The Back Track to Art

Today is precisely the end of my first six months as director of the director of the Northfield Arts Guild.

Do I hear a huzzah? …

Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s been a fun, if busy, ride thus far.

By way of a quick down-and-dirty six-month director’s report, here’s what I’ve mostly been up to thus far:

• Figuring out how this organization works, and how it manages to run so many programs that affect so many people in this town;
• Determining what sorts of fingers the org has in what sorts of pies, and which of these pies are most crucial to keep fingering;
• Learning the budget inside-out, and analyzing how our members’ and supporters’ money is spread across programs;
• Asking what do we do well–for our members and for our public–and further asking what can we do better;
• Meeting as many key Guild supporters as possible, and trying my best to remember all of their names;
• Writing grants, asking for donations, seeking sponsors, and becoming (or at least trying to become) an artsy money-making machine.

Stay tuned to my director’s blog for more details in coming months on these and many other projects and issues pertinent to the Guild and to the community of Northfield. In the meantime, here’s a quick request for input (which I’ll repeat a few more times in the next few weeks):

The Northfield Arts Guild is interested to hear from NAG members, from artists, from the NAG audience, and from community members–what do you want us to provide in the way of the arts to the city of Northfield? What hopes and dreams do you have for the arts in this town? What artistic services, programs, resources, or projects do you imagine digging your fingers into?

The Arts Guild wants to hear from you. Let us know what we can do for you. (You can either submit your ideas via the comments function on this blog, or you can email them direct to me at: michael(at)northfieldartsguild(dot)org.) Cheers!

Art is sometimes underrated and overlooked. It doesn’t often warrant front-page coverage in the paper. It seldom is grist for frenzied blog commentary and community-wide speculation as is, say, a drug controversy or intrigue at city hall or other social squabbles. Perhaps this is why people sometimes ask “what good is art, anyway?”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question. There’s no doubt that certain aspects of civilization–health care, civic institutions, the rule of law, wars that are not going so well, and so on–are more crucial to the daily functioning of our society than art is. But, I would argue, art is in some ways more important even than these struggles, because art rises above them.

A few years ago I took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to France, and I took a train out to Chartres to see the town’s famous cathedral. Once there, I latched onto a tour with a local English-speaking historian. He pointed out the stories in the cathedral’s stained glass, the vast labyrinth on the cathedral floor, and the Gothic sculpture that adorned the exterior of the building. We examined the flying buttresses, learned how many steps were in each tower (and when each tower was built), and came to a part of the cathedral accessible to a small town square. Here, he pointed out sculptural figures that were armless, occasionally headless, chipped in leg and foot, and asked us if we knew what had happened to them. One person guessed that was the ravages of time, but the guide shook his head.

“In 1793,” he said, “revolutionaries converged on the cathedral to remove the sculpture and rededicate the building as a palace of enlightenment, or some such.” Such fanatics had knocked many of Paris’s cathedrals to the ground in the early 1790s, and some wanted to do the same in Chartres. They began hacking at its statuary only to be interrupted by an brave local official. “They had already done some damage, as you can see, knocking off heads and other elements that they could reach. The official stopped them by simply saying in one hundred years people will want to come see the cathedral.”

The simple answer to what good is art, is that it is in art that societies rise above it all. This is not to diminish those who are concerned about drug abuse, and politics, and the struggles to improve, or at least not further damage, the world. But in the long run, art outlasts all the tiresome and anxiety-inducing aspects of living; it outlasts the petty arguments, the blood feuds, and all of the curses and denouncements of one segment of the species against another. Art is the way we reveal ourselves as somehow more than ordinary and capable, despite our plentiful flaws, of filling the world with beauty.

This blog is just finding its web-feet, so it has yet to be linked anywhere–neither to the Northfield Arts Guild’s own website nor to either of the local community discourse clearing houses. But this will happen. Soon. Mark my word…

Meanwhile, as a preview, here are a few things you can look forward to reading about in coming weeks on The Back Track to Art:

• A new NAG web-feature: Artist Links. A page of web-links from artists around the Northfield community.
• A new NAG artist program: ARC. The Artist Resource Center, an effort by the Guild to get crucial services and information to artists who need it.
• A new NAG initiative: The Generation Next Initiative. An effort to engage and involve college students in community arts programming, which will have–if all goes well–two complete programs in place by this fall.
• A new community initiative: Arts and Culture Collaborative. An effort by organizations to join together to share resources and work together for the greater good of the community.

Of course, these programs are in addition to all the great ongoing programs, classes, projects and shows you’ve all come to expect from your fabulous Arts Guild!

Arts administration, like art itself, is not just work and toil–occasionally it can be fun.

Such is the case when just a few weeks ago when, on a glorious Minnesota summer evening, I traveled to the home of Sam Demas and Laurel Bradley to fulfill an obligation I had made at the Northfield Arts Guild’s Annual Art Auction back in February.

That Auction event in February, by the way, occurred just a week after I started my position as the director of the Guild, which meant I spent my first days working in Northfield mired in the last-minute scramble to find prizes and to organize the event. Since, in my off-hours I fancy myself an amateur mixologist, I humbly offered my own services as a cocktail mixer as a prize in the auction. More specifically, I offered to “invent” two new cocktails and provide enough ingredients for a cocktail party of 10 people. The prize was won by Sam and Laurel, who wisely waited until the loveliest time of year to cash in, making the event gloriously enjoyable for me and, I presume, for everyone involved.

For your benefit, here are cocktail recipes for the two drinks I invented and brought to the party for Sam and Laurel. They were both created with consideration for the preferences of the party hosts, and they were intended to be appropriately summery and refreshing.

Longfellow’s Song

In a highball glass, place 3-4 sprigs of fresh basil and 1 tablespoon of orgeat syrup and muddle generously. Add crushed ice and 2 oz gin, and add the juice from 4 lime halves, leaving 1-2 lime shells in the glass as a garnish. Add 2 cucumber slices, top off with soda water, and garnish with a sprig of basil. Viva la summer!

The Typhoon

In a pitcher or large jug add 8 cups water, 2 cups of fresh lime juice (about 20 limes), 2 cups superfine sugar, and about 10-15 thin slices of fresh (peeled) ginger. Whisk together the ingredients until the sugar dissolves. Leave the pitcher in the refrigerator overnight and strain out the ginger pieces.

In a highball glass, add ice, a fresh lime wedge, and one jigger of rum. Fill glass 3/4-full with lime-ginger juice, and top off with soda water. Add a mint sprig as a garnish, and enjoy!

 

With all the focus on and talk about Northfield’s youth of late, I thought I’d point out something about how the arts, and the integrative use of the arts in school curricula, can affect our kids in a positive way. According to this article from the Tucson Citizen, which is based on a Harvard study of a program called “Opening Minds through the Arts (OMA),” the arts help improve student skills in the “three R’s,” and the use of the arts in a school curriculum correlates to significantly higher test scores among students.

According to the article, the OMA program integrates instrumental music, opera, dance, theater and visual arts in the curriculum in teaching reading, writing, math and science to children in Tucson area grade schools. An arts integration specialist and a team of seven artists work alongside classroom teachers to adapt lessons to “support teaching of core skills and knowledge,” and the program employs a list of more than 50 Arizona artists to teach residency courses in the schools. The results of these efforts, according to the article, are clear across the board in terms of teacher, student, and parent satisfaction and increased student performance. Meaning, the arts are a forgotten key component in any effort to advance the education of our kids.

Now, before I go on, let me issue a PROPAGANDA ALERT. Warning: What you are about to read may be interpreted by some as a bit horn-tooty.

The Northfield Arts Guild has a long and proud history of involvement with the schools and students of Northfield–producing student theater, teaching classes to children, exhibiting student art work, and, in the past, organizing artist residencies for local schools. And, for the reasons listed above, we are dedicated to finding the means to expand these efforts.

With that in mind, we have been working these past few months to resurrect and expand the school artist residency program, which was lost in the Northfield school budget cuts of 2003, but to be honest it has been difficult thus far to find funding sources.

We will keep trying, though–for we at the Guild do believe in the power of the arts to make education, and the world, better.

Two articles have been published recently in major venues describing a current trend in the arts. Apparently, more and more artists are migrating out of expensive metropolitan areas and into more affordable and less stressful small towns.

One article, published by the Boston Globe on June 24, 2007, says that some cities and even states are “trying to lure artists as a matter of economic policy because it can help boost the local economy.” And although the article has a strong Massachusetts and East Coast slant, citing Richard Florida and talking much about the region surrounding hyper-expensive Boston, it also spends a good amount of time here, in our beloved home state. It cites the work of Ann Markusen, a professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota who has “studied artist migrations and their economic impact on communities.”

According to Markusen, Minnesota has the largest economic programs built around recruiting and promoting artists. “It’s like an epidemic,” Markusen said. “All the small towns are building strategies around artists.”

The second article, from the Economist on December 19, 2006, describes how poor and run-down towns in rural areas around the country often turn to art out of desperation. “For Main Streets that find no buyers but want to preserve their heritage,” the author writes, “two promising themes for revival emerge. First, art. There is money in painting and plays. These draw tourists—and artists, for their part, seem quite happy about the low cost of living.”

The second theme, by the way, is alternative energy. Hm, does any of this sound familiar?

Welcome to the blog of the executive director of the Northfield Arts Guild in Northfield, Minnesota.

You’re probably wondering why I’ve decided to call this blog The Back Track to Art. Good question!

I was thinking first and foremost that, with the so-called blogosphere growing ever more subdivided and crowded, I should give my blog a name that’s at least somewhat catchy. This is in the hopes that some of you might remember to check back every now and then to see what’s going on.

But even more than this, the name is inspired by an interview with the new Minnesota State Arts Board director, Thomas Proehl that I published while wearing my arts writer hat on mnartists.org this week.

I was asking Mr. Proehl about how his career developed after graduating from Moorhead State with a degree in theater, and he said:

I ultimately moved to New York hoping to be an actor and realized that I didn’t have the … personality, maybe, to continually be rejected. So I thought there’s gotta be a way for me to be in the arts, because that’s all I wanted to do. I found that there’s the back track, which is the administrative track to support what’s on the stage and what’s being presented. So that’s the route I took. [Emphasis added.]

I simply liked Proehl’s turn of phrase–the back track–for the administrative end of the arts. And since this blog will at least somewhat focus on my adventures in arts administration, I figure what better name is there for it?

I hope you enjoy The Back Track to Art!