Making Waves Blog

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.

Last week I hosted 16 representatives from the Town and Chamber of Commerce of Opelika, Alabama. These distant neighbors had come to Cincinnati to learn more about how our city works, including how we support and involve the arts in civic life. I invited four arts colleagues to come help me tell our story and, as always when I listen to what our arts organizations are doing, I found myself inspired. It’s as if they are intentionally doubling their impact through amazing arts with impact on the community. Keep reading to find out how you can double your impact, too.

I’m inspired today by the IT group of First Financial Bank, one of 2015’s 270 business partners conducting ArtsWave campaigns. Their entry into an organization-wide sculpture competition took top prize, thanks to its ingenious incorporation of a list of required everyday materials transformed into something magical. Ladybug buttons, shredded paper grass, pipecleaner flowers and a popsicle stick birdhouse all were combined in a beautiful tabletop diorama.

Anticipating the first flowers of the growing season is a ritual that many of us share. For many of us, as well, there is the ritual of anticipating the coming season of arts events, announced by each organization with a mix of glorious abundance, pride and colorful exuberance.

My daughter Delaney recently asked me to be "The Producer" for her act in the elementary school talent show. The Working-Mommy part of my brain silently shrieked, "Oh no! I don't have time for One More Thing!" The Juggling-Mommy part of me said out loud, "Of course, what do you want to do?"

When I first moved here and marveled at all there is to do, a friend remarked enthusiastically that “Cincinnati has more festivals than weekends.” ArtsWave has been producing one of Cincinnati’s many festivals for nearly 30 years, and it’s coming up next weekend on March 7-8. Macy's Arts Sampler is two days of nearly 100 free arts events that span from Japanese music to puppet shows to hip-hop dance.

Cincinnati’s arts community embraces collaboration as a core value. Working together is our superpower, epitomized by the ArtsWave annual community campaign, dating back to 1949. Just think: once a year, for twelve weeks, arts organizations jointly promote fundraising by ArtsWave for the sake of generating tens of thousands of contributions for the entire arts ecosystem.

In my decade in Harford, Connecticut, I had the privilege of working with some outstanding CEOs and community leaders who chaired our united arts campaign--which was much smaller than ArtsWave's. I was often asked to research and report on what was different about Cincinnati's campaign...