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Meaning or McTown?

Maryo Ewell
Colorado Council on the Arts

Summer Institute for Arts Management, June, 2002
Wake Up Call

The year was 1948. My phone rang. Wakelin McNeil, 4-H Ranger, was on the line and he said, There are 9 people from rural Wisconsin who took up my offer for 4-H leaders to learn creative writing.

"I said, 'I wish I'd known they were coming today. I'm pretty busy.'

'One of the women has 13 children.'

'A farm woman with 13 children has time to come to Madison and talk about writing?'

'She's here,' he said.

'All right, I'll see them right now. Where?' …

I found the 9 people in a hot room that looked out on the slope down to Lake Mendota. There were 8 woman and one boy. The boy was about 18 years old. One of the women was tall and gray, two were young, one was fat and jolly, one was quiet and serene, one was dark and small, two were middle-aged. They waited for me to say something, and as I paused a moment looking at them…I forgot that they had come to Madison to talk about the technical processes of creative writing. They became, instead, a symbol of people I had encountered in my wanderings, people who knew a wordless appreciation of the theater that was life.

Then I said to the 8 ladies and the one boy: 'You are like a group of my neighbors when I was a kid down in Kansas.'

The tall, gray one said: 'You remind me a little bit of a neighbor of mine up in Manitowoc County. He's a farmer. Not really a very good farmer.'

'Why did you come?'

'I don't know exactly. Except that we've heard that you want people to write about their own places and the folks they know well. I think I could do that.'

I said to them: 'Tell me about yourselves. Where did you come from and what kind of places are they?'

And then began one of the most incredible experiences I ever had. These 9 persons stayed at the University for three days; and every day about 9:00 in the morning we would start talking together. And as we talked our lives and the struggle in them emerged to lie against the whole fabric of our native places; and as we talked, hour after hour, a kind of fantastic play that was like life itself began to emerge and to encompass us all within within its spaceless and formless self. There were times when we would speak, not as ourselves, but as imaginary characters that grew from our talk of people and events that were as real as the earth itself. The whole affair was a kind of dramatic ecstasy in which we were both the actors and the audience, the dancers and the music.

When the three days were over, it was as though a kind of dream had ended, with no more explanation than that with which it had begun. Then we awoke suddenly and realized that we had hardly mentioned the processes of writing at all and that, instead of a partly completed manuscript tucked in pocket or purse, we had only a confused but terribly exhilarating sense of something that had stirred our lives.

When the group was ready to leave Madison, I said: 'I have met with hundreds of groups like this one, and I have seen hundreds of plays, but I have never had a deeper sense of theater than we have had together.'

The tall, gray lady said: 'I think it was because we all had something to express, and we did express it, and maybe the memory of it is somehow better than the written play.'

'I wish there were more persons like yourselves.'

'Mr. Gard,' said the tall, gray lady, 'there are hundreds and thousands of rural
men and women who live on the land and love the land and who understand the true meaning of the seasons and man's relationship to man and to his God.'

I said: 'If that is so, the plays they send to me don't reflect such an appreciation.'

She replied that she thought one reason the plays reflected little poetric appreciation of the area was because everything was made to seem too complex, too technical, too difficult. She said there must be a great, free expression. If the people of Wisconsin knew that someone would encourage them to express themselves in any way they chose, if they knew that they were free of scenery and stages and pettinerss that plays we do seem so full of, if they knew that someone would back them and help them when they wanted help, it was her opinion that there would be such a rising of creative expression as is yet unheard o in Wisconsin, and it would really all be a part of the kind of theater we had had these past three days, for the whole expression would be of and about ourselves." [Grassroots Theater p 214-6]

This book, Grassroots Theater, was written fifty years ago by Robert Gard. Gard worked for the University of Wisconsin. Although he was trained as a playwright, he did not work for the theater department; he worked for the College of Agriculture. His job was to help every Wisconsinite who wished to write, to realize their potential as a writer.
This may seem strange to you: what did this have to do with Agriculture?

To answer this question, I need to go back another 50 years from when Gard wrote that. Robert LaFollette was Governor of Wisconsin. His friend Charles Van Hise was President of the University of Wisconsin at the same time. Together, they strove to create a public university that truly belonged to all of the people. "The boundaries of the campus are the boundaries of the state," was the slogan of the "Wisconsin Idea." No Wisconsinite should be denied access to a university education in any course of study because she lived too far from Madison, or because he farmed and could not leave the farm most months. WHA radio, "oldest station in the nation," was created to enable people to study at home. Correspondence courses were pioneered by the university in 1906. By 1912, nearly 100 additional faculty members were hired just to keep up with the number of correspondence students - and to conduct on-site classes for these students in various regions of the state throughout the year. LaFollette and Van Hise linked the idea of a well-educated citizenry to strong, participatory grassroots involvement in self-government. This was the culture of the University for some 60 years: that whatever a person's talent, the University could help. Of the arts Van Hise said, "I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state; I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him…." Later, in 1925, President Glenn Frank said, "There's a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama… The arts are vital, if in the years ahead we are to master instead of being mastered by the vast, complex and swiftly moving technical civilization."

The power of the Wisconsin Idea was the linking of creative expression to participatory, grassroots self-government. All citizens must be provided opportunities to think, to discuss, to fulfill their personal talents (as President Van Hise said). All citizens must not merely consume life but participate in the making of it (as President Frank said). Then Wisconsin would show the United States what a democracy could truly be - for the people, yes, but of and by the people.

So for much of the 20th century, then, the Extension and Agricultural Extension activities of the University included the arts alongside assistance in milk production techniques, engineering, ecosystems management. Gard - and by 1972, the 27 other artists who included children's drama specialists, Norwegian folk music specialists, church organ specialists, choral singing specialists, choreographers, composers, and more - Gard spent his career trying to fulfill the Wisconsin Idea by helping people write.

I tell you this for several reasons. First, because Gard and many others who worked in the Agricultural Extension service in the United States especially during the first half of the 20th century are some of our "all the arts for all the people" ancestors. And just as we need to know who our genetic ancestors were, to better understand ourselves, it is important to know some of our arts ancestors, to better understand what we do and most important, why we do it. The second reason is because tomorrow morning you will hear from E'Vonne Coleman who is giving the fourth Robert Gard Lecture, so now you know a little bit about who Gard is, as context for what E'Vonne will say. By the way, Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America, the book I read from, was reprinted, and its royalties help to support the Gard lecture, and please feel free to purchase one at the desk - not just to support the lecture, but because it is a thrilling narrative that links the personal creativity of each American, the place where he or she lives, and the urgent nature of the work that all of us in this room have chosen to do. It is an incredibly contemporary book and I was honored to be asked to write the new introduction, placing it in contemporary context. I think it's one of those books that ought to be on every arts administrators' shelves, along with Arts Extension's Fundamentals of Local Arts Management. But anyway. So the third reason I'm talking about Gard is because what they were trying to do via the Wisconsin Idea is the context for what I'm wrestling with these days, as a person who has, like you, devoted her life to this kind of work. Remember the Wisconsin Idea; I'll come back to it - creativity linked to democracy.

Now I need to tell you is that I'm Robert Gard's daughter. I can't say that I had the normal childhood that every kid seems to long for. I remember my tenth birthday, for instance.

I had four friends over and my folks were very mysterious about what was going to happen. When my friends arrived, we were led to the back yard. Three large pieces of cardboard had been propped up against trees - they read, Act One, Act Two, Act Three. We were told that the name of the play was to be "The Diamond in the Corn." We were provided with a big piece of quartz. We were provided with a box of old clothes. We were told that we had one hour, and that all of our parents would be over to watch the play at 4:00. Of course, we invented and produced a play. As I recall, the play ended ambiguously: we searched for the diamond in the corn, but never found it. I realized - but only after about 30 years had passed - that my parents were teaching me to embrace creativity, to embrace a new way of thinking, in the most ordinary of day-to-day events. Why can't a birthday party be a play?

This metaphor has stuck with me all these years and is getting more and more important to me. I think that we are at an incredible time in human history, in cultural history and cultural histories. We're at that strange moment, I think, where we know that everything is changing but we don't know what it is changing to and we don't know what things mean, yet.

Birthday parties? What do they mean? Remember that old joke: a fellow is proudly showing an ax to a buddy. "That's my grandfather's ax," he said. "Gosh," said his friend, "that's in beautiful shape for such an old ax." "Oh, I had to replace the head a couple of times. And I replace the handle every five years or so. But I sure am proud of it - to be the third generation in my family to use that old ax." How on earth do you understand meaning? Or devise an appropriate response to what you think you understand?

Just take recent world events of the past few months, for instance. Ten years ago, we all thought we knew what "warfare" was all about. There was a clearly defined "enemy" and that "enemy" was generally a distinct national government or a group of national governments. Not so any more. But the US is applying much old methodology to a new situation these days.

In fact, what is "nationalism" any more? Think about the Olympics. There was a German changing his citizenship and skiing for Spain. Russian coaches for the American skaters. China participating at all. Yet for the now-famous figure skating competition you had blocs of judges from Russia, Ukraine, Poland and China voting for the Russian pair, and judges from Canada, Germany, Japan and the US voting for the Canadian pair. Looks like the Cold War to me. Old methodology, new situation.

Or what is "ethnicity," even? In past census polls in the US, you selected your ethnicity from among 6 categories - 5 racial groups plus "other." In this past census, you could check more than one category. Let me quote Kenneth Prewitt at the New School for Social Research in New York. "Six different categories produce sixty-three different permutations and combinations, since Hispanic-ness as an ethnicity stands outside that classification, it's Hispanic-non-Hispanic times sixty-three, that's 126 different racial and ethnic groups. Once you've gone there, there's no stopping. The Arab-Americans want to be their own racial group. The Chaldeans want to be their own racial group. Who's to say they shouldn't be? If we can have 63, why can't we have more? What is a race, anyway, for heaven's sakes? The biologists don't think it means anything. The anthropologists don't think it means anything. So who's to say we shouldn't create whatever kind of small racial groups we want to in this society?" And of course, in years past, the ratio of one group to the other, per the census, has guided much public policy, including the allocation of public funds. Uh oh, what will guide us now? There's a looming crisis of old methodology, new situation.

So the world has changed, but systems for responding to the changes aren't there any more. Even at the micro level we can see this.

In my small town, you'll see American flags everywhere, from huge ones over the entrances to town to small ones on car antennae - but the voter turnout this past fall was the smallest it has ever been. Yet we were all taught that the essence of living in a democracy was the right to vote. You'd have thought that people who really wanted to express their patriotism would have flocked to the polls this fall. Apparently voting isn't linked to patriotism any more. Yet many people old and young, Anglo and non-Anglo, rich and poor, wanted to make some statement about the war. What is the only model we have that truly brings such a diversity of people together in a common response? , Well, sports. It brings people together - even for a brief and unimportant moment - and we have learned that. So when we want to express something in common with our neighbor, however different he is from me, we behave as though it were the Super Bowl. I suspect a lot of people realize that this is a pretty shallow way of articulating patriotism. But, it's all we have got as a model now. Old methodology.

Similarly, the "corporate model" is the defensible way to get things done these days. Even government agencies' long-range plans tend to refer to their former "constituents" as their "customers." In the corporate world, there are tangible things you can measure - number of customer, numbers of shares sold, profit over loss, dollars returned to shareholders. And it seems relatively simple to evaluate. Profit is good. Loss is not good. So the government and non-profits turn to this model to describe themselves and their work. But using the model lock, stock and barrel doesn't make sense for the government - which is supposed to equalize basic services to everyone as a social good - or for the non-profit world - whose domain is the quality of human life. But in the absence of new ways of evaluating our work, we fall back on the available model. Old methodology.

We are all exceptionally busy people, and it is much, much easier to deal with things that are clear-cut. Dealing with consumer "brands" is easy; why not respond to our country as a brand - who has the time to get involved? Why not exactly emulate the corporate model - who has the time to insist on appropriate vocabulary and evaluation categories when there is a simpler, black-and-white way to go? So there may be new meanings, but we can't respond to them because there isn't a new methodology.

We ask, what's wrong with definable, predictable, identifiable, measurable?

Then we often ask:

Why should I get involved with the redefining, the unknown, the qualitative, the time-consuming, the messy?

My answer is simple. Because if we don't, we abrogate our commitment to our neighbors, to our communities, to the notion of living in a democratic society. "Massachusetts" is more than a brand, isn't it? "Northampton" is something more than a marketing concept, isn't it? "Business" is more than making profit at any cost, isn't it? Human beings are complex wholes and as such are more than "customers," aren't they? "Representative government" is more than having the right to talk but not the responsibility to listen, isn't it?

I believe that it is absolutely imperative to re-introduce the notion of meaning into public life. In the absence of articulated meaning, we fall back on sports behavior to substitute for citizenship. Brands, marketing, and bottom line become the Esperanto - the generic currency - of public life. The opposite of meaningful, I believe, is generic. And we can too easily, not even knowing it, move from McDonalds to McNorthampton to McMassachusetts to McGlobe to McHuman.

Perhaps you see now why I am talking about this stuff at an arts gathering. For who better to be articulators, testers, stimulators, redefiners of public meaning than artists and arts organizations? Who better to raise ideas? Big ideas? And help us arrive at new ways of thinking about the new big ideas?

Dear heaven, you may be saying, why is she laying this on us? I have enough on my hands to get the shows hung or produced, the staff managed, the audience members into the house, the funds raised just to keep the doors open! Of course I would like to redefine public life but I'll do that after I come back from my 10 meetings this week! After I hire a new financial manager! After I finish the grants and final reports I need to write! After I die!

But that is, in some ways, the problem. The arts sector has done a very, very good job in the past decades becoming institutionalized in the best sense. We do the shows. We're at those meetings. We've raised the money for that financial officer. We're credible enough to get those grants. We are often invited to be part of community marketing efforts, we attract money and political support and audiences as never before, we are part of the concept of "livable cities," we are becoming skilled in making the political process work for us. We have succeeded. And we surely do not want to lose the credibility that we have struggled so hard to gain.

Yet as we have become institutionalized, as we have become a "sector," as we have become more credible, the resources stakes have risen. We need more money to keep the doors open. We need more political goodwill to build a facility. And as we have struggled to do that we have often done it at the expense of other groups in the community against whom we have had to compete for increasingly scarce resources of money, goodwill, volunteers' time, strung-out schedules of prospective audience members. We are, in fact, segregating ourselves from our communities, even, ironically, as the idea of "more arts for all the people" is becomingly an increasingly accepted slogan.

And as we become increasingly segregated, we compete harder. We seem to devote more time and resources for a smaller percentage of return, whether the return is measured in memberships, grant money, or audience members. "Methodologies," then, become the attractiveness of the brochure, the location of the building, and the business savvy of the CEO, and "meaning" becomes relative income, relative audience size, or diversity of audience.

Is this "meaning?" Is this how you want to evaluate your work - in other words, is this how you ultimately want to be judged?

Many of you may know that the RAND corporation - a think-tank that tackles policy questions on many economic and political fronts - has just published a huge study funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. It looks at the future of the performing arts in the US. In a nutshell - quite unfair to the authors, so you may want to download it for yourselves from RAND's website - in a nutshell, the researchers have stratified performing arts organizations into the small groups with budgets under $100,000, the medium, and the very large groups like the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The researchers believe that 20 years from now, the biggest groups will still be around, though they will be spending an increasing amount of their budget on advertising, securing blockbuster shows, emphasizing big-name stars, and presenting relatively conservative material to draw the large audiences they must have. The researchers believe that the grassroots groups, used to making do on volunteer labor and used to scrounging for every penny, mostly local pennies, will still be there. But they believe that the middle group is at serious risk. They now tend to have audiences that are the "traditional" arts audiences, meaning, largely Anglo, well-educated, aging people. They tend to have budgets dependent on outside money. They often own buildings with mounting costs. RAND predicts that in the years ahead, many will be unable to adjust (find the new methodology) to the changing demographics and economics and will simply disappear.

Now, very interestingly, RAND notes that the one group of mid-range arts organizations whose audience composition is actually changing to include diverse people (including younger people), and which seem to be getting a different handle on securing resources, are those groups which value their community, and community service, as highly as they value the producing of art. Bill Moskin, writing for Americans for the Arts, goes even a little further in his study of certain "effective" arts organizations - they not only serve their community, but their art-making responds to the community and in return, the community passionately "owns" the arts organization. I just read comments from an officer of the Knight Foundation contrasting two arts organizations after Hurricane Andrew in Florida. One called her and said, "Our building was just blown down, but I think we have skills that can help this community heal. What can we do?" The other called her and said, "The hurricane is causing such devastation that our audiences will be affected and we may not survive the year - can you provide us with emergency funding?" The officer from the Knight Foundation observed that the thinking of the first organization - offering their skills to the community - is the kind of thinking that makes them important in the community. The thinking of the second organization makes them unimportant in the community when there are many equally good causes to support and fewer resources. Indeed, this second organization did eventually close its doors, and she believes that in the twenty-first century, "what can the community do for me?" thinking will be the predictor of organizational death.

These three snippets suggest to me that, to flourish, arts organizations may have to re-think their role in their community. Deep relationship to the community may be part of - maybe the core of - the new methodology. All arts organizations will probably need to change somehow.

For some, this may mean bringing their art-making and art-producing skills to bear on questions of difference, fear, the meaning of family, the meaning of place, the meaning of roots, the issues of growth.

For others, this may mean changing their notion of community work from one of "outreach" (which, after all, tends to imply that "I've got it, and you will be better off if I provide it for you") - from outreach to a genuine inclusiveness. A shift from "for" to "with" and "of." At a recent Grantmakers in the Arts conference, the director of a major community foundation said, "Art outside the context of everyday life, art within a consumption model rather than a participation model, is what makes art not as important as I think all of us would like it to be in the country." (Remember what President Frank said in 1925: "There's a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama…"?)

For others, this may mean adding the notion of community art to their spectrum of "real" art, recognizing that community art is much more than art made by non-professionals, but an art form with its own aesthetic, its own standards of excellence, a people's knowledge of themselves and their place, expressed through the techniques of art forms.

For others, this may mean working closely with players in the for-profit sector and the so-called unincorporated sector - the people who work in community theater or play music informally in rock and roll bands - on behalf of ideas bigger than the artificial distinction among sectors.

For others, this may mean allowing new kinds of people into their decision-making structure, even recognizing that this may change the nature of the organization. Or changing structure altogether and inventing new processes for making decisions.

In short, whether artistic, programmatic, or structural, we need to look at something bigger. It is instrumental, yes - survival techniques. It is idealistic, too - the arts' response to a changing world.

A philosopher from Northwestern University, Baker Brownell, wrote this in1950, well aware of how the post-atomic-bomb world was changing. I find it very pertinent now, fifty years later:

Ours is a culture of displaced persons. It is tattered with escape and wandering, and as such is a culture founded on being lost…. What [Hitler] did to millions in the concentration camps, and [Stalin] to tens of millions in the mass deportations, the Western world in general does less dramatically but as effectively to hundreds of millions, swarming homelessly to centers of vicarious and secondary culture. [President Frank, where are you???] Their lives die out, love rots, and hope is replaced by avid stimulation. In all this, art may become merely one of the seducers to death. Or it may become the insight of life and survival itself.

This means working in a different kind of arts world from what most of us know. It is a world in which we define, and work towards, human ends - meaningful individual and collective life - rethinking, maybe even letting go of, the means of recent decades - means like building performing arts centers or "professionalizing" the arts. (Remember the Hurricane Andrew example I used a few minutes ago? Well, the end of her story was that the first organization, who lost their building, realized as they worked in the community afterwards, that the building was actually standing in the way of their mission, and they did not rebuild.) It is a world in which we train artists about their disciplines AND about how communities work AND how they can contribute to community-building. It is a world in which we don't pit the arts against health care or homeless shelters or literacy programs as is the case now. It is a world in which we think about the for-profits as groups to plan and work with, rather than as organizations with a responsibility to support us, the non-profits.

This has a lot to do with what we call cultural planning, and many of your groups have probably been involved in designing cultural plans in your communities. In the first wave of cultural planning in the US, resulting plans tended to be predictably about certain things, like better coordinating calendars and fundraisers, or designing a common arts advocacy campaign. Typically, the plans would identify the logical group to take the lead on getting each of these needs met.

In the second wave of cultural planning, going on right now, plans tend to identify "gaps" in the community. They might create a new organization just for the purpose of filling the gaps, and the arts groups help support the new organization. For instance, the new arts council in the Silicon Valley has two purposes - more arts education in the community, and creating new shared cultural facilities in the community - with a ten-year time horizon to achieve these things, at which time it will dissolve.

But there is a new type of "cultural planning" that we will start to see, I think, and these plans will get beyond the notions of the non-profit arts as a sector unto itself. The new type of cultural planning will recognize that the arts are also means to a bigger end, a human end. (And, incidentally, this has nothing to do with compromising quality; indeed, it may actually raise the quality bar - but that's another talk.) The cultural sector will work with other sectors and will address questions like:

· What are the big values that will define our community of the future? In other words, what will it mean for someone to say, "I am from Gunnison, or Northampton, or Durham?" Remember in the selection I read from Grassroots Theater the work of the three days together began with Gard's question "Tell me [about your communities] and what kind of places are they?" What kind of places are they? This is not a trivial question. Try it for yourself. Can you give a deep answer, an answer that means something, to that question? Yet, that question is the crux of developing a meaningful future for your place.
· A second question might be: What should individual life be like? Will everyone's creativity and desire to participate be valued equally, for instance? If that were true, what might we see in our community different from how things are now?
· What should public life be like? Can the arts be a part of enhancing citizen participation in the community dialogue? What will be the nature of public places? Of public symbols?
· How can we as a group, whose currency is creativity, work on behalf of seeing that kind of community become a reality?
· What changes of attitude, aesthetics, programming, or structure does each of us need to make, personally and organizationally, to see that kind of community become a reality?

Only when we start discussing questions such as these can we - not just we as arts people, but we as citizens in a society that presumably values democracy - start making real headway. An organizational theorist whom I know says that when we tackle questions in difficult times we tend to ask narrower, tactical questions rather than broader, meaning-oriented questions. By asking "how" at times of crossroads, we only trivialize who we are and what our potential importance is. Instead, we assume our real power by asking "what" and "why."

I don't know about you, but I am thinking a lot about democracy these days. My agency was told recently by someone who works for the governor that not only may we not talk to the press about the arts situation in Colorado, but we must stop the arts constituency from talking to the press. This person was also concerned that too many people were talking to their elected officials about the arts and she felt that her office should approve advocacy for the state's budget bill. In a newspaper article three days ago in the Denver Post, I read that President Bush is about to approve snowmobiling in Yellowstone Park, reversing a decision of the Clinton administration. Bush had postponed implementing the Clinton administration's decision, in order "to give the public more opportunity to be heard." Of the 330,000 public comments, 270,000 were opposed to snowmobiling - but that, apparently, really doesn't matter at all. I ask, where is government "of" and "by," as well as "for," the people?

I fear that our representative form of government, our notion of democracy, is trembling. What is our democracy? How can we ensure that it remains healthy? I personally believe that this is the most important question that any American faces right now. Everything else follows from that.

The Wisconsin Idea linked the advance of knowledge, healthy economies, strong communities, and creativity to the end of a truly participatory, democratic society that starts at the grassroots. I believe that each of us must do everything in our power to build a democratic society, starting at home. We as arts people may have one of the most important roles to play. Can we help start the discussion of what our places are like? Should be like? Can we help figure out ways to move democracy forward at home? The arts project funded by the Ford Foundation, "Animating Democracy," may be one of the most important arts endeavors happening right now (visit www.artsusa.org to read about some of these projects). Can we help create a community where people know what it means to live there, a community that isn't McTown, where people aren't McHumans? Remember, as Brownell said, in a time of great transition, "the arts can be seducers to death," or "the insight of life and survival itself."

It all begins at home. It probably means changing how you think about your work. It probably means changing something, or some things, about your arts organizations. But, is it more important to put our creativity to work in the defining, and redefining, of democracy, or to showing a 5% growth in audiences this year? Articulating meaning, or at least, surfacing these discussions, in your place, is where it all must start.

You can be givers of meaning, and thus, givers of life. And if that is so, then you are the diamonds in the corn that I have been searching for all these years.

Nothing less than democracy is at stake.

Sources

Brownell, Baker, The Human Community, Harper and Bros., 1950

Gard, Robert, Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America, University of Wisconsin Press, 1955; reprinted by University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

Grantmakers in the Arts, "Beyond Art: A Community Perspective," panel discussion, http://www.giarts.org/library_additional/library_additional_show.htm?doc_id=295629

Howe, Frederick, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912

McCarthy, Kenneth and Kimberly Jinnett, A New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts, RAND Corporation, 2001

Moskin, Bill and Jill Jac,son, "From Stability to Flexibility: Relevance, Excellence and Cultural Participation," Americans for the Arts Monograph, vol3, no 2, June 1999

Prewitt, Kenneth, Keynote Address, Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, http://www.giarts.org/library_additional/library_additional_show.htm?doc_id=295634

RAND Research Brief, "The Performing Arts: Trends and Their Implications," http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB2504/, 2001; the longer version is also available on the site.

http://www.americansforthearts.org/AnimatingDemocracy/