Mass Culture is an arts support organization that strives to harness the power of research to learn and generate new insights, enabling the arts community to be strategic, focused and adaptive.
Mass Culture is an arts support organization that strives to harness the power of research to learn and generate new insights, enabling the arts community to be strategic, focused and adaptive.
Topic: Impact Assessment in the Arts
When: 10 am to 3:30 pm, January 9, 2023
Where: Fiegle Centre, Macewan University
The Edmonton Roundtable event is part of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Connections funded series titled Expanding Impact: Activating Arts and Culture Today (EI). The project is the national knowledge mobilization strategy for the Mass Culture Research in Residence: Arts’ Civic Impact (RinR) program. RinR connected academics from six universities, including six Mitacs-funded graduate student researchers, six arts funders, and 20 arts organizations, to engage in research on arts’ civic impacts. The national research event series supported by EI began in May 2022 to deepen community engagement and the relevance of the frameworks developed during RinR. The event series aims to present the qualitative arts for civic impact frameworks developed by the research interns, as well as spark dialogue, learn, share, and inspire action by bringing together researchers, academics, artists and cultural practitioners from across the country to discuss arts’ value and impact assessment. The series is ongoing.
The Edmonton Roundtable discusses several arts civic impact frameworks broadly with the following prompts: Are you having an impact? How do you know? How do you show?
Topic: Creative Climate Action: Understanding Impact in Arts-Climate Engagement on PEI
When: 5 pm to 7 pm, June 7, 2023
Where: Beaconsfield Carriage House
For every art administrator, researcher, practitioner, creator, and anyone working behind the scenes. Your dedication changes and progresses all spheres of society, present and future. With you, creativity lives on and bring all hope to the world.
We love art.
I know this sounds generic and cliché,
But just stop for one moment,
Breathe.
Listen.
Think
We love art.
A picture, a sound, emotion, and movement, a color, an idea.
All to translate the value of human connection.
We love art.
Images and sounds that are endless.
We create things to say, and show what we
See,
Feel,
Understand,
Inside and outside of ourselves.
We need art
To progress in,
Culture,
Society,
Nature,
And philosophy.
We love art.
The reality of perception,
No matter if it is bad or good.
It is free from all limitations.
Allows flexibility,
And for us to go deeper within ourselves
And our ecosystems.
We love art.
A form to explore beyond what we see.
To develop tools for one another.
To research to protect its existence.
To fight for inclusivity,
And our stories.
All to care and nurture
A creative space for opportunities.
We give our time,
Days
and Years.
Working to preserve,
Create
And share,
All because we truly love art.
I chose to paint the monarch butterfly while listening in on the MASS Culture Roundtable Event on January 9th, 2023, because I ultimately felt that the work being done is never truly “perfect” or complete. Throughout the conversations being had at each table I sat with, I felt that the overarching theme of the event was openness to change. The monarch butterfly is representative of strength, tenacity, and metamorphosis, which I felt best represented the marginalized communities in the arts and culture sector.
My main takeaways from the roundtables were emotional and energetic, with the strongest feelings being between frustration in our current systems, yet hope and imagination for the possibility of sectoral change. I feel that frustration and hope are intertwined experiences; our belief in other possibilities drives our frustration in being caught up in the systems that do not serve us, yet that frustration drives our desire to bring those possibilities to life. With that in mind, I feel that the frustrations shared and reciprocated in the roundtables allowed beautiful ideas to grow, creating hope for what the sector could be. Although there is likely more frustration to come after these roundtables, so too there is more growth to come.
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