Mile-High Musings on Arts, Culture, Creativity and Philanthropy

Philadelphia will celebrate national Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) in April, for the first time in many years. This national celebration, sponsored by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History , and also promoted by the United States Conference of Mayors , is now in its 10th anniversary year. Recognizing this quintessentially American art form is especially appropriate for Philadelphia, which has an extraordinary legacy of leadership in jazz. Beginning with Ethel Waters, and extending to John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Stan Getz, the Heath Brothers, Dizzie Gillespie, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Grover Washington Jr, Stanley Clarke, Philadelphia has an illustrious roster of jazz greats who were either born here or lived and worked here for a significant portion of their life. Despite the demise of many of the City's historic jazz clubs, the City still has a vital, thriving jazz scene, with many venues and a strong and deep array of renowned working musici...

Art-Reach students and staff in Art Gallery at City Hall with artist Ben Volta The past year the Philadelphia Cultural Fund (the vehicle through which the City distributes funding through a competitive peer process) for the first time ever allocated a portion of the funding to go into a new "Arts for Youth" project grant program. This new grant program, which I encouraged, allowed a group of exemplary projects using the arts to address critical challenges facing our youth to be supported. Given that the process for the next round of grants for this year will be launched soon (at a significantly reduced funding level, due to budget cuts), and that City Council is now holding budget hearings, it seemed like an opportune time to highlight one of the projects supported in 2010 Art-Reach is an organization devoted to "enriching lives by connecting underserved audiences to cultural experiences so that they may benefit from and enjoy the transformative power of the ar...

The new Census numbers for Philadelphia are in, and the city managed to actually record a population increase, the first in 50 years. And while the increase was tiny - 8,456 residents, which represents a .6% increase to 1,536,006, the reversal of the decades-long decline is huge. Many older industrial cities are shrinking in population - Chicago, Baltimore - so this increase is especially notable. It is also notable because it confirms that Philadelphia has recaptured the "fifth largest American city" spot from Phoenix, which had passed Philly for a few years. (Click here for sample of press coverage.) There are two big phenomena that jump out as you look at the detailed numbers, by neighborhood and by ethnicity. Clearly, the City is becoming much more diverse, and immigration, especially among Latino and Asian populations are a major contributor to the growth of the City. Philadelphia was a "majority minority" city in 2000 and that trend continues in 2010. The p...

Great story and slide show on the Fast Company Design Website about a $400 million, 18-year (so far) initiative to commission young (mostly) Norwegian architects to create extraordinary structures in some of Norway's most spectacular and wild natural settings - fjords, rivers, forests. These structures are not huge - They are modest (in scale, not design) walkways, observation platforms, rest houses. These are beautiful examples of how human intervention and structures can meld brilliantly with the landscape, and also how design and architecture can become a driver of tourism, and in ways that don't have to involve constructing enormous "architectural destination" buildings. So while it may seem like a lot of money, it has funded 120 sites and they are only halfway through the program. You can check out the slide show here , but I've included an image to provide a flavor of the program (the image is actually not from the slide show at Fast Company but from the Nor...

First off, must apologize for dropping off the face of the earth on my blog for a month or more. It's just been unbelievably busy and I have not found the time to write. The "New Posting" box has been open on my computer for weeks, as has the similar page for Huffington Post. I had intended to dive in on the debate provoked by NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman on the supply/demand issue (New York Times article is here ; Rocco's blog is here ; sample blog response from Linda Essig's Creative Infrastructure here ). But now it seems rather anticlimactic. I will say, in brief (OK, I am not so brief), that I think the debate sparked by Rocco is a very healthy one. It is crystal clear if you look at the Americans for the Arts National Arts Index and other research that the number of nonprofit arts groups has been rising dramatically for the past decade or more, while at the same time the "market share" of philanthropy going to the arts has been declining, and th...