NASAA News and Current Information

Assembly 2018: A Time to Celebrate!

NASAA Assembly 2018, November 1-3 in Baltimore, Maryland, is about enhancing your skills, learning best practices and networking with your peers, sure—but it’s also about celebration! NASAA turns 50 this year, and we are thrilled to spread the joy with our devoted members by way of a masquerade and mask-making party at the Assembly. We want to hear you cheer on your fellows at the annual Roll Call of the States. Two special leaders in our field will be honored. And we recognize our generous donors at a jazzy dessert reception. Check out the Assembly agenda for these happy details and more, and hurry: register, reserve your room and join us!

Thank you to our NASAA Assembly 2018 supporters.

Support Your Professional Community

NASAA is your professional community! We connect you to colleagues around the country who know the unique joys and challenges of your work. We foster networks you turn to for support, knowledge, inspiration and guidance. When you give to NASAA, you strengthen your professional community and support opportunities for members to connect, network and learn from each other. Please give today—because we’re all one community and support to NASAA supports us all. Thank you!

Racial Equity in the Panel Process

RE-Tool: Racial Equity in the Panel Process is a new resource for grant makers seeking to interrupt racial bias embedded in grant adjudication practices. The paper is a product of the Equity in the Panel Room project, a collaborative initiative of public and private funders that reexamined grant-making practices through a racial-equity lens. The project considered multiple aspects of grant making, including applicant recruitment, panelist training and the dynamics of panel discussions. NASAA and the South Carolina Arts Commission sat on the steering committee of the initiative, and NASAA’s Pam Breaux was a contributing editor of the resulting report.

National Arts Participation Survey Results

U.S. Trends in Arts Attendance and Literary Reading: 2002-2017 is the first analysis of the results of the 2017 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) undertook in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. This iteration of the survey, which has been conducted seven times since 1982, had a sample size of 28,000 adults over the age of 18 from around the country and asked about arts activities respondents engaged in over the preceding year. The survey’s initial report—which assesses results relative to those from the 2012, 2008 and 2002 editions of the survey—finds that, between 2012 and 2017, the share of adults who attended visual or performing arts activities grew by 3.6% to 132.3 million people and that the rate of reading poetry grew by 76% to 28 million people. To accompany it, the NEA has published the survey’s raw data and created an interactive data tool searchable by art form. A comprehensive report on the 2017 SPPA is due to be released in 2019.

Supporting the Arts in Rural America

Survival Skills is an article published in the latest edition of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals‘s Inside Arts magazine about rural America’s need for greater access to the arts and other cultural resources. Written by Maine Arts Commission Assistant Director Linda Nelson, the article addresses the impact of isolation on local arts ecosystems and highlights how “rural arts practitioners are turning challenges into solutions that might benefit the wider culture.” It recommends creative placemaking and stronger connections between urban and rural communities as strategies for supporting rural arts development.

Arts, Technology and Making Sense of the Future

In February, Salzburg Global Seminar—a nonprofit organization with a mission to bring together cross-sector and cross-cultural leaders—convened a group of 50 artists, futurists, cultural theorists, museum professionals, technologists, educators and policymakers hailing from 25 countries to focus on the intersections between the arts and technology. The role of artists and cultural institutions in “developing futures” was one of the themes of the event’s panel discussions and working groups. Participants generated a toolkit on how to implement ethical change. A detailed summary of the event’s proceedings is now available in The Shock of the New: Arts, Technology and Making Sense of the Future.

Christian Gaines Joins WESTAF as Executive Director

Christian Gaines has been selected to serve as executive director of WESTAF. He will begin work at the regional arts organization in mid-January 2019. Gaines currently is concluding his second term on the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. He most recently served for five years as executive director of ArtPrize, a nonprofit international art competition in Grand Rapids open to every artist working in every medium from everywhere in the world. During his tenure at ArtPrize, Gaines worked with staff and community partners to develop and implement programs that addressed and improved the ArtPrize experience for artists, venues and visitors of color. He also worked to ensure that ArtPrize involved and embraced disability culture through exhibits, events, programs and support services. For five years, Gaines worked at IMDb.com, an Amazon company, where he served in the Withoutabox film festival submissions division as a specialist in festival strategy and business development. He also served for eight years as director of festivals for the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, and for four years as festival director and director of programming at the Hawaiʻi International Film Festival in Honolulu. Gaines succeeds Anthony Radich, who piloted WESTAF for 23 years.