NASAA News and Current Information

Proceedings and Photos from NASAA Assembly 2016

NASAA Assembly 2016 offered state arts agency council members and staff a wealth of practical content and invaluable opportunities to connect—along with artistic inspiration and enthusiastic support from the Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs. Peruse the proceedings for materials from mo st sessions (peer session notes coming soon), and enjoy more memories in the photo album.

NASAA Web Seminar: Public-Sector Grant Making

State arts agencies award more than 20,000 grants to arts projects and cultural organizations each year. To make the most of limited funding—and to harness the power of broad community involvement—some public agencies are experimenting with new grant-making models. Join NASAA and a team of experts from the Foundation Center and GovLab for NASAA’s next web seminar, Innovations in Public-Sector Grant Making, taking place Tuesday, November 15, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Eastern. Register for this session to hear a discussion of innovative approaches and to learn about strategies used elsewhere in government that can inspire new thinking about your own agency’s options.

This Giving Season

Twice a year, in the spring and at year’s end, we ask you to consider a personal investment in NASAA. The Winter Generosity Campaign launches this month and will run through December 31. In this season of giving, please consider making a contribution to strengthen our state arts agency community. Watch for postal mail and e-mail in the coming weeks, or give on-line today. Thank you!

Congressional Arts Report Card

Just in time for this year’s elections, the 2016 Congressional Arts Report Card is available from the Americans for the Arts Action Fund. A valuable resource for understanding the positions of individual federal lawmakers, it highlights the work of congressional arts leaders and shows the key arts decisions each member of the House and Senate made during the 114th Congress (2015-2016). The report card scores congressmen on 12 factors and senators on 9. It also recounts the time line of the NEA’s most recent budgeting process and illustrates the agency’s 50-year appropriation history.

The Every Student Succeeds Act and the Arts

The Arts Education Partnership (AEP), which since 2015 has been hosted by the Education Commission of the States, has a new report pointing to how states can support the arts while implementing the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA: Mapping Opportunities for the Arts considers the arts relative to four parts of the law, which was signed in 2015 and reauthorizes the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It also summarizes research supporting the role of the arts in realizing ESSA’s goals. The report concludes with a section answering common questions about the arts and states’ implementation of ESSA.

Creative Aging from the Teaching Artist’s Perspective

In a new report, Teaching Artists Speak! Lifetime Arts shares teaching artists’ perspectives on creative aging. The report summarizes the results of a survey that asked teaching artists about their interest in creative aging, their training in working with older adults, the types of organizations that contract them and their hourly rate. It also offers a set of recommendations for how to support teaching artists working in creative aging. The survey—which was distributed by with the help of the National Guild for Community Arts Education, the Teaching Artists Guild, Community-Word Project and the Association of Teaching Artists—garnered 201 responses from teaching artists in 23 states.

States and the Innovation Economy

The Council of State Governments recently published a new brief about state measures of creative and entrepreneurial economic development. States and the Innovation Economy looks at the data sources and metrics states use to track creativity and innovation in the education and business sectors. It also features case studies of three states—Massachusetts, North Carolina and Oregon—that have created and implemented innovation economy indices. States have found these indices helpful in informing policy conversations. Nonetheless, challenges remain in using them to understand the urban/rural divide, to benchmark state spending, and to capture “soft data” like freelance employment and community engagement.

The Evolution of Public Engagement in the Arts

In a new literature review, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission considers research charting changes in arts engagement rates since 2000. The paper concludes that there is a “new participatory culture” in America distinguished by four factors: (1) low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, (2) strong interest in creating and sharing, (3) use of informal mentorship networks, and (4) a sense of social currency and connectedness. This new paradigm may blur traditional binary distinctions in the arts—such as amateur/professional, hobbyist/artist and consumer/producer—but it also is expanding the conception of arts participation. As a result, according to the paper, arts participation in the United States can be seen as robust and not in decline, as reports from recent years have suggested.

First-Ever Study of Choral Music Audiences

Assessing the Audience Impact of Music Concerts is a new report from Chorus America that summarizes the results of the “first-ever systematic study of choral music audiences.” This study was driven by questions about who attends choral music concerts, what motivates this attendance and the effect of it. The paper is based on a survey deployed over two performance seasons, from 2014 through 2016, to audiences of 23 choral groups from around North America. More than 14,000 audience members at 136 concerts responded. Major findings are that personal relationships fuel the audiences for choral concerts, social motivations drive first-time attendance, different artistic programs have different audience impacts and audience engagement corresponds with levels of audience impact.

New Report from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project

The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) has published new findings from its ongoing research about alumni of undergraduate and graduate level arts programs in the United States. SNAAP’s 2016 Annual Report, which is based on survey responses from more than 35,000 arts alumni of 46 colleges and universities, provides updated information for arts education advocates as well as a look into the effects of multidisciplinary arts training and issues of resource inequity for artists. For example, the report shows that most arts graduates are satisfied with their postsecondary education experience. It also points to links between multidisciplinary artists and entrepreneurial and freelance career tracks. Regarding the challenges practicing artists face and the resources they need, the report highlights inequities based on race, gender and the educational achievements of the parents of arts alumni.