This is the 75th in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

ZAPP Announces New Enhancements and 2013 Arts Festival Conference Location
The ZAPP® system launched a series of significant enhancements for both artists and festival administrators this spring. The improved artist interface employs a sleeker, modern look and convenient ways to interact with the art festival community. Artists also enjoy smarter ways to locate and more easily apply to shows, including a searchable calendar, improved keyword search, and the ability to mark shows as favorites for years to come. Administrator features include enhanced editing and customization options, as well as tools to make communicating with artists even easier and more efficient. In other ZAPP® news, the 2013 ZAPP-sponsored Arts Festival Conference location and dates have been announced. The fifth annual ZAPP® festival industry convening will take place October 7-8, in Louisville, KY. The conference is organized for the more than 600 arts festival users of the ZAPP® system but is open to any art fair administrator or artist.

WESTAF and the NEA to Host Accessibility Institute in Denver
The National Endowment for the Arts is partnering with WESTAF to co-host an accessibility conference June 6-7, 2013, in Denver, CO. The event will bring together approximately 40 arts professionals, including state arts agency accessibility coordinators and a variety of arts administrators interested in accessibility issues. Participants will engage in a day and a half of accessibility training and will also have an opportunity to work directly with Beth Bienvenu, the Director of Accessibility for the NEA. Session topics will include online technology and accessibility, arts and aging, current trends in ways organizations are addressing accessibility, and an introduction to new accessibility resources. For more information on this training, contact Leah Horn at Leah.Horn@WESTAF.org.

The International Award for Public Art in Shanghai
At the invitation of Jack Becker, editor of Public Art Review, Anthony Radich attended the conference and awards ceremony for the International Award for Public Art, which took place April 11-15, in Shanghai. The first-time event was a most impressive collaboration between Becker’s organization, Forecast Public Art, and Shanghai University. The contacts from that world conference will influence the development of WESTAF’s Public Art Archive. Following the conference, Radich accompanied his wife, Sonja Foss, on her multi-city China lecture tour. During the tour, she presented her theoretical work on invitational rhetoric to faculty students at major universities in China.

More on the Arts Education Tax in PortlandBecause of the intense interest in the new Portland, Oregon, income tax to support arts education, WESTAF commissioned arts writer Dinah Zeiger to produce a monograph on the subject. This detailing of how the initiative was conceptualized, campaigned for, and ultimately passed is available on the WESTAF website: www.westaf.org/assets/pdf/Portland_Arts_Tax.pdf.

Folk Arts Professionals Meet at the Vee Bar RanchFor more than 20 years, WESTAF has supported the annual meeting of the Association of Western States Folklorists. The recently concluded meeting at the Vee Bar Ranch April 25-27, in Wyoming featured a focus on younger people entering the field. Recognizing the need to include more young professionals in the meeting of a field that has not experienced much transition in leadership, WESTAF supported the attendance of 11 young professionals at the meeting. The new professionals were featured in a session in which they made presentations on the challenges they face in succeeding in their profession. For more information about this meeting, contact Jen Toews at Jen.Toews@WESTAF.org.

This is the 74th in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

WESTAF Introduces YouJudgeIt.org™
The WESTAF technology team and project administrators have been working to rebuild and expand some key WESTAF technology offerings. Major improvements are underway to the heavily used arts sites ZAPPlication.org®, CallForEntry.org™, and GO:GrantsOnline.org™. While working on improvements to these projects, the technology staff has also been developing a new site called YouJudgeIt.org™. YouJudgeIt is designed especially for the smallest arts organization, the thriftiest church group, and the most under-resourced community fair. The site was built to be much simpler than WESTAF’s more advanced sites and is affordably priced to introduce a whole new group of users to online-adjudication technology developed and administered by WESTAF for the benefit of the arts. The site is currently in testing and is expected to be available in April.

Public Art Archive™ Senior Advisory Committee Convenes in Denver
The members of WESTAF’s Senior Advisory Committee for the Public Art Archive project met January 10-11, 2013, in Denver. Agenda items included: a) a presentation and discussion of the capabilities and limitations of Wikipedia and other crowdsourcing sites to accommodate public art; b) a presentation of the latest developments in cataloging and classification systems for public art and the future development of the Archive to serve the specific needs of the field in this area; c) a discussion of the criteria to be used to evaluate strategic partnerships proposed by social media entrepreneurs; d) a discussion about ways to work with governmental bodies to collect information about public art; and e) a discussion of ways to invite the public to help document public art processes in a sophisticated and comprehensive way.

WESTAF Leadership and Advocacy Meeting
WESTAF trustees and a small group of state arts leaders will convene February 27-March 1, 2013, in Washington, D.C.. The purposes of the meeting are to engage in briefings regarding the status and future prospects for federal arts support, to meet with members of Congress and their staffs, and to join the WESTAF trustees in a discussion of ways to generate more state-government support for the work of state arts agencies. This meeting follows up on a December 2011 WESTAF meeting in Washington to which WESTAF brought 55 arts advocates from across the West for a similar purpose. The 2013 meeting will be slightly condensed and include a different mix of participants. The condensing was undertaken to avoid duplication of the efforts of NASAA, which hosted a major meeting for state arts agency chairs and executive directors in Washington, D.C. last October.

Portland’s New Arts Education Access Fund
The attachment to this edition of Update Notes contains a description of a new voter-approved fund to support arts education in the schools. WESTAF presents a summary of the effort because it represents a major advance for arts education advocates, and we want to spread the word that, even in these days of limited expectations about what the public sector can and should do for the arts, the public continues to have an interest in supporting the arts!

Creative Advocacy Network Achieves Breakthrough Victory with Income Tax Measure

Arts Education and Access Fund becomes first dedicated public fund for the arts

On November 6, 2012, voters in Portland, Oregon, passed a landmark $35 per-taxpayer income tax to restore arts teachers to every local elementary school and fund the arts citywide. The measure will raise a total of $12.2 million in annual net revenue with approximately 69% funding arts teachers and arts education coordination and the remaining 31% funding nonprofit arts organizations and grants to increase arts access for Portland residents. The Arts Education and Access Fund was years in the making and is the first local public fund to make targeted investments in both K-12 arts education and community-based arts organizations through a voter-approved income tax. Here’s how they did it.

For decades, arts leaders and elected officials worked to improve Portland’s creative capacity with the understanding that arts, culture, and creativity shape neighborhoods, improve the education system, boost economic development, and enhance livability. In 2008, Portland mayor-elect Sam Adams invited elected officials from each of the three counties that make up the Portland Metropolitan Region to join him in convening more than 1,500 community members for a region-wide discussion on the future of the arts. Together, they developed a Creative Action Plan for Portland called Act for Art, and central to that plan was the establishment of a new dedicated funding stream for arts and arts education. The Creative Advocacy Network (CAN) was established as an independent 501(c)3 organization to develop and advocate for this proposed new public fund for the arts. In 2009, CAN’s work began.

With an annual budget of under $300,000; a staff of 2-3; and funding from the city of Portland, arts patrons and member organizations, CAN’s sole mission was to establish a dedicated public fund for the arts to increase access to arts and culture for every resident, make free arts and music experiences available to every school-age child in classrooms and communities, and strengthen the highest quality arts organizations to allow Portland to reach its true creative and cultural potential. To achieve this goal, it had to build an investment plan that met the needs of the region’s diverse arts, education, civic and business interests, identify a funding source that would raise enough money annually, inspire voter support during the worst recession of our generation, navigate a path to the ballot through signature gathering or the right local government partnership, and build a movement of support strong enough to carry it to victory.

What began as an effort rooted firmly in the nonprofit arts community, shaped by a focus on strategic grantmaking, evolved dramatically when CAN began to look more closely at the steep decline of arts and music teachers in area schools. Shocked that 11,596 Portland children attend schools that do not have any art, dance, drama, or music instruction, CAN went public with Portland’s arts education crisis and began a conversation with Portland’s six school superintendents brokered by Mayor Sam Adams. Together, they developed a plan to restore arts education to every Portland elementary school by funding teachers and community-based arts education programs. This promise became the core of Portland’s groundbreaking Arts Education and Access Fund.

Public interest and outrage heightened when on April 2, 2012, the U.S. Department of
 Education
 released its
first study of
arts education
in more than
10 years and clearly showcased how far behind Portland had fallen. Only 18% of Portland elementary schools provide art instruction compared to 83% nationally, and just 58% of Portland elementary schools provide music instruction compared to 94% nationally. While twenty-eight percent of all Portland schools provide no arts instruction of any kind–no music, drama, dance, or visual arts. This is compared to just 3% of schools nationally.


By June 27, 2012, when Mayor Sam Adams led Portland City Council in referring CAN’s proposed new public fund for the arts to the November, 2012, ballot, it had successfully forged an innovative new three-way partnership between the city, Portland’s six school districts, and the nonprofit arts community–with 10,000 supporters signed on, 68 member organizations on board, 5,000 volunteer hours logged, and 76% support for the ballot measure in early polling.

When campaign time came, CAN formed a 501(c)4 sister organization to lobby for the ballot measure and launched the Schools & Arts Together campaign to get out the yes vote for what had become Ballot Measure 26-146. After a heated campaign, during which nearly every notable news source opposed the so-called “arts tax” and two other proposed money measures for school construction and permanent library funding divided the vote, the Arts Education and Access Fund passed with a triumphant 62% of the vote.

Portland’s new $35 income tax for income-earning adult residents of Portland (and exempting any taxpayer under the federal poverty limit) will be due annually beginning in April, 2013. When the school year begins next fall, nearly 70 elementary school arts teachers will be sustainably funded, every elementary school student in Portland’s six school districts will be guaranteed an arts education and arts supplies, and programs and field trips will be made available for all school-age children through grant funding to Portland’s schools and nonprofits. In addition, Portland’s nonprofit arts organizations will have the public support they need to bring the arts to life for every Portland resident, providing free arts experiences, reaching underserved communities, and developing imaginative community-based arts experiences for children all while continuing to shape its neighborhoods, fuel its economy, educate its children and bring the region together. In Portland, $35 goes a long way.

This is the 73rd in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

Public Art Archive™ Announces Partnership with Laumeier
WESTAF has developed a partnership with Laumeier Sculpture Park in Saint Louis to support the advancement of the public art field through technology and especially through the Public Art Archive project. Laumeier is one of the nation’s premier outdoor sculpture parks–with works by Niki de Saint Phalle, Sol LeWitt, Vito Acconci, Mary Miss, and Mark di Suvero–and is accredited by the American Association of Museums. The park is directed by Marilu Knode, who previously served as associate director of future arts research at Arizona State University and senior curator of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Knode also has an appointment as the Aronson Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Initially, WESTAF and Laumeier will work on ways to expand the breadth and depth of WESTAF’s Public Art Archive project as a means of bolstering resources of the public art field. WESTAF looks forward to a long and fruitful partnership with Laumeier. For more information about this exciting new partnership, please contact Rachel Cain at Rachel.Cain@westaf.org.

CaFÉ™ to Launch New User Interface
In November, WESTAF’s art adjudication website, CaFÉ (CallForEntry.org), launched site upgrades that expanded functionality and improved usability in the online scoring and image review processes. Additional upgrades will roll out in December. Some of these enhancements will benefit applicants, while others will expand the usability of the administrative side of the site. Also in store are an updated CaFÉ logo and new site landing page. Users will enjoy a fresh new look and feel and a more modern interface when they visit the new site.

WESTAF to Host Professional Development Meeting for Community Arts Administrators
WESTAF will convene community arts administrators in the West December 17-18 in Denver. Attendees will reflect on the state of the community arts field and discuss innovative strategies for field advancement. Emerging technologies for community arts management and recent policy and research work will be presented. Session presenter Carl Grodach, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Texas-Arlington, will discuss his current research on urban cultural policy in the United States and internationally. Jason Schupbach, Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts, will discuss the NEA’s Our Town program and its relevance to community arts administrators. Richard Saxton, Creative Director of M12 Arts, and Kirstin Stoltz, Program Director of M12 Arts, will discuss the 2012 Our Town grant and their work with digital storytelling and rural arts. This session was organized with the assistance of Rob Lautz, community arts manager at the California Arts Council.

Seventh Consecutive Year of State Advocacy Funding Awarded
The WESTAF trustees are making a seventh year of advocacy funding available to support the work of the state arts agencies across the WESTAF region. Each state in the region is eligible to receive up to $10,000 to support advocacy on behalf of the state’s arts agency. In addition, WESTAF provides technology assistance to state arts advocacy efforts.

Click HERE to read the full interview on the Audiovore website.

For additional information on the IMTour program, contact Bryce Merrill at bryce.merrill@westaf.org.

The opening presentation, provided by multicultural communications authority Salvador Acevedo, tackled the question of remaining culturally relevant in changing communities.

Click HERE to see Salvador Acevedo’s presentation.

Drew Shope of Thrive Social Media guided attendees through discussion of why social media is important and which tools work best for arts festivals.

Click HERE to see Drew Shope’s presentation.

The Marketing for Makers session–lead by artist and arts business consultant Megan Auman–was designed for artists by an artist. Auman’s presentation touched on core sales philosophies and marketing techniques to help artists find plans in their respective sales plans.

Click HERE to view Megan Auman’s presentation.

WESTAF Executive Director Anthony Radich recognized Daut’s contribution to the work of WESTAF, noting that “Shannon has been involved in virtually every aspect of WESTAF’s growth and development over the last twelve years.  Her involvement with our work has resulted in more progressive programs, more client-friendly software projects, and more far-sighted policy development.  She has been a tremendous contributor to the success of our organization.”

Daut had a long career at WESTAF.  One of her early projects was the management of WESTAF’s ArtJob, the 24-year-old project that seeks to link jobs in the nonprofit arts with qualified job seekers.  She followed that work with the development of CallforEntry.org (CaFE™), a successful online site that was designed to bring the solicitation and adjudication of public art into the internet age.  Most recently, she conceptualized and worked on the development of Public Art Archive™, a WESTAF website that contains a highly searchable database of public art and whose goal is to showcase all the public art in the United States.  In addition to these projects, Daut has worked closely with the Western state arts agencies to advance cultural policy throughout the region and has managed a wide variety of grant programs, professional development and cultural policy convenings, and other efforts of WESTAF.

Daut holds a bachelor’s degree film studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a masters degree in communication from the University of Colorado, Denver.  She is co-chair of the Create Denver Advisory Committee, a creative economy initiative of the city of Denver, and currently serves on the governing board of the National Performance Network.

For additional information, please contact Leah Horn at leah.horn@westaf.org or call 303-629-1166.

This is the 66th in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

Third Annual ZAPP® Conference Wraps in Atlanta
The 2011 ZAPP® Conference was held September 18-20, 2011, in Atlanta.  The meeting featured a wide range of topics aimed at improving the administration of art fairs and buoying the success of artists selling at the fairs. Featured presenters included San Francisco-based consultant Salvador Acevedo, a leader in the field of changing demographics, who offered insights on how to attract diverse event audiences; and Crafting an MBA founder Megan Auman, a Jonestown, Pennsylvania designer, maker and educator, who presented artist marketing strategies aimed at attracting new customers and maximizing websites and social media campaigns. Additional noted speakers included Marci Rolnik of Lawyers for the Creative Arts in Chicago, who updated artists and administrators on the latest developments in copyright law affecting visual art on the Internet; and Boston-based entrepreneur Michael Salguero of CustomMade.com, an online marketplace connecting shoppers looking for fine custom items with skilled makers. For more information about the ZAPP® Conference, please contact Leah Charney at Leah.Charney@WESTAF.org.

The Public Art Archive™ Goes Mobile
The Public Art Archive™, a sophisticated, searchable online database of public art in the United States, is home to a growing number of public art collections, which you can now access from a mobile device by visiting m.publicartarchive.org in your smartphone’s browser. The new mobile site allows visitors to search for, map and obtain directions to works of public art; identify public art located near them; and share information about the works via email and Facebook.

Next WESTAF Symposium Announced
The next WESTAF symposium will be held in April of 2012 and will focus on the way data related to the arts and creative economy is collected, vetted and made available to the field.  Through its work on the Creative Vitality Index™ (CVI™) and its partnership with Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (EMSI), WESTAF has enlarged its network to include scholars and practitioners on the cutting edge of the field.  WESTAF will bring these individuals together for a lively discussion of their work and a sharing of their perspectives on the future prospects for the collection and dissemination of cultural and creative economy data.

We are now on Twitter! Follow us using the following handles:
@WESTAF, @WESTAFCVI, @ZAPPlication, @CallforEntry, @PAArchive, @gograntsonline

For additional information, please contact Leah Horn at leah.horn@westaf.org or call 303-629-1166.

This is the 65th in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

The Third Annual ZAPP® Conference Convenes in September
The third annual ZAPP® Conference, a professional development opportunity for those who work in the visual arts festival field (artists, event administrators and staff, promoters, and more), will take place September 19-20, 2011, in Atlanta, Georgia. Sessions at this year’s conference feature topics such as: visual arts and copyright law, best practices for jury processes from both the artist and administrator perspectives, and online marketing for artists and events using social media and other tools. The conference will also feature a symposium in which presenters will discuss ways to re-envision and strengthen the art fair business. Tracks are available for both artists and art fair administrators, free portfolio review opportunities will be available for artists, and all are welcome—this event is not just for ZAPP® users. The ZAPP® Conference registration website and official agenda can be found here: bit.ly/zapp2011. Special day-pass rates are available for Atlanta residents. To listen to the 2010 ZAPP® Conference keynote and symposium, visit bit.ly/zapp2010audio.

On-site Scoring at a ZAPP® Event on the iPad? Coming Soon!
The ZAPP® team is now developing an on-site adjudication tool for the iPad, Android tablets, and other tablet devices. With this application, jurors at fine art fairs no longer have to carry around clunky notebooks, binders, and clipboards when scoring for Best in Show and other awards on site. The ZAPP® on-site adjudication tool will allow jurors walking a show to view a map of the event and sort by medium, booth number, or artist name. This tool also frees up staff and administration time as the juror’s on-site scores can be viewed online or exported into a spreadsheet for easy record keeping. The application displays artists’ jury images for reference, and allows the juror to score and comment on an artist’s booth presentation at the art festival. The application is undergoing one last round of internal testing and will be beta tested at events this fall.

WESTAF.org’s New Look
WESTAF recently unveiled a new website. In addition to featuring a modern look and feel, the new site includes a news page with RSS functionality, upgraded navigation, updated information, and a special password- protected area for WESTAF trustees. Visit westaf.org to take a look. We hope you enjoy the new site, and don’t forget to like us on Facebook (on.fb.me/westaf) and follow us on Twitter (twitter.com/westaf).

Public Art Archive™ Update
The Public Art Archive™ is home to a growing number of public art collections. To view the collections added to the Archive to date, visit PublicArtArchive.org. If you represent an agency or other entity that manages a public art collection, please contact Public Art Archive™ Manager Rachel Cain at rachel.cain@westaf.org or by phone at (303) 629-1166 to schedule an orientation webinar and learn more about adding a collection. Currently, there is no fee associated with adding a public art collection to the Archive. Also, you can now access the Public Art Archive™ from a mobile device by visiting m.publicartarchive.org in your smartphone’s browser. Find public art on the road and at home from your phone!

For additional information, please contact Leah Horn at leah.horn@westaf.org or call (303) 629-1166.

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