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

Arts in Education Week draws to a close tomorrow, so arts education is on my mind and in the air. A recent blog post by Alan Yaffe - here - that contended arts education advocacy should be focused more on art-making than art-viewing got me thinking. It is true, much energy goes into trying to get K-12 students to attend arts events, and that's wonderful and much-needed. We try to organize class trips, and bemoan the increasing challenges of getting access to buses, to getting the OK to leave school for an arts experience when the pressures of sticking to curriculum and "teaching to the test" are ever-present. And arts groups do all they can to provide "enrichment", to facilitate those out-of-school experiences and to also bring teaching artists or arts education programs into schools. But ultimately, and I think virtually all arts groups and teaching artists engaged in this work would concur, the most important component is having qualified arts teachers in ...

Tribute in Light - produced by Municipal Art Society -  http://www.mas.org/programs/tributeinlight/ I have never actually written about 9/11 in any of my blog posts, and can't say why exactly I feel compelled to do so this year. The obligatory Facebook post or tweet just seemed inadequate. Perhaps it is the timing of President Obama's speech about ISIS that emphasizes how much the terrorist threat remains real, how much this date 13 years ago marked a dramatic change in our world view. In 2001 I was the President and CEO of the Arts & Business Council, based in New York City. In the early morning of 9/11/01, I was meeting with my board chair, Warren Bodow, and my board member Karen Brosius, then a senior executive in corporate philanthropy and marketing with Altria. We were meeting in Karen's office, on a high floor in the Altria headquarters on 41st and Park. As is often the case in corporate offices, Karen had a news channel - probably CNN - running on a TV in h...

Recently I spent some time with Carolyne Heldman of Aspen Public Radio for her program CrossCurrents, and the segment has just recently aired and been posted to their website. It was a wide-ranging interview covering how I got into the arts/philanthropy/policy world in the first place, my thoughts on the challenges arts groups face, and finally, the work of the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation and the state of the arts in Denver and Colorado. I thought my blog followers might find this worth listening to:  http://aspenpublicradio.org/post/crosscurrents-gary-steuer-bonfils-stanton-foundation Carolyne was a great interviewer and got me talking about some things I am not sure I have talked about before - at least not to the media. And my apologies in advance to the many groups and programs I could have mentioned in the interview but didn't, or that got edited out. I was particularly aware in listening to it that in talking about Denver and Colorado's great cultural assets I cited ...