80 stories by "Diane Ragsdale"
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was givi…
This is the sixth post in a series of posts focused on the course on beauty that I am coordinating/teaching for business students at UW-Madison. In the fourth week of the Beauty Class I w…
This post discusses how the students prepared for a visit to the contemporary art museum; their three-hour visit to the museum and the exercises they completed there; and the portfo…
For those following the Beauty Class, this post is about the first two portfolio assignments. One of the primary methods of learning in this course is the creation of portfolios in…
Art is a different value system. Like God, it fails us continually. Like God we have legitimate doubts about its existence but, like God, art leaves us with footprints of beauty. We sense th…
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about the course in beauty that I am teaching this term at UW-Madison, under the auspices of the Business School and the Bolz Center for Arts Admi…
In a week I will be heading to Madison, Wisconsin to teach a 12-week course in beauty for undergraduate business majors. The course is aimed at helping students cultivate an aesthetic se…
A couple months back I was asked to give a talk on civic leadership to a group of arts leaders participating in the fantastic UK-based Clore Leadership Programme. We tend to take for granted…
Devon Smith has written a smart, provocative post on a debate she engaged in at the recent Americans for the Arts Conference in Nashville. It's called We Should Allow Failing Arts …
There is an arts story that has been nagging at me the past couple months. It’s the recent announcement of the revised plans for the NYC Performing Arts Center planned for the forme…
Doug Borwick has a new post (inspired by comments made by Lyz Crane at the Creative Placemaking Summit) on the "central disconnect" between arts organizations and community engagement. Th…
Last week I gave a brief talk in Edinburgh (at an event sponsored by Mission, Models, Money) for a small gathering of leaders in the arts and culture sector. The aim was of the meeting was t…
Happy New Year! This is a condensed and slightly adapted version of a short talk I gave in October at an event called Blowup: Innovation in Extreme Scenarios, hosted by a hub organization ca…
Recently, Nina Simon has written a smart post taking aim at the "Need versus Want" distinction often used to describe the role of (nonprofit) arts organizations"as in, "Our job is not to giv…
A few weeks back I was invited to attend the 2013 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in Philadelphia as a Conference Blogger. I joined Barry Hessenius (Barry’s Blog) and a whole tea…
A couple months back I was one of a number of people interviewed for a research project of Grantmakers in the Arts. The interview was aimed at understanding my influences as a funder (when I…
Last week, over on New Beans, Clay Lord wrote a post in which he mentioned the release of a new report on the salaries at arts agencies and used some of the findings, as well as some pers…
A few days ago, while doing research, an article caught my attention. It was written in 1936 and it was about the birth of Theatre Arts magazine twenty years earlier (in 1916). Here…
A couple weeks back I gave a talk in Australia at the annual conference of APACA (the Australian Performing Arts Center Association). It's called Living in the struggle: Our long tug of war …
A couple weeks ago, one of my favorite arts bloggers, Andrew Taylor (a/k/a The Artful Manager) wrote a post whose title conveys a pretty strong thesis: Organizations don't evolve; they co…
A few weeks back, in a guest-post on Engaging Matters, Roberto Bedoya extended an invitation for others to join him in blogging about "how the White Racial Frame intersects with …
Last week I wrote a post on the efforts of foundations to encourage diversity (of various forms) in nonprofit arts organizations, in which I suggested that such efforts could be construed…
Clay Lord has been on fire over this past week with a couple truly substantive and provocative posts"both aimed at issues around ethnic diversity in the arts. The first asserts that (1) v…
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on changing definitions of success in which I, essentially, asked, Can we change them? And do we really want to? In a thoughtful comment to the post (wel…
Happy New Year a week late. I picked up a book at the university library a few days ago called Morals and Markets and have read a few chapters, which have been tumbling around in my mind …
