How can the arts and culture community make sure it’s on the policy radar of candidates campaigning to be Philadelphia’s next mayor?
The answer, from arts leaders at a forum at Moore College, is simple:
Don’t ask the mayor how the city can provide more support to artists; rather, show the mayor how artists can help the city solve its problems.
Echoes of John F. Kennedy’s memorable inaugural address exhortation, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
The panelists (Patricia Wilson Aden, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance; Jane Golden, Mural Arts Philadelphia; and Jason Schupbach, Drexel University) said the broad strokes of an arts policy agenda for Philadelphia have been pretty clear for a long time.
What’s changed over the past twenty years is the way that the arts have been embedded in city government and neighborhood development beyond the core Office of Art, Culture and Creative Economy. These include artist residencies and independent commissions through a number of agencies – ranging from City infrastructure departments to the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the District Attorney’s Office, the regional transit agency, and partnerships working parks, commercial corridors and neighborhood revitalization.
Nobody has created an atlas of this work, but its scope would be impressive.
While it is encouraging to see this aspiration, the “ask not” philosophy is only part of the picture. It only addresses part of what the arts and culture community offers the city, and it risks instrumentalizing artists into the service of city programs.
There can be a broader vision as well. As Aden, put it, high school curricula insist that students take four years of English classes, but nobody things they will become novelists. “So why can we discuss art in schools, just because everyone is not going to be an artist?”
In this view, art is essential to the well-being of the citizenry, part of being a well-rounded and fully realized person, a foundation of any transformational social policy.
To read more about Philadelphia’s agenda for the arts, read Jane Golden’s essay here.
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