Building For The Arts

Over the past two decades, the arts in America have experienced an unprecedented building boom, with more than sixteen billion dollars directed to the building, expansion, and renovation of museums, theaters, symphony halls, opera houses, and centers for the visual and performing arts. Among the projects that emerged from the boom were many brilliant successes. Others, like the striking addition of the Quadracci Pavilion to the Milwaukee Art Museum, brought international renown but also tens of millions of dollars of off-budget debt while offering scarce additional benefit to the arts and embodying the cultural sector’s worst fears that the arts themselves were being displaced by the big, status-driven architecture projects built to contain them. With Building for the Arts, Peter Frumkin and Ana Kolendo explore how artistic vision, funding partnerships, and institutional culture work together—or fail to—throughout the process of major cultural construction projects. Drawing on detailed case studies and in-depth interviews at museums and other cultural institutions varying in size and funding arrangements, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Atlanta Opera, and AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, Frumkin and Kolendo analyze the decision-making considerations and challenges and identify four factors whose alignment characterizes the most successful and sustainable of the projects discussed: institutional requirements, capacity of the institution to manage the project while maintaining ongoing operations, community interest and support, and sufficient sources of funding. How and whether these factors are strategically aligned in the design and execution of a building initiative, the authors argue, can lead an organization to either thrive or fail. The book closes with an analysis of specific tactics that can enhance the chances of a project’s success. A practical guide grounded in the latest scholarship on nonprofit strategy and governance, Building for the Arts will be an invaluable resource for professional arts staff and management, trustees of arts organizations, development professionals, and donors, as well as those who study and seek to understand them.

Hugh Hardy covers the essentials of designing performing arts facilities, including need-to-know information about design renovation, & technical aspects such as lighting, acoustics & materials.

Arts and Business aims at bringing arts and business scholars together in a dialogue about a number of key topics that today form different understandings in the two disciplines. Arts and business are, many times, positioned as opposites. Where one is providing symbolic and aesthetic immersion, the other is creating goods for a market and markets for a good. They often deal and struggle with the same issues, framing it differently and finding different solutions. This book has the potential of offering both critical theoretical and empirical understanding of these subjects and guiding further exploration and research into this field. Although this dichotomy has a well-documented existence, it is reconstructed through the writing-out of business in art and vice versa. This edited volume distinguishes itself from other writings aimed at closing the gap between art and business, as it does not have a firm standpoint in one of these fields, but treating them as symmetrical and equal. The belief that by giving art and business an equal weight, the editors also create the opportunity to communicate to a wider audience and construct a path forward for art and business to coexist.

This Design and Development Guide is an essential book for those who are involved in the initiation, planning, design and building of facilities for the various performing arts, from local to metropolitan locations. It includes the stages in the development, decisions to be taken, information requirements, feasibility and advice necessary in the design and development of a new or adapted building. Part one of this guide provides the background information about the organisation of the performing arts, the prevailing issues, the client and various building types. In the second part, the author deals with the components of design and development, identifying the roles of the client, advisors and consultants, the stages to be achieved, including client’s proposal feasibility, the process of briefing, design and building and eventually hand-over and opening night, with a consideration of the building use. Studies include the assessment of demand, site requirements, initial brief, building design and financial viability. Information requirements, as design standards, for the auditorium and platform/stage, and the support facilities, are included. Separate studies focus on the adaptation of existing buildings and provision for children and young persons. THE CONTENT COVERS A WIDE RANGE OF PERFORMING ARTS (CLASSICAL MUSIC, POP/ROCK, JAZZ, MUSICALS, DANCE, DRAMA) AND PROVIDES INFORMATION ON EACH AS AN ART FROM AND NECESSITIES TO HOUSE PERFORMANCES.

Building Communities, Not Audiences: The Future of the Arts in the U.S, written and edited by Doug Borwick, holds that established arts organizations, for practical and moral reasons, need to be more deeply connected to their communities. It serves as an essential primer for any member of the arts community-artist, administrator, board member, patron, or friend-who is interested in the future of the arts in the U.S. It also provides new ways of looking at the arts as a powerful force for building better communities and improving lives. "It is from community that the arts developed and it is in serving communities that the arts will thrive . . . Communities do not exist to serve the arts; the arts exist to serve communities." Building Communities, Not Audiences identifies the factors that serve to isolate established arts organizations from their communities, points out the trends that loom as imminent threats to the long-term viability of the artistic status quo, and presents principles and mechanisms whereby arts organizations can significantly extend their reach into the community, supporting enhanced sustainability. Included are case studies and examples of successful community engagement work being conducted by arts organizations from around the U.S. Twenty-three contributors, representing chamber music, dance, museums, opera, orchestras, and theatre as well as an array of arts administration perspectives provide breadth of coverage. "The economic, social, and political environments out of which the infrastructure for Western 'high arts' grew have changed. Today's major arts institutions, products of that legacy, no longer benefit from relatively inexpensive labor, a nominally homogeneous culture, or a polity openly managed by an elite class. Expenses are rising precipitously and competition for major donors is increasing; as a result, the survival of established arts organizations hinges on their ability to engage effectively with a far broader segment of the population than has been true to date." -------------------------- From the Foreword by Rocco Landesman, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts: "I think the days of the arts in ivory towers are behind us; the very best arts organizations are . . . connecting communities with artists . . . . Not only can the arts build communities, I think we must." From the Foreword by Robert L. Lynch, President & CEO, Americans for the Arts: "Doug Borwick calls for substantive rather than superficial efforts, authentic and systemic changes. . . . The challenge is not whether to build communities or audiences but how to build communities and audiences together." -------------------------- Contributors: Barbara Schaffer Bacon: Co-Director, Animating Democracy Sandra Bernhard: Director/HGOco, Houston Grand Opera Susan Badger Booth: Professor, Eastern Michigan University Tom Borrup: Principal, Creative Community Builders Ben Cameron: Program Director for the Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation William Cleveland: Director, Center for the Study of Art and Community Lyz Crane: Community Development Consultant David Dombrosky: CMO/InstantEncore Maryo Gard Ewell: Community Arts Consultant Tom Finkelpearl: Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art Pam Korza: Co-Director, Animating Democracy Denise Kulawik: Principal, Oneiros, LLC Helen Lessick: Artist, Civic Art Advocate Dorothy Gunther Pugh: Founder & Artistic Director, Ballet Memphis Stephanie Moore: Arts and Culture Researcher Diane Ragsdale: Cultural Critic, Speaker, Writer Noel Raymond: Co-Director, Pillsbury House Theatre, St. Paul, MN Preranna Reddy: Director-Public Events, Queens Museum of Art Sebastian Ruth: Founder/Artistic Director, Community MusicWorks, Providence, RI Russell Willis Taylor: President & CEO, National Arts Strategies James Undercofler: Professor, Drexel University; former President/CEO, Philadelphia Orchestra Roseann Weiss: Director, CAT Institute, Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis, MO

This is a modern, stylish and practical guide to the traditional craft of bookbinding, written by the founders of the London Centre for Book Arts, a destination workshop space that attracts visitors from all over the world.

This full-color celebration of communities engaged in creative cultural expression profiles nine exemplary grassroots arts projects depicting an intersection of creativity with love of place. Stories range from children building an African-inspired mud facade on their Oregon middle school to an annual blessing-procession and festival in North Philadelphia that brings to life dozens of the most depressed blocks in urban America. Other regions represented include Minneapolis, Boston, Berkeley, rural Maine, San Francisco, the New York Bronx, and Vancouver, Canada. Community-based arts resources are sited throughout. Works of Heart offers a compendium of multicultural human-interest stories that will inspire and inform both community development professionals and citizen activists. Among those profiled are Lily Yeh and the Village of Arts and Humanities, Clara Wainwright and the Faith Quilts Project, Dolly Hopkins and Public Dreams, and the Beehive Collective.