The Journal, Spring 2015 by Kansas Leadership Center

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VOLUME 7 - ISSUE 2 - SPRING 2015

HOW THE ARTS

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The Journal (Print edition: ISSN 2328-4366; Online edition: ISSN 2328-4374) is published quarterly by the Kansas Leadership Center, which receives core funding from the Kansas Health Foundation. The Kansas Leadership Center equips people with the ability to make lasting change for the common good. KLC focuses on leadership being an activity, not a role or position. Open to anyone seeking to move the needle on tough challenges in the civic arena, KLC envisions more Kansans sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good. KLC MISSION To foster civic leadership for healthier Kansas communities KLC VISION To be the center of excellence for civic leadership development KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS David Lindstrom, Overland Park (Chair) Ed O’Malley, Wichita (President & CEO)

Ron Holt, Wichita Karen Humphreys, Wichita Susan Kang, Lawrence Carolyn Kennett, Parsons Greg Musil, Overland Park Reggie Robinson, Topeka Consuelo Sandoval, Garden City Clayton Tatro, Fort Scott Frank York, Ashland WEB EDITION

http://issuu.com/kansasleadershipcenter SUBSCRIPTIONS

Annual subscriptions available at klcjr.nl/amzsubscribe ($24.95 for four issues). Single issues available for $10 by emailing cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org. PERMISSIONS

Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source. For other reprint, copying or reproduction permission contact Mike Matson at mmatson@kansasleadershipcenter.org. KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

325 East Douglas Avenue Wichita, KS 67202 316.712.4950 www.kansasleadershipcenter.org PHOTOGRAPHY

Jeff Tuttle Photography 316.706.8529 jefftuttlephotography.com ARTWORK

Janice Burdine www.burdineartbox.net MANAGING EDITOR

Chris Green 316.712.4945 cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org GRAPHIC DESIGN

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” – Pablo Picasso

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CONTENTS Welcome to the Journal By President & CEO Ed Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Malley . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Dispatches from the Kansas Leadership Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Leadership Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Strokes of Genius By Sarah Caldwell Hancock . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 State of Flux: The State of the Arts in Kansas By Dawn Bormann Novascone . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Making Creativity your Business By Sarah Caldwell Hancock . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 When is Leadership an Art? by Julia Fabris McBride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Getting the Message to Stick By Chris Green . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Carving a Niche By Patsy Terrell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Molding a State of Makers and Doers By Sarah Caldwell Hancock . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Featured Artist: Kansas: The Ellis Island for Black Pioneers By Janice Burdine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Poem: What Makes This Wonderland: By Laura Lee Washburn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 The Back Page By Mark E. McCormick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Sarah Caldwell Hancock Mark McCormick Dawn Bormann Novascone Laura Roddy Patsy Terrell Brian Whepley

COPY EDITORS Bruce Janssen Shannon Littlejohn ILLUSTRATIONS Pat Byrnes

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IT’S HOW YOU PLAY THE GAME WHEN DEALING WITH TOUGH ISSUES, PROCESS MATTERS

And a baseball example (I just can’t help myself):

There is usually a direct relationship between the process used to get results and the lasting effect of those results.

• The slow, methodical process used to develop the current Kansas City Royals roster looks as if it will have lasting results. (K.C. went to the World Series last year and is 7-0 this season as I write this!)

A few national examples: • The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) became law in a bitterly divisive political battle. It’s no wonder almost everything about it continues to be a bitterly divisive political battle.

This brings us to recent process issues in Kansas. The Wichita Eagle opined recently that the current legislative “process (related to school finance) inspires no confidence in state leaders’ ability or intention to write a fair, adequate school finance formula over the next two years.” We have no opinion about the school finance law per se, but we do have an opinion about the process Kansans use to make decisions and create laws.

• The No Child Left Behind Act became law with a substantial bipartisan majority. Originally celebrated, the law has been seen as lacking ever since. But both political parties and two presidential administrations have been adjusting it and doing so more or less with the same bipartisan spirit of the original law.

• The school finance act of 1992 was a bitter fight that led to constant litigation and consternation among education stakeholders.

It’s our belief that if Kansans get better at the process of leadership, it will lead to stronger, more sustainable outcomes over the long haul. It’s not our place to take sides on policy issues, but we believe it’s our responsibility to help Kansans improve the processes by which they make tough choices and tradeoffs.

• The Kansas Economic Growth Act was an endeavor supported by conservatives, liberals and moderates and has enjoyed general support ever since its adoption in 2004.

The recent block grant approach to school funding signed into law gets points for creativity, but our experience suggests it will exacerbate the current tensions and lead to more, not less, consternation.

A few Kansas examples:

Why? The process by which it was crafted and passed was rushed and contained little authentic engagement with all stakeholders.

Create the opportunity for people to learn things they don’t know and then support them and respect them as they modify their positions based on what they are learning.

Contrast that process with the process the state is using to chart a new course for water resources. On the water issue, engagement is high and stakeholder input is valued.

None of us exercise leadership all of the time. We all make mistakes. I’ve criticized the state’s work on education funding, but I surely have violated my own rules of process on matters now and again.

My guess is 10 years from now, the water effort will be seen as successful, the block grant funding effort as leading to more strife.

Exercising leadership is rare. It doesn’t happen often. It’s a bit like baseball. Hit the ball three out of 10 times and you go to the Hall of Fame. Exercise leadership three out of every 10 opportunities and you are pretty special.

What can we all learn from these examples? Here are some simple rules of process: • If you are trying to exercise leadership – to mobilize people to make progress on daunting challenges – you need to be more of an advocate for the process of engagement than your preferred solution. • The bigger, more controversial the topic, the more you want a substantial majority, made up of multiple perspectives, to be in support of the new direction. • If you have authority, view your role as creating the conditions for collaboration among the key stakeholders. Use your convening power. Bring people together who aren’t usually together. Help people listen to one another. 5.

My sense is that when we strike out, or hit a towering “back, back, back” fly ball only to have it grabbed on the warning track, it’s often because we failed to create a healthy process.

Ed O’Malley President & CEO Kansas Leadership Center

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DISPATCHES FROM THE KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

YOUR LEADERSHIP EDGE CAPTION CONTEST Write a caption for this Your Leadership Edge cartoon about distinguishing between technical and adaptive work. Craft a witty, pithy or insightful entry using KLC leadership ideas and submit it to yle@kansasleadershipcenter.org. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll become eligible to win a special prize.

To learn more about the experience, visit www.yourleadershipedge.com. For more information about subscribing as an individual or signing up your organization, please contact Amanda Cebula at (316) 712-4955 or acebula@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

GETTING AN EDGE What does it look like to have leadership training literally at your fingertips? Your Leadership Edge: A KLC Experience is a new offering from the Kansas Leadership Center that marries high-touch, in-person experiences with high-tech delivery. It is accessible anytime, anywhere.

SKILLS FOR TEACHING LEADERSHIP

Delivered through an innovative mix of webinars, cartoons, videos, articles and other forms of media, Your Leadership Edge keeps you connected to the KLC principles and competencies. You work to learn them at your own pace and on your own time. The experience is designed to help you learn how to make progress on the tough challenges you care the most about.

The registration deadline for a first-of-its-kind multidisciplinary conference for teachers of leadership is fast approaching. The Teaching Leadership Conference running from June 10-12 at the Kansas Leadership Center & Kansas Health Foundation Conference Center allows teachers, coaches, facilitators, and consultants to learn

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new methods and enhance their skills. The cost for attending the conference is $300 and the application deadline is May 15.

WORKSHOPS UPDATE Four opportunities remain for participants to develop specific leadership teaching skills at one-day workshops.

The conference features a keynote from Marty Linsky of Cambridge Leadership Associates and an interactive keynote by Deborah Helsing from Minds at Work. Helsing works with Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, authors of “Immunity to Change” and “How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work.” She directs a global coach training school based on the Immunity to Change process, which helps people overcome barriers to growth and unlock hidden potential.

Upcoming sessions are: July 8, Team Coaching for Leadership Development; Aug. 12, Storytelling for Teachers and Coaches; Sept. 9, Case-in-Point in the Classroom; Nov. 11, Facilitating Leadership Coaching Circles. The workshops are ideal for individuals using KLC’s leadership framework, although anyone with the passion and aptitude for developing others may attend.

Participants will be able to choose from four skill development tracks: (1) Teaching KLC Principles & Competencies, Part 1; (2) Coaching Foundations; (3) Case-in-Point Fundamentals; and (4) Strengthening Community Leadership Programs.

The cost of each workshops is $100. For more information or to register, please visit: klcjr.nl/tlwrkshps

OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALUMNI

A second multidisciplinary conference will be offered Oct. 7-9. It will feature an interactive keynote from Carter and Teri McNamara of Authenticity Consulting. For more information or to register, please visit: klcjr.nl/tlconf.

Continue learning and stay connected to leadership ideas – and other KLC alumni – through Konza gatherings and On the Balcony conference calls. Konza gatherings provide an environment for alumni to continue their leadership learning and connect with others in their community who have learned the KLC framework. Learn more about Konza gatherings by visiting klcjr.nl/konzaclubs. You can find out about upcoming Konza events near you on KLC’s Facebook page at klcjr.nl/konzaevents.

SUMMER OFFERINGS Even though it will be summertime soon, it doesn’t mean you have to take a vacation from cultivating your leadership skills. KLC will be offering monthly opportunities for Kansans from all of walks of life. The programs help individuals who want to add value to their efforts by gaining knowledge, skills and personal insight that will help them advance what they care about.

On the Balcony calls, monthly conversations about leadership for the common good, are hosted by KLC President and CEO Ed O’Malley. For more information, visit: klcjr.nl/onthebalcony. Upcoming On the Balcony Sessions:

Sessions of KLC’s three-day experience “You. Lead. Now.” will run June 15-17, July 13-15 and Aug. 17-19. Fall offerings are set for Sept. 14-16, Oct. 1214 and Nov. 16-18.

June 9, Make conscious choices; July 7, Inspire a collective purpose; Aug. 11, Leadership is risky; Sept. 8, Take the temperature; Oct. 6, Act experimentally; Nov. 10, Identify who needs to do the work; Dec. 1, Get used to uncertainty and conflict.

If you are looking for a sustained program with intensive coaching and support, a session of “Lead for Change” will begin Aug. 3-6 and conclude Oct. 20-22. For more information, visit www.kansasleadershipcenter.org/programs. 7.

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THE LEADERSHIP LIBRARY EXPLORING THE ARTS AND LEADERSHIP None of the items listed here explore leadership in a conventional, direct, how-to way. Instead, they are concerned with creativity and learning, but they contain ideas that enhance leadership competencies and demonstrate the value of engagement with the arts.

“The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life”

by Twyla Tharp “The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life”

by Eric Booth What does being an artist or a creative person have to do with leadership? Plenty, as it turns out. Booth notes that artists manage their progress by “navigating as straight a course as possible” while tackling emotional, intellectual, metaphoric and practical extremes. This process will sound familiar to those acquainted with KLC’s leadership competencies, as will Tharp’s emphasis on the necessity of developing creativity as a practice and being prepared to take risks and engage in self-analysis. These easyto-read books will help you think about where your creativity resides and, along with arts experiences, they will spark your observational skills and help you explore many interpretations and perspectives.

“A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will rule the Future”

by Daniel H. Pink Pink’s central contention is that the age of left-brain-style, or L-directed, thinking is succumbing to an age that requires R-directed skills and sensibilities such as artistry, empathy, taking the long view and pursuing the transcendent. He discusses the causes of this shift (abundance, Asia and automation) and why workers need to develop six aptitudes – design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning – instead of focusing on function, argument, logic and accumulation.

“Visual Thinking Strategies: Using Art to deepen Learning across School Disciplines”

by Philip Yenawine This book is brief and to the point but covers the bases of why Yenawine became interested in developing better art education processes for the Museum of Modern Art, how he did it by collaborating with cognitive researchers and the unexpectedly grand results Visual Thinking Strategies can have in the classroom. Individual chapters discuss the method’s positive impacts across the curriculum and teach readers to use the process effectively. Although the book is about elementaryschool classrooms, the types of learning we want to encourage in children are the same skills that help us address adaptive challenges.

“Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”

by Carol S. Dweck How well do you deal with difficulty? Anyone working on an adaptive challenge will acknowledge that the process is arduous. This book explains why some are able to continue to strive and improve when others hit the wall. Dweck argues that those with a growth mindset are able to stretch themselves and “stick to it,” even when things don’t go well. She rejects the idea of the natural genius and uses many in-depth examples, from Thomas Edison to Michael Jordan, to counter the common notion that high achievers possess native talent.

“How the Brain Learns”

by David Sousa An expert in educational neuroscience, Sousa translates research findings into usable information for educators and general readers. In a chapter called “The Brain and the Arts,” Sousa notes that the competencies of the arts help students perceive relationships, entertain multiple solutions to a problem, make decisions in the absence of rules and use imagination as a source of content, among other things. Perhaps most relevant to those working to become better at leadership are the “habits of mind” encouraged by the arts, including better abilities to engage and persist, envision, express, observe, reflect, and stretch and explore.

Brainpickings.org

by Maria Popova If you don’t feel up to a whole book, or if you’re looking for additional sources that explore creativity, the arts, cognitive psychology, design and their connections to, well, just about every other discipline, this is a great site to read regularly or add to your social media feed. You can also subscribe to a weekly newsletter – a sample issue is available on the site. Popova, who describes herself as “a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large,” combs books, speeches and other media for insightful nuggets and brings them together with commentary and unfailingly artful illustrations, graphics and photography.

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D R AWI NG

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IN N E R ARTIST When you hear the word leadership, the arts may not be what first comes to mind. But once you start thinking a little more about it, it’s difficult not to see links between them. Art, after all, is ultimately about connecting deeply and moving people to a new perspective. Leadership on difficult problems essentially requires the same thing. This issue of The Journal, planned by contributing editor Sarah Caldwell Hancock, explores the connections between the arts and leadership in a number of different ways. Readers will have a chance to examine the state of the arts in Kansas and how the arts can help you lead more effectively, benefit local economies and even help address a deeply entrenched social problem. We take our inspiration for this issue from those who have laid the foundation for the idea that leadership can be artistry. It is a concept that has gained currency through the work of people such as Harvard University’s Ron Heifetz, a musician himself. He, Marty Linsky and their colleagues at Cambridge Leadership Associates have advanced the idea of leadership being an improvisational and experimental art, which has heavily influenced how KLC teaches leadership. In her book about Heifetz’s approach to teaching leadership, Sharon Daloz Parks writes about the importance of acknowledging and elevating the artistic aspects of leadership to shift our society’s mindset. Leadership becomes not about the wielding of power but mobilizing others in creating something new. We hope the stories in this issue inspire more artistry in the practice of leadership, regardless of whether you, the reader, can draw, paint or sculpt. To face down the biggest challenges facing their state, Kansans will need courage, creativity and the ability to connect with others in deep, meaningful and empathetic ways. Exactly the kinds of situations that may call for the inner artist in all of us.

Chris Green

Journal managing editor

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HOW THE ARTS

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Arts experiences can enhance key abilities required to exercise leadership. But you must find ways to seek them out. By Sarah Caldwell Hancock

of notebooks. I make sure he and his brother get to their lessons and have ample opportunity to explore their own creative capacities and find inspiration in professional performances.

A friend’s favorite memory is taking his 9-year-old daughter to the Art Institute of Chicago. She looked carefully at the paintings and listened to her dad talk about what she was seeing, and she didn’t complain too much about all the walking and standing. After a few hours, she grinned widely, held her hands to her head, and (perhaps channeling Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”) said, “Dad, I think we should leave soon, because my brain is full!”

But what about us adults? Who is overseeing our arts experiences? I know many adults who only rarely, if ever, attend an arts performance or exhibition (Sports and action movies don’t count!) and who claim to have neither the time nor inclination to explore their creative sides or appreciate the artistic efforts of others.

I know how she felt, because I, too, feel my mind filling to capacity when I visit a museum to look at artwork, when I sing with the church choir or fill in for the usual accompanist, or when I attend a concert or play. My mind is full, but it’s not the usual jumble of to-do lists, work concerns, family needs and volunteer commitments. Instead, my thinking wanders from those well-trod cognitive paths into areas that leave me with different ideas, renewed energy and new understandings.

What are these people missing? The ancient Greeks might say they’re missing a chance to experience catharsis, the emotional cleansing and intellectual clarification that audience members experience after seeing a play, especially a tragedy. A psychologist specializing in stress relief might make a related point and say they’re neglecting to realize that attending a music performance can reduce stress. Advocates for the visual arts might argue that ignoring the aesthetic realm means denying an innate human capacity that lifts our spirits and helps us understand ourselves.

You may identify more with my younger son. Despite my best efforts, he just doesn’t love art museums, especially large ones. My husband and I chuckle when we recall his dramatic sighing, moaning and whining, “Can we go to the beach now?” as we made our way through the J. Paul Getty Museum, a large art museum in Los Angeles. (To be fair, he was not quite 7, and we had promised a beach visit when we were finished.) He likes playing the piano, though, and is in his second year of playing saxophone in the school band. Plus, he participates in a local summer theater program and draws endless cartoons in his treasured stack

All of that is probably true, but people who do not participate in the arts are also failing to capitalize on a chance to boost the cognitive skills that can help them become more effective people. Educators and parents take great care to offer these transferable skills of the arts to children, but adults can also benefit, and those who want to make progress on adaptive challenges might benefit the most.

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HOW THE ARTS BENEFIT EDUCATION

of the brain as mathematical processing. The more a child builds the connections among these areas, the better he or she learns.

Cognitive researchers, neuroscientists and educators have long realized that the arts enrich education and support brain development in children from preschool through high school. Study after study has shown that the arts directly support learning in core subject areas. Visual arts, for example, foster close observation and consideration of multiple interpretations, and help students analyze scientific images. Music education facilitates understandings of patterns and fractions that help in math class. Drama boosts literacy skills, story comprehension and the quality of narrative writing. Arts-heavy curricula engage both students and teachers.

WHAT THE ARTS OFFER ADULTS All of this explains why we should care about arts education in schools, and why we should thank teachers who pay for art supplies out of their pockets or use already squeezed instructional time and field trip budgets to help students explore a local art museum, create a clay mug or perform a play. Extending those opportunities to adults is crucial, too, because the arts can build the creativity and empathy that help us think like leaders and move others.

The arts also assist brain development. Music lessons, for example, help students learn perseverance, the necessity of practice and how to break a large project into pieces to take gradual steps toward success. These skills fall under the umbrella of executive function, the complex frontal-lobe processes that conduct cognitive activity. These executive attention skills are linked to empathy and impulse control. A story from The Washington Post that made the social media rounds in January 2015, for instance, cited a study that evaluated brain development in more than 200 children who played instruments and found favorable effects on attention and emotional control as well as more rapid cortical thickness maturation.

Consider what the world demands. In a 2010 IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries, respondents named creativity the most desirable leadership competency and noted that creative leadership needs to invite disruptive innovation, change enterprises to engage innovation and be comfortable with ambiguity. Doing these things requires us to work with teams and understand how others think and see the world, the workplace or the weekly staff meeting. Translated to the civic arena, individuals need to energize others, intervene skillfully and manage themselves while diagnosing the situation. Sound familiar? Arts offer a path to these skills because they require us to cultivate observation and listening skills and to interpret what we are seeing and hearing. And thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the rub: If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever argued about a movie or book, you know that no two people interpret art in the same way. If you truly engage with a work of art, you will think about what you are seeing, hearing or reading, and you will adopt different points of view and ways of thinking as you seek to build meaning.

Brain scans offer another view of how the arts help us learn. Studies have revealed that different brain networks are involved in visual arts, movement arts (dance) and music, and that experience in all of these areas during brain development forges connections that lead to growth and creativity. This cognitive growth occurs, according to many researchers, because the areas of the brain used for different activities overlap. Scientists and mathematicians, for example, share tools such as observation skills and understanding spatial movement with the arts, and musical training activates the same areas

Visualize this scenario: At Harvard Medical School, students participate in an arts-based pre-clinical course called Training the Eye. Art educators facilitate active, structured study of works of art along with

If you truly engage with a work of art, you will think about what you are seeing, hearing or reading, and you will adopt different points of view and ways of thinking as you seek to build meaning.

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“Freedom of Speech.” The teacher asks the students to look at the artwork. “What do you see here?” she asks. The students initially comment on the blue of the standing man’s shirt and the way the men flanking him are dressed. (They are wearing ties!) The teacher accepts each comment, paraphrases it and points to the area of the painting to which commenters are referring. When comments become a bit silly, she laughs with the students then calmly directs them back to the image. She asks them to think about a recent social studies lesson about the Bill of Rights and their upcoming visit to the Kansas Capitol. Student comments become more focused. Some see things others don’t see or disagree about how to interpret the looks on the faces of the people in the painting, but nearly all the students participate

medical imagery on topics such as “Line and Symmetry in the Cranial Nerve Examination” and “Texture and Pattern Recognition in Dermatologic Diagnosis.” Students grow accustomed to sustained periods of looking at a piece of art and responding to three simple questions: What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? As they do so, they hear others’ answers and build on them. Sometimes they disagree and offer evidence that supports a different interpretation. Now imagine this very similar scenario: A group of Kansas third- and fourth-graders are sitting on the floor, gathered around their teacher. The teacher stands beside a large poster of Norman Rockwell’s

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Catherine Seitz facilitates a class discussion about art at Westmoreland Elementary School in northeast Kansas. Seitz teaches third and fourth grades and says using art helps students learn how to express themselves more effectively.

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DISCUSSION GUIDE

PRACTICING OBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS This story discusses Visual Thinking Strategies, a teaching method that uses art to help learners practice exploring multiple interpretations and points of view. Practicing and expanding on the method can help us become better at distinguishing between observations (the act of noticing) and interpretations (the act of assigning meaning) and aid the exercise of leadership. Turn to page 76. You will see â&#x20AC;&#x153;Kansas: The Ellis Island for Black Pioneers,â&#x20AC;? a work by featured artist Janice Burdine based on historical research. Discuss the following questions with a group:

What is going on in this image? What do you see that makes you say that? Using one of your observations, try to make another interpretation about the meaning of what you see. Then, try to come up with a third. How many different meanings can you create from a single observation? What difficulties might the people represented in this image be facing? What tough issues might this artwork help us explore? Specifically point out what you see in the painting that is leading you to make those interpretations.

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in the discussion. Each time a student makes an observation, the teacher asks, “What do you see that makes you say that?” Students respond by describing visual evidence from the painting.

When properly facilitated, Visual Thinking Strategies also engages unusual voices and unpacks emotions. Teachers who use the technique indicate that it draws in English-language learners, students with disabilities and those typically disinclined to join discussions. The peer collaboration model means that the method is just as useful in a university or adult learning environment as it is in an elementary school. Discussing images offers a chance to learn what others are feeling. “It’s impossible with the arts not to integrate emotional content,” says Yenawine, and discussing such content leads to understanding what others feel.

Both of these groups are using versions of Visual Thinking Strategies. Philip Yenawine is a former art educator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and co-founder of Visual Understanding in Education, a nonprofit research organization that trains teachers to use the technique. He says that when we think of art education, we often envision studio-based art: classrooms full of people painting and drawing and manipulating clay. This practice is helpful, and schools and art museums still work to provide it, but most of us will never be artists. “If I had to count on my drawing skills to take me into the world of art, it would be a pretty short trip,” he says.

“Empathy is a hard thing to teach,” Yenawine says.

“You can’t teach thinking. People have to learn how to do it. You can’t do it for them – you can just help. All of this is a matter of activating the brain to work, in tandem, with the tool we use to communicate – language.”

Instead, those grade schoolers and medical students are using their sense of sight to build a deep and crucial set of skills, with art providing the entry point. As they verbalize what they see and identify evidence, they are learning to communicate and gaining the confidence to speak up in a group. They also learn to entertain multiple interpretations of the piece in front of them. Because they are in a safe space where the teacher/facilitator isn’t looking for one correct answer or diagnosis, they do not take classmates’ disagreements personally, but instead are open to others’ ideas and evidence. They experience teamwork and collaboration with peers, and they learn how to approach a new topic.

PRESCRIBING A DOSE OF THE ARTS Leadership is an inherently creative act. Just as there is no paint-by-number for an artist, there are no tidy tests for a leader. Both have to trust in the process and the skills they build to take them through it. The Visual Thinking Strategies approach is an excellent example of how the arts present a path to the cognitive habits that enhance leadership competencies.

In other words, they’re building empathy and creativity. Karin DeSantis, a Seattle-area cognitive researcher who helped develop Visual Thinking Strategies, says a current high-tech industry buzzword is flexible thinking, the ability “to constantly respond to new information and come up with your own opinion about it quickly.” Discussing art with Visual Thinking Strategies builds this capacity, because participants are asked repeatedly to think about and react to what is said. Using an older business cliché, DeSantis explains that looking at what’s happening in an image and grounding comments in what’s there is thinking “inside the box.” When participants speculate about meaning, “outside-the-box thinking begins.” Growth occurs when both kinds of thinking happen simultaneously. “You think carefully about what you see, but also think ‘What could this be?’”

Those of us who have completed our formal educations may feel we don’t have access to the arts in the same way that we did when we were younger. We may have trouble finding time to dust off our musical instrument and practice, or we may not think we are interested in visiting art museums. Like my son, we may rather head for the beach. But you’ll do yourself a favor if you write yourself an arts prescription from time to time.

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our hearts. When you can compute this process, you feed yourself.”

Visit an art museum or go to a play. Practice looking and noticing, and take someone along who wants to discuss what you see. Repeat. Use Visual Thinking Strategies, either by educating yourself or seeking out a trained facilitator, as a way to encourage flexible thinking while learning to observe closely and wonder productively. You’ll reap other benefits, too.

Like my friend’s daughter, your brain will be full. Sarah Caldwell Hancock is a contributing editor to The Journal. She became interested in exploring how the arts foster cognitive growth while persuading university students of the importance of their literature and humanities courses and again while communicating the benefits of the visual arts through the Friends of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas.

As Yenawine puts it, art has “the capacity to read into your mind through your eyes and ears, and into your heart, which is really your brain – your intellect and your emotions – to allow the fullest experience of these things, and you feed your spirit.”

She thanks Beach director Linda Duke and senior educator Kathrine Schlageck for their help in finding sources for this piece. She also thanks an amazing piano teacher, Carol Kliewer, who taught her to persevere and modeled how to live an artful life in rural Kansas.

“We need to strive to integrate both sides of our brains,” he says. “The arts are the perfect place for a combination of ideas and information and emotional content as well – things that reach into

LEARN MORE “Preparing Students for the Next America: The Benefits of an Arts Education.” Published in 2013 by the Arts Education Partnership: http://www.aep-arts.org. “Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition.” Published in 2008 by The Dana Foundation: http://www.dana.org/Publications/PublicationDetails.aspx?id=44422. “Critical Evidence: How the ARTS Benefit Student Achievement,” by Sandra S. Ruppert. Published in 2006 by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. “The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings from Four Longitudinal Studies,” by James C. Catterall, Susan A. Dumais, and Gillian Hampden-Thompson. Published in 2012 by the National Endowment for the Arts. “Formal Art Observation Training Improves Medical Students’ Visual Diagnostic Skills,” by Sheila Naghshineh, Janet P. Hafler, Alexa R. Miller, et al. Published in 2008 by the Journal of General Internal Medicine. “Music Lessons Spur Emotional and Behavioral Growth in Children, a New Study Says,” by Amy Ellis Nutt. Published in 2015 by The Washington Post. “The Role of the Visual Arts in Enhancing the Learning Process,” by Christopher W. Tyler and Lora T. Likova. Published in 2012 by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. An excellent source of information about K-12 education, including arts education, is edutopia.org.

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WHAT’S THE STATE OF THE ARTS IN KANSAS?

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IN A CHANGING LANDSCAPE,

T H E S TAT E ’ S A R T C O M M U N I T Y HAS BEEN ADAPTING WITH THE HELP O F A C A N - D O M I N D S E T. H O W E V E R , I N T H E A F T E R M AT H O F A C O N T R O V E R S Y O V E R S TAT E F U N D I N G OF THE ARTS, TIMES ARE LEANER AND THE ENVIRONMENT IS TOUGHER.

W H AT K I N D O F L E A D E R S H I P W I L L I T TA K E T O H E L P T H E A R T S GROW AND CHANGE TO PROSPER INTO THE FUTURE? By Dawn Bormann Novascone

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Tucked behind a barbed-wire fence, a group of Lansing Correctional Facility inmates quietly begin to harmonize. Hush, hush. Somebody’s calling my name. Inside a prison chapel, the minimum-custody inmates who make up the East Hill Singers repeat stanzas again and again until songs are up to the professional conductor’s high standards. They work in what could easily be considered the bleakest location in Kansas. They conduct tasks – accept criticism, laugh at mistakes and beam with joy after nailing a complex piece of music – that some of the men haven’t been able to accomplish in their entire lives but for the choir. Their voices are far from perfect, but that’s hardly the point. If there’s an example of the powerful influence of the arts on one’s soul, it might be at its finest hour inside these prison walls. The East Hill Singers, now in their 20th year, have helped hundreds of men who are about to exit the penal system and return to society. Yet the choir and many other artistic groups in the state have had to weather serious financial uncertainty and dramatic change. After large cutbacks to state grants and an overall drop in private donations, the group has survived with volunteer labor (including some from prison administrators), small grants, goodwill donations from the public and a hefty dose of Kansas determination. The choir is a tiny slice of the state’s art scene, but it illustrates just how eclectic, impactful and fragile the arts can be within Kansas. In many respects, it also shows how scrappy the artistic community can be when solving a problem. Time will tell if there are limits to that can-do spirit.

Anthony Seymour (top and left), an inmate at the Lansing Correctional Facility, practices with the East Hill Singers menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chorus inside the prisonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chapel; Larry Haynes sits in his bunk at the prison. He says that his participation in the East Hill Singers allows others to view him as a human being, not a criminal; Jacob Waldrup harmonizes with other inmates during a practice session last year. The East Hill Singers, a menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chorus made up of minimum security inmates, is now in its 20th year. It has helped hundreds of men return to society.

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A RT H AS A LWAYS B E EN A N INT EGRA L PART OF TH E STAT E’ S C ULT UR E. Art has always been an integral part of the state’s culture. Tucked away in some of the most unlikely locations, Kansas artists are creating works that inspire communities and individuals to great change. Throughout the state, Kansans are engaged in art for employment, cultural engagement, education, community improvement, stress relief, economic development, tourism and much more.

could easily spill over to affect local units of government, too, creating further pressure on the fragile mix of financial support sustaining the arts in Kansas. In what ways will the arts have to adapt in Kansas in order to thrive in the years to come?

Ask just about any Kansas arts supporter to describe the creative scene and they’ll point to a small town that’s lost funding, artists who have left the state entirely and schools struggling to pay for cultural field trips. But they’ll also highlight powerful successes such as the Symphony in the Flint Hills – an event that draws 7,000 people to the tallgrass prairie – as a way to show just how effective art can be when given the chance. The event began as a grass-roots idea when one woman wanted to celebrate her birthday, but it’s become a state treasure, thanks in part to a strategic infusion of state dollars. Some wonder what kind of support would be available now.

Kansas became the center of a national art debate in 2011 after Gov. Sam Brownback shocked arts supporters by wiping out funding for the Kansas Arts Commission. (He initially had sought to eliminate the commission entirely and replace it with a nonprofit foundation, but the Kansas Senate blocked his executive order). The state’s art agency went from a $1.57 million budget in 2011 to zero in 2012.

The recent past looms large for many in any discussion of the arts in Kansas. The state’s arts community has been adapting after funding losses from the state that came after the economic downturn had started to curtail private and local grants. Some advocates have moved on, but others still feel a great sense of loss from changes in how the state funds the arts. Some critics still see little reason to fund the arts over other worthy priorities. Plenty of uncertainty remains, especially with state government facing fiscal challenges. Those issues

Brownback wanted to prioritize spending in tough times and urged private donors to keep the arts vibrant in Kansas. But private funders didn’t pick up the slack. The state lost more than $1 million in matching federal and private grants from sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts. The sudden move produced a backlash. The commission’s defunding had a big impact because it had turned its small budget into matching grants available in all 105 counties. It also had been a central guiding resource to turn to whenever artists, civic groups

TALKING THE LANGUAGE

“Do you want to be known for the state that’s anti-art? Because it’s a terrible marketing ploy,” art commissioner Larry Meeker recalls saying in a letter he fired off to the governor.

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M a in

and nonprofits were stuck. Losing money was one thing, but some felt blindsided because they abruptly lost an agency that offered professional direction at their time of greatest need. Rural communities were hit especially hard, because many rural art councils didn’t employ savvy grant writers or marketing professionals to help make up the funding. “It was more than money. It was about providing them with professional development and other resources across the state,” says Hays Mayor Henry Schwaller, who has served on the new and previous art commissions. Public outcry stirred change. The following year, Brownback agreed to launch a retooled state arts program called the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission. It’s part of the commerce department and has a new mission. The new agency essentially scrapped most of the old programs. State officials say the agency wants to help artists and artistic groups pay for program-based needs rather than pay for general operating expenses, which was one part of the former arts commission. As such, grants are distributed to programs that drive economic development, be it through tourism, job growth or otherwise. Grants are considered onetime funds to kick start a project rather than annual disbursements. It just makes sense, state officials said, as state revenue drops and officials prioritize what they see as core functions of government. “If we were going to have state funding for the

Members of the East Hill Singers perform at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Lawrence in a concert last November.

arts, then it needed to also be focused on creating jobs and economic development and community development,” says Dan Lara, Kansas Department of Commerce spokesman. Some arts supporters see such thinking as shortsighted. It’s hard to pin down what the state’s artistic community contributes to economic development. How do you quantify a program that inspires, say, the state’s next Gordon Parks? But Meeker, now the chairman of the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, thinks that it’s essential for artists and arts groups to point out their value to lawmakers. Years after firing off that letter, Meeker worries that some arts organizations haven’t adapted to the state’s new reality. “I’ve often told arts groups (that) when we go to legislators, our credibility wouldn’t be hurt a bit if we just went with a big Greenpeace button on our shirt as well. Because we’re here for a handout,” Meeker says. Art clearly contributes to economic development, he says, so why not tell businesses how it complements their goals? “We need more credibility,” he says. “And we need to talk the language of economic development.” There’s also a strain of thinking that argues art organizations can learn how to thrive in the absence of government funding by forcing themselves to

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innovate and find creative ways of providing programs and services. Nearly two decades ago, the Harvard Business Review argued in an article that strategic collaborations with other nonprofits, community groups and businesses could represent a way forward for the arts to achieve mutual gains in difficult fiscal times. But even that story relied on examples from large urban centers such as Chicago and St. Louis.

THE NEW NORMAL The Creative Arts Industries Commission was funded at a $700,000 level in 2013 but dropped to $200,000 for 2014 and 2015. It was enough to return some matching federal and private dollars to the state. The state brought in at least $560,800 in 2014 and $430,000 for 2015 in additional grants. Peter Jasso, executive director of the commission, is optimistic about his agency’s new mission and its progress. It has created new guidelines and new grant programs and has handed out grants to several rural and suburban arts programs from Overland Park to Wamego. The agency, he says, is determined to help the arts thrive in Kansas communities. When the arts funding controversy came up during Brownback’s heated gubernatorial campaign, some Creative Arts Industries commissioners also spoke up to defend the new agency’s progress. “Every time a proposal comes, we look at it and ask ourselves: ‘Is this creating an economic opportunity for the community, and would this go on without us?’” commissioner Connie McLean said during the campaign. She indicated that the agency was “in step with the economy and where the Legislature is.” Meeker thinks the state agency is making progress with limited dollars. He understands that the change hasn’t been easy. But he thinks it’s the right step. “We only make progress when we sit down and work together,” Meeker says. Rural communities are hurting, he acknowledged. Although the commission is responding to those circumstances, it likely won’t change its policies about funding salaries or offering long-term, recurring grants to the same group. Such an approach would be pointless given the funding realities. “We don’t have much money to be able to sustain anything,” Meeker says.

The choir of inmates, clad in blue shirts, and community volunteers, including some former East Hill Singers, come together four times a year for concerts outside the prison walls; John Gilmore (left) and Maurice Perry (right) perform alongside Ben Denham (center photo) during an East Hill Singers performance in Lawrence; The group’s performances include singing of religious and popular music as well as choreography. Kirk Carson, the director of music for a Prairie Village church, is the group’s conductor and artistic director.

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The Arts in Prison proposed 2015 budget figures show just how delicate funding is for many nonprofit art groups. The bulk of its revenues come from annual fundraisers from private donors or groups. Some of the money comes from passing the hat at concerts. Arts in Prison works at a state-owned facility but proposed no government funding in 2015.

Schwaller says the new agency has a long way to go before it catches up with the work of the previous agency. The state once offered substantial statewide training to help nonprofits expand their missions and help artists grow their businesses. That professional direction, he says, is missing now.

In a few cases, organizations and festivals have ceased operations. Others report struggling to continue serving everyone they’ve helped previously, especially groups such as low-income children and teens who can’t do much to help an organization’s bottom line. In Lincoln, a city of 1,200 in north-central Kansas, the arts center is down, but not out, says director Joyce Harlow. It went from 2.5 employees to one part-time person – Harlow. She cut the budget through attrition and now shoulders much of the work herself, working a full-time shift on a part-time salary. She now depends on volunteers to make several programs happen, including summer art sessions for Lincoln youth.

Schwaller thinks the new agency is so busy handing out grants for short-term gains that it has largely overlooked long-term strategies that would promote economic development, too. “We’re not thinking about three to five years from now,” he says. “We’re thinking about what it’s going to look like next week.” And the idea that arts organizations are scrappier or more efficient in the face of cuts?

She wonders how the center would function if she only worked a few hours a week. Who would help visitors navigate traveling art exhibits and who would look for funding sources to pay the bills? The center stopped some programs to preserve others. While the center’s supporters work to find creative ways to bring back some of what they offered , it’s unlikely to be as much as it was before.

“I don’t know how scrappy they can be if they’re in a town of 2,000,” he says. Many rural arts agencies are barely hanging on, he says. Although state funding made up a small portion of the resources for many of them, it often paid for one or more employees, who in turn led a team of volunteers.

"We’ve been here 22 years, and I expect that we’ll continue to be here," she says.

“At least half of them or three-quarters of them have found ways to survive again by reducing paid staff, by cutting programs or blending programs together. How sustainable that is in the long term? I don’t know,” he says.

DOING IT ON YOUR OWN Critics of government funding for the arts often point out that they aren’t opposed to the arts,

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Applying for state grants is a cumbersome task filled with red tape that turns some artists, volunteers and civic groups off, says Marci Penner, executive director of the Kansas Sampler Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving and growing rural culture in Kansas.

per se, but that government shouldn’t be in the business of paying for it. Individuals should be compelled to pay taxes only to fund the essential functions of government, especially protecting people’s rights. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for art they disagree with, and artists shouldn’t be hemmed into creating the kind of art government wants – and pays them – to create.

Artists will regularly tell her, “I want to do it our way.” Or “We’re just going to make it work.” Penner pointed out that grass-roots groups in Cottonwood Falls have held jam sessions for more than a decade. The music brings in visitors and is a tourist attraction in its own right. “They never depended on arts money. They just did it themselves,” Penner says.

Former Kansas budget director Steve Anderson originally proposed defunding the Kansas Arts Commission, and he says he’d do it again. Back then, Anderson was immediately greeted with an onslaught of angry arts supporters, including some who carried a coffin outside his office to represent the death of the arts in Kansas.

But such efforts can fall apart quickly. For instance, even those legendary jam sessions nearly halted when two vital people retired.

The real problem, he said, is that the issue became so emotionally charged so quickly that it was difficult for him to argue his point: that government should fund only essential services. Art, he believes, does not fit that definition.

“Seventy-five percent of the cities in Kansas are volunteer-led. There’s not an economic development director. There’s not a paid chamber person,” Penner says. More professional guidance could help bridge those losses, organize local efforts and help those efforts keep from being crippled when one crucial volunteer leaves or local funding sources are tapped out. “Most places are just doing it within the community. That might work for a little while, but I think that will get harder and harder,” Penner says.

“I could have moved approximately 42 children from the developmentally disabled waiting list” for services, he says. “We proposed doing that with the funding, and we weren’t able to do it because clearly they fought us and won. I would make the argument that it’s taking money away from essential services of government.” A libertarian strain of thinking can run strong in Kansas, even within communities that support the arts. Many agencies operate independently and prefer to keep it that way. They don’t want the state meddling and messing up a good thing.

There’s also the symbolism. The loss of funding sends a message about how much Kansas values the arts. As Penner notes, people often take their cues about what’s important from authority figures.

EVEN AS THE RECENT PAST CONTINUES TO LOOM LARGE IN THE STATE’S DISCUSSION ABOUT ARTS, THE NEXT BIG ADAPTIVE CHALLENGE FACING THE ARTS IN KANSAS MAY ALREADY BE TAKING SHAPE.

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MORE ON TH E WEB:

View more photographs of the East Hill Singers and hear their music in this online video:

klcjr.nl/easthillsing

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“In the case of art, it felt like the governor’s administration – though they would argue this point – it still feels like they made a judgment about arts in Kansas to say that it wasn’t as important. And so that trickles down,” she says. “And I do believe, I think that (Brownback) thought he could find a better way. We lost (national grant) money for a while, and it just put a damper on things to at least perceive that art wasn’t valued.”

one full-time director and a part-time employee. The program has scraped by, but deeply dedicated volunteers wonder: Should it have to? The program pays quantifiable dividends for the state with lower recidivism rates. The group claims an 18 percent recidivism rate compared with an overall recidivism rate of more than 30 percent for the state, Lynch says. State funding was never the sole revenue source, but it was recurring. When the Creative Arts Industries Commission was created, Lynch didn’t immediately find a grant she was qualified to receive. That might change, though, as the state agency continues to tweak its grant programs and address concerns from artistic groups throughout the state.

HOLDING TO PURPOSE The state’s new reality can be difficult for programs that were once hailed by the state as great community boosters, volunteer models and part of a publicprivate partnership. Many picked up services that had once been offered by the state.

But the funding will never be recurring, which worries volunteers and prison officials.

“We are holding on by our fingernails,” acknowledges Leigh Lynch, Arts in Prisons executive director. “We lost funding when the arts commission was closed. We lost opportunities for development when the arts commission closed.”

Meeker agrees that the program is likely a good example of how art can save the state money and deserves funding, but he wonders why the Creative Arts Industries Commission should suffer shame for not funding it year after year. Why not the prison system?

At Arts in Prison, which organizes the East Hill Singers, the mission is basic: Give inmates a positive outlet to express themselves, and they’ll gain skills and learn teamwork to reconnect more effectively with their communities upon release. Prison officials have long praised Arts in Prisons for its work to meaningfully engage inmates in classes such as the visual arts, poetry, literature and even yoga.

“That to me shouldn’t come back to the arts commission for funding,” he says. “That should go back to the prison systems, just as hiring a guard or anything else does.” Prison administrators at Lansing faced cuts of their own but have worked hard to keep the program going. When a massive budget crisis hit the prison years ago, the warden and high-ranking employees volunteered their free time to provide security for concerts. Without concerts, the program was doomed, because it largely survives on free-will offerings between song sets. But even private funding has lagged.

The choir consists of inmates and community volunteers who come together four times a year for public concerts outside prison walls. The group is a beloved guest at several large Johnson County churches. Between songs, inmates offer personal narratives. “Art nurtures a creative sense in you. People use art to express themselves. They use art to grow,” says inmate Larry Haynes.

The nonprofit has already stripped services that were once offered to 11 correctional facilities. It’s down to the Lansing Correctional Facility.

At a concert, he’s not just a criminal. He’s a man. “They just see the East Hill Singers,” he says of the public.

“We decided we were at a point where we had to pick and choose what we were going to be able to do,” Lynch says.

Arts in Prisons has leveraged every dime to stay afloat. Its operating expenses have gone from $200,000 with three employees to $109,000 with

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“It was more than money. It was about providing them with professional development and other resources across the state.” HENRY SCHWALLER Hays Mayor

“We need more credibility, and we need to talk the language of economic development.” LARRY MEEKER

“I would make the argument that it’s taking money away from essential services of government.” STEVE ANDERSON

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WHAT’S THE STATE OF THE ARTS IN YOUR COMMUNITY? SIX QUESTIONS FOR SHAPING THE FUTURE

1. What is working well with the arts in your community?

2. When you think about the future of the arts in your community, what concerns you the most?

3. What big, lofty things would you like to see happen related to the arts in your community?

4. Examine the gap between reality and what you would like to see happen. What makes progress on the arts difficult in your community?

5. What are the different perspectives or viewpoints you see related to the arts in your community?

6. What kind of leadership would it take to close the gap between reality and aspiration for the arts in your community? Think beyond just technical fixes (funding, forming new organizations, etc.) and explore what dynamics you might work with others to change.

DISCUSSION GUIDE How would you diagnose the situation facing the state’s arts community in 2015? What has and hasn’t changed since 2011? How would you diagnose the situation from the perspective of other stakeholders in the story, such as the governor, Legislature and general public? What are their values, loyalties and potential losses? What examples of leadership do you see emerging in this story? What additional opportunities for leadership do you see?

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Would it be possible to create any other system in Kansas that could help sustain the arts on a statewide scale? Most arts supporters interviewed by The Journal don’t think so.

Like arts organizations across the state, Arts in Prison has shifted its thinking to seek out new funding sources. It has expanded its mission to explicitly state a targeted focus on reducing recidivism. It was always part of the organization’s effort, volunteers said, so why not put it in writing to pull in more dollars? The program offers résumé tips and mentoring programs designed to ease the transition after inmates are released. Lynch says she’s careful to make sure the program maintains an arts-focused approach, but she has kept an open mind to preserve core programs. They’re regularly learning how to evolve.

The National Endowment for the Arts sets specific eligibility requirements for the state arts agencies it partners with, including having designated staff and the financial support of state government. Advocates fear the NEA would never offer matching grants to a private group at the same level as a state agency. Even Anderson, the former state budget director, agrees that the NEA would never welcome state government bowing out of the equation. But, he counters, why not?

Some think that adaption is exactly what must happen in leaner times. But there are others who wonder how many programs like Arts in Prison are being lost as the state looks to save money in the short term.

Others argue that the state’s role is essential given the delicate nature of many arts groups. Replacing state funding with private dollars was tried and failed, they say. Philanthropic donors prefer to pay for a cancer wing, one supporter insisted, rather than the light bill for an arts program in rural Kansas.

INNOVATIVE FUNDING AND IDEAS The Creative Arts Industries Commission is learning, too. Jasso says it is fine-tuning communication efforts to get the word out about the agency. Officials held a listening tour throughout the state early on, and he’d like to do it again.

The heat surrounding the issue is clearly much lower than it was four years ago. A new status quo is in place and some wonder if anyone really “won” the debate over arts funding in 2011. But the state’s continued push for smaller government might yet raise the heat on both supporters and skeptics of government funding for the arts.

Jasso wants to sees the agency become a communications hub so communities can share ideas that could be modeled elsewhere. He wants to make sure the grant programs are clear.

The issue could again become a flashpoint for intense debate about the role of government and the value of the arts. But it could also offer the opportunity to more collaboratively put big questions on the table for discussion.

Lynch, for one, says the changes have helped. She has identified a grant that Arts in Prison could use to help its mission. Maintaining flexibility is the key to expanding in the short term, several arts supporters say.

How will the people of Kansas sustain the arts into the future? What should state government’s role be and how can it be best supplemented? What should arts organizations, grant makers, private donors and communities be responsible for? What creative solutions will be required to see that good ideas receive a chance and that effective initiatives can be sustained over the long term?

Funding shortages have forced everyone to think differently and consider how to move forward. Arts advocates will still seek new funding opportunities and dream up new ideas. Many artists and arts agencies throughout the state have already started to reinvent themselves. There’s no other choice.

Even as the recent past continues to loom large in the state’s discussion about arts, the next big adaptive challenge facing the arts in Kansas may already be taking shape.

“It’s like when you come in at the end of the season and cut all the weeds,” says Steve Curtis, director of community building and engagement with Community Housing of Wyandotte County, which uses art to facilitate youth and community programs in impoverished neighborhoods. “They’ll come back up. They might come up differently.”

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Steve Curtis, director of community building and engagement with Community Housing of Wyandotte County, sits in the Epic Arts Clay Studio in Kansas City, Kansas, which he helped create with $3,000 of his own money.

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Sometimes all you need to advance the arts in Kansas is a resourceful spirit and a few dollars in the bank. And you don’t necessarily need to be a full-time arts advocate to do it.

Lawrence, for instance, a group of artists have launched a subscription service for locally produced art. Many other communities are piecing together small grants to make incremental steps. A mural project in Topeka is using a crowd-funding website and other donations to raise the $10,000 needed to paint at three new locations.

In Kansas, unusual suspects such as Steve Curtis, director of community building and engagement with Community Housing of Wyandotte County, are using inventive approaches to accomplish objectives like using art to facilitate youth and community programs in impoverished neighborhoods.

Such efforts are emerging at the state level, too. The state’s arts agency, the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, has been offering a Kansas Arts License Plate to help raise funds to invest in the arts. Vehicle owners pay an annual $50 fee that goes to funding arts programs in Kansas.

Community Housing, which usually helps rebuild neighborhoods and homes, practically stumbled across the chance to launch Epic Clay Studio, a ceramic studio, in a long vacant downtown Kansas City, Kansas, storefront.

‘JUST DO SOMETHING’

The studio got off to an inauspicious start when Community Housing was asked by another nonprofit, Accessible Arts, to store surplus pottery wheels and a kiln in an empty building it owned. The previous tenant, a barbecue joint, had closed years earlier. Retailers weren’t exactly beating down the door, so the favor was easy.

It’s easy to look back and say Epic Clay was an easy, innovative idea. It was hardly that simple. The light bill nearly curtailed the entire project. Curtis, the husband of Democratic state Rep. Pam Curtis, eventually found a local nonprofit that would pay it if Epic could provide a financial literacy component. “What are you talking about? We’re a clay studio,” Curtis says, still laughing years later.

The housing agency sent Curtis to meet with Accessible Arts to take a look at the equipment. He started asking questions. Why simply store the equipment? The community was desperate for a gathering place. The building was there. The equipment was there. It wouldn’t enhance the tax base, but what did anyone have to lose if they opened a clay studio and offered discounted classes?

Studio artists eventually hatched an idea – Finance 101 for Artists. A University of Missouri-Kansas City faculty member presented a professional development class to about 15 local artists, and the lights remained on at the studio that year. The studio has proven popular with a diverse group of young and adult students from the surrounding low-income neighborhood, special-needs students from the Kansas City, Kansas, school district and the nearby Kansas State School for the Blind, and residents throughout the metro area.

Curtis gathered local artists for help, pitched in $3,000 of his own money and recruited volunteers to prepare the building, which sits in the Strawberry Hill neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, just across the Kansas River from Kansas City, Missouri.

The ideas didn’t stop there. Curtis received a $9,000 grant to beautify and conduct programming in a park adjacent to the clay studio. The Art Squad, a four-person youth group that Curtis helped form, is dreaming up ideas to entice the community to the new space. The squad envisions the smell of brats wafting through the air to entice families into the

That was 2011. Years later, the studio lights still glow. An air conditioner has been added, classes continue to grow, and an energy-efficient kiln is in use. Epic Clay is not an isolated example. Artists continue devising innovative ways to fund art projects. In

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Curtis says his next project will likely take him into an entirely new financial experience, crowd funding, which allows the community to contribute online. The housing agency needs a reliable truck (aesthetics are unimportant) to haul supplies to the farm on a regular basis to give his personal vehicle a break. As for the advice he’d give to other would-be arts entrepreneurs, Curtis says supporting the arts and launching new ideas don’t need to involve grandiose plans for museums and art galleries. He suggests starting small. Most of his endeavors start with $3,000 or less that he contributes from his wallet to establish what some in the business community might call a proof of concept. He leverages that effort to find other grants that help launch long-term sustainability.

space. There will be art classes, of course. And maybe a pie baking competition judged by the firefighters stationed down the block.

FINDING RESOURCES Curtis, like others in Kansas, is constantly on the hunt for unusual grants that might blend with the needs of his community. He started with a basic Google search of “money for arts” and zero knowledge of what might be out there. Early on, he found money to abate graffiti and used that to form the Art Squad, which paints murals on privately owned garages marred with graffiti. He uses the money for paint supplies, solar-powered motion detector lights and small stipends for the young artists. The artists and the homeowners came up with the mural idea. The Art Squad started looking for other opportunities to help. They offered art classes to all ages at a recently revitalized park, which had been considered dangerous and off-limits for years to anyone but criminals. Soon the group was joined by walking clubs eager to use the park.

“No one wants to give you money when you don’t have something up and going,” he says. Artists are creative problem-solvers. Take advantage of that and let them solve community problems, he says. Use art to draw people together in a nonthreatening way. Ask community members what they want, listen and enlist them to help. And perhaps most important, don’t be afraid to fail.

The Art Squad is working to integrate art into an urban farm created by the housing agency and volunteers to feed a neighborhood. It also spied a school nearby and submitted a grant to beautify the area from the viewpoint of a child walking to school.

“Just do something,” Curtis says.

DISCUSSION GUIDE Steve Curtis is an example of arts leadership coming from a nontraditional place, a community organizer with Community Housing of Wyandotte County. It happened because of a connecting interest between the housing agency and an arts group. Think about your own leadership challenge. Who might have connecting interests with you on that challenge? Brainstorm the names of five people or groups you might want to connect with that you have not yet reached out to.

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Making creativity your business By Sarah Caldwell Hancock

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Creativity is “trending” these days. Here’s why it’s important to your success – at home, at work and in the civic realm – and how you can improve your own practice of it.

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CREATIV IT Y IS

HAVING

Popular culture is awash in references to the act of bringing fresh ideas to life. An issue of The Atlantic magazine I encountered last summer, for example, contained numerous articles on the subject.

MOME NT

economy. Top business schools offer entrepreneurship programs, and many of them include coursework in creativity and design thinking in an effort to boost students’ capacity for innovation. The Kansas State University College of Business Administration, for one, offers both a major and a minor in entrepreneurship.

One could read about the neuroscience of creativity, the synergy of creative partnerships (Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a stormy yet productive relationship), the process followed by highly successful creative people. Don’t neglect the one about using a Home Depot paint gun to spray nacho cheese powder on a taco shell and “Five Creative Solutions,” a brief description of innovative ways to solve persistent problems, such as growing meat in a lab to overcome the inefficiencies faced by animal husbandry. The magazine was more than interesting enough to get me through my 45-minute slog on the elliptical machine at my gym.

Chad Jackson, director of the K-State Center for the Advancement of Entrepreneurship, says the center was established in 2009 after a group of alumni and community entrepreneurs gathered and said K-State was behind the curve in one of the fastest-growing programs in the country. A cross-campus idea competition called K-State Launch drew many participants who wanted to develop ideas and business plans and compete for seed money prizes. The program has helped start 34 businesses and facilitated university approval of a minor in entrepreneurship in 2012. Each year, 40 students are selected for the minor, but demand has been overwhelming: After sending one email that first year, Jackson received 160 applications in 48 hours. The minor requires three courses and two electives and is designed to be flexible and interdisciplinary. One of the required courses, Exploring Creativity, is offered in the English department.

And it’s not just magazines. The new-releases section in bookstores are filled with titles concerned with innovations and creativity. “Creativity Inc.” “The Innovators.” “Agile Innovation.” “How We Got to Now.” There are more than a dozen TED Talks alone about creativity, not to mention classes, seminars and online tutorials. Everyone, it seems, wants to think more deeply about how to better engage our creative impulses and infuse creativity into our organizational and civic cultures. But how much do we really know about creativity? Is it a skill that can be taught? An innate competency that can be cultivated? A bit of both?

Jackson says he is frequently asked about entrepreneurship. “People often say it can’t be taught, that it’s something you’re born with,” he says, but “research has shown over and over again that is wrong. All the great management researchers and scientists have shown it’s a process. Like any process, it can be taught.” Jackson notes that creativity is also a process: a framework can be taught initially, then supported with exercises and experiences that help people learn to be creative.

LEARNING THE ART OF CREATIVITY The search for bolstering creativity isn’t limited to art classes or writing workshops. It’s also permeating teaching at business schools, where it’s found a home among finance, spreadsheets and management.

Cultivating creativity is crucial to developing entrepreneurs, Jackson adds, because “you have to be able to think creatively and do things differently than they’ve been done and tap into that side of your thinking to be truly successful.” He says the nuts-and-bolts side of developing a business is a

Business schools are betting that creativity can be taught and be the engine that drives innovation, a crucial ingredient in U.S. competitiveness in the global

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you’re wrong when you’re showing your stuff to your teacher. You’re afraid when talking to them in critiques; it’s hard to be creative because you’re afraid you will be wrong.” He says the creativity course helped him learn to risk failure and take good things away from it. Now he’s on the product-design track, which treasures original thinking and requires fresh approaches. His portfolio has earned him internship interviews with three product-design firms in Minneapolis.

traditional path of learning that comes naturally to many students, whereas creativity is new to them. Deborah Murray, an Exploring Creativity instructor, agrees. One of the most challenging aspects for students is interactivity. “You can’t just sit back and absorb,” she says, “and you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself.” The first day of class includes exercises based on looking foolish, taking risks and curiosity, qualities Murray says are required to develop creativity. The course requires students to read and discuss theories of creativity; write a book review; attend arts activities or performances; maintain a “sketchbook” with exploratory exercises, writing, drawings and other pieces that meet creative goals; and complete a creative project. All of these activities foster deep thinking in students about meaning, life goals, connections among fields of study, and the role of ideas and creative practice.

Jenkins says she sees more connections as a result of her experience in the class. “I’ve been very intentional about finding ways to put squares into circles, where before I had compartments,” she says. She is focusing on bringing together her interests in theater, civic engagement and economics to create a socialissues dialogue “theater day” in which participants are presented with a problem like socioeconomic inequities in education and then explore thoughts and solutions through drama. Both Manuel and Jenkins say they benefited from realizing the importance of creativity in their lives. Manuel says the practice of keeping a journal broadened his horizon of inspiration, and Jenkins rediscovered how her love of theater could help her thoughts in other areas be more “systematic and inspired” by sustaining a creative practice.

Zach Manuel, a senior in interior architecture and product design, and Rebecca Jenkins, a junior in sociology and economics, are former students of Murray’s who have profited in different ways from their semester exploring creativity. Manuel says that as he finished his first year of architecture, he feared his school’s critique process. “You’re either right or

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Kansas State University students Kati Krieg, Danny Neely, Meg Anderson and Beth Bowman perform before an audience at the student union for K-Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s On the Spot improvisation comedy team. Creative activities such as performing improv comedy can help individuals develop skills that will serve them in their working lives.

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DISCUSSION GUIDE Acting Experimentally Identify a leadership challenge you would like to explore. It can be one that you are facing or a story in this magazine about a challenge that someone else is facing.

What experiments do you imagine have been attempted on this challenge thus far? What have the results been? Generate a list of at least 10 experiments that could be attempted on this challenge. Give yourself permission to be unrealistic or ridiculous, as well as practical and realistic. Imagine what the results of each experiment could be. You might see the possibility for multiple results from the same experiment. Identify the low-risk experiments most likely to produce the greatest gain on the challenge.

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IMPROVISING SUCCESS If a creativity class seems too conventional, you might be ready for the approach a friend of mine has taken. She’s an editor and writer for a technoogycentered company and feels uncomfortable with public speaking, but a supervisor’s departure left her to fill in at webcasts and industry events. She tried some public speaking clubs but found them too formulaic, so she enrolled in an improvisation class on the advice of a friend. That friend, Avi Jacobson, is a communications consultant for Wells Fargo in San Francisco. He says he isn’t naturally adventurous. Despite a background in classical music performance, conducting and singing, plus a current interest in acting, he says he has to remind himself “to step out of the box.” Working in a structured corporate environment engenders reliance on protocol and agendas, but an improv class Jacobson took a decade ago at a theater now known as BATS Improv taught him to escape that way of thinking, and he encourages others to take the plunge. Improvisation is essentially a live exercise in creativity, while on stage with other people. The first thing improv teaches is that everything is an offer: every line, every mistake, every hilarious situation or action from another actor. Unlike real life, in which we might meet others’ ideas with “Yes, but …,” improv trains actors to react with “Yes, AND …” as a way to accept and build on thoughts expressed on stage. Training yourself to accept new ideas and situations brings other competencies that are useful in everyday environments. “As an improviser, you’re responsible all the time for how you present yourself to the audience and responding to the other actors,” Jacobson explains. “Your job is to make your scene partner look good. If you’re not concentrating on yourself, you’re on a team – you’re constantly raising the bar.” He notes that in business meetings, you might have good ideas, but if you’re not building on the thoughts of others, you won’t get very far. Instead, he says, you strive to “leverage your own skills in a way that brings out the best in everyone else on the team.” Jacobson says he has become adept at identifying others’ workplace strengths and feeding them the right material to move the team forward and get the work done. Another skill improvisers learn is to revive a stale scene on stage by doing something unexpected to

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inject energy. Your character can have a heart attack, make a blubbering confession or start speaking in tongues, but the important thing is to take bold action. Although you would never fake a heart attack in a meeting, you might find yourself in a stagnant situation in your job and ask, “What can I do to get my boss to look at me in a different way? Or what can I do to motivate this person?” Jacobson says improv helped him learn to make bold choices to move things forward. My friend has been through a few weeks of improv exercises and finds them fun and challenging. She’s still processing, but her Facebook posts indicate that she’s enjoying the ride.

FINDING WHAT MATTERS As you’re making bold choices and moving your team forward, improvising and exercising creativity also helps you cut through the noise and decide what’s important. Murray says that one of the crucial lessons of her course is figuring out “what matters and what doesn’t to you personally,” and that part of that process necessitates displaying your vulnerabilities. “While not having my personal life at the front of the classroom all the time, I’ve been able to say to my students, ‘I’ve submitted poetry to six journals and received three rejections just this week!’ Or ‘I’m having trouble concentrating because my mother isn’t well,’” she says. This fosters a safe environment for creative exercise and translates into the civic arena. “If you’re not willing to be a human being and respect that others are human beings, you’re never going to get out of your respective corners in your shouting match,” Murray says. Vulnerability and empathy help students cultivate the flexible thinking skills the world requires. Jackson sums it up best when he describes some students’ attitudes as they come to college. He says students, especially those who are the first generation in their families to attend college, expect it to be like technical school and give them very specific skill sets. Of course, that is not the reality students encounter. “What I say is, I want to help you learn to solve problems we don’t even know exist today. The world is changing so fast that we don’t know what you’ll run up against in your career,” he says. “We want you to be able to think effectively – we want you to solve those problems.”

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fuel your

own

creativity

MAYBE YOUR COLLEGE DAYS ARE OVER, AN IMPROV CLASS ISN’T AN OPTION IN YOUR COMMUNITY AND YOU DON’T WANT TO READ ENTIRE BOOKS ON THE SUBJECT. WHAT CAN YOU DO? HERE ARE SOME IDEAS.

Attend performing arts events that are outside your usual experience. Not a regular at the ballet? Give it a try. Pay attention to what you wonder about and how you feel as you watch it. Start a creativity/idea journal. Jot down those thoughts that occurred to you while you were brushing your teeth or grocery shopping. Interesting places you want to visit, books you’d like to read or funny memories are a great place to begin. Don’t worry if they aren’t big ideas. You don’t have to show any of your thoughts to anyone – they’re just for you. Disrupt your routine. You could do this in a major way by taking a long trip to an exotic location, or you could make smaller strides such as trying a new ethnic cuisine or even rearranging your office so your desk is facing another direction. Sometimes new perspectives are literal. Gather with others to form a “creativity studio,” which is something like a book club for creative pursuits. You can discuss a book one month, attend an art exhibit another, share craft interests or have a local artist visit and show some work. For best results, keep your group to a manageable size (maybe five or six people) and invite members outside your usual social circle. Use online inspiration boards to feed your interests in a relaxing, low-pressure environment. Look for things that appeal to you, but do so mindfully: Take time to wonder why you like that paint color, that classic car or that drink recipe. Unplug. It’s no accident that almost every book or article you’ll read about creativity mentions the need to get away from our devices. Go for a walk outside, take time to connect with a friend face to face and set aside time to let your mind wander.

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WHEN IS LEADERSHIP AN

A R T ? 44. 48.

–Willa Cather, “The Song of the Lark”

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ART IS N’T A TER M TO BE THR OWN A ROUND LOOS ELY. BUT IN RETR OS PEC T, W E CA N S OMETIM ES SEE LEADERSH IP AS C END ING TO A RTIS TRY.

By By Julia Fabris McBride

When is leadership an art?

I’ve been reading Willa Cather’s “The Song of the Lark.” It’s about a 19th-century woman born of the Great Plains who becomes a world-famous opera singer. She’s a country girl whose talents compel her to leave her home, a lonely woman who manages to draw energy from a deep sense of where she’s from, the beauty of her birthplace and the authenticity of the people who nurtured her growing up. I began this column with a quotation from the book.

Not very often. Painting is an art. Theater is an art. Poetry is an art. Artists live on the edge of society. They may put off settling down, delay or deny themselves a family life, avoid home-ownership or neglect retirement funds all for the sake of art. Most would say it is worth it. They wouldn’t have it any other way. Still, it’s not easy. And on behalf of every artist who has ever struggled for the sake of beauty and meaning and truth, I hesitate to trivialize the word art.

In those sentences, Cather makes the best case I can muster for calling leadership an art. Leadership, like art, demands truthfulness. If you wish to lead, you must tell yourself the truth about your motives. You must be honest about what you are willing to do to make a difference. You must assess every situation with as much clarity as you can muster. You must name the elephants or fan the flame of conflicting viewpoints so it burns bright enough for everyone to see. You must look people in the eye and tell them, truthfully, that you cannot make progress alone. You must be willing to authentically and deeply acknowledge to yourself that others matter. You must be willing to hear and hold multiple truths from multiple people and patiently weave them together to create a new and better reality.

Be honest. When you hear the word artist, do you think of someone who just finished up a degree in leadership studies? You do not. You think of Vincent van Gogh alone in his room with a bloody ear. You think of Billie Holiday, her soulful voice and untimely death. The Kansas City Rep’s insightful production of “Our Town.” Or a young and buoyant Music Theatre Wichita cast, holding hands and beaming acknowledgment for a standing ovation. If we say leadership is an art, what other arts would we need to acknowledge? The art of massage? The art of friendship? The art of war? The art of shaving? (Google the “art of” and see for yourself what pops up.) The audacity! Where does it end, I ask you? Leadership is an important task. Sometimes it’s the work of a lifetime. It’s an honor or a challenge. It takes skills. It takes compassion. It takes empathy. It takes vision. It takes relationships. It takes disciplined attention to purpose. Above all, perhaps, it takes patience.

Leadership is about processes that lead to improved products, healthier communities, more meaningful lives. The better and more inclusive the process, the more sustainable the outcomes. Leadership is about building connections among people and ideas for the sake of making a difference. And, yes, it requires creativity and social and emotional intelligence to do it well. Visual and performing artists connect with people on the frequency of heart, soul, emotion and values. The best of them use paint, song, script, sculpted marble or some other medium to reveal truth and generate insights that enhance our sense of what it is to be human.

Nonetheless, sensible people insist on referring to the art of leadership. Respect for them requires me to give the matter a bit more thought.

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map. You will be making it up as you go along. I don’t know whether leadership is for dummies. But I know it’s not for the faint of heart.

Those of us who wish to raise leadership to the level of art have a different medium at our disposal. We have the KLC framework. We have a set of five principles that remind us that anyone can lead if they are purposeful, actively engage others and willingly take risks. We have a set of four competencies that remind us that leadership happens at the edges – when we stretch ourselves by listening differently and speaking more consciously, and when through our actions we compel others to let go of old habits, adapt and grow. The KLC principles and competencies give us guideposts to identify what leadership is – and they help keep us honest about what leadership is not.

There has been at least one occasion in my life (as I’m sure there has been in yours) when I set a goal, thought things through, calculated the risks, held to purpose, experimented beyond my comfort zone, spoke from the heart, engaged others and built bridges between factions, eventually accomplishing something that took leadership. If you’d asked me in the middle of it, though, I would not have called what I was doing leadership, and I certainly would not have called it art. I’d have said that my efforts were probably necessary, alternately fun and annoying, and quite possibly futile. Looking back, I’d tell you that what I and others accomplished through combined acts of leadership was satisfying beyond measure.

Blogger Seth Godin provides similar guideposts about art: “It’s easy to keep track of what art is by what it is not. It’s not following a manual, reading a ‘Dummies’ book, looking for a map. It tends to be people who work with a compass instead, who have an understanding of true north and are willing to solve a problem in an interesting way.”

Sometimes, in retrospect, a series of successful acts of leadership by multiple people, taken together, ascends to the level of art: A group makes progress not through flamboyant exploits or overt artistry but through experimentation, commitment, learning and engagement.

The two sets of guideposts, the one about leadership and the other about art, overlap. Both leadership and art require experimentation. There is no map to guide you in the pursuit of leadership on the deep, daunting challenges or complex, golden opportunities in front of you. If you want to lead, you must define your own true north and be willing to approach your endeavor in new and interesting ways.

Leadership, then, is an art. But it’s an art that exists only in hindsight. Julia Fabris McBride is the vice president of the Kansas Leadership Center. She is a graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and for 20 years created and performed theater in Chicago. She and her husband, sculptor Bill McBride, moved to Matfield Green in 2006.

When it comes to challenges that really matter, there can be no “Leadership for Dummies.” There is no

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GETTING THE MESSAGE TO STICK What role can art play in making progress on a difficult social problem? A group in Kansas City has harnessed its talents in support of efforts to reduce violence in its community.

The idea for the Artists for Life Project sprang from Darryl Chamberlain, a self-taught Kansas City artist who helped organize a group of area African American artists wanting to spread an anti-violence message. 52.

PEERING THROUGH SHATTERED GLASS, A MAN IN A HOODED RED SWEATSHIRT AIMS A GUN. THE TEXT ABOVE THE IMAGE SCREAMS IN LARGE BEIGE TYPE:

“A R E YO U LIST ENING ? ” IN SLIGHTLY SMALLER PRINT BELOW:

“THE MURDER RATE IN KANSAS CITY IS 1.5 TIMES GREATER THAN CHICAGO!” By Chris Green

American artists created artwork designed to promote discussions aimed at reducing handgun violence in the Kansas City metro area.

In just a glance, this provocative, in-your-face piece of art created by Kansas City, Kansas, artist George Mayfield delivered an unambiguous message when it was put on display in the community last year. While Chicago often grabs the headlines, it was in Kansas City, Missouri, where you were statistically more likely to die in an act of violence.

The driving idea behind the group’s project was that visual art is more than just something to look at. It can help a community make progress on a difficult social problem by encouraging people to stop, think and make changes in their behavior.

For Mayfield, the artwork represented a way to grab people’s attention and come face to face with an issue they’d probably rather not think about. “A lot of people are desensitized to what you hear a lot about on the news,” Mayfield says. “It just goes right over you unless it hits home in your family and neighborhood. I think sometimes when you can see (the art), it just gets your emotions going a bit, and that’s what it is supposed to do. Evoke some kind of emotion.”

The framed creations from Artists for Life wound up on display in community reception halls and galleries in Missouri and Kansas. The exhibit traveled as far as the Brown v. Board National Historic Site in Topeka, where the works were displayed for two months and seen – and commented on – by hundreds from all over the country. But the reach of Artists for Life went well beyond gallery walls.

In a year in which Kansas City groups, including the police department and a collaboration of law enforcement groups called the Kansas City No Violence Alliance (KCNoVA), mounted intense efforts to reduce violent crime in their community’s urban core, art such as Mayfield’s became a way to contribute to the cause. Through the Artists for Life Project, Mayfield and more than a dozen other African-

Community activists distributed 200 poster-sized copies of the artworks to churches, businesses and other locations across Kansas City so people could see the works as they went about their everyday lives. The posters also started appearing at public events. They became the backdrop for a television news conference about violent tragedies plaguing

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the city. They’re now even winding up on publications being printed by KC NoVA to continue pushing the anti-violence message further into the community. The display of the Artists for Life posters has overlapped a year in which Kansas City saw a historic drop in violence, closing the gap with Chicago. After averaging more than 100 murders per year from 2008 to 2013, the city saw 77 in 2014, the lowest total in nearly 50 years.

from The Light in the Other Room, a collaboration of nearly a dozen Kansas City-based African-American artists that Chamberlain was a part of. Not everyone Chamberlain talked to, though, was enamored of the idea of using art as a way to spread an anti-violence message. The issue was difficult for people to talk about. Some couldn’t see the outcome he envisioned with the posters, Chamberlain says, even as group members sketched out ideas and thought about potential audiences.

‘MAKE IT STICKY’ The idea for the Artists for Life Project sprang from Darryl Chamberlain, a 57-year-old self-taught artist who moved back to the Kansas City area in 2004 after living away from his hometown for 32 years. The death of a 12-year-old girl in Chicago in 2013 provided the inspiration for Chamberlain, who frequently uses art to teach children about AfricanAmerican history, to take action.

"There were some artists that did not feel that it would be effective,” Chamberlain says. “Some thought it would be effective, but it was not their cup of tea. Some were with us from the beginning."

Hadiya Pendleton was shot to death just a week after performing at an event for President Barack Obama’s inauguration. The girl’s death weighed on Chamberlain because it was difficult to hear about a young girl going from the “highest high to the lowest low” in such a short period of time. He quickly realized that such a tragedy easily could have happened closer to home. Chamberlain attended a presentation about a program called Rocket Grants, which had been launched in 2009 by the Charlotte Street Foundation, a Kansas City, Missouri, arts group, and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. It seeks to encourage and support “innovative, public-oriented art in nontraditional spaces.” Chamberlain started thinking about what could be done with the resources provided by such a program. He began meeting with a group of people he knew

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But Chamberlain says skepticism from some quarters about the project only made the effort stronger. It helped the group keep things in perspective and think carefully about what the artwork should say, so that it might have a real impact. "You need somebody that keeps your feet on the ground," Chamberlain says. Artists for Life received a grant from Rocket Grants

Kansas City Homicides Per Year

(From left to right) George Mayfield, Darryl Chamberlain, Yvette Williams, Gregory Powell and Erlene Flowers were among the 17 artists who contributed to the Artists for Life Project.

in March 2014 that paid for the printing of the 200 posters that were distributed throughout Kansas City. Fifteen artists joined Chamberlain and Mayfield in the collaboration. The list of collaborators included an up-and-coming young artist, Martice Smith II, and a Baltimore artist, Dion Pollard, inspired by the effort. Other artists involved were Erlene Flowers, Bonnye Brown, Lonnie Powell, Anthony High, Kim Cole, Keith Shepherd, Margaretre Gillespie, Yvette Williams, Ben Mercer, Sherman Boyd IV, Edwin Presswood, Veronica Sublette and Cpl. Gregory Powell of the Liberty (Missouri) Police Department. The works created in the group ranged in tone from highly provocative depictions warning about the negative consequences of violence to positive messages encouraging the safeguarding of the lives of children, the teaching of respect for life and the seeking of friendship. One poster declares, “African American culture is … music, art, dance, poetry” and “not guns!” The artists targeted their work to reach specific audiences. Some pieces were aimed at the people likely to perpetrate violence. Others sought to reach children, parents and the community at-large. The idea behind engaging these audiences with visual art was that it would be more attention-getting and memorable than words or slogans could ever be alone. "We hope the posters make it sticky," Chamberlain says of the anti-violence message.

A JOB NOT YET DONE Chamberlain says the group has been encouraged by the drop in the murder rate in Kansas City but thinks that the community still has significant work to do. Seventy-seven homicides is too many. "Our job is not done,” Chamberlain says. “We're still in the danger zone."

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As for the contribution that Artists for Life made to the effort to reduce gun violence, Chamberlain says that’s nearly impossible to know. What’s important is that the posters have helped put an anti-violence message front and center for more individuals. "I think it's got people thinking,” Chamberlain says. “People are thinking about their roles on some personal level." And there’s evidence that messaging can play a vital role in curtailing violence. For instance, in Chicago, an organization called Cure Violence is having success by treating violence as if it were an epidemic outbreak of infectious disease. The group trains violence interrupters and outreach workers to prevent shootings by cooling down and mediating conflicts. It also has outreach workers to identify and treat those most at risk to violence. But it’s the third plank of the group’s strategy – “mobilize the community to change norms”– that shares some of the same purposes as the Artists for Life effort. Cure Violence works to respond to every shooting, organize the community and spread positive norms that violence is not acceptable. It seeks to amplify the message that violence isn’t a normal part of daily life and that it’s a behavior that can be changed. The challenge of spreading positive norms is an issue that resonates well outside the city limits of Kansas City, Missouri. While the homicide rates in the urban centers of Kansas are significantly lower than that of Kansas City, Missouri, those places aren’t immune from the problem. In fact, Kansas tied for the nation’s 21st-highest black homicide victimization rate in 2012 (down from No. 7 in 2011), according to a report from the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group. Missouri ranked No. 1 with a homicide rate among black victims of 34.98 per 100,000 people.

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An Artists for Life poster hangs in the window of Brenda’s Thriftway Cleaners at 39th Street and Indiana Avenue. The group’s works ranged in tone from highly provocative depictions warning of the negative consequences of violence to positive messages about respect for life.

how the images got people talking. She ended up becoming a community coordinator of sorts for placing the posters around the city.

Whether broader violence-prevention efforts in Kansas City can continue to push the homicide rate downward is an open question. What has happened in Kansas City actually mirrors trends sweeping other major cities across the country. Trying to pin down definitive reasons for this decline in crime and violence is difficult.

One place where she’s seen the artwork make a difference is at Genesis School, a Kansas City, Missouri, K-8 school that lies in the 64130 ZIP code, an eight-square-mile area dubbed the “murder factory” from a 2009 series in The Kansas City Star. A lot of children live in places where shootings are not uncommon, and several students have lost family members to handgun violence.

Criminologists told The Washington Post this year that a variety of factors, including improved community policing strategies, have been contributing to the drop nationwide. Other factors at play included prison sentences keeping criminals behind bars longer, a changing drug market and aging populations that commit fewer crimes. “While local efforts may contribute, that the pattern is widespread tends to suggest global factors, not so much local initiatives,” James Alan Fox, a crime statistics expert and professor at Northeastern University, told The Post. But Janae Gaston-Bowers, a community activist who led a team of people that distributed the Artists for Life posters around Kansas City, says she’s seen the impact that the poster can have on individuals who see them. Bowers, a writer and poet, attended the Artists for Life Project’s public debut with her family in Kansas City last year and was impressed by the artwork. She contacted Chamberlain to get some of the posters to share at different events and was impressed with

When Bowers took the works of the Artists for Life Project to the school, she says it helped give students a way to talk about their own experiences and inspired them to write essays, songs and raps. “It made them think that there is hope for them and that there are people who care about their future and people who care whether they live or die,” Bowers says. The important thing now, she says, is that the community continues to harness the power of art to help shape people’s thinking, behavior and attitudes for the better. “This is something that’s going to be continued,” Bowers says. “It’s not just an event here or an event there.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE Energizing Others Against Violence What voices do you see being engaged in this story? Which of these voices would you consider to be unusual? What makes engaging unusual voices challenging in this situation? Starting where people are is an important part of exercising leadership. How would you assess the efforts of Artists for Life to start where people are in this story? When you think about challenges within your own community or organization, what unusual voices might need to be engaged to make progress? How could you more effectively start where they are?

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C A RVING A N ICHE

THE FORMULA FOR BUILDING A VIBRANT ARTS ECONOMY VA R I E S W I D E LY F R O M C O M M U N I T Y T O C O M M U N I T Y I N K A N S A S . BUT WHETHER YOU’RE IN A LARGE CITY OR A SMALL TOWN, THE BENEFITS GO WELL BEYOND JUST DOLLARS AND CENTS. BY PATSY TERRELL

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Bonnie Cameron practices in her Main Street music studio known as The Living Room in Hoxie, a city of about 1,200 in northwest Kansas. Cameron returned to her hometown from Germany, where she had been performing as a professional opera singer, to teach the arts. 59.

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More than half a million visitors have gone to the Walnut Valley Festival in the past four decades. Every third weekend in September, the population of Winfield more than doubles as approximately 13,000 people arrive for the five-day acoustic music event. Those visitors have an economic impact on the community that it otherwise wouldn’t see: All the town’s hotel rooms are booked, and restaurants and shops order extra products and hire extra help. The festival has been estimated to pump as much as $12 million into the town each year.

Kansas, drawing in audiences who spent another $73.2 million attending those events (excluding the cost of admission). The numbers can be even bigger in metropolitan areas. The advocacy group Americans for the Arts found that arts and culture events created an economic impact of $273.1 million for the Kansas City area and supported 8,346 full-time-equivalent jobs. Of course, in the big picture, the arts are just a small part of the state’s overall economic activity ($762 million or 0.53 percent in 2013). The number of people working in arts, entertainment and recreation in Kansas (15,500) is much smaller than other industries, such as health care and social assistance (168,600), manufacturing (162,800) and retail (144,100). But the sector has been a growing slice of the workforce, with jobs increasing 12.3 percent from 2011 to 2013, according to state figures.

The Walnut Valley Festival also features its own distinct culture. The campground swells with music lovers as people stream into town. Stages spring up among the tents and campers, and instrument cases are the accessory of choice, because almost everyone brings at least one musical instrument to jam by the campfire or to play on the campground stages. The four official stages host well-known professionals as well as up-and-comers.

It’s also hard to peg a number to the intangible benefits, such as enhanced community identity and vibrancy, that Winfield (population 12,300 in the 2010 Census) and even some smaller communities receive.

Sarah Werner, CEO of the Winfield Area Chamber of Commerce, says the festival gives the town more than just money. “It’s one of the things we’re known for. Not only does it contribute to the community in terms of financial impact, but it contributes to the culture of our town.”

HOW IT HAPPENS

As communities become more and more interested in how to distinguish themselves, having a unique event is a tremendous benefit. That culture attracts visitors who are likely to leave their money behind. Some studies show that the creation of a vibrant arts economy can provide meaningful financial benefits for a community. A 2007 study found that nonprofit arts and culture organizations spent $80 million throughout

But how exactly does a community begin developing a vibrant arts economy? The answer varies considerably from place to place. But people – individuals who step up to start something special or work with others to create it – are crucial to the formula for success. The Walnut Valley Festival didn’t start out hosting multiple international competitions and drawing people

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FROM LEFT: Mary Kay, an art instructor at Bethany College, says that the arts help foster empathy; Camryn Gourley, Emma Schamberger, Allie Gourley, Elyssa Rucker, Emily Bainter and Adleigh Ziegler practice improvisation in one of Bonnie Cameron’s arts classes. Cameron currently teaches 50 private students, conducts a community choir and hosts recitals, plays and small concerts in her studio.

from all 50 states and many foreign countries like it does now. One family’s leadership and ability to engage the community made all the difference. In the 1960s, local instrument maker Stuart Mossman was making the rounds of music festivals to sell his wares. He and a colleague thought it would be great to have a local festival and decided to approach businesses about putting up the money to create one. Bob Redford, who owned an insurance company, was the first person they approached. He liked the idea, thought it was a good investment and decided to make the entire outlay himself. It took about a decade for the festival to get into the black, and it required going to the bank for a loan after the first year to pay off the initial festival and get money to operate the next year. But the Redford family persevered. Rex Flottman, media director of the Walnut Valley Festival, says the festival owes part of its success to the small-town bankers who kept it going in those early years. “It would be really difficult to start something like this today,” he says. “You could with enough capital, but getting people to tie up that kind of money on a risky proposition like that … it would be tough.” The Redfords also engaged others to help create systems to grow and nurture the event. The community stepped up in a big way: Each festival requires 400 to 600 employees, and Flottman says there aren’t too many people in Winfield who haven’t been involved in some way. “We’re partners,” he says. “It would be real hard to accomplish something like this without that help. You’ve got to have a community behind you.”

However, having one person with a mission and the drive to mobilize a community can’t be underestimated. In Hoxie, Bonnie Cameron is teaching music to students as young as 5 and as old as 77. A professional opera singer, Cameron and her husband returned to her hometown from Germany, where she had been performing. Family ties brought her back, but she’s found a cause to champion. “The arts had almost completely died in Hoxie,” she says. Schools can’t afford much in the way of arts programs, and families are often so busy that they don’t make time for music lessons. “We’ve got to put the responsibility on the community to make sure the kids still have that opportunity even if they’re not getting it in school,” Cameron explains. “I try to be a realist, not an idealist. I feel like it’s something that won’t be resuscitated in the schools for a long time.” The community has been receptive. Cameron currently has about 50 private students, and about 60 people participated in a summer theater production. She also conducts a community choir and hosts arts events – dance recitals, voice recitals, plays and small concerts – at her Main Street studio, known as The Living Room. Her efforts have brought together adults as well as young people for performances and events as both performers and audience members. “I hope I’m helping give the community something to broaden horizons,” she says. Jodi Kennedy Rogers and her two girls have participated in all three of Cameron’s summer productions, and the daughters also take private voice lessons. Rogers says it has been a “true

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The Dewayn Brothers, a bluegrass band from Emporia, performs at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield last year. The festival officially started in 1972 and survived with the help of small-town bankers who kept the festival going in its early days. More than a half million people have attended the festival over the past four decades.

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DISCUSSION GUIDE Leadership Starts With You and Must Engage Others Where do you see individuals taking the initiative to lead in this story? What challenges do they face? To what extent do you see the effective engagement of others in this story? What are the consequences of ineffective engagement? How would you assess your own ability to take the initiative and engage others on a leadership challenge? Where are your strengths and where do you fall short?

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blessing” for the kids to have the opportunity and she can see a difference in them. “It’s a huge learning experience for them to be able to get up and have the confidence to perform in front of people,” Rogers says. Rogers says it has also been interesting to learn about her fellow townspeople. “You discover how much talent there is in the community that you didn’t realize,” she says. “Especially for a small community, where we all know each other, we learned we didn’t really know each other.” By seeing a new side of individuals, one gets a new perspective of the whole town. “We're a very small community, so every little bit counts,” Rogers says. She is thankful for the opportunities Cameron is bringing to Hoxie. “So many of us are helping her to achieve her goals because we can see what a positive influence her studio is on our community,” she says.

BUILDING STABILITY But the situation in Hoxie also points out a potential difficulty. What if the person who is the driving force decides to leave for some reason? What happens then? Can the event or business survive? In Peabody, the Main Street Program flourished under a director who had a lot of charisma, according to Marilyn Jones. The town hosted everything from Christmas music to historical tours. “She had so many good ideas,” Jones says. But the director

left, a business that owned 13 buildings in town pulled out and the political future of the Main Street Program changed. “If one person makes it and that person goes, then there’s a big void,” Jones says. But down the road in Cottonwood Falls, transition is afoot. For more than 15 years, the Emma Chase Café hosted live music jams on Friday nights, first in the street outside the café and then in a nearby building. Sue and Monty Smith decided to close the restaurant in late 2014, but the music is continuing. A number of things happened to make that possible. First the Smiths told people their intention to retire far enough in advance that there was some time to plan. The musicians who had played there were motivated enough to keep it going. “Coordinating the music continuation just sort of fell into my lap,” performer Annie Wilson says. “I recognized this as something that has been a big draw to our community and really put us on the map statewide, but was going to simply end unless somebody did something. Nobody else stepped up, and it didn’t seem like anything was going to happen, so I started to get involved.” She got advice from the Smiths and after meetings and negotiations learned that the city building they’d been using for indoor performances would be available. It’s occupied by an arts and crafts co-op, Prairie PastTimes, that the Smiths also started and managed. The artists have organized on their own to keep going and are partnering with the musicians for the Friday night music. The city has stepped in to do

some building repairs. In addition, the new restaurant owners at Keller Feed & Wine Co. are welcoming the musicians back for outdoor performances when the weather allows. Rent for the building is paid through donations. The Smiths offered continued use of their sound system, and some other volunteers have stepped up to help. Wilson prepared a guide with detailed photos and directions of all the logistics of setting up, breaking down, opening and closing. “Granted, there are many ifs in our current setup,” Wilson says. “We are depending completely on the viability of Prairie PastTimes and Keller Feed & Wine Co. We just have to hold our breath, think positive and hope everything works out – just about like everything else we do in life!”

MORE THAN MONEY: THE SMALL-TOWN PAYOFF As small communities struggle for population, the arts might be an opportunity. Lucas is one example. The Garden of Eden brings people from around the world to see S.P. Dinsmoor’s distinctive home and sculpture garden populated with grotesque concrete animals, spindly trees, human figures, an angel and other inhabitants that depict his vision of modern life in 1907 to 1928, the years his creation took shape. The site’s unusual vision motivated the Kohler Foundation, a Wisconsin-based foundation that has long supported the arts and education, to restore it along with the Miller’s Park museum and art gallery. This huge investment provided jobs in the community, and one of the

people who worked on the project decided to make his home in Lucas. “We made a significant investment in the Garden of Eden, but we do not share financial information,” says Terri Yoho, director of the Kohler Foundation. “While in Lucas, we employed several local people and we purchased as much as we could locally, as is our regular practice when working out of the area.” Erika Nelson, an artist who lives in Lucas and is on the board of the nonprofit that owns the site, says the arts are just one part of the economic fabric of Lucas. “The arts are one piston in a multicylinder engine, so they do help drive the town. But as with anything in a rural community, it can’t be the entire source.” That engine’s performance is enhanced, however, when the arts inject new energy into the community. Cameron, in Hoxie, believes music is giving students tools they can use the rest of their lives, tools that might not be available otherwise. “I can already tell a difference in them, in how they speak to adults, how they speak to their teachers. They are learning how to use their voices, how to present themselves and how to handle themselves in various situations,” she says. Creative expression allows people to see the world differently, says Mary Kay, an art instructor at Bethany College in Lindsborg. “Being able to imagine into other people's ways of thinking. The only way to be able to do that is to let go of yourself and step back so you see and can understand how other people work – to be empathetic. An artist can't make it if they're not empathetic. You have to be willing to step into another point of view,” she explains.

FROM LEFT: Shanda McDonald, a Shawnee, Oklahoma, musician, plays the fiddle in the Pecan Grove campground at the Walnut Valley Festival last year; The interior of the men’s room at Lucas’ Bowl Plaza is decorated with toy cars. Community members constructed the facility in 2008 because of a lack of public restrooms for visitors to a town of about 400 people. It was voted the second-best restroom in the country in a competition last year; Lucas was designated the “Grassroots Art Capital of Kansas” in 1996.

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Mary Kay paints in her Lindsborg studio, a converted elementary school outside of town. Kay says there are similarities between the processes of art and community leadership

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Kay, who lives in and works out of a converted schoolhouse, doesn’t hesitate to make the connection between the processes of art and the processes of community leadership. Artists naturally adopt alternative viewpoints, she says, and effective leadership does, too. “For leadership to be very good, it has to be very creative. You use what materials you have to put together new combinations to get a variety of expression.” The need for creative expression doesn’t wink out of existence at the edge of the city. Nelson moved to Lucas after buying her house over the phone while she was in Arizona. Cameron says that, although living in a small town isn’t always easy, she knows she is an example to young people there. “I can’t teach my students it’s OK to live in a small community if I complain that I can’t do everything here,” she says. “If they think they’re limited, they’ll never try things.” On the plus side, in some ways, a small-town environment makes it easier for Cameron to do what she’s doing. “Because it’s such a tight-knit community, the information is more accessible. I know if I lived in a larger city, my prices would be different and not everyone would have access – only the more privileged kids.”

ENCOURAGING ARTISTS While the benefits of a strong arts presence roll off the tongues of art supporters, not everyone in every community shares that enthusiasm. Some don’t believe the benefits are real, some think they’re too long term when there are more pressing issues to deal with and some think the arts should be privately supported. Few want to come out and say the arts aren’t important, but when looking at where to invest scarce dollars, it’s easy for critics to question the value of the arts when there are potholes to fix, schools to be supported and jobs to be cultivated. In these times when “no taxes” is a common cry among politicians, it’s hard to imagine a way to find public money for all the things a community wants, including the arts. Sometimes the arts end up falling by the wayside. In 2006, the Arts Council of Topeka closed its downtown office and laid off its staff after the City Council eliminated its funding. The cut was part of an effort

to reduce property tax rates in the city, and aid for the agency was shifted to a crime prevention program. This year, members of the Sedgwick County Commission signaled they might rethink whether to continue funding the arts. The arts can bounce back from such setbacks. In Topeka, for instance, a nonprofit organization, ARTSConnect, was founded to try to fill the void, aiding efforts such as First Friday Artwalks and the Topeka Mural Project. A first step is tapping resources that are already available. “You can augment a town, make it more friendly, but there also has to be an existing component, a base layer, a wellspring from which to draw,” Nelson says. Lindsborg, like Lucas, had a history of being an active arts community with its ties to Birger Sandzen and Lester Raymer. Some communities have buildings that can become gathering places. The Stiefel Theatre for the Performing Arts in Salina, the Fox Theatre in Hutchinson and the Granada Theatre in Emporia are all examples of beautiful venues that were restored through community efforts and now host a variety of events. In other cases, benefactors are inspired to leave legacies. The Bowlus Fine Arts Center in Iola, the Deines Cultural Center in Russell and the Baker Arts Center in Liberal are all products of local individuals who wanted to provide for the future. Each offers opportunities for cultural enrichment for their communities. Famous sons and daughters also provide arts launch pads. Fort Scott Community College has its Gordon Parks Museum, and Independence has the William Inge Center. In Hutchinson, poet William Stafford is honored as part of a large mural downtown, and his son has visited multiple times. When communities lack history or resources, drivers like the Redfords in Winfield and Cameron in Hoxie can provide the needed energy. Wherever it comes from, it results in a town where citizens feel involved. Jim Richardson, a National Geographic photographer who makes his home in Lindsborg, and Kay both say that their town embraces anyone who wants to make something – from professionals to hobbyists. “Everybody has a voice. That's profoundly important,” Kay says. “It doesn't matter what you're making – you're making something.”

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Erika Nelson, a Lucas artist, stands outside the Garden of Eden, a distinctive home and sculpture garden that recently underwent restoration. Nelson, who serves on the board overseeing the site, says the arts can help small communities prosper.

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Caroyln Kubis works in the Epic Arts pottery studio in Kansas City, Kansas.

MOLDING A S TAT E OF MAKERS AND DOERS

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The arts are just one of many priorities that Kansans can have. But the stories of two arts innovators suggest the arts can connect with more people and help foster an independent spirit of creation in the state.

By Sarah Caldwell Hancock

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Saralyn Reece Hardy, the Marilyn Stokstad Director of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, speaks with Todd Haralson during a KU Veterans Network event at the museum in February.

Advancing the arts can be difficult work. The arts certainly aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Or the No. 1 priority. The demands of our society call for people to pursue excellence in science, technology, engineering, math, business, medicine, social services, philanthropy, politics and countless other careers and callings.

What they found was disheartening. Simply put, having experts talk to groups about artwork and deliver information about artists, techniques and modern art didn’t work. “Understanding of modern art didn’t change. People didn’t move toward selfsufficiency. Teachers weren’t able to do the lessons they tried, and kids didn’t learn anything. The news was really bleak,” Yenawine says. “From an educational standpoint, it was a waste.”

The arts do have a place, though. More people could benefit from tapping into the artistic parts of themselves more often and from seeing the arts innovate and prosper.

One of the trustees introduced Yenawine to Abigail Housen, a cognitive researcher who was interested in aesthetic development. Her research in the 1970s had shown that viewers understand works of art in predictable patterns, which Housen identified as the five stages of aesthetic development. She didn’t necessarily plan to use her ideas to develop a curriculum, but Yenawine convinced her that her data could help develop a teaching method that could rescue art education.

Helping people be aware and understand the value of the arts is a leadership challenge. It’s one that two people who’ve exercised leadership in the arts – Philip Yenawine and Saralyn Reece Hardy – can relate to, and their experiences provide a kind of map to navigate this challenging terrain. Yenawine, who currently lives in Massachusetts, became a museum educator in the late 1960s because he thought art was an important marker of humanity and that it was necessary to our lives. The field of museum education as we know it was new, and he helped build it from lectures in an auditorium to the engaging, sometimes raucous school class visits or small-group hands-on activities we may think of now. He served as director of education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1983 to 1993. During this time, museum trustees asked if art education programs were working, so Yenawine and his staff conducted a thorough review and evaluation.

Researcher Karin DeSantis helped the team develop an approach that used a tightly scripted set of questions – “What’s going on in this image?” “What do you see that makes you say that?” “What more can you find?” – and a trained facilitator to guide viewers through carefully selected artworks. “It started out much more complicated – we tried to do too much too fast,” Yenawine recalls. “As we watched teachers teach what we gave them and students learn, we simplified and simplified and realized how long stage change takes. We

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Joel Escarpita Her primary interest at the Spencer is thinking about the museum as a setting for “new forms of investigation” of what she calls the “big, tough, divided issues” such as immigration, health, community development and economic disparity. “The idea that I might be able to stimulate a richer conversation around that with these amazing works of art that carry such power is very inspiring to me,” she says.

had ‘aha’s’ all along, but perhaps one of the biggest was when the first teacher said, ‘You know, kids are arguing with evidence in other classes.’” With that comment, Visual Thinking Strategies was born as a way to teach visual literacy in schools along with classroom behaviors such as listening to others and disagreeing without anger, after which true collaboration and critical thinking quickly followed.

Yenawine and Reece Hardy didn’t set out to model what the arts need to do to survive in Kansas and around the country, but they provide great examples of how to do it. Here are some lessons we can learn from their stories.

Not everyone immediately saw the value of Visual Thinking Strategies, but it has gained credibility over time. Yenawine, Housen and DeSantis created a teaching method that has enhanced not only art education, but also the creative thinking skills of students of all ages and even the diagnostic skills of medical students.

1. Confront what doesn’t work.

FIVE LESSONS TO LIVE BY

Yenawine had to face the difficult truth that love of and knowledge about modern art wasn’t translating into successful art education. It just wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. Reece Hardy says institutions have to work to become outward-looking rather than inward-looking places and to think strategically about partnerships that can enlarge the field by connecting the arts to other disciplines.

Saralyn Reece Hardy became director of the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 2005, the latest in a string of positions she has held in the arts. She had also been director of the Salina Art Center and director of museums and visual arts at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. Her experiences include working to establish and sustain an arts organization on the local level and policymaking on the national level, plus building on her interest in contemporary art, all of which have given her a unique perspective on the challenges and rewards in the arts.

2. Listen and collaborate. Reece Hardy says a necessary step is to take the time to “learn someone else’s language” rather than “living inside your own understanding.” In the

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context of a research university, it means the art museum needs to reach out to mathematics, physics and marketing, for instance, or offer broader perspectives by bringing in international artists in residence. In the rest of the state, it means connecting to community and becoming familiar with the many places in Kansas that are “wonderful and special.” “Artists and people all over Kansas feel like my community,” she explains.

3. Communicate value. Reece Hardy notes that those in the arts need to become better at talking about what they offer. “We need fierce defenders of arts in its singularity and things only it can do, that dimension to experience that is only explained by a poetic expression. You can’t really explain it away,” she says. She adds

Jim Richardson, pictured in Scotland, is a Kansas-based photojournalist known for his photography in National Geographic magazine and depictions of rural Kansas life. He and his wife, Kathy, opened the Small World Gallery in Lindsborg in 2002. See story on p. 58. (photo courtesy of Jim Richardson)

that art reaches across disciplines and is relevant and meaningful to agriculture and social questions, for example, and that art can be “continuously useful” in finding connections.

4. Work across factions. Reece Hardy also has plenty of experience navigating dissent. During her time in Salina, she learned to work with those who didn’t view the arts as a community priority. “I grew to love the people who disagree the most,” she says. “Truly living in a community means that you’re not segregated into interest groups – you need to sit by someone who’s quite different from you and share what about conceptual art is interesting to you, for example, and (have him or her) say, ‘Well, I don’t get it’ and have that conversation in a respectful way.”

“The beloved family farm image that we have of Kansas that is so much a part of our heritage: We have to figure out who we are now. … One of the opportunity gaps is clinging to a past that can’t come back in the face of massive change,” she explains. The arts can cultivate the capacity to honor the past, navigate massive change and contribute to necessary global, state and local dialogues.

5. Retain enthusiasm and capacity for wonder. Reece Hardy speaks eloquently about the role of the arts and how contemporary art helps us understand how we bring meaning to our lives and the lives of others. She has kept sight of what brought her to art in the first place.

We are ultimately a state of makers and doers, including people who quilt, weld, knit, crochet, build, sculpt, grow, paint, write, photograph, beautify and repair. We are musicians, crafters, woodworkers, gardeners and dancers. Our ancestors trod a road full of hardship as they scratched livings from the prairie, building towns, farms and ranches from nothing with hard work and perseverance. Along the way, they kept their eyes on the stars by expressing themselves and enhancing everyday life with artistry.

As we’ve seen in this issue of The Journal, the arts in Kansas do many things: They enrich our communities by adding economic vitality and quality of life. They bring people together in new ways. They foster empathy, critical thinking and creativity by helping us see connections and build meaning through the eyes of others. They help children and adults alike develop cognitive habits that better prepare them to lead. They inspire us. The arts face many difficulties, and budgetary and political realities present adaptive challenges for the arts in our state. But Kansans have a history of making progress under difficult circumstances. Another of the great benefits of the arts is how they help us preserve, remember and honor the state’s heritage while helping shape what we will become in the future. “Staying in it for the long haul is a Kansas value, because we’re connected to seasons and are a little closer to the land,” Reece Hardy says, and the arts are good at asking difficult questions about the pace of change and the role of tradition.

Kansans should recognize and connect with the state’s heritage by tapping into that independent spirit of creation and innovation in their daily lives.

DISCUSSION GUIDE This story identifies five key ways for arts advocates to broaden their reach in Kansas. To what extent do you believe these approaches are relevant to your own leadership work on the issues that you care about?

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“KANSAS: THE ELLIS ISLAND FOR BLACK PIONEERS” BY JANICE BURDINE

The end of the Civil War offered the promise of freedom to African Americans in the South. But freed slaves continued to face the grim realities of political, economic and social oppression. In hopes of seeing the promise of freedom fulfilled, thousands of them came to Kansas, inspired, in part, by the opportunity to homestead and the state’s association with the abolitionist John Brown. The Exodusters, a name that references the biblical exodus from Egypt, became the first large wave of black migration after the war, with an estimated 60,000 traveling to Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. Their journey to Kansas, a hopeful but often arduous one, is chronicled in a piece of art by Janice Burdine of Wichita, which was recently put on display in the Smoky Hills Room of the Kansas Leadership Center & Kansas Health Foundation Conference Center in Wichita.

“This was really our Ellis Island,” Burdine says. “For the freedmen, Kansas has been a special place.”

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FEATURED ARTIST Janice Burdine was born in Boley, Oklahoma, and reared in Wichita. She received her bachelor’s degree in art education from Wichita State University, and a master’s degree in art education and counseling certification from Emporia State University. She is a lifelong educator who has worked as an illustrator, printmaker, author and activist for change through education.

Burdine, a retired high school art teacher and counselor, painted a scene of about a dozen Exodusters making their way to their new homes. The image, based on Burdine’s historical research, is split up across six separate panels. The work makes use of “negative space painting,” in which the artist uses the black background of the canvas to portray the travelers. Each individual in the scene is distinctive. There’s a man driving a wagon whose face cannot be seen. The young man beside him is the group’s protector. The viewer makes eye contact with a baby being carried. A dog is there to sound the alarm for danger. A little girl sits on the back of the wagon beside a boy. She holds a flower symbolizing the “rebirth of all those dreams that have come to life with the kids in the back,” Burdine says. For Burdine, the story of the Kansas Exodusters is a story of civic leadership from the annals of history. They fled racial violence and oppression but could not escape it entirely in Kansas. Their travels were difficult and most arrived with very little money. But they settled and built up communities in rural areas and cities. Some of their communities, such as Nicodemus, a National Historic Site in northwest Kansas, and the Tennessee Town neighborhood in Topeka, remain with us. The story of the Exodusters shows how Kansas has long been a place that has symbolized hope. But it’s also a reminder that the journey to freedom and equality is challenging and difficult, and the road to get there is one that spans not only miles, but generations.

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FEATURED POEM

WHAT MAKES THIS WONDERLAND: BY LAURA LEE WASHBURN

that cat purring in the window while she watches you outside on the street, and when you hear her purr, and the dog smelling what dogs smell in the echinacea, everyone’s slow steady breath without effort, clear eyes and stars in the corners of eyes, the whole world of Borrowers and beasties, dog Knuckles and uncles and umbrellas for twosomes, spools, and cigar boxes, pictures cut from magazines, double-sided tape, fresh water or salt water pearls calling to the ants talking amongst the sunflowers, even the wheat whispering your names, the rabbit that nibbles clover and takes two steps away from the dog, the boy and the girl forever, the girl and the girl forever, indelible love, a slight breeze against the flag or the sail of the heart, baseball in Kauffman after seventh inning stretch, the old bard laughing in the green evening park, pinafores, ticket stubs, pasta al dente, butter cream icing on three layers of cake, a slow walk of an evening from the yellow house outward while holding hands holding the lead, and pinprick lantern lights, the firefly moon, over yonder a low growl, bay, owl hoot, train sound, the bejeweled elephants lumbering in the distance like bees, the promises you make and the promises you keep.

Laura Lee Washburn is the director of creative writing at Pittsburg State University and the author of “This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition” (March Street) and “Watching the Contortionists” (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as “Cavalier Literary Couture,” “The Carolina Quarterly,” “Ninth Letter,” “The Sun,” “Red Rock Review,” and “Valparaiso Review.” Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri. She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky.

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THE BACK PAGE ART GIVES US A WINDOW TO INCONVENIENT TRUTHS In “American Denial,” a PBS documentary on Myrdal’s work, researchers said Myrdal said the so-called Negro problem was actually an American civilization problem.

Americans aren’t simply in denial about racism, we have subconscious defense mechanisms that stall efforts to address it. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist and Nobel laureate, said as much in his groundbreaking 1944 study “American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.”

“It’s anything but a Negro problem,” cultural sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh said in the documentary. “It’s a condition produced fundamentally by exclusion, racism and discrimination, and the unequal distribution of resources.”

Our inability or unwillingness to adequately address inequality means we’ve allowed this issue to smolder. It erupts every few months, spewing Fergusons, Trayvon Martins, Paula Deens or secretly recorded fraternity songs.

Myrdal’s work sold 100,000 copies. Lawyers cited it in the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education schooldesegregation case. It laid the groundwork for subsequent integration efforts.

But in that void, the arts – namely the Harlem Renaissance and Kansans who helped shape it – have given the discussion space, language, power and direction. Artists have shouted what society has whispered or neglected to articulate.

The Harlem Renaissance had a similar, though wider reach. From it, people donned a new identity and summoned profound courage.

The Harlem Renaissance marked the beginning of the “New Negro Movement,” intended to elevate the black condition from social disillusionment to racial pride via protest and affirmation.

Confronting the challenges of the civil rights movement – facing barbed wire-wound baseball bats in Selma, Alabama, 50 years ago – might have been impossible but for the Renaissance’s inspiration and social consciousness.

Some of the movement’s brightest lights – Gordon Parks, Oscar Micheaux, Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes – hailed from Kansas.

That tradition endures through the work of The Kansas African American Museum’s Queen Mother and benefactor, Dr. Samella Lewis; James Pate’s ”Kin Killin’ Kin” anti-gang exhibition touring the country (the museum wants to bring it to Wichita); and culture-conscious hip-hop such as Public Enemy.

Consider Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” where he discusses progress’ difficulties:

African Americans have engaged the arts for generations in a quest for liberation. In this work, we find the little hopes and tragedies about who we are and who we aren’t as Americans.

“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, and boards torn up.” Hughes, raised in Lawrence, describes how the mother somehow managed to climb.

Myrdal’s dilemma still haunts us. But in the arts, we have a forum to discuss vividly the tough interpretations and inconvenient truths society might have us ignore; to dismantle carefully constructed stories we tell ourselves about America and equality.

“So, boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps, cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” In Brooks’ poem “The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel,” the Topeka native offers a glimpse of urban fatalism.

Mark E. McCormick is the executive director of The Kansas African American Museum in Wichita.

“We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.”

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“Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.” – Twyla Tharp dancer, choreographer and author

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