Tribute: Bess Lomax Hawes

We should all be so lucky to live to the ripe age of 88; luckier still to live a rich, full, and varied life; and luckiest of all to have a loving family, countless friends and associates who admire and respect us and our work, and yet still retain our compassion for other people and our zest for life.

Bess Lomax Hawes, who passed away a few days ago, was such a person.

For starters, she is arguably the single most important reason there is a comprehensive network of folk and traditional artists and organizations in the U.S. As founding director of the National Endowment for the Arts' Folk Arts Program, it was largely due to her vision that every state has a folk arts program, that the Smithsonian Institution holds its annual Folklife Festival on the National Mall, and why we recognize folk and traditional artists with the National Heritage Fellowships. This last program is so prestigious, and Bess's role in its creation so pivotal, that the awards themselves were named for her.

But all this barely scratches the surface of who she was as a person.

Growing up as the daughter of John Lomax (whose early recordings of largely self-taught blues and folk musicians throughout Appalachia and the deep South remains one of our greatest cultural treasures), and sister of Alan Lomax (who who continued and expanded his father's work) it was no fluke that Bess was drawn to folk and traditional artistic expressions.

An early member of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie's band, she is probably known best among folk musicians as co-author of the song made famous by the Kingston Trio, "Charlie and the M.T.A."

I worked quite closely with Bess during my time at the National Endowment for the Arts. She was pushing 70, had a flock of acolytes circulating in and out of her office on the 7th floor of the Old Post Office Building. She never raised her voice. She never said a mean word about anyone. And her smile, which was always a half-breath away, could light up a room.

There was something very "Aunt Bee"-like about her; a warm, trusting soul who with a recognizable voice and a ready laugh, packaged in a matronly figure with gray hair pulled back in a bun. I always expected, hearing her talk in staff meetings, that if Bess couldn't convince people around her to view things from her perspective, that all she had to do was make a call and Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife would gently show you the error of your ways.

It never happened. Bess always knew the best way to approach people; to get projects off the ground; to share credit; and most of all, respect the many artists whose work, without her efforts, might otherwise have remained largely undiscovered or unappreciated.

It's been about 10 years since I last saw her. She attended the Nancy Hanks Lecture at the Kennedy Center as part of National Arts Advocacy Day, and although it had been years since we'd been in touch, her face lit up in that warm smile of hers when I stopped by her seat to say hello.

Bess lived a long, full, rich, and rewarding life. Like I said, we should all be so lucky.

Share the Knowledge

Our attention is turning relentlessly towards the holidays. I keep wishing it were last April and that I still had a good eight or nine months to complete all the things I set out for myself this year, but no. It's coming on late November. Thanksgiving is around the corner. And I am as far behind as ever.

In truth, the things I am behind in are personal rather than work-related. I still haven't gotten to re-roofing my porch, or losing 15 pounds, or fixing the floor under the freezer in the basement. I haven't ordered next year's firewood or put the winter tires on our cars.

But at work, looking back over the year, I can honestly say there have been some amazing accomplishments.

Though it seems but a distant memory now, it was only a few months since we finished our last commitment to Art Fits Vermont (the Puzzle Project) which, like its predecessor Palettes of Vermont, engaged thousands of Vermonters, and several dozen New Yorkers and Quebecois on a creative, shared, exploration of the cultural ties that bind us. It was only 10 months ago that we selected the 10 artists whose creative output, combined with Lyman Orton's generosity, gave us the 103 works known collectively as "The Art of Action." Similarly, we have enjoyed keeping track of the "Art of Vermont" as it coils its way around the state showing Vermonters in all parts of the state a significant portion of the State's accumulated art collection. (All of these projects are easy to find by noodling around on the Arts Council's website).

But to be honest, one of the most heart-warming things we are doing is going to launch in about two weeks. As of today we have nearly 90 works of art and craft donated to "doing our pART"--the Council's auction to benefit the Vermont Food Bank.

It has been so great to meet so many artists as they bring their works in to the Council; to talk to them about their experiences and to hear how nice it is for them to be able to share their work to support a good cause.

Listening to their stories, it seems like an appropriate time of year for us all to share some of our stories. Please consider this posting to be an invitation to anyone reading this (especially if you are in Vermont) to share some of the great things you are doing/or have done over the course of this past year. It can be an organizational or personal story; it can be about something you have participated in directly, or something you know is happening in your community. Or it could be a really cool idea that simply should be shared.

Scroll down, leave a comment, and depending on the response, I'll revisit some of your highlights in a future post.

In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving!

Eight Places to Visit in St. Johnsbury

The Arts Council held its fall retreat in St. Johnsbury recently, and if our experience there is any indication, people living in or planning to visit the Northeast Kingdom have a lot to look forward to in the coming years.

I've mentioned a few times in this blog about the efforts all over the Kingdom to collaborate on marketing and promotional efforts. Trying to develop a single-themed message about such a huge and diverse area of Vermont presents many challenges. There is the sustainable, value-added agricultural movement whose focal point appears to be Hardwick. There is the Nulhegan Basin (surrounding Island Pond) whose primary industries are wildlife recreation and (value-added) wood products. There are the two major ski resorts--Jay Peak and Burke Mountain-- and some world-class mountain biking to be had at Kingdom Trails. There are three colleges: Johnson State College (I know, technically in Lamoille County), Sterling College in Craftsbury and Lyndon State College that provide excellent post-secondary education experiences across a broad spectrum of disciplines that build on and feed the cultural and recreational sectors. And all through the Kindgom are located hundreds of artists and artisans--all of whom create a variety of works that can be found by visiting their studios, farmer's markets, or fairs and festivals.

The Northeast Kingdom Travel and Tourism Association serves as a collection point for all kinds of information about "things to do" in the Kingdom, from outdoor recreation, to agritourism, to cultural and heritage tourism. From North Troy and Jay to St. Johnsbury; and from Canaan to Hardwick the Northeast Kingdom is diverse, quirky, independent-minded, and--as our experience in St. Johnsbury proved--generous to an extreme.

Our meeting was held in the "new" Catamount Arts Center--the former Masonic Lodge next door to Catamount's old location. (sidebar: the old Catamount site has been bought and being converted to a studio recording house by Neko Case. Check her out!) Catamount Arts now boasts two cinemas, showing independent and foreign films daily--and even the latest digital performances from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera (the next one is Puccini's Turandot, airing November 7th). They also have a cabaret room in the basement (where we held our board meetings) which, along with a few other smaller utility rooms, serve as classrooms for people of all ages. They have a gallery just behind their ticket office which, during our meeting, was showing the Art of Vermont, an exhibition featuring works that are part of the State's significant art collection. Best of all, however was the incredible spirit flowing throughout the building--no doubt caused by the excitement generated by the performance and outreach programs put together by Jody Fried and his staff . Metaphorically speaking, Catamount Arts is one of the Northeast Kingdom's significant sources of renewable energy.

Within a stone's throw of Catamount are new fewer than seven other community/cultural institutions--almost all of which, over the years, have received significant facility or program support from the Council. The Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium (Charlie Browne, Director) is a "must stop" for anyone visiting St. J , as is the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, the public library donated by the Fairbanks family which contains one of the great examples of Hudson River School Art, The Domes of Yosemite, by Albert Bierstadt, in its very accessible gallery.

The day after our Board meeting ended, I returned to the Athenaeum to attend a concert by Helena Baillie who performed the three Bach Partitas for violin as a benefit to raise money for the Athenaeum's new Steinway grand piano. It was a tour de force and I can only hope that Minnesota Public Radio, who recorded the event, will allow its Vermont affiliate to air the program. The Athenaeum's director, Irwin Gelber, is doing for the Athenaeum what Jody Fried is doing for Catamount. The energy and excitement in both places are palpable.

Across from the Athenaeum is the Caledonia Courthouse which has wonderful public art by photographer Michael Sacca and tapestries by Elizabeth Billings--installed about 10 years ago with Art in State Buildings funding when the Courthouse was significantly renovated.

Practically next door to the Courthouse is the South Congregational Church--a venue used by many arts groups looking for world class acoustics and significant seating capcity. Like the Catamount Center, The Fairbanks, Athenaeum, and Congregational Church have all received significant funding from the Council's Cultural Facilities Program over the years--as well as frequent program support.

And while we're still "on the hill" it hardly bears mentioning that the St. Johnsbury Academy is one of the preeminent secondary educational and cultural institutions in the New England. It boasts significant programs and instruction in the visual and performing arts--comparable in quantity and quality to such storied New England boarding school as Exeter, Andover and Milton Academies--and its guest artists' performances are almost always open to the public.

Just down the hill from Catamount Arts on Railroad Street is the new visitor's center (home of the NEK Chamber of Commerce in the old Railroad Depot)--again, a facility that has benefited from the Council's Cultural Facility program, and in the middle of the next block heading east on Rte 2 is the Northeast Kingdom Artisan's Guild, a gallery and store chock full of high quality arts and crafts. Those are the seven (eight, including Catamount) I know about--there probably are more.

I realize that this is sounding a lot like a travel writer's diary, but before I leave you to discover your own favorite part of St. Johnsbury, I have to mention the hardware store across from Catamount Arts where you can purchase just about anything you could possibly need for your home; the outstanding Elements Restaurant which had no problem accommodating the Council's board, staff and guests for dinner; and--perhaps the biggest surprise of all--the incredibly well-appointed Comfort Inn where several of us stayed.

St. Johnsbury--you really should see it for yourself. It's a great way to start your visit to Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.

Spray-feeding the Cloud

So a few days ago this gem pops up on my Facebook page from my kid brother Will, VP of Product for Tripit:

Will Aldrich is spray-feeding my URL in niblets open-face to the skein, maxing out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds (less jamming at the Google scaffold).

Will is having some fun at his nOOb older sib's expense. To his ilk, this makes perfect sense. To the rest of us it's more like a wake-up call.

Social networking. Facebook. MySpace. Twitter. RSS. These things that sound so easy and safe and yet probably are not, are everywhere. They lurk on our home computers, our laptops, our hand-helds. Their use may be part of the intellectual DNA of my four children (No, I'm not going to show them this post, but they'll probably learn about it soon enough), but not mine.

What the Html does all this mean? Less than five years ago I was fluent in the English language. Now I need lessons in a whole new vocabulary, sentence structure--and worse--a complete recontextualization of what it means to be a player in the world of ideas, imagination, and communication.

If you're like me you're probably getting desperate. I'm told social networking, viral marketing, and p-to-p are to this decade what email, listservs, and b-to-b were to the last decade. I'm just not ready for it yet. I liked the 1990s. Now I've got to navigate this new stuff. How do I start? What do I trust?

Someone on my own staff said to me last week, "I hate how you're using Twitter." Ouch. I had tweeted to my twibe a gwand total of five times. (What, am I seriously a twibe-tweeter? Oh how totally Elmer Fudd of me.) "You're the director of the Arts Council. I don't care whether your son remembers his soccer cleats."

Hmm...actually I thought I had posted that gem on Facebook. It turns out I had. But what I didn't know was in my zeal as a nOOb, I had conflated Facebook and Twitter by linking them so that what I posted to one also appeared in the other.

Yeah. Conflated. There's a word my brother Will will probably never use in a tweet. (Now, of course, he surely will. That's what brothers do.)

But getting back to the issue at hand.

One has to start somewhere. So here's where I'm starting.

Here's a guide to how to give yourself some privacy on Facebook. And here's an article that describes 12 ways to use Facebook in a business setting. Both the guide and the article were shared with me by another person on my staff through our listserv. How very 90s.

(Thank God!)

Looking Forward

The Times-Argus recently printed an article which gave a pretty bleak assessment of state budget woes in the coming years. According to the article, this recession is "different from the three previous recessions...[because] employment and consumer spending aren't expected to bounce back as quickly."

Among the measures states will have to use to balance their budgets are to increase college tuition, reduce funding for the arts and other cultural programs, and push costs for employees and repairs into the future.

Thomas Friedman predicted this back in a June 2003 NY Times column. The federal government is out of money. The $789 billion it borrowed last spring will stave off some things for a while. But the budget crunch is, according to how I read Friedman, the result of services that used to be paid for with federal dollars (that, as taxes, are significantly less for you and me) now being paid for by the individual states (which, especially in a low population state like Vermont, are considerably more expensive for you and me).

I'm neither an economist nor an educator, but it seems strange to me that every time our government (federal, state, or local) gets into trouble financially they look first to the arts and to education to start restoring some sort of balance.

I can just hear the conversations around federal and state policy-maker's cabinet-room tables.
"What?! We have a deficit of 4 trillion dollars?!"" Shocking!!" "We must do something!" "I know, let's take away all funding for the arts at the federal AND state level. That will save us a solid $500 million. $350 million for the states, and $150 million for the feds." "Oh, good show, that should keep the middle class distracted and at bay for a few more years." "Well done!"

Trouble is, when the national debt is pushing $12 trillion and growing by nearly $4 billion a day, the problem will not be solved by cutting arts and education.

In fact, picking the arts first as a place to cut seems a little disingenuous...

Employment and revenues are the biggest problem (if you're a glass-half-full kind of person) or health care, interest payments on the debt, defense spending, social services, and corrections are the biggest problem (if you're a glass-half-empty kind of person). Either way you look at it, the arts sector and the education sector are a significant part of the solution to what is or is not in the glass.

The arts sector is a significant employer/training ground for much of what drives our high tech economy (where do you think, for example, the film and music industries get their talent from anyway?). After family, education is probably the single biggest indicator of how a person will become socialized as an adult. The longer one stays in school--or, more accurately, the longer one continues his/her commitment to learning, the more positive one's life experiences are likely to be.

Why in hell is anyone thinking of cutting these things?

Here's what I've learned over the years. With only a few brave, sometimes controversial exceptions (like Richard Florida), economists generally don't know what to do with "the cultural sector." It is a sector that has either matured in the past decade or so--usually well after most economists finished their graduate training, or it matured millennia ago and economists (and the policy-makers they advise) have lost touch with it.

In either case, today's economists and their their measuring tools are inadequate to the task. It is certainly possible keep track of ticket sales, and art purchases. But there is nothing other than the so-called "multiplier effect " that allows us to infer the kind of spending that goes on in parking lots, gas stations, restaurants, and hotels as the result of arts events. And that's just barely capturing the true value of the cultural sector.

How does an economist measure the impact of a teaching artist? Or the impact of a clustering of visual artists in run-down warehouse district? Or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? What tools has the economics profession developed that will convincingly relate the presence of a high-quality theater company or a cartoon school to the social and economic well-being of a village? (Yeah, White River Junction, that's a big shout-out to all of you! :))

What is it going to take for the soft science of economics to develop some harder edges where the arts and culture are concerned?

It seems to me that education and the arts are the absolute LAST places that government should cut. Biases aside, it's just not worth the price of elimination. Education is all about our future--our children's future. The arts are all about creativity and imagination.

We are going to need a lot of the latter if we are going to have a hope of delivering on the promise of the former.

So...if you want to do something to put a little more in the glass, click here. And, on behalf of artists and arts organizations in Vermont whose work inspires, thrills, entertains, and challenges us all, thank you for your ongoing support.

Transitions

Last week, readers of Seven Days were treated to a wonderful feature article by co-founder and publisher Paula Routly on her associations, past and present, with the The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts' soon-to-retire, founding director Andrea Rogers. (see article)

In a state like Vermont, where a sneeze in Burlington results in a "Gesundheit!" from Brattleboro, this was (is) really big news.

I knew this was coming, of course. Andrea and I have both served on the board of the New England Foundation for the Arts for quite a few years and during the few times that we carpooled to meetings and shared stories about our lives and careers, we sometimes talked about how an organization with a long-serving director might best prepare for his/her eventual transition. But it was never Andrea we were discussing, ever. She was too engaged, too in love with her work (with all its challenges) to even THINK of retiring!

No, I learned about her retirement plans in typical fashion...from Andrea herself who called me a few weeks ago to let me know as a courtesy. I guess maybe she meant to give me some time to collect my thoughts before headhunters started calling to see if I knew anyone who could replace her.

As if!

The truth is, the Flynn without Andrea is going to be like Burlington would be without the Flynn. Or like Vermont would be without Burlington. Unimaginable.

When the news about Andrea went public, however, I didn't notice at first, because my head and heart were elsewhere, absorbed by something much sadder that took place unexpectedly in Dorset, Vt.

James (Jay) Hathaway, sculptor, entrepreneur, director of the Manchester-in-the-Mountains Chamber of Commerce, and Arts Council Trustee (Vice Chair) died suddenly at the end of a bike ride with his young grandson.

One hears about such things and reacts with shock and dismay at first. But they are soon replaced by an awareness of how incomprehensibly brief one's time on earth actually is. Jay lived every day like it was the first present opened on Christmas morning. He was unfailingly positive and imaginative; always willing to roll up his sleeves and get things done. And according to the consensus opinion of the people who attended his service in Dorset last week, every one of them was his best friend, his favorite person, the one who could make his day. All 500 of us.

I'm sure there are many people who could use these two transitions as a means to draw far more deep and meaningful conclusions about how we work and how we live. All I can do is look forward, sure that just as the Flynn will survive and thrive, so too will Jay's family and associates in Dorset. While Jay's life is over, his life's story surely is not. And while Andrea is retiring to a well-deserved "life after the Flynn," I'm sure there will be much more she will add to our lives here in Vermont.

In the meantime, Vermont's cultural life continues on in its frenzied pace, a pace set, in no small part, by Andrea Rogers and Jay Hathaway--two great friends of mine, two great friends of the Vermont Arts Council, and two great friends of the arts in Vermont.

doing our pART, too

A year ago we initiated a project called "doing our pART" which essentially created an opportunity for artists and others to convert their work into cash to support the Vermont Foodbank. We achieved our goal of raising $10,000 through an online auction of about 75 items, mostly visual art works. This figure represents about 20,000 healthy meals to hungry Vermonters.

A few months ago, the Obama administration intiated a program called United We Serve, a nationwide initiative to "create a sustained, collaborative and focused effort to meet community needs." While it might look like the feds took a page our of our "doing our pART" playbook in creating this program, the reality is this is just a plain, old-fashioned, great idea and everyone who thinks of it should get credit, even if they are not the first.

So in the context of United We Serve, say hello to "doing our pART, too."

The idea is essentially the same as last year. We are creating an opportunity for you or your organization to donate something to the Council who, in turn, will auction it off and the net proceeds will go to the Vermont Foodbank.

What is different about this year is that we are giving contributors the option of keeping 30% of the proceeds from the sale of their work product. They of course also have the option of donating the full about of the auction sale to the Foodbank. We hope that by repaying a portion of the costs associated with creating a work of art, more people will be inspired to participate.

Please go to the "doing our pART" section of our website and find out how you can do YOUR part!