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.

This is the 72nd in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

Professional Development Seminar for Young Leaders of Color

WESTAF’s Multicultural Advisory Committee convened a leadership-development seminar for young leaders of color September 20-21 in Denver. The two-day session brought together young cultural leaders of color throughout the region to engage in professional development coursework and participate in activities designed to help them create a network to support their careers and the cultural interests of the people they represent. The seminar was facilitated by Margie Johnson Reese, vice president of Big Thought. Reese most recently served as a program officer for Media, Arts and Culture for the Ford Foundation in West Africa. New WESTAF trustee Tamara Alvarado co-facilitated the seminar. Alvarado is currently at the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose, California, and previously worked at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana. Key faculty for the event included Bay Area marketing expert Salvador Acevedo and dancer and communications professor Maisha Fields, who presented a session on using individual diverse identities to be more productive at work and in the community. For more information about the seminar or WESTAF’s Multicultural Advisory Committee, contact Leah Horn at Leah.Horn@westaf.org.

The Dinner-Vention Project
WESTAF-supported Barry’s Blog will host what blog author Barry Hessenius calls the “Dinner-Vention.” He encourages the field to extend invitations to forward-looking cultural thinkers and leaders to a dinner that will serve as a platform for those who do not yet have power and influence in the field to intervene in the national conversation on big issues of the day. Barry’s Blog readers (8,000 as of last week) are invited to submit the names of people whom they think represent this unheralded group. The dinner will be captured via video and made available online. Find more information at Barry’s Blog: blog.westaf.org.

WESTAF-Sponsored Chicago Arts Festival Conference a Success
WThe fourth annual Arts Festival Conference, presented by ZAPP®, convened September 6-7 in Chicago and brought together artists, arts festival administrators, and leaders in the visual art festival field. This professional development and future planning conference opened with a presentation by Google’s Cole Nussbaumer titled “Storytelling With Data.” She led conference attendees through an interactive exercise to illustrate how arts festival data can be used to influence and educate audiences and artists participating in arts festivals. Additional presenters included: Sam Bower, co-founder of ArtHERE.org (a website for matching underutilized spaces with art) and founding executive director of greenmuseum.org (an online museum of environmental art); Amelia Northrup, strategic communications specialist at TRG Arts; Adrienne Outlaw, an artist whose work is often informed by emergent bioethical issues and the leader of Seed Space (a lab for artists, writers, and curators); John Spokes, director of development for United States Artists; Barbara Goldstein, public art director for the City of San José Office of Cultural Affairs and editor of Public Art by the Book; Jennifer Rapp Peterson, founder of IndieMade.com; and Mark Rowland, director of digital experience at Simple Truth, a Chicago-based brand strategy and communications firm. For a full agenda and/or information about ZAPP®, contact Leah Charney at Leah.Charney@westaf.org

IMTour Featured at the Western Arts Alliance Conference
The artists selected for the inaugural 2012 WESTAF Independent Music Tour (IMTour) roster were introduced to presenters at the conference of the Western Arts Alliance (WAA) September 5-8 in Denver. The artists had an opportunity to learn more about the world of nonprofit touring. Integrated into the conference was a performance by IMTour group Paper Bird in collaboration with Ballet Nouveau at Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House.

This is the 71st in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

IMTour Grant Recipients Selected
The artist roster for the WESTAF Independent Music Tour (IMTour) project has now been selected. The artists were chosen by a national panel of music industry professionals, consisting of booking agents Erick Carer of Uncle Booking; Craig Grossman and David Priebe of Green Room Music Source; and Stefan Goldby, Executive Producer at Buzzine Networks. These panelists work with the largest names in independent music and were immensely helpful in identifying bands that are on par with nationally successful acts. The groups selected are: Snake Rattle Rattle Snake, Ian Cooke, Mane Rok, The Changing Colors, Paper Bird, and The Photo Atlas. The participating musicians will receive financial and technical support for touring to nonprofit performing arts presenters in the WESTAF region. For additional information on these artists, please visit the IMTour site at http://imtour.org/. Please contact Bryce Merrill at Bryce.Merrill@westaf.org for more information.

WESTAF Welcomes Nicole Stephan
WESTAF is pleased to announce the addition of data and design specialist Nicole Stephan to the WESTAF team. Stephan holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design and recently obtained her master’s degree in the interdisciplinary field of information and communication technologies for development. She is in the first graduating class in this emerging field from the University of Colorado’s Alliance for Technology Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute. Her field research, conducted in Kathmandu, focused on the utilization of internet communication technologies at Nepal’s largest fair trade handicraft organization. Stephan previously served as data design lead on a Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones Adviser web tool, an innovative charting platform displaying up-to-the-second economic data and market sentiment. Stephan will work primarily on the Creative Vitality™ Index project, leading the redevelopment of the CVI™ Data on Demand web tool.

CaFE™ Launches New User Interface
WESTAF’s CallForEntry.org will relaunch this August ushering in a host of new enhancements. Based on customer feedback that WESTAF has collected over the past 18 months, the site will be reintroduced to the public with an updated graphic interface, modernized administrative functionality, and intuitive design features created to help artists, jurors, and administrators effortlessly navigate the site. For specifics on the over 100 site improvements, contact Raquel Vasquez at Raquel.Vasquez@westaf.org.

Introducing ZAPP® 2.0
Throughout the summer and fall, several exciting new features and enhancements are coming for users of the ZAPPlication® system. For the first time since 2004, the system will have a sleek new front-end design that creates an even more user-friendly system experience. New artist-requested functionality will allow applicants to submit multiple applications to the same event using a single profile. Another artist-friendly addition is the ability to preview application images in the exact same manner as jurors will view the information during the jury process. Event administrators will benefit from many ZAPP® 2.0 enhancements, including an updated Event Editor section with new smart editing capacities and the ability to add show location maps. Improved text editors and communication portals will allow administrators to further streamline their artist relations and communication efforts. For additional information, please contact Leah Charney at Leah.Charney@westaf.org.

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

Register Now!
The fourth annual Arts Festival Conference will convene September 6-7, 2012, at the Avenue Crowne Plaza Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. register now at bit.ly/zapp2012!

Save the date!
ZAPPlication.org is pleased to announce that the fourth annual Arts Festival Conference will convene September 6-7, 2012, at the Avenue Crowne Plaza Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. register now at bit.ly/zapp2012!

This is the 70th in a continuing series of updates about the work of the Western States Arts Federation.

WESTAF Announces Two New Research Fellows
WESTAF is pleased to announce the addition of two research fellows to the Creative Vitality™ Index team. Lori Pfingst is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Washington State Budget and Policy Center and has a doctorate in sociology from the University of Washington. Pfingst will work with the CVI™ team to evaluate additional arts, culture, and creative economy data streams to include in the updated CVI™ Data on Demand tool. Matthew Barry is the Director of Data and Information Initiatives at the Piton Foundation in Denver, Colorado. The Piton Foundation is working with Barry to develop a web tool for health and education data sharing and data-related storytelling. Barry will work with the Data on Demand development team to integrate new data visualization concepts and reporting tools into the site.

Public Art Archive™ Collection Management Survey Results
Archive staff recently surveyed public art program administrators regarding their use of collection management tools. The purpose of the survey was to secure information to help guide the development of the Archive’s now-in-development public art collection management tool. The vision for the Archive project has always included a collections management feature that is specifically designed to address the needs of public art managers. Survey results revealed that only 30% of the respondents managed their collections online. In addition, the survey confirmed that most of the online tools used to manage public art collections are outdated and/or substantially ill suited to the management of a public art collection. A survey follow-up meeting will be held in conjunction with the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in San Antonio on June 8. The meeting will convene 30 members of the public art field to secure their additional advice on the the development of the Public Art Archive’s™ collection management tool. For more information, please contact Rachel Cain at rachel.cain@westaf.org.

WESTAF Board of Trustees Convenes in Reno
WESTAF’s board of trustees met May 16-17 in Reno, Nevada to revise and update its long-range plan. Alex Ooms, who facilitated the 2009 planning process, returned to manage the 2012 effort. Ooms is currently heading a company that raises venture capital and manages mergers and acquisitions. Highly active in education reform, Ooms currently serves on the boards of the West Denver Preparatory Charter Schools, the Colorado Charter Schools Institute, the Charter School Development Corporation, the Colorado chapter of Stand for Children, and is a senior fellow in education at the Donnell-Kay Foundation. He is also a poet who worked in the Literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Ooms holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College, a master’s degree from Georgetown University, and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School at Northwestern University. The long-range plan that is being developed in collaboration with Ooms will be completed in October 2012.

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