2,241 stories by "Joe Patti"
Ah, Spring! That time of year when an arts organization’s mind turns to thoughts of season brochures and other promotional materials. Whether those materials are created by a board com…
This really great story on the Americans for the Arts blog caught my eye that I would label as unintentional placemaking. Though I could think of other apt terms. Douglas Sorocco writes abou…
Earlier this month, Kathryn Haydon addressed the insidious personal belief that one is not creative. I use the term insidious because I view the belief as something that undermines somet…
I guess I should have waited a few more days before making last week’s post about today’s graying audiences not being the same graying audiences of two decades ago. Toward the en…
I am pretty open about admitting when I made a wrong call. While I consistently counsel against investing too many resources into the hottest fad, even I have to admit that the Pokemon Go! c…
You and your staff are ready for a crisis. Everyone, including your volunteers, regularly reviews plans for handling your audience in case of fire, tornado, earthquakes, active shooters, etc…
For the last 20-25 years, audiences have been getting grayer and dying off. We have all heard that statement multiple times in our careers. We have probably made that statement multiple time…
Last Fall Grantmakers in the Arts published a summary of key findings from a study about community arts training. The study focused on the increasing focus of local arts agencies into cross-…
Going back to the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project special report I referenced yesterday, there were findings in another area that grabbed my interest. The following chart breaks d…
The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) just released a special report that focused on how alumni of creative arts programs across different graduate cohorts felt about the educat…
Two years into a six year research project, Ballet Austin has started learning things about their audiences that run contrary to their assumptions. While the audiences in every community are…
If you found yourself agreeing with the thesis of my post yesterday about claiming someone is selling out or is dumbing down art is an attempt to exclude those people in order to save Art, I…
Last week The Guardian wrote about how the current political climate in a number of countries has brought Arthur Miller’s The Crucible into relevance again. There are a couple sentence…
If you ever doubted that executive director positions were all about the fundraising and light on requiring artistic vision, the recent news about the firing of Ft. Worth Opera general direc…
Last month I saw a story in the New Yorker about an attempt to preserve the culture of the Iñupiat of Alaska through the creation of a video game. I initially thought that the game hadn&#…
I came across an interview Daniel Pink did with Derek Thompson, Senior Editor at The Atlantic where Thompson gives The 5 Rules for Making a Hit. Now I want to say from the outset that the ti…
Seth Godin made a post last week about maintaining a commitment to quality in your work. (my emphasis) When you seek the mass market, there are two paths available: You can dumb down your me…
One of my earliest posts on ArtsHacker encouraged people to feel comfortable with altering and amending contracts. Every organization operates in a different environment and has varying …
Australia’s ArtsHub site had a valuable piece on “diversity” efforts by arts organizations. I put diversity in quotes because the title of the article is “Diversity i…
I was reading Peter Drucker’s Managing the Non-Profit Organization. In a chapter near the end of the book he talks about self-renewal through change of perspective using examples like …
I have served on my county library system board for over half a year now. They say public libraries aren’t relevant any more but as the title of the post suggests, if this is what the …
In my post yesterday, I quoted Matt Burriesci as he addressed how uncomfortable people feel when it comes to advocating the intangible value of the arts. We should stop being ashamed to beli…
There has been a lot of conversation recently about what to do in light of the Trump Administration’s stated intent to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Th…
I was really grateful for Aaron Overton’s very first post on ArtsHacker last week. Aaron is a programmer with a lot of experience in website development for performing arts organiz…
Last night I gained some additional assurances that everyone has the capacity to comprehend art at a basic level when they encounter it. Some recent university grads started a “creativ…
