People invested in the future of arts and entertainment gathered Wednesday to listen to community panelists and a nationally known speaker at Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust’s “Thought Leader in Residence” event at Phoenix Center for the Arts.
“Our sense is that we need to bring in national thought leaders to help us think about local issues, local challenges and see where we can move new ideas from any place in the nation right here to Phoenix,” said Judy Mohraz, president and CEO of the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust.
Ben Cameron, the Program Director for the Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, gave the keynote speech, which followed a panel discussion by audience development expert Matt Lehrman, developer Tim Sprague and entrepreneur and arts organizer Greg Esser.
Kimber Lanning, Local First Arizona director and Modified Arts owner, led the panel and added additional commentary. She began the discussion by stating that arts in Phoenix are on a “downward trajectory.”
Panelists had five minutes to share what issues they saw in the arts and entertainment community. The art scene struggled from a lack of funding and community collaboration as well as difficulties attracting new audiences, panelists said.
Cameron spoke about what he has observed on a national scale and then addressed the panel’s concerns. Afterward, audience members asked both Cameron and the panel lingering questions.
As people had once questioned the necessity of a priest as an intermediary to God, Cameron said, audiences now wonder why professional artists are needed to intercede with creativity.
“What if the moment we’re in is the equivalent to the religious reformation of the 15th century?” he said. “What if we’re living in the middle of the arts reformation?”
This requires artists and entertainers to develop innovative ways to produce audience engagement, Cameron said.
“The environment that we were created to fulfill, the environment in which we were designed to thrive, is not the world in which we live today,” he said.
He gave examples of how other communities have adapted to the landscape shift, such as the Trey McIntyre Project where a successful choreographer created a strong arts community in Boise, Idaho.
“They have launched not an arts agenda, but a civic agenda,” Cameron said.
The dance company showed that it cared about Boise by working with the community to create art, he said.
Cameron discussed the lack of corporation involvement and how large, business leaders no longer focus on communities. He said artists should not approach businesses asking for money, but rather, should ask for the help of their staff such as human resources or marketing personnel.
Cameron emphasized that the arts are not limited to the facilities they reside in, and sometimes the best artistic pieces are created when one relies on the community instead of a physical building.
He gave an example of a theater company that performed a Shakespeare play in the street that separated an African-American community with a Hispanic community. He said the play developed communication between the two communities.
Urban planner Peter Newton, 38, said more discussions like “Thought Leaders in Residence” are needed in order to change Phoenix’s arts scene. He said some of the questions asked showed that not everyone understood what the discussion was about. Some of the examples Cameron gave were of cities with strong financial backers, Newton said, which is not the case in Phoenix.
Aiste Parmasto, a 33-year-old art consultant, said she thought she learned something from the speaker.
“He gave us more of a macro perspective of what else is happening in the nation,” Parmasto said. “The local people are just kind of myopic because we’re so isolated, so we don’t actually branch out or do benchmarking across the nation, and so he gave us more of a vision of what can be accomplished.”
Contact the reporter at danika.worthington@asu.edu
