Nancy Glaze

Local Arts Agency Links the Arts and Business

Posted by Nancy Glaze, Nov 16, 2011


Nancy Glaze

Nancy Glaze

Nancy Glaze

Valerie Beaman asked all of the Blog Salon writers several question prompts regarding the intersection of arts and business. The following are my answers to a few of them:

How can the arts best convince the corporate world of their value to business?

Half of the residents in Silicon Valley view themselves as artists and participate in either formal or informal arts activities regularly. Silicon Valley’s residents are incredibly diverse and the region is home to the largest proportion of arts and culture organizations focused on ethnic or cultural awareness among comparable regions in the United States.

Those who work in technology are interested in learning about other cultures and connecting with their own. The nature of the more than 650 arts and culture organizations as well as the diverse workforce seem a natural fit and a win-win for arts groups and businesses that want to engage and enlighten employees.

Creating partnerships between the arts and the private sector within a framework of diversity and cross-cultural understanding supports an authentic need that springs naturally from the way we do business here and who is in the workforce. Silicon Valley is viewed as a global technology leader and is the birthplace of innovations and inventions that have changed the world.

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Jim Sparrow

Fort Wayne: Integrating the Arts Through Practice

Posted by Jim Sparrow, Nov 18, 2011


Jim Sparrow

Jim Sparrow

In Fort Wayne, IN, the arts are an active part of the downtown redevelopment. One of the anchors to this involvement is the new Auer Center for Arts and Culture, which is aligned with our vision of integrated partnerships.

These partnerships are both traditional, such as the ballet, an arts gallery (Artlink), and the administrative offices for Arts United, as well as non-traditional, including a small business partnership with Pembroke Bakery and offices for Fort Wayne Trails.

We have also formed a Cultural District Consortium with our organization, the city, our CVB, and our Downtown Development Group that has a presence in the building. Its focus includes development of business, activities, and public art within the downtown core.

The center’s concept includes fully-integrated business services; financial, insurance, IT, phones as well as shared common space and business service staff and operational space. It is also structured with the objective of changing the operation and relationship of the arts with the community and its development.

The Auer is a community center with activity focused less on events and more on active arts and cultural space. Our model defines arts in a very broad manner, but has high-quality traditional arts at the center.

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Donald Brinkman

Blending Fine Art, Commercialism, & Technology (Part 2)

Posted by Donald Brinkman, Nov 16, 2011


Donald Brinkman

Donald Brinkman

I am a painter and writer who makes a living as a researcher and software developer and I believe the noisy intersection of these domains is the point of genesis for some of my most successful ideas.

As recently as the late 20th century there were notable initiatives to bring art and research together such as the sadly-defunct Xerox PARC PAIR program, the ongoing Art + Code program at Carnegie Mellon University, and Leonardo, MIT’s journal on art and technology.

The link between art and science still exists but I wonder how significant it is in modern day ‘serious science.' It is astounding and distressing that this approach is losing out to a technolinear approach.

The discipline of computer science in particular suffers from an emphasis on mastery of mathematics and logic with little regard to creativity. There are still bastions of creativity in the computer science education world such as Brown University, where seminal 3D and hypertext pioneer Andy van Dam encourages his graduate assistants to orchestrate elaborate skits on a weekly basis. These skits are performed ‘flash mob’ style during his entry-level computer science courses. You can find a sampling of the skits here. I hope that we see more of this in other schools.

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Ms. Christine Harris

Linking Creative Education & Talent Development

Posted by Ms. Christine Harris, Nov 18, 2011


Ms. Christine Harris

Christine Harris

You see more and more reports indicating that creativity is a critical issue facing our world -- and that there is a serious lack of it throughout the business environment.

No wonder we celebrate and even venerate the life of Steve Jobs because he demonstrated a heart and soul connection to his personal creativity that we don’t see too many other places, and many of us feel is missing within our own lives.

So -- you would think with all of this concern about our ‘creative capital’ we would be increasing our commitment to arts education, not pulling further away from it, right? What is wrong with this picture?

I think we have both a communication issue as well as an outcomes issue.

First, the  communication issue is that despite decades of research showing the positive personal and academic impact of arts education, we haven’t moved the needle in terms of school curriculum strategy, educational budgets, or civic and corporate commitment. So, let’s stop using the same language because no one has been seriously listening for years.

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Giovanni Schiuma

Designing and Implementing Arts-Based Initiatives

Posted by Giovanni Schiuma, Nov 16, 2011


Giovanni Schiuma

Giovanni Schiuma

Today many organizations have discovered the benefits related to the use in business of the arts in order to explore and solve business issues.

Unilever has largely used arts-based initiatives (ABIs) to spur people’s change and to develop organizational culture. Nestlé has used ABIs to enhance marketing team’s creativity and to develop communication skills and collaboration in terms of ideas and expertise sharing.

Atradius has captured brand value by developing a partnership with Welsh National Opera. Price Waterhouse Coopers has used ABIs to unlock employees’ creativity energy, inspiring and challenging people to think and act differently.

Indeed the arts, in the form of ABIs, represent a powerful management tool for developing workforce and organizational infrastructure that can drive business performance improvements.

Examples can range from the use of art forms to entertain organizations’ employees and clients, to the deployment of arts to develop ‘soft competencies’ of people in the organization, and may include the exploitation of the arts to create intangible value to be incorporated into products or to transform and enhance organization’s infrastructural assets such as, for instance, image, identity, reputation, culture, and climate.

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Michael Gold

Inside Arts Based Interventions

Posted by Michael Gold, Nov 18, 2011


Michael Gold

Michael Gold

Michael Gold

For any individual or culture to change it has to want to change.

Arts based interventions that have the potential to affect real change are engaged when someone inside the corporate culture sees the need and the potential. It is essential that such interventions be very carefully designed.

There must be a thorough and agreed upon understanding of the client’s “pain” and how an art based intervention can be applied to catalyze that pain into specific productive results. A good starting place for practitioners is Giovanni Schuima’s book The Value of Arts for Business.

The only thing that will convince corporate interests that its management needs the resource of the artistic perspective is word of mouth based on experiential results. One cannot blame Chief Learning Officers and CEOs for being skeptical.

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