 both close by and far away, could know more about the programs at SMU. In 1911, SMU was founded. In 12, the campus master plan was approved and Dallas Hall construction started. In 13, the first librarian was hired. That's when 2013 was the year of the library. In 1914, the first faculty began to be hired. So that's why this is the year of the faculty in our centennial. And in 15, of course, the student showed up. And so 15 will be the year of the student. And so we're very pleased to have the opportunity here in our third World Change or Spotlight event to feature the National Center for Arts Research and several of our guests. We're very pleased that the chair of our board, Karen Prothrow, is here. And Karen, where are you? There she is. Thank you, Karen, for being with us. And Linda Evans, the Meadows Foundation president and chair and CEO and whatever other title. But she's obviously a great part of the success of NCAR. And Linda Custard, who is the chair of the Meadows Museum Advisory Board and really heads up the major events for the centennial. And so would you join me in having these three people recognize? When I mentioned the Meadows Museum Advisory Board, there is one other board I wanted to note. And that is the Meadows Executive Board. It's a very important advisory board for the Meadows School of the Arts. A lot of what gets done really gets shaped and pushed and directed by this executive board. It's a very important component of the success of the Meadows School of the Arts. And so Dean Bowen is here. And I'd like members of the Meadows Executive Board to please stand with Dean Bowen. Meadows Executive Board. One of the things that we are celebrating this year is the ability to have within-car individuals of incredible strength and knowledge and so on come and help us shape this new national center. It's one thing to claim to be a national center. It's another thing to be a national center. And so we're committed to making sure that that in fact occurs. And one of the things that we need in that operation is to have fellows who come to the campus really work with us, learn what's involved with it, and over time, even maybe after the fellowship ends, stay with the center in some capacity to work and make sure that we continue to benefit from it. And so we're very pleased that Nancy Nasher and David Hammaseger committed resources to endow our first of these fellowships. We hope there will be others, but this is the very first endowed position for the National Center for Arts Research. We've had a good bit of support operationally, but over time we certainly want to move to endowments to make sure that the future is bright and that the support that is needed is always there. So would you join me in thanking Nancy and David for this particular gift? Thank you very much. We have worked very closely with them over the years, of course, with the National Sculpture Center and all of the things that people who shop at North Park get to enjoy. Everybody has their favorite piece there. I had a grandson who was eight before he liked the guy with a hammer. He wouldn't even go down that hall. I said, well, I'm not going to tell that until he gets over it. But nevertheless, the contributions to art and family are tremendous. And we're very pleased to have Kate Levin, the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, to be the first to serve in this position. And I think that one of the things that you'll see through the interaction between Zanni and Kate is that there is a real understanding of what the opportunities are and what the need is along with the opportunities and then a real commitment to make sure that this National Center meets the needs of the fine arts community around our country. So would you join me in greeting Kate Levin and Zanni Voss? Let's say one. Before this got established last fall, I had agreed to teach the first half of a class tonight from 6.30 to 7.30. So, you know, the bad thing about putting something on your calendar, it shows up. And so I've got to go do that. So excuse me. Thank you, Dr. Turner. And thank you all very much for coming this evening. How many of you are already familiar with National Center for Arts Research? Okay, a lot, but not everybody. So I'm going to give just a very brief overview of who we are. About 18 months ago, we had a vision. And the vision is to act as a catalyst for the transformation and the sustainability of the national arts community. And a mission is that we wanted to be a leading provider of evidence-based insights that enable arts and cultural leaders to overcome challenges and increase impact. Basically, what we want to do is provide more knowledge back to the arts and cultural field about itself based on its own data. It's a pretty simple concept. In order to do it, though, first we had to start by compiling a lot of different data. So we have amassed data from the Cultural Data Project, Theater Communications Group, from IRS 990s. So we have data on about 50,000 arts and cultural organizations from around the country. To understand cultural policy, we've pulled in data from the National Endowment for the Arts, for the Institute of Museum and Library Studies, and from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. And we said, okay, that's great. We've got the cultural policy and the organizations, but that's not really enough. Arts organizations don't exist in a vacuum. They exist in communities. And so to order to understand how does where we live affect how we operate, we've wrapped into that all of the information from around the communities where arts organizations are located from the Census Bureau so we can give every arts organization a sense of place. That's really our starting point. What we've done is we've been able to create a series of health metrics across a wide variety of different objective outcomes so that we're able to show what was performance for different arts sectors, for arts organizations of different sizes, different geographical locations. We wanna start kind of probing the data to see where did the significant differences lie. And after looking at what was performance, we realized that's really not enough to understand this. We have to be able to understand really what drives performance. You know, what drives performance from the organization's own characteristics, from the characters to the community that it operates in, the availability of public funds through the local and state and federal cultural policy. And ultimately, from the leadership of the organizations, how does the expertise of leadership end up affecting outcomes of performance? We're working with IBM to create an online dashboard that's going to enable free of charge any arts organization in the country to be able to go online and to look at what is its health relative to the field on a variety of metrics given what its organizational characteristics, its operating conditions and its local community characteristics are. We've started out also by creating a number of white papers. We have had two white papers that I'm very proud to say were co-authored with one of the MA MBA students, Ann Marie Gann. One had to do with examining whether or not the MA MBA funding represents a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier communities. Another looked at whether there is gender equity in pay amongst art museum directors in terms of gender equity. Both of the white papers have generated considerable national interest in national prints and have been really wonderful drivers to NCARC site. We are also trying to engage the field through a lot of resources. Marla Teilia and her team are out there trying to, it makes sure that we are drawing people to the National Center of Arts Research not just to look at what were the findings but to engage with the findings and to engage with one another in conversations about now that we know what some of the issues are, how can we work to move the dial on improving them? And even considering the first report, considering the dashboard that's upcoming, the white papers, the engagement activities, all of those are really exciting but there's nothing more exciting to me in this first year than being able to welcome our first Nasher Hamaseger Fellow to National Center for Arts Research, Kate Levin. Now, when we set out to say we needed a fellow, we've got a wonderful team of researchers. There's Glenn Voss, the research director, Rick Bryce, who's a research fellow. Bill Dillon works with us who's the associate dean of Cox. We've got the research team but what we needed really was somebody who was an outstanding visionary leader from the field who could help inform our research, who could help to keep us honest, who could help to make sure that what we're providing is useful. And so we decided, let's see who we can find who would fill that bill and the person whom we've selected has exceeded all of our expectations. Kate Levin is a principal at Bloomberg Associates which is a philanthropic consulting firm that's created to collaborate with cities around the world to help improve the lives of their citizens. Kate also serves as the head of arts programs for Bloomberg Philanthropies. As you know, prior to that, Kate served for 12 years as the commissioner for the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and there she managed the single largest funder of the arts in the United States. She grew funding for the arts. She also made sure that the sector's creative capacity expanded into economic development, tourism, human services, and education initiatives. Technology development, improvement, streamline application processes, data collection. She's a fellow data geek just like me which is one of the things that we really hit it off over. Capacity building programs have strengthened the nonprofit leadership in the sector in the city of New York. She worked to create several new cultural districts and cultural organizations and she's extended New York City's vitality and impact as a world cultural capital. She's also a former professor, so welcome back to the university environment. Professor of English at City College, CUNY and she's also served in the administration of Mayor Koch. As I said, when we set out to find a fellow, I had high expectations but I never imagined that I could find somebody that I really viewed to be one of the biggest catalysts for arts and culture, not just in New York City but now in the world through her work with Bloomberg Associates. So I hope you will join me in humbly welcoming Kate Levin to come and talk with us this evening. Kate. You've been about your experience as commissioner with the Department of Cultural Affairs and then move into a little bit about your experience currently with Bloomberg Associates, not only what the jump was and the responsibilities and the challenges but also kind of what excites you about your current job. Well, before I started my job with the city I had no gray hair, so look at it that way. New York City has around 1200 nonprofit cultural organizations and my agency got applications from around 1100 of them annually and funded around 900 annually. So what was fascinating was the depth and breadth of the work we were seeing and the opportunity to see if government could genuinely play a constructive role in an area that we were funding because like other city agencies it was about public service, it wasn't a question of taste. It was really about what was best and most productive for all of New York citizens and neighborhoods and that's a kind of different standard of proof than exists in a lot of funding equations when it comes to culture. So that was pretty interesting and one of the things that we did in the course of our tenure under Mayor Bloomberg's leadership was actually overhaul how the money was given out because it had kind of become calcified in a very political system and in the course of doing that, I had, I have never told you this, don't be appalled but I basically failed math for the 12 years I had to take it but I realized that I actually was pretty wedded to numbers because of the ways in which they can be extraordinarily positive in making the case for culture. I think arts organizations and artists tend to resist quantification for some wonderful and understandable reasons. It doesn't often tend to get at the ways in which arts and culture can be genuinely transformative but if you're working on behalf of a municipality and if you're working for Mike Bloomberg you really need to be able to show what the benefits are of public dollars and you owe it to the public. So we did a deep dive and discovered that half of the organizations in New York and half of the organizations applying to us for funding have annual operating budgets of less than $250,000 which for all the people that think culture is a big white travertine marble elitist kind of sport guess what, it's not. And that really gave us the opportunity not only to figure out how to reshape our funding process which then generated an increase in 20% more organizations getting funded and a 30% increase in the amount of dollars we were able to advocate for. But I think it hopefully has created a different platform for the dialogue around the value of arts and culture and the ability to see it as a really dynamic small business sector and to be able to see its impact across a spectrum of areas of civic policy. So it was an extraordinarily exciting time to be able to serve, to be able to create a fair amount of chaos. Had a really bad track record with snake issues if anyone's interested, including and very poisonous Egyptian python who escaped and went AWOL for four days. And yes, we increased the amount of anti-venom at the local hospitals. And that fell under culture. I was the zoo girl. So we had somebody jumped off a monorail into the tiger bin because he had seen God. There's lots of interesting stuff that happens. But my worst snake episode was the anorexic snake. Don't know, sorry. Don't mean to divert. My current job is fascinating because it is such a privilege to get to know colleagues from around the world to understand what's happening in other cities. I think in some ways you don't really understand what you have, what you're dealing with until you see it in respect to colleagues and peers who are dealing with slightly different kinds of issues. But from being a three and a half month old startup what I can report is that there is a huge amount of similarity across urban areas who I think are frankly in many ways more advanced than we are here in the United States about appreciating the value of culture both institutionally and the need to cultivate creative artists and creative thinkers around this sector. But the capacity in this country to put together public-private partnerships is I think really our contribution to sustaining this sector and it will be a very interesting challenge to work with colleagues and try and see if that's a skill set that can really start to translate because I think there's a great desire to understand some of the benefits and robustness and innovation that go along with that kind of model in the arts. And I know that you said that being able to move from a kind of entitlement system with grants to a place where it was more merit-based. How did data help in that process? I know that you are a strong believer in using data kind of as a tool to instigate change. Are there other examples where data really came in handy to help inform a decision that impacted the city? I can't think of a decision that data didn't inform. The question again with arts and culture the huge challenge is that there's no real input-output model. With my colleagues in public health if you give them 10 more dollars they can do X number or more TB patches. Or my colleague who was the transportation commissioner if you gave her Y dollars she could pave Z miles of street. It doesn't necessarily work that way in culture. If you give an organization a percentage more money they don't necessarily make more art. They make better art. But better gets into a qualitative kind of conversation which for lots of reasons I think we in this country have been pretty scared of having because it's hard to have in a constructive way. I hope we're getting better at that. But there are all kinds of data points. My favorite which I had to abandon because of a change in procurement was just around making the case for the value of arts and culture to people who might not understand the entire trajectory of impact. The Bronx Zoo was the biggest procureer of hot dogs and hamburgers made in the Bronx. And then the manufacturer moved to New Jersey so that was the end of that data point. But it remains the biggest employer of teenage youth in the borough. And the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Academy of Music are in the top 1% of employers in the borough of Brooklyn. So creating little mini data narratives around those kind of things were really helpful with individuals who again were stuck on seeing culture as a matter of taste. And if I don't like what happens in that building my tax dollars should not be going to benefit them because somehow those dollars are being privatized as opposed to creating this incredibly generative set of impacts that a lot of times frankly were credited to the economic development side of the ledge or not the cultural side. But as data portraits get more and more sophisticated I think we've been increasingly able to claim credit for what the sector is able to produce. And looking for as a part of what we wanna do with NCAR is to help to transform health to provide knowledge that will help us better understand what's happening within our own decision-making communities that might be changed. Looking forward and thinking about the field what do you see as some of the key issues affecting the arts and cultural field kind of looking towards the future of arts and culture? Are there particular kind of sticking points or bumps in the road that continually come up? I think one of the issues for cultural organizations is a tendency to believe that whatever the truth of yesterday and the day before has been is what we need to plan for. And in some ways what we've seen and your research bears this out smaller organizations have an easier time innovating because they don't yet have a baked in infrastructure that they need to service. And so in the area for example of digital engagement larger organizations because they have the capacity and the infrastructure have done some amazing things at trying to figure out how to reach out to the public in different ways using technology. But smaller organizations in a very different footprint for example ticket sales. What we saw is a lot of smaller theater companies in New York were figuring out how to use email as a way of selling tickets at a period where I mean one of the biggest long-term impacts of 9-11 on New York was the diminution of subscription sales. Took a real hit and never really recovered and the zeitgeist suspicion is that people just think differently now about planning ahead. But I think there are also other factors. There are lots of different ways of getting discounts and the place that subscription sales used to play in household economics and in terms of arts consumption has changed. But it's a real imposition on organizations that now need to do single ticket sales. So just figuring out that if you have the right kind of mailing list, if you send an email at 4.30 saying seats still available to someone who's deciding whether to go to a movie or a bar or whatever their leisure activity is gonna be for that evening, you can have a full house pretty easily and extremely inexpensively. So that's sort of one very block and tackle way that I think some organizations are starting to meet the challenge of a changing universe in terms of how to reach audiences, how to make their goods and services appealing, how to tackle certain kinds of diversity that everybody is trying to reach out to. But I think that the biggest single challenge is cultural organizations tend to be acts of passion. Someone has a real vision and they feel it very strongly and they wanna try and create an organization around it to promote it and that doesn't necessarily mean that the impulse comes with a rock solid business plan or a desire to engage with all the other terms of financial health. And on my tenure, the city of New York took a huge economic hit after September 11th but the 2008 recession was also pretty colossal and I'm really proud of the fact that we didn't lose any cultural organizations directly as a result of 2008 and I think it was because we had instituted the cultural data project right before that cycle hit and organizations as a result were much more keenly aware of their own finances because they'd had to go through an application process that required them to really snuggle up to their audited financials in a way that most of them found repulsive but at this point they've kind of gotten into it. So I think self-knowledge across a range of things that relate to programming but that really also relate to business is an ongoing challenge but such a huge opportunity as well. I wanna shift from thinking about the health of the organizations themselves of looking at kind of as a city, as a district, as a plan. If a city really wants to set its sights on being an arts capital, I wanna relate this back to the work that you had done for the downtown Brooklyn cultural district and what do you see as some of those key elements that in looking at the desire to really have a collective sense of cultural vibrancy, what has to be there? The short answer is artists. It's really about content. It's kind of sad, the Ford Foundation a number of years ago put together this consortium of foundations that did a really interesting piece of research that showed that I think it's 96% of Americans value art. Only 28% of Americans value artists and there's some disconnect of who's making the art and we've just gotten to a very weird place in our society. I think we're very focused on celebrity but the notion of actually creating art and the cycle of trial and effort and not necessarily success that goes with that I think is something that's difficult for people to appreciate with a cadre of folks who aren't necessarily so bottom line focused. So the downtown Brooklyn cultural district came about because the Brooklyn Academy of Music which I think has now become generally accepted as one of the nation's most influential performing arts organizations. Actually, my first job was there out of college and when I told people where I work they asked me what instrument I played. So I sort of surfed that reputational wave but the city of New York owns four different massive parking lots around that venue and so the commitment was to start developing those parcels and in part out of recognition that BAMS continued reputational gains had finally made that neighborhood a place that was attractive for development but that those developments would all include a major cultural component. And so it's the science project from hell to try and marry commercial residential development with arts organizations but the theater for an audience as a venue I encourage you all to go to when you're next in New York. Open this fall with a wonderful production by Julie Tamor of Midsummer Night's Dream and renovated a city owned building that now contains a bunch of small theaters and the largest glass blowing facility in the US so I know a whole lot about blast furnaces and fire rating and stuff like that but again the key theme of everything we tried to do in the district was what serves artists and the borough of Brooklyn has become the place in New York City where young people wanna live they're not so interested in Manhattan anymore and that's really on the backs of its reputation as being a creative place and I've had the good fortune to travel around the world, it's hilarious. I got in an elevator in Istanbul with a guy wearing a Brooklyn t-shirt and he was Turkish and he wasn't from New York or anything but the fact that that's become a brand and its association is with creative cultural types is absolutely fascinating. I think my great grandparents would run screaming but because they did everything that could get out of Brooklyn but it's sort of a wonderful I think lesson for how cities can be transformed through the strength of the desire to associate with creativity but it is no small task to want to really nurture and embrace artists because again they're not house pets, not house broken, wanna do stuff that you can't necessarily control. You don't know what the outcome is gonna be. There may not be a reliable financial gain and so I think for folks in public policy to really embrace that can be a struggle but I think you absolutely have to do it. I mean one of the things that Mike Bloomberg did a lot when he was mayor was sanctioned temporary public art projects and every single one got yelled and screamed at. I think the one most people have heard of is the Christos Jean-Claude Project, the Gates in Central Park in 2005 and the Audubon Society I'm sure had a target with my face in the middle of it but the day it opened everybody said what are you gonna do next? And it was really, that was 2005, it was the first time that the city of New York was in the media for something other than death, doom, despair and it brought four million visitors to the city in 16 days, $254 million in additional tax revenue and those are exactly the kind of data points. We made sure that we really studied them precisely because we knew we needed to be able to speak to the impact in ways other than cab drivers and their fares engaging in passionate conversations about whether they liked it or not which I personally think was really useful. It's very Tabermasian in creating a civil society to be able to have people talk about stuff that isn't each other but I think, again, being able to take the risk on someone else's vision and live with it even when it's not so popular. One final example, we also worked with one of our park conservancies did a project that had originally been seen in England with the English artist Antony Gormley and it was a series of 31 casts of Mr. Gormley Naked that were placed on buildings around the Flatiron District of New York and our police department made sure to do a briefing informing everybody that they weren't people committing suicide, it was an art project. But we still, there's still front page headlines, suicide jumper, spark chaos and the tabloids were really kind of going after us for being to artsy fartsy and the mayor was great about saying you should really come see this. If you don't want to, you don't have to but this is an option that's here for you and it's not a requirement but it's a wonderful thing and it will spur visitation and tourism and it did and all summer long while it was up people were wandering around with maps out trying to find these things and they really looked at their city in a way that was very different and so, again, having the commitment to understanding that artists may from a public policy point of view be a little frustrating but that the benefit you get is just extraordinary. And are there certain elements so this was a public, private, the Brooklyn Cultural District effort, are there certain things that, so you can say yes, let's have more artists but from an infrastructure standpoint what are some of the key elements that aid in that? Affordability, rehearsal and studio space. I mean it's interesting, I think in City Policyville everybody gets very excited about incubators for tech industries, increasingly for fashion design, want to support the financial sector. The creative sector, people start getting a little weird about and again I think it's partly because we're not sure what the benefit's gonna be, not sure whether there's commercial success at the end of the rainbow but if you look at arts and culture as an R&D sector like any other it becomes pretty clear that to service artists what you need is to give them affordable rehearsal and studio space. One of the things we did in New York was create this little real estate company and it's sole job is to do affordable rehearsal and studio space because we realized that part of the challenge was the need for an intermediary that was very well versed in real estate as opposed to art, to be able to figure out how to generate and manage these spaces and so in addition to some standalone facilities there were two pilot projects up and running when I left City Service but the next two projects are gonna be putting studio spaces in library buildings because our public library systems and I think this is gonna be a national trend as library materials are going digital you don't need the same amount of storage space and public library systems all over the country are facing real capital infrastructure problems leaking roofs and heating systems that are defunct so to try and repurpose them in ways that are really sympathetic to community residents seemed like a major opportunity but a lot of capital projects we did included affordable studio space as a piece of the action and the irony of this all is everybody is versed at seeing communities flourish because again they're associated with creativity they're associated with artists and yet the choke point comes when you figure out okay how do I allow more artists to be here? We've got time for just a couple of questions if anybody would like to pose a question to Kate? I would say from what I can tell the city of Edmonton is doing extraordinary work in the area of arts and culture they seem to have found a really great balance between public support of their institutions and creating a lot of opportunities for artists to make work and they also seem to be using their creative sector as a way of dealing with a bunch of population diversity issues they have indigenous population they have a lot of folks who have settled in the area more recently so my hat's off to Edmonton but I think just in general this is purely anecdotal but I happen to be married to an artist and whenever we travel in Europe people don't look twice at the fact that his passport says artist pretty much every time we have come from Europe into the United States someone at border security wants to know what that really means so I think partly it's an attitude about what counts and who gets to say they're an artist and I think we have a little bit of a ways to go here One quick question and yes? Absolutely not In terms of public service who is being served if it's a population that is otherwise underserved and that's where different kinds of data come in we redid our entire data system to allow us to have a certain amount of GIS mapping capacity so we could see where services were being provided that was a huge one price point like stuff that's free different kinds of disciplines what aren't people getting to see so there are a bunch of different ways of calculating again public service Well I know you'd like to continue this conversation so we're going to do just that out in the lobby and after this is over so I want to thank everyone for coming and thank Zani and Kate for leading this this afternoon I'm also we're very fortunate and grateful to have such an incredibly supportive mayor in Dallas for our arts and culture initiatives so Mike Rawlings has come today and I'd like to ask him here to wrap us up with a couple of words Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas Thank you and I don't like you Jose since you're leaving us that's not good but we want you to come back at some point you've always got a home here in Dallas I do like the fact that Mayor Bloomberg had a term limit because we were able to get people like you out to Dallas he just recently was in Dallas and he offered his resources in many ways to our city because of the work you guys have done it's such a it's such a wonderful model for us and I'm very excited about this project most of you know that I'm a big art supporter and I believe that Nancy and David's gift on this is a really remarkable thing so it's a classic example of those private public partnerships you were speaking of and we've got so many generous folks here in Dallas Dallas is a few years younger than New York City and so we've got some growin' to do but we are starting to grow into our suit we've got wonderful edifices with all of our great worldwide architects and some fabulous directors and conductors and other folks that we've been able to attract I agree with you that it's all about the artist ultimately and that's where I think we need to grow as a city and to be able to take data and take art and say those things come together is really a strategic catalytic converter if you will to make us grow faster so I think that's extremely, extremely important we do have a lot of things that New York doesn't have that is cheaper rent than Brooklyn, okay I tell the story, my daughter just moved from Brooklyn and her rent went down a lot and she was an artist and I think from kids that are graduating from the great Prats and RISDs and art institutes of Chicago's and Juilliards do have a life to live and we can provide them that on the other hand we've got to enable ourselves to think more creatively because we're good at numbers sometimes we're not as good on the creative side and I think learning about many of those things are extremely important but for us to become the great city that I think we all want to be our art strategy is fundamental to this we've seen what has happened in the last 15 to 20 years and I believe we've just started to see what it can do but we've got to be able to do that in a right way to prove to the business community which is still under funds our arts world significantly and I love my business partners but they just do compared to the rest of the country and it's put on the back of our philanthropist and then back to government as well and understanding how we use art in the city of Dallas and the county of Dallas to be able to do it but we need tools like this so thank you so much for coming we want to have you back this is arts week we've been doing a lot of art stuff here this last week and maybe next year we can even give you a bigger form to talk about this thank you Jose and thank you to SMU and thank you to all the arts patrons out here that I look around this room everything you do thank you thank you again I thank you for coming if you've not visited the NCAR website it is a must visit it's a fascinating you can read the first report you saw the website up here earlier I guarantee you we are going to change the way that people talk about the arts in America in the next five years with the work that's being done here by Zani at SMU so take a visit to that website I'm hoping to stick around for a little bit thank you very much for coming thanks to Mayor Rawlings, thanks to Kate and thanks to Zani and thank you for coming today