The Big Canvas: Summary of Findings

The Big Canvas: Summary of Findings

THEMES

Broad ideas that should animate the strategy — and in turn be used to sell it to the public.

● Embrace “creativity” as a regional motto and global brand. Creativity is a participatory habit that buoys the economy, bonds the community, and bridges barriers of class, race and age. Philadelphia is a distinctively creative place — after all, America was created here — and would become more so if the region consciously pursued this goal.
● Think in the active, not passive, voice. Culture thrives on participating and doing, not just attending. Don’t just think in terms of professionals and audiences. Celebrate and expand ordinary citizens opportunities to make art. What’s more, make being part of an audience as participatory a learning experience as possible.
● Bridge barriers to access, whether concrete or mental. Residents praise the quality and diversity of cultural offerings, but warn that powerful barriers of cost, access and class prevent people from sampling them more widely. The cost and inconvenience of transit and parking may be a bigger impediment than ticket prices. Information on the plethora of events across the region is scattered and incom-plete, and even excellent Web sites are unknown to many. Factors of snobbery, intimidation and fear can prevent possible patrons from ever reaching art’s front door. So elitism is out; enthusiasm and access are in.
● Be a thread in a fabric, not a sector in a silo. Citizens view arts and culture not as a “sector,” but as part of the fabric of their lives in a community. They say the arts help communities to express who they are, to foster connections
and solve problems. So cultural leaders should be eager to make common cause with other community goals that (in citizen thinking) are tightly interwoven with arts and culture e.g., education, open space, job creation and crime prevention.
● See the whole child as the work of art. Arts education is not only, or even, primarily just about “art.” The arts are a vehicle for educating the whole child, in all subjects. They are particularly valuable in reaching the nontraditional
or alienated learner. They build skills of collaboration and expression that are valued by employers and needed by communities.

PRINCIPLES

These are the practical dos and don’ts of crafting a strategy and putting it into action.

◆ Ownership is nine-tenths of success. For a regional strategy to succeed, a regional entity must own responsibility for it.
◆ Regional had better really mean regional. The entity that owns the strategy must be truly diverse, across geography, race, art forms, profession, age and class. An arts strategy run exclusively by and for arts professionals will
never fly. The board should include politicians and business leaders, so that the region’s power structure feels it has a stake in the strategy.
◆ Don’t try to sell green bananas to anxious people. This perilous economic moment is not ripe for talk of new taxes to feed an arts and culture fund. But citizens see plenty of useful things that can be done now to prepare the ground and sharpen the message for a regional fund.
◆ Focus on the three C’s: Communicate. Coordinate. Collaborate. Too many resources are wasted and opportunities lost, citizens feel. Information is scattered and confused; groups working on similar goals don’t know
one another, and the wheel is forever being invented anew. Following the three C’s will reassure taxpayers that existing resources are being well-spent and any new funds will be wisely used.
◆ Don’t just feed the big dogs and the usual suspects. Any strategy viewed mostly as bolstering well-known institutions in Center City will never earn broad support from the neighborhoods and the suburbs. Any fund must have a clear, transparent, public process for awarding grants or aid. And it should benefit new, as well as traditional, recipients.
◆ Play it measure for measure. Figure out how to measure and describe success in terms that have meaning for ordinary citizens. Be accountable for succeeding on those terms, then advertise your successes aggressively.
◆ Getting there (and back) is half the battle. Addressing the access problems related to mass transit and parking is vital.
◆ Education doesn’t happen just in schools. Any good arts strategy will focus on education, but it won’t focus exclusively on kids in schools. Programs at arts venues, after-school programs and recreation centers can be just as
important. And educational programs should extend to adults, too. Talk about arts education in terms that include and attract people who don’t have young children.

ACTIONS

These are specific steps for preserving, extending or enhancing cultural offerings that made citizens’ eyes light up. These are the type of “sticky” ideas that would attract public support to a strategy.

■ Create a central Web. 2.0 clearinghouse for arts and culture in the region. Market the heck out of it. Give it powerful search tools. Make it easy to contribute listings. Enable social networks connecting arts patrons, professional artists
and amateur enthusiasts. Encourage ratings and reviews a la Netflix, RottenTomatoes.com or Amazon.com.
■ Collaborate with SEPTA to create a strategy for better connecting audiences to venues. This strategy would include:
     ■ A “Culture Passport” — This would be a”smart card” that users could load with value to buy discounted admissions as well as transit and parking. Create rewards for using the passport to sample a broad array of activities.
     ■ The Philly Van Go “culture bus” — A transit service to connect people with underserved venues, using art themes to enhance the trip. Could include a charter or “mystery trip” approach, using the Web 2.0 site to promote the service and book business.
■ Help schools continue field trips to arts and culture venues.
■ Fund artists-in-residence at schools, after-school programs and recreation programs.
■ Begin an “Art Ambassador” program that encourages people to sample art forms and venues they might otherwise not try. (Use the Web 2.0 site to make these matches.)
■ Set up a regional space bank for performance, exhibition and rehearsal spaces.
■ Set up a regional information-sharing network for community arts centers, a la the Theatre Alliance.
■ Organize the region to lobby Harrisburg to incorporate the arts more meaningfully and concretely into state academic standards.
■ Craft a replicable strategy for using community squares and parks as democratic arts venues.
■ Set up TKTS booths for regional arts attractions.
■ Make Philly a center for celebrating emerging “pro-am” arts.