Bolz Center for Arts Administration

The Dawson Research Initiative

Since 2005, the Bolz Center for Arts Administration has been working in partnership with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters to connect our students and performing arts professionals to emerging research relevant to the field. The initiative honors and celebrates the life and work of former Arts Presenters president and arts management pioneer Bill Dawson.

Each year, a team of Bolz Center students is commissioned through the William Dawson Research Internship Fund to define and explore an emerging issue in performing arts management, and present their findings at the Arts Presenters National Conference in New York each January.

Past topics have included ''How We Make Meaning,'' an exploration of emerging insights in consumer behavior, brain science, audience research, and sociology, and ''Professional Presenters and the Amateur Arts,'' defining the promise and challenge of engaging non-professionals in the life and work of professional presenting organizations.

Our topic for the 2008 annual conference is professional learning in the performing arts -- where it happens, how it happens, and how it might be enhanced and advanced in our increasingly dynamic industry.

Full details on the Dawson Research Initiative are available on the project home page.

The Cultural Dynamics Map

As part of our on-going work in defining and exploring the dynamics of cultural production, connection, and support, the Bolz Center for Arts Administration worked in partnership with two other institutions and several advisers to create the Cultural Dynamics Map.

The Cultural Dynamics Map is an on-going attempt to apply the methods and modeling language of systems thinking to the world of arts and cultural production, consumption, support, and experience in the United States. Building on the first conversations of an October 2003 meeting on systems thinking and the arts, a smaller project team developed this map in close consultation with systems consultant Steve Peterson.

The first draft of the map was released in March 2005 to open a more public discussion of its ideas, assumptions, and connections. An updated and expanded poster version of the map was released in February 2007 at the national conference of Grantmakers in the Arts. Both versions are available for download. The poster version requires a large-format printer.

Bolz Center Commissioned for National Convention Project

In June 2004, most of America's major professional service organizations for the performing arts will convene in Pittsburgh for the first-ever National Performing Arts Convention. Thanks to a recent project award, the Bolz Center for Arts Administration and several of its graduate students will be deep in the thick of it, refining its discussions and capturing its ideas.

[ Jump to the project homepage ]

The Bolz Center has been commissioned as the lead organization in the I-DOC Project (Interview, Document, Observe, and Clarify), an innovative effort to enhance and extend key issue conversations arising at this historic convening.

The Bolz Center will coordinate a project leadership team including Bolz Center Director Andrew Taylor, national arts consultant Alberta Arthurs (formerly of the Rockefeller Foundation), and noted Princeton University scholar Steven Tepper. That team will select and train an observation/analysis team of up to 20 graduate students from across the country, who will identify and document emerging issues and trends among the many sessions, and provide on-site summary and analysis through the web and during convention sessions.

The resulting model may then be applied to other major conferences over the coming years. More information on the I-DOC Project is available on the project web site: http://www.bolzcenter.org/idoc/.

Performing Arts and Higher Education

Bolz Center for Arts Administration Director Andrew Taylor recently served on the leadership team for the 104th convening of the American Assembly, a public policy conference hosted by Columbia University. Entitled 'The Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining, and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education,' the invitation-only conference addressed the dynamic co-evolution of higher education and the professional performing arts in America, and sought ways to strengthen this connection for the future.

Participants included the Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the presidents of Princeton University and Columbia University, as well as national figures from higher education, government, business, foundations, and the arts.

As part of the leadership team, Andrew co-authored the conference report (due out in Summer 2004) and co-led several conference sessions. He served a similar role on the 100th convening of the American Assembly in 2001. The American Assembly was founded by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1950 'to illuminate issues of public policy.'

More information on the convening and its goals are available on the web:

American Assembly: The Creative Campus

Bolz Center hosts the 'Cultural Dynamics Project'

On October 4 & 5, 2003, fourteen leaders from across the country convened in Madison, Wisconsin, to re-envision the nature and structure of arts and culture in America.

Visit the Project's Home Page

The project built on the discipline of systems thinking, which has provided a useful toolset for disciplines as diverse as meteorology, biology, social science, and human systems—areas that all share a complex structure of dynamically interconnected elements. The Cultural Dynamics Project seeks to turn that same toolset toward the reasoned development of cultural policy, the responsive management of cultural institutions, and the dynamic training of future leaders in the field.

In addition to the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, partners in the project include National Arts Strategies, based in Washington, D.C., and Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley, based in California.

Digital Dance Library

In March 2002, the Bolz Center for Arts Administration joined with a cross-disciplinary team from across the country to assess a new resource for American dance. The Digital Dance Library Project explored the feasibility and potential of an on-line archive of moving images of dance: a core library of curated recordings of American dance, to be organized, digitized and distributed for educational purposes to appropriate institutional users—schools, colleges and universities, dance programs and dance companies, libraries and archives.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project was coordinated by The New Media Lab at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Bolz Center director Andrew Taylor led the team exploring and recommending business models to sustain the initiative.

Full information on the project, along with a downloadable summary report, is now available on-line through the link below:

[ Digital Dance Library Project ]

Building Creative Cities

On May 1 & 2, 2003, just over 100 creative leaders convened in Memphis, Tennessee, to draft a guiding report for building creative cities. Bolz Center Director Andrew Taylor was selected as one of this "Creative 100," and brought the thoughts, experiences, and insights of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration to the convening.

The meeting was hosted to explore options and ideas for cities that want to compete for the "Creative Class" -- young, mobile professionals -- whose presence, or lack thereof, is helping to determine the future of American cities.

The event built upon the work of Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class (see http://www.creativeclass.org/), who also participated in the event. Florida is the Heinz Professor of Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon, where he also heads the Software Industry Center. He has been a visiting professor at MIT and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Exploring an Arts Information Network

Over the past several years, there has been exponential growth in the amount of web-based news and information about the arts and cultural sector. Dozens of organizations and individuals have put a great deal of work into improving management of and access to these resources - which include news, research reports, data sets, journal articles, bibliographies, citation indices, expert listings, commentary, education resources, conference postings, and other items. But despite the growth and development of independent web sites, little in the way of dynamic interconnection between these resources now exists.

Through the support of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Bolz Center for Arts Administration -- in cooperation with the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University -- convened a group of arts information content providers and funders for a December 3 conversation to explore these issues. A key question was whether it is desirable to leverage individual resources and sites through increased interconnection and shared technology and protocols. This meeting focused primarily on news and information resources and not on art objects, events, digital collections, and the like.

By way of stimulating the conversation, the invitation packet included a short paper that explores one possibility for building such a loosely integrated network. The paper is available for download from this web site (Acrobat format, requires free reader software ).