Strengthening Community Arts Organizations
Posted on March 6th, 2008 by kludden
For the past year, the Maine Arts Commission has focused its Community Arts Development efforts on “capacity building,” or strengthening local community arts organizations. What, in your opinion makes for strong community arts organizations?
Filed under: Community Arts and
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What makes for a strong community arts organization for me is we’ve got to clean up the membership in these things. They are all full of flakes and fruitcakes who can’t make it anywhere else so they either join a community arts organization or maybe their local Tibetan Buddhist cult instead of taking their medication.
There ought to be a law: No people who bury their own placentas under an oak tree allowed, no one who owns a bongo drum or anything they can bang on allowed, no one who wears anything diaphanous and puts glitter on their face allowed, no single men who can’t paint or keeps their pants on allowed and especially no women who are married to rich guys allowed.
All those listed above do not I repeat do not contribute to a sense of community in a community arts organization. What they do is make your community arts organization look like the 1972 Democratic convention except nowadays everyone seems to be wearing a brassiere and they eat broccoli instead of LSD.
If I think of any other laws and rules and regulations I’ll post them.
I’m a placenta-burying, bra-wearing, Buddhist flake who voted for McGovern and I resemble that remark!
Geeze, guy–artists, by their very definition are gonna be weird. The more the merrier!
Beyond the fact that an organization needs to let people know they exist, I don’t think there are any set rules. It’s a matter of acceptance. Creating the feeling of acceptance is practically an act of God. If the general attitude of accepting is large, then the community is large. If it is small then the community is small.
Every community has it’s own workable size but there is obviously a possibility that acceptance also has a backside called rejection. People wish to be accepted and do not wish to be rejected. When a community rejects too many people, then the rejected people often form their own community.
The Federalist Papers discusses the formulation of the constitution for the Union of States, You will find that there is a lot of attention given to how to fairly balance the factions of society. Each faction of society is a community of shared interests co-existing in the Union, which could never have come together as a union if the separate factions could not identify a shared interest in doing so, and would never have endured as a union if the balance of factions had not acheived an acceptable level of fairness.
I agree with the comment about acceptance. People in a commnity art association need to accept all who are interested in the arts, whether artists or art supporters. Beyond that, it’s extrememly important to get as many members as possible to be involved. If they are involved, they will support the organization and also spread the word about its activities. They’ll be active proponents, and art organizations need this to survive!