Making Waves Blog

Ensuring a thriving cultural mix and a diverse artistic menu is a powerful differentiator for our region. And it’s this impressive mix, supported by tens of thousands of contributors and volunteers, that will keep Cincinnati’s arts scene at the forefront of innovation for the next century and beyond. Find out how ArtsWave is making sure those things happen.

Not only does investing in the arts enliven our communities and bridge cultural divides (never more important in our world than it is today), but gifts to the arts are also ensuring the dreams and imaginations of the future.

Today is the annual Arts Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C. Find out two ways to show your support of the arts right now.

The 2016 ArtsWave Community Campaign is picking up speed! We have a big target to reach by April 28 -- $12,450,000 – but literally hundreds of volunteers are helping hit that number, and already nearly 8,000 gifts have been counted. Three weeks in, $3 million is in the door. Here's five more ways to show your support.

In case you missed my live-tweeting during #SB50, here is my round-up of the three most memorable moments of Super Bowl L, and how they tie into ArtsWave (hint: they don’t involve football).

Greater Cincinnati has a thriving arts scene -- and that's important for making sure the region also has a thriving economy.

At ArtsWave, we believe Greater Cincinnati's long-standing and vibrant arts community helps differentiate our region. How can we get more people talking about these successes and unique organizations that make Cincinnati amazing? How do we create, polish and amplify a positive reputation through the arts?

Technology, surprise and leaps. Those are the words that describe 2015 for ArtsWave. What are your three words? Share them on ArtsWave's Facebook page.

Holiday cheer often means holiday travel, and for me, this year is no exception. Although time is tight and the to-do list long, part of my planning is also about what cultural events and arts-related places and spaces we’ll be hitting while I’m there. I’m not alone in checking out local arts when I travel, and - as they make great memories for themselves - arts travelers also make significant economic contributions to the communities they visit.

The Pumpkin Project was a great reminder to me of the importance of planning. And as we once again slide head-first into the holiday season, I am excited that ArtsWave has a new service that can help all of us get a better handle on our busy schedules and enjoy planning to have fun.

Arts organizations are not creating art in a vacuum. Throughout our history, the arts have been an integral part of the community, helping to bridge differences, and sometimes, provoking dialogue and debate. Twenty-five years ago, that debate brought national attention to the region.

One of my favorite memories in the arts is also one of my favorite professional memories, the chance to cover the first-ever master class by legendary modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham in Russia for the Moscow Times.

In many schools across our region just like across the country, there is no choice, just a struggle to keep arts as part of the curriculum, or included in extracurricular programs. There are competing demands for funding, for time in the day, or a scarcity of other resources. And it’s abundantly clear that kids and youth in underserved or low-income communities suffer the most from program cuts, even though research shows consistently that they benefit most from arts engagement in school. Next week is National Arts Education Week, and it’s a great time to call attention to why this matters.

I find the last days of summer to be highly reflective. My dad used to take the entire month of August as vacation, a time of restoration and planning for a highly demanding year ahead. For a kid, this was a great thing: consecutive weeks with parents in a place of serenity, away from the stresses of the normal routine. I will treasure the memory of painting side-by-side with my daughter...

At home and at work, it’s all about the right recipe. Of course, recipes do best when you have high quality and abundant ingredients on hand. At ArtsWave, we’ve been thinking about what happens when you add Cincinnati’s high quality and abundant arts experiences into the mix of other civic and regional priorities.

Cincinnati knows how to throw a festive party whether it’s all about baseball, music, beer, or innovation. It’s time to invite more of the world to our party, not just for the national spotlight and tourist revenue that these events provide, but also for the infusion of energy and exchange of new ideas that they inspire among our creative workforce. The more, the merrier… and the stronger our region becomes.

Sometimes you need a change in perspective. Each year, the Americans for the Arts convention offers me an opportunity to get the 30,000 foot view of the role of arts in our nation. Three things stood out for me this year at the annual gathering of more than a thousand local, state and national arts administrators, organizers, policy-makers, educators and advocates.

We, too, have a set of assets that distinguish our region from others, even if our history has been less about musical exports and more about building institutions. We can take a page from Nashville’s playbook by better leveraging our nationally significant arts and cultural organizations to drive economic growth and civic identity. We also have burgeoning festival, neighborhood, pop-up art, and maker cultures that have yet to be fully leveraged as thriving, complementary counterparts to our enviable legacy institutions. With all this going for us, what if we simply put a stake in the ground and declared, “Cincy is an Arts City”!?

I often am asked how ArtsWave makes grants with the dollars it raises through the annual community arts campaign. It’s a story we love to tell, with origins that date back decades ago.

The arts have been in the news a lot over the past two weeks. In response to these stories, I’ve heard more than a few times that these results are impressive for “a city our size.” As much as I understand the sentiment and our region's population size, I think we are selling ourselves short with this qualifier. Within the space of twelve days, Cincinnati has done something that other cities, large or small or in between, can only envy. We’ve shown our unique capacity for collaborative action around things that we value—namely, a thriving, innovative, and inclusive arts scene.