Category: Past Virtual Study Groups

This virtual study group (VSG) focused on how COVID-19 has disrupted arts and culture research and policy.

Date: Tuesday, June 16, 2020

CRN hosted two VSGs over two days. Comparative Policy of the Response to COVID-19 occurred on June 17th.

Purpose

Cultural researchers, arts agencies, arts organizations, and artists around the globe are grappling with the COVID-19 crisis, how it is affecting the arts field now, and how it will change the future of the field. As an international forum for cultural research practices, CRN is convening the collective brain power of the network to discuss topics relevant to the crisis. Objectives for this conversation are to allow for shared learning, to understand challenges, to share relevant research, and to provide ideas for future research.

This session explored how cultural research and data sources can help public arts agencies make the case for equitable, sustained cultural funding in the post-COVID-19 economy.  What do we know now, where are gaps in knowledge, what do we need to track during/post COVID, to what extent are arts inequities unique and/or reflect larger systems?  How is DEI prioritized in COVID-related arts policy responses, and to what ends?

The session was moderated by David Pankratz (Creative Sector Research). Holly Sidford (Helicon Collaborative), Pam Breaux (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies) will join David and attendees in bringing their perspectives and questions to the conversation as discussants.

Notes

Please view notes from the discussion here.

Readings

• Holly Sidford/Helicon Collaborative, “Not Just Money: Equity Issues in Cultural Philanthropy,” 2017 
• SMU DataArts/TRG Arts, “Arts and Cultural Organizations: In It for the Long Haul,” 2020
• NASAA, “Covid-19 Resources for State Arts Agencies,” 2020
• Americans for the Arts, “Equitable Investment and LAAs: Research, Goals, and Strategies,” 2020
• Americans for the Arts (AFTA), Equitable Investment Policies and Practices in the Local Arts Field, 2018. https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/legislation-policy/naappd/equitable-investment-policies-and-practices-in-the-local-arts-field  
• Americans for the Arts (AFTA), The COVID-19 Impact Survey for Artists and Creative Workers, Segmented by Race/Ethnicity, 2020  https://data.surveygizmo.com/r/391676_5ed80525776907.30859129.  Results are drawn from AFTA’s “The COVID-19 Impact Survey for Artists and Creative Workers” http://www.americansforthearts.org/CovidArtistSurvey, a survey that will remain open for the foreseeable future. 
• Akonadi Foundation/Kenneth Rainin Foundation, “Mapping Small Arts and Culture Organizations of Color in Oakland,” 2018
• Nonprofit AF/Vu Le, “The Curb-cut Effect and READI,” 2020
• Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, “Racial Equity and Arts Funding: Executive Summary,” 2018
  
  

Panel Bios

Pam Beaux joined the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) in 2015. As president and CEO, she works with the association’s board of directors and staff to advance NASAA’s policy and programmatic mission to strengthen America’s state and jurisdictional arts agencies. A native of Lafayette, Louisiana, Pam has held leadership positions at the local, state and national levels. While in Louisiana state government, she was secretary of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism (CRT), assistant secretary of CRT (overseeing its cultural development portfolio), and executive director of its state arts agency (the Louisiana Division of the Arts). During her time at CRT, Pam developed and led Louisiana’s cultural economy initiative and spearheaded the successful UNESCO inscription of Poverty Point State Historic Site (an ancient Indian site) as a World Heritage site. 

David Pankratz retired recently as Research & Policy Director for the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council after a 35-year career in research and evaluation in arts policy, advocacy, and management.  Topics of recent research are racial equity and arts funding, impacts of the arts, and individual artists, while his co-edited books include The Arts in a New Millennium.  David also held senior positions for EmcArts, The Independent Commission on the NEA, and the J. Paul Getty Trust.  He has taught for Carnegie Mellon University and earned his Ph.D. in Arts Policy and Administration from The Ohio State University.       

Holly Sidford is Co-Director of Helicon Collaborative, a national consulting firm that works with artists, cultural organizations, foundations and other creative enterprises to make communities better places for all people – more vital, adaptive and just.  Helicon focuses on three themes central to healthy communities:  equity, sustainability and beauty. Holly has 30 years’ experience leading cultural and philanthropic organizations and is nationally recognized for her work in expanding access to arts and culture, enhancing support for artists, and building organizations’ strategic capacity. Before starting Helicon, Holly was the founding President of Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a ten-year national initiative to improve support systems for artists. She has held leadership positions at Ford Foundation, The Howard Gilman Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts and Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities.  

Are we ready to face the global challenge of Covid-19 pandemic outbreak? Do we know how microbes, migration and metropolises cohabitate or relate to each other? Can we tap into the artistic and cultural creativity to better understand the global infectious diseases or even investigate how they travel across urban and human borders?

The VSG discussed these questions in a live conversation with artists, curators, researchers and cultural producers of the Contagious Cities. This international cultural project was developed by Wellcome Trust in 2018 to mark the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic that infected a third of the world’s population and killed 50 million people. The VSG will share important insights from the Contagious Cities project, that brought together international curators, artists and scientists through residences across New York, Hong Kong and Geneva to explore how epidemics spread in urban environments.

What do we hope to achieve?

The VSG aims to inform and educate a wider community of cultural researchers, artists, academics and creative workers on the key questions of pandemic diseases to share support and solidarity in the midst of the global spread of the Covid-19. It intends to expose and promote a creative and artistic intake on the crucial issues of the pandemic physical, social and cultural impacts upon urban communities. 

The Panelists

• Moderator: Dr Natalia Grincheva
• Ken Arnold – Creative Director at Wellcome (London, UK)
• Sarah Henry – Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Museum of the City of New York (New York, USA)
• Ying Kwok  – Curator of Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close at Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, China)
• Matt Adams – Co-founder of Blast Theory (London, UK)
• Dr James Doeser – Freelance cultural researcher (London, UK)
• Ken Arnold – Creative Director at Wellcome (London, UK)
  

Suggested Pre-Reading:

1918 influenza: the mother of all pandemics

These are the best run cities in the world

WHO Healthy Cities

CONTAGIOUS CITIES: FAR AWAY, TOO CLOSE

Contagious Cities (radio series) 

A strange new world? Not really

Mariam Ghani on her film Dis-ease

Blast Theory’s blog on pandemics and public health

Sarah in Intelligencer

The Lancet: COVID-19 and the anti-lessons of history 

New Statesman – The contagious power of fear: why some believe that panic is a virus

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

3:00pm EST (North America)
 
You can register for the event at the following link:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/56089788463174155

‘Cultural Democracy and Cultural Equity: reflections on debates in the UK and USA’

What the VSG is about?
This VSG will explore the terms ‘cultural democracy’ and ‘cultural equity’, addressing how they are used by different and disparate communities of academics, arts administrators, funders and policymakers in the UK and USA. 

We are keen to understand whether these terms – and the ways in which they are put to work in the cultural sector – share any similarities in terms of use, history, power and problematics. Are we fighting the same fight? Do we share the same problems? Are these issues organisational, structural, ideological? How can practitioners, advocates and academics share with, and learn from, one another in pursuing these ideas to better facilitate action, impact and change?
 
What do we hope to achieve?
We hope for this to be the beginning of a much longer and wider conversation. Think of this VSG as an invitation to engage in conversation with academics, practitioners and other interested parties and to see whether you want to come along for the ride. This isn’t intended to be a teaching session, but we want very much to be sure that the discussion takes a long view, backward, forward, and enables comparative debate to begin.

As an initial outcome of this session, we’d like to invite you to join us in future relationship/network building, information and resource sharing via an informal coalition of interested people. We’ll ask you to input into how this might best be achieved. Anyone keen to stay in touch, talk more, share more and (possibly) participate in future project activity can respond via the post-event email.

Suggested Pre-Reading:
Hadley, S. & Belfiore, E. (2018) Cultural democracy and cultural policy, Cultural Trends, 27:3, 218-223.

The Cultural Research Network hosted a Virtual Study Group called “Demystifying Museum Soft Power: Geo-visualising Museums’ Influence”. This VSG shared key findings of a research project that has sought to define, explain and deconstruct the ‘soft power’ of museums. Spanning museums’ contributions to place branding, urban regeneration and the development of tourism, the concept of ‘soft power’ is an increasingly valuable metric for the museum sector, providing a unique set of insights.

(Demystifying Museum Soft Power: Geo-visualising Museums’ Influence from Cultural Research Network on Vimeo)

The presentation will aim to demonstrate the pilot version of the award-winning dynamic web application that was developed in partnership with Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The app Museum Soft Power Map, enables users to explore a geographic spread of ACMI’s cultural resources and social outputs. Multiple layers across several datasets visualise ACMI’s cultural collections, online audiences, international partnership networks and the impact of traveling exhibitions. Plans are now underway for this pilot to be further re-designed in collaboration with museums around the world.

This interactive VSG will encourage experimentation, networking and a collaborative exploration of what museum ‘soft power’ is and how it can be measured and analysed.  Find out more about this project on the Digital Studio’s website or view the pilot version of the Museum Soft Power Map.

The VSG will be led by Dr Natalia Grincheva, Lead CI and Conceptual Designer of the digital mapping system. Dr Grincheva is a Research Fellow in the Research Unit of Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne. She is a dedicated scholar with internationally recognized expertise in contemporary museology and cultural diplomacy. Her publication profile includes over 30 research articles, book chapters and reports published in prominent academic outlets.  She is the holder of numerous academic awards and fellowships, including Fulbright (2007-2009), Quebec Fund (2011-2013), Australian Endeavour (2012-2013), SOROS (2013-2014) and others.

Guest speakers:

Gail Dexter Lord is one of the world’s foremost museum and cultural planners. Co-founder and President of Lord Cultural Resources, her clients include the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Ottawa’s National Holocaust Monument, the National African American Museum of History and Culture, and the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, just to name a few. She has co-authored the bestselling book “Cities, Museums and Soft Power” which redefines soft power for the urban age and designs new roles for cultural institutions; and the “Manual of Strategic Planning for Cultural Organizations”. Gail is a Member of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in the French Ministry of Culture, and holds an Honorary Doctor of Letters from McMaster University.

Seb Chan is Chief Experience Officer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. He is responsible for holistic experience design and oversees teams responsible for experience & digital, ICT, as well as the museum’s collections, digitisation & digital preservation programs. Prior to this he led the digital renewal and transformation of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York (2011-2015). He has also worked as a museum consultant with institutions across North America, Europe and Asia. His work has won awards from American Alliance of Museums, One Club, D&AD, Fast Company and Core77.

Chris Harris is Head of Exhibition and Touring at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Since 2005 he leads ACMI touring program and exhibition design and production teams. Chris has produced many of the museum’s most loved exhibitions, ranged from imported popular culture hits such as Hollywood Costume and Tim Burton: The Exhibition, to major ACMI developed exhibitions, such as Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, Candice Breitz’s The Character and Yang Fudong’s Filmscapes or the permanent one – Screen Worlds. Most recent major exhibits include DreamWorks Animation, Game Masters and Wonderland, launched in April 2018.

Eliza Coyle is Community Programs Officer at Yarra City Council Libraries, where she designs, plans and implements innovative and communal led events and long-term collaborative projects. Eliza has also served as a Researcher on the project Deep Mapping: Harnassing Museum Soft Power, a collaborative practice-based research between the University of Melbourne and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Her research tasks for the project included mapping ACMI international blockbusters and coordinating the team of 5 creative writing interns working on the digital story-telling component of the mapping system.