“The Art School of the Future”

Ruby Lerner, founder of the arts funding organization Creative Capital, has written a terrific post called “The Art School of the Future” on Creativz, my new favorite arts blog. I encourage you to read the whole post, but here’s a highlight:

“If I were designing The Art School of the Future, I would integrate art theory, practice and technical training with a professional development curriculum. This would start with strategic planning, goal setting, work/life balance, and time management. The Art School of the Future would also teach financial literacy, encouraging young artists to build good financial habits early in their lives and careers. And we would spend a LOT of time on communications — verbal communications, presentation skills, negotiating, marketing, outreach and PR. We would teach artists community engagement skills — how to reach the audiences they most want to reach, and who to partner with to make that happen. We would teach strategies for working collaboratively with other artists.

“These skills are powerful, not only because they will be useful throughout a working artist’s life, but equally because they will help artists take advantage of many other opportunities in creative fields, and beyond. The reality is that not everyone coming out of art school programs will end up as a working artist, supporting themselves full-time on creative work — and that is fine. So, art school graduates should also be able to teach, run an arts business, curate, produce, install work, raise money, do promo and marketing, and understand the technical aspects in their mediums.”

What do you wish you had learned as a student in the arts that would have prepared you for your career today? How do we make changes to the arts curriculum to insure that emerging artists are prepared, while still fulfilling our obligation to teach creative skills and give a broad education?

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