Art in the News - 2019
Read the latest arts news
Newsweek recently published an opinion article that looks at the role artists could play if they had access to data and tech infrastructure to make cities more liveable: "A smart city should be designed to solve for not just infrastructure needs, but for what kind of city citizens want to live in."
For the past decade or so, there’s been a renewed emphasis on arts education. When many schools reduced or did away with extracurricular courses such as band, dance, and visual arts, one effect seen was students less engaged and less likely to hone skills such as critical thinking, collaboration and creativity.
Implicit bias and other structural impediments mean that we open fewer doors to girls, students of color and kids from low-income and rural communities. When they don’t engage deeply in STEM, we all lose. But the arts have always been a haven for the otherwise marginalized, and arts education connected to STEM can open many possible doors.
ArtsEd Tennessee is three years into an effort to become a one-stop shop for lawmakers who need perspective on whether proposed bills may adversely impact arts education. This advocacy effort is advancing through a partnership with Americans for the Arts and the CMA Foundation.
Art museums are open to visitors, but are they welcome and accessible to all? To answer this, museums are becoming more aware of solutions to make artwork available to patrons with disabilities.
The awards, initiated in 2011, aim to promote the best practices of public art construction from across the world and enhance urban art and culture standards. The awards ceremony collects the world's best practices and opinions for the reference of Shanghai's development.
Though arts budgets in Philadelphia have not recovered to their pre-”doomsday levels,” every elementary and middle school in the city now has some amount of arts resources and schools with 300 students or less are given an extra $50,000 to help support the needs of their students, including arts related funding.
Music teachers in Milwaukee argue that music is a core subject on par with history and social studies, and that every student should have access to high-quality, sequential instruction — including the opportunity to read music and play an instrument — as part of a well-rounded education.
State law currently only requires high schools to provide art classes — one credit — though many local school districts have arts requirements for elementary and middle schools. A group of arts educators called the Kentucky Coalition for Arts Education is pushing for the bill, called the Arts Education Equity Act, ahead of next year’s legislative session. A similar version of the bill was proposed but never received a hearing this year.
