Backstage

In a tacit admission that the nation's arts organizations face a daunting yet similar set of challenges, Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit arts advocacy group, and the MetLife Foundation have announced a series of 20 national arts forums to take place from coast to coast during the remainder of 2005. The goal of the MetLife Foundation National Arts Forum series is to identify as many major shared issues as possible and, more important, the strategies being developed to tackle them.

"What we really hope will come out of this is a real picture of the arts landscape we're grappling with," said Gary Steuer, vice president and executive director of the Arts & Business Council of Americans for the Arts. "It's an industry with dramatic changes taking place, such as a generational change in which philanthropists -- people traditionally 'for' the arts -- are retiring and dying. We have to ask what we're doing to educate, inspire, and build support from the next generation of philanthropists. It's a situation in which major and minor foundations are shifting focus away from the arts and, due to corporate mergers, where there's been a reduction in access to, and in the diversity of, corporate arts support. There's a lot to discuss."

The purpose of the forums -- in Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Denver, Hartford, Houston, Indianapolis, Miami, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, St. Louis, St. Paul, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. -- is not so much to discuss locality-specific issues as to explore how shared concerns might yield solutions that cross geographical boundaries.

"While the dialogues will obviously be somewhat different in different communities, what we're really aiming for is to identify overarching issues," Steuer said, adding that the hope is "to bring all the themes together into one published piece that will really make this a national dialogue." For now, summaries of the forums will appear on the website of Americans for the Arts, http://www.americansforthearts.org along with an interactive section encouraging more dialogue within the greater community.

The forums represent the MetLife Foundation's largest collaboration to date with Americans for the Arts. According to Steuer, when the Arts & Business Council and Americans for the Arts merged last February, the MetLife Foundation saw great potential for the program, nearly a decade old, to be significantly expanded and enriched.

With each forum produced by an affiliate member of the Arts & Business Council, Americans for the Arts, or both, the process is far from cumbersome, said Steuer: "Each one has to submit its topic or topics for approval before we go ahead, since we prefer avoiding these forums as vehicles so local in nature that it isn't relevant to anyone else. But, however, we do look forward to dialogue with different local spins." (The New York City forum was slated for Wed., May 18, at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian.)

As an example, Steuer cited an upcoming forum in San Francisco, which he says will likely revolve around a recent and controversial study issued by the RAND Corporation. Called "Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts," the report questions whether the traditional arguments employed by arts advocates to advance their cause are still effective.

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