from one state to another. From excitement to intense fear, for example. Change in a positive direction is no less daunting in the heat of it. As a leader, the trick is to go toward the fire — to be transformed and shape the future from the other side.

In my own case, incensed by the stupidity and injustice, I raged onto the policy page. Commanding ire and fire, I churned out a groundbreaking proposal for arts in public service – a plan that taps federal resources to build the creative workforce in Arizona. Brilliant colleagues rallied on LinkedIn (not hacked) and got it circulating within days.

I sent it to federal, state, and local electeds and their key staffers.

I made sure that our good citizens of the arts could not ignore it.

I let a reporter know it was in development. They said to call them if it amounted to anything.

Social media busybodies told me to shut up, then disappeared in the face of facts and argument.

Allies politely asked me to lead my own defense.

I did fall apart for a time, then.

The holidays came, the new year rang. Family kept me feeling safe. Defensiveness finally melted into discernment through a sojourn in our DC home. Time and distance bore witness, though not taking it personally is nonsense advice.

In the last year, I have examined my circumstances and measured my own mistakes. At this age, wisdom aches like everything else.

I’ve also seen clearly the harm others do. Few amends have been made, so I have consciously said my goodbyes. Last on my list is to write a few letters to the boards and bosses of the bullies who messed with me.

Looking back, it was all magical fall, humane happenings among more potent swirls of spirits and sorcery. Ancestors above and aliens out in the inky night skies. I smile now at the sweet silences and gentle goadings of all our comings and goings.

Also, a bow to the cosmic choreographer deftly dancing across divides, drawing out devilish details in the divine. Another thing I’ve learned this year – I am a witch of water. Yes, there are days in the ditch. I don’t mind.