Arlene Goldbard

This is the first section of a talk I gave on 19 June 2009 at the National Summit of Ensemble Theaters, meeting at the University of San Francisco. Click here to download the full text.
I’ve just moved back to California, part of a big life-change for me. Whenever I come here, I touch down with [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote briefly about the May 12th White House Briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery I had helped to organize. Now, a detailed report on the briefing has been released. You can download it from the Cultural Recovery page of my Web site. The report is the next [...]

I have some advice for Rocco Landesman, the newly appointed Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, but first I have to convince myself it is worth offering.
In case he reads this, I’ll summarize my advice up front: Rocco Landesman, the intelligence, risk-taking and independence for which you are admired on Broadway will be [...]

I’m on the road with time for just a quick note to tell you that on May 12th, more than sixty activist artists, community artists, creative organizers and uncategorizable fellow travelers took part in a White House briefing I helped to organize. Actually, it was two meetings in one: I’d proposed a meeting of community [...]

The most-forwarded article award for this week goes to “The Creativity Stimulus” by my friend Jeff Chang, which appears in the May 4, 2009 edition of The Nation. It’s a concise and compelling argument for the vital role that artists and artists-activists can play in democratic renewal and national recovery:
Every moment of major social change [...]

By now, I know my tribe: like Lewis Mumford, “I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.” (Or like Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”)
If you’re a member too, perhaps you also watched Battlestar Galactica, a sci-fi series that just ended (but will certainly be available in one form or [...]

We humans are good at condemning other people’s sins of omission. There’s a whole publishing industry around how much the average German knew about Nazi atrocities, for instance, calibrating ordinary people’s exact degree of culpability for what was done in their names. But it’s much harder to admit the same faults in our own and [...]

My heart goes out to President Obama on his thus far unrequited desire to form a more perfect union with the other party. I understand what he is trying to do, but I’m worried that he doesn’t understand why it won’t succeed just now.
Consensus is a beautiful idea. In Aristotle’s philosophy, everything has a [...]

“It’s critical,” my wise friend said, “that you continue to advocate for what you want without allowing yourself to be shaped by the limitations around you.”
This is such a challenging idea, my head swims when I try to get a firm grip on it.
In the personal realm, it arises with great force. Despite all [...]

There they go again! A few right-wingers who want to defeat the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan now before Congress are using one of its smallest provisions, a $50 million supplemental allocation to the National Endowment for the Arts, as a dart they hope will let the air out of the bill.
There aren’t a [...]