California Can Reconceive the Arts by Offering More Choices and Ways to Participate

Demographic and Technological Shifts Could Let Arts in the Golden State Better Serve Communities

California is undergoing massive changes in technology, demography, the nature of work and, thus, in leisure activity. So is its cultural sector, with consequences for how Californians experience art and for how California organizations and artists deliver the arts and engage their audiences.

Over the last three decades, the term “arts participation” has essentially been understood as arts attendance within the non-profit arts field. The field’s key indicator of arts participation over this time has been attendance at any of the seven “benchmark” arts events: performances of ballet, musical and nonmusical …

The Arts Can Do for California What Politics and Big Business Can’t

The Cultural Sector Retains Its Credibility, Imagination—and Ability to Bring People Together

Can the arts save California?

On every public policy challenge other than climate change regulations, the state seems stuck. We can’t transform our underfunded and underperforming education system to meet the …

My Youthful Years In Ansel Adams’ Orbit

I Wanted to Revolutionize Photography. Then I Got a Job With the Man Who Wrote the Rule Book.

I had the enormous good fortune to work for the photographer Ansel Adams in the early 1980s.

At the time I applied for the job, I was a graduate student in …