CREATIVE SOLUTIONS
As the economic climate worsens, Seidel and others tout the resilience of the arts and those who work creatively to keep it in classrooms and community centers.

“We can look at some of the losses but we also need to focus on new innovations and new processes,” says Seidel. “It’s a time for entrepreneurial initiative, but that’s not new for people in this field.”

Lichtenstein sees some silver linings at Urban Gateways.

“We’re feeling the economic impact, but at the same time that we’re feeling it and it’s devastating, there’s also this really powerful momentum being built around this crisis,” she says. “It has been a really incredible opportunity to build new coalitions, to have different kinds of conversations with people. We’re bringing in principals, we’re bringing in parents, reaching out to other arts groups … so while I feel like we’re definitely feeling the cuts and we’re seeing it in schools and suffering is happening with museums and cultural institutions in Chicago, at the same time there’s a lot of energy and excitement about national conversations around the arts.”

Included among those national conversations is the proposed addition of a White House-level secretary of the arts and culture, a post that music producer Quincy Jones and others have publicly asked President Barack Obama to consider. And in February, Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser announced Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative to help fellow arts organizations persevere the economic storm. In the first three and a half weeks of its launch, Kaiser reported that 250 arts organizations contacted the Kennedy Center for its pro bono help, which will include a new arts in education program, slated to pilot in the Lafayette, La., schools next year, that aims to reshape the current, episodic nature of children’s arts education.

“We’ve created an approach that uses the resources of the Kennedy Center, the local schools, and local arts organizations to create a tailored program for K-8,” says Kaiser, author of The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations. “So many schools do programs but they’re not tailored … and we’re trying to say, ‘Let’s take what the organizations have, what the schools have, and what the Kennedy Center has and see what collectively we can do.’”

Current Harvard Graduate School of Education master’s students enrolled in the AIE Program also see the opportunities along with the challenges. One example is integrating arts into other subject areas.

“Arts and other content don’t need to be mutually exclusive at all,” says Christine Jee, Ed.M.’09, a public school teacher in Lawrence, Mass., a city north of Boston with a large Spanish-speaking population. “We can have this crisis, and focus on everyone cutting the arts, or we can think creatively of new ways to incorporate them.”

“Sometimes it’s just getting arts in the door,” says Elena Figueroa, Ed.M.’09, an elementary school teacher in Framingham, Mass., where 60 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. “You can integrate into the classroom if you do it with integrity.”

Both Jee and Figueroa have done exactly that, using grant money for special arts-based class projects or for first-time trips to museums. This fall, Santina Protopapa, Ed.M.’09, will return to Cleveland’s Progressive Arts Alliance, the nonprofit she founded in 2002 to bring meaningful arts experiences to children in a community where 100 percent of students qualify for free lunch. Despite a “skeletal” staff and an annual budget of $270,000 that serves 1,500 children a week, Protopapa says she is “trying to scale it up in Cleveland so that every child will have an art experience every day.”

What will help during this economic crisis, she says, is Ohio’s new cigarette
tax, with 30 percent of revenue earmarked for the arts.

“All the artists are telling people to ‘smoke one for the arts!’” she says, jokingly.

“I foster celebration rather than justification, and hopefulness rather than despair,” says Davis. “Maybe folks dare to cut the arts because they know they will not go away. It’s very inspiring to see those who work on a shoestring budget and when that funding dries up, they still work.”

As agents of social change, says Davis, it is, after all, what artists do.

– Mary Tamer is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Ed. Her last piece profiled illustrator Jeff Hopkins, Ed.M.’05. The illustrator, Tim Walker, is a visual arts teacher in a Plymouth, Mass. middle school.