Follow this link to a video in which he speaks eloquently about the philosophical inquiry at the heart of this staggeringly ambitious project.  Thanks to Elaine Ng and her team at Art Asia Pacific magazine for making it happen.

Alex Knapp, Forbes Staff

|3/05/2012 @ 2:27AM |787,177 views

Five Leadership Lessons From James T. Kirk

Captain James T. Kirk is one of the most famous Captains in the history of Starfleet. There’s a good reason for that. He saved the planet Earth several times, stopped the Doomsday Machine, helped negotiate peace with the Klingon Empire, kept the balance of power between the Federation and the Romulan Empire, and even managed to fight Nazis. On his five-year mission commanding the U.S.S. Enterprise, as well as subsequent commands, James T. Kirk was a quintessential leader, who led his crew into the unknown and continued to succeed time and time again.

(Image via Wikipedia)

Kirk’s success was no fluke, either. His style of command demonstrates a keen understanding of leadership and how to maintain a team that succeeds time and time again, regardless of the dangers faced.  Here are five of the key leadership lessons that you can take away from Captain Kirk as you pilot your own organization into unknown futures.

1. Never Stop Learning

“You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there’s no such thing as the unknown– only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.”

Captain Kirk may have a reputation as a suave ladies man, but don’t let that exterior cool fool you. Kirk’s reputation at the Academy was that of a “walking stack of books,” in the words of his former first officer, Gary Mitchell. And a passion for learning helped him through several missions. Perhaps the best demonstration of this is in the episode “Arena,” where Kirk is forced to fight a Gorn Captain in single combat by advanced beings. Using his own knowledge and materials at hand, Kirk is able to build a rudimentary shotgun, which he uses to defeat the Gorn.

If you think about it, there’s no need for a 23rd Century Starship Captain to know how to mix and prepare gunpowder if the occasion called for it. After all, Starfleet officers fight with phasers and photon torpedoes. To them, gunpowder is obsolete. But the same drive for knowledge that drove Kirk to the stars also caused him to learn that bit of information, and it paid off several years later.

In the same way, no matter what your organization does, it helps to never stop learning. The more knowledge you have, the more creative you can be. The more you’re able to do, the more solutions you have for problems at your disposal. Sure, you might never have to face down a reptilian alien on a desert planet, but you never know what the future holds. Knowledge is your best key to overcoming whatever obstacles are in your way.

2. Have Advisors With Different Worldviews

“One of the advantages of being a captain, Doctor, is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it.”

Kirk’s closest two advisors are Commander Spock, a Vulcan committed to a philosophy of logic, and Dr. Leonard McCoy, a human driven by compassion and scientific curiosity. Both Spock and McCoy are frequently at odds with each other, recommended different courses of action and bringing very different types of arguments to bear in defense of those points of view. Kirk sometimes goes with one, or the other, or sometimes takes their advice as a springboard to developing an entirely different course of action.

However, the very fact that Kirk has advisors who have a different worldview not only from each other, but also from himself, is a clear demonstration of Kirk’s confidence in himself as a leader. Weak leaders surround themselves with yes men who are afraid to argue with them. That fosters an organizational culture that stifles creativity and innovation, and leaves members of the organization afraid to speak up. That can leave the organization unable to solve problems or change course. Historically, this has led to some serious disasters, such as Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Organizations that allow for differences of opinion are better at developing innovation, better at solving problems, and better at avoiding groupthink. We all need a McCoy and a Spock in our lives and organizations.

3. Be Part Of The Away Team

“Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.”

Whenever an interesting or challenging mission came up, Kirk was always willing to put himself in harm’s way by joining the Away Team. With his boots on the ground, he was always able to make quick assessments of the situation, leading to superior results. At least, superior for everyone with a name and not wearing a red shirt. Kirk was very much a hands-on leader, leading the vanguard of his crew as they explored interesting and dangerous situations.

When you’re in a leadership role, it’s sometimes easy to let yourself get away from leading Away Team missions. After all, with leadership comes perks, right? You get the nice office on the higher floor. You finally get an assistant to help you with day to day activities, and your days are filled with meetings and decisions to be made, And many of these things are absolutely necessary. But it’s sometimes easy to trap yourself in the corner office and forget what life is like on the front lines. When you lose that perspective, it’s that much harder to understand what your team is doing, and the best way to get out of the problem. What’s more, when you’re not involved with your team, it’s easy to lose their trust and have them gripe about how they don’t understand what the job is like.

This is a lesson that was actually imprinted on me in one of my first jobs, making pizzas for a franchise that doesn’t exist anymore. Our general manager spent a lot of time in his office, focused on the paperwork and making sure that we could stay afloat on the razor-thin margins we were running. But one thing he made sure to do, every day, was to come out during peak times and help make pizza. He didn’t have to do that, but he did. The fact that he did so made me like him a lot more. It also meant that I trusted his decisions a lot more. In much the same way, I’m sure, as Kirk’s crew trusted his decisions, because he knew the risks of command personally.

4. Play Poker, Not Chess

“Not chess, Mr. Spock. Poker. Do you know the game?”

In one of my all-time favorite Star Trek episodes, Kirk and his crew face down an unknown vessel from a group calling themselves the “First Federation.”  Threats from the vessel escalate until it seems that the destruction of the Enterprise is imminent. Kirk asks Spock for options, who replies that the Enterprise has been playing a game of chess, and now there are no winning moves left. Kirk counters that they shouldn’t play chess – they should play poker. He then bluffs the ship by telling them that the Enterprise has a substance in its hull called “corbomite” which will reflect the energy of any weapon back against an attacker. This begins a series of actions that enables the Enterprise crew to establish peaceful relations with the First Federation.

I love chess as much as the next geek, but chess is often taken too seriously as a metaphor for leadership strategy. For all of its intricacies, chess is a game of defined rules that can be mathematically determined. It’s ultimately a game of boxes and limitations. A far better analogy to strategy is poker, not chess. Life is a game of probabilities, not defined rules. And often understanding your opponents is a much greater advantage than the cards you have in your hand. It was knowledge of his opponent that allowed Kirk to defeat Khan in Star Trek II by exploiting Khan’s two-dimensional thinking. Bluffs, tells, and bets are all a big part of real-life strategy. Playing that strategy with an eye to the psychology of our competitors, not just the rules and circumstances of the game  can often lead to better outcomes than following the rigid lines of chess.

5. Blow up the Enterprise

“‘All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.’ You could feel the wind at your back in those days. The sounds of the sea beneath you, and even if you take away the wind and the water it’s still the same. The ship is yours. You can feel her. And the stars are still there, Bones.”

One recurring theme in the original Star Trek series is that Kirk’s first love is the Enterprise. That love kept him from succumbing to the mind-controlling spores in “This Side of Paradise,” and it’s hinted that his love for the ship kept him from forming any real relationships or starting a family. Despite that love, though, there came a point in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, where Captain Kirk made a decision that must have pained him enormously – in order to defeat the Klingons attacking him and save his crew, James Kirk destroyed the Enterprise. The occasion, in the film, was treated with the solemnity of a funeral, which no doubt matched Kirk’s mood. The film ends with the crew returning to Vulcan on a stolen Klingon vessel, rather than the Enterprise. But they returned victorious.

We are often, in our roles as leaders, driven by a passion. It might be a product or service, it might be a way of doing things. But no matter how much that passion burns within us, the reality is that times change. Different products are created. Different ways of doing things are developed. And there will come times in your life when that passion isn’t viable anymore. A time when it no longer makes sense to pursue your passion. When that happens, no matter how painful it is, you need to blow up the Enterprise. That is, change what isn’t working and embark on a new path, even if that means having to live in a Klingon ship for awhile.

Final Takeaway:

In his many years of service to the Federation, James Kirk embodied several leadership lessons that we can use in our own lives. We need to keep exploring and learning. We need to ensure that we encourage creativity and innovation by listening to the advice of people with vastly different opinions. We need to occasionally get down in the trenches with the members of our teams so we understand their needs and earn their trust and loyalty. We need to understand the psychology of our competitors and also learn to radically change course when circumstances dictate. By following these lessons, we can lead our organizations into places where none have gone before.

-end-

A Colossus in Clay Speaks a Generation’s Message

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: February 14, 2012

Any visitor to the museum in early February might have thought that the floor was being gutted, but there was something odd about this scene of destruction: In the middle of it all, a kind of rough gray tower of what appeared to be cement rose from floor to ceiling, looking in places like detritus designed by George Lucas for the planet Tatooine, in other places like something left by the Incas and in others like the underside of an old highway overpass. More than anything else, it looked like the product of a very large rogue 3-D printer infected by a virus, randomly downloading schematics and plans.

But the object, expected to be one of the showstoppers at “The Ungovernables,” the museum’s Triennial — which opens on Wednesday with more than 50 young artists from around the world — was made by human hands. Using mostly clay, one of the world’s oldest and plainest art-making materials, a crew of six men and women from Argentina assembled, shaped and carved the piece, working seven days a week for the last month under the direction of a 31-year-old sculptor named Adrián Villar Rojas.

Until only a few years ago, Mr. Rojas, who was raised and educated in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city, was little known even in his own country, working out of a studio in his parents’ garage. But he rapidly gained a following after beginning to show in Buenos Aires, and he was chosen to represent his country in the 2011 Venice Biennale, where a towering forest of his deranged clay structures became an unexpected hit. (Roberta Smith, in The New York Times, proposed that they might be a “new kind of visionary assemblage.”)

He began using clay partly because it was cheap and plentiful and its crude physicality tacked against the ethereal look of a lot of Conceptualist-influenced work by established Argentine artists. But the clay itself — because of what happens when it dries — began to shape his ideas about the kind of work he wanted to make.

“Look at this, we finished this only yesterday,” he said recently in strongly accented but perfect English, showing a visitor to the New Museum a piece of the sculpture. Mottled gray and scarred by deep cracks, it looked as if it could have just been unburied by archaeologists. “It’s an instant ruin,” said Mr. Rojas, who looked almost ancient himself, his hair and glasses dusted with clay powder. “It’s the gift the material gives us.”

He thinks of such pieces as ruins from the future, the wreckage of civilizations yet to come and difficult even to imagine, beyond the fact that they will eventually collapse, as civilizations have an unfortunate habit of doing.

Like many ruins, the piece itself will be demolished, not long after the Triennial ends on April 22, both because there is no good way to take it apart to get it out of the museum and because, Mr. Rojas says, “I really love the idea of not having a body of work.”

The crew that helps build his monstrosities is less like a group of studio assistants than like a band, with Mr. Rojas as lead singer and one of the songwriters. Over the last two years, as his star has ascended, the group has traveled like a band on extended tour, tramping from Ecuador to Germany to Mexico to Colombia to Italy to France and now to New York, creating pieces in each place as a kind of impromptu performance. While the sculptures are not improvised, exactly, they incorporate ideas from everyone in the group and evolve as they are built.

The group’s modus operandi, to be constantly in motion and seeming to make up the rules for itself as it goes, is one of the few readily identifiable things it shares with the 34 individual artists, artist groups and temporary collectives who make up the Triennial.

The show’s curator, Eungie Joo, spent a year and a half traveling to more than 20 countries to choose the participants, most born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s. Eating lunch in the museum’s lobby recently with Mr. Rojas, she said the first thing she had to recognize as she set out to assemble a representative picture of the work of young artists around the world — the goal of the Triennial — was that “it’s a mission that admits its failure before it starts”; the generation is just “too diverse and complex for many kinds of generalizations.”

But she saw these artists as united by having come of age in an era of disillusionment, many in countries and regions that had overthrown colonialism only to suffer under dictatorships, global economic crises and other endemic political and cultural problems. (The show, with a concentration on the Middle East, Asia and South America, includes only three American-born artists.)

Though Ms. Joo started her search before the inception of Occupy Wall Street and even before the first Arab Spring uprisings, the motivating spirit of both movements seems to suffuse the show. Jonathas de Andrade, 29, a Brazilian artist in the Triennial, expressed the propensity of his generation of artists this way: “Once we stop moving, we are a simple picture. When we move, we produce constant reflections on many circumstances. We adapt. We interfere. We provoke.”

Judged on the criteria of hustle alone, Mr. Rojas is certainly a model of the generation. Besides creating the monumental piece for the New Museum, titled “A person loved me,” he and his crew have also begun work on a large related outdoor sculpture that will go on display in the World Financial Center Plaza for a month, beginning on March 1. It was commissioned by Arts Brookfield, which handles cultural programming for the public spaces of the Brookfield real estate company.

When Mr. Rojas and the others arrived in New York to begin work on the projects on Jan. 6, their plane landed at dawn, and they were at work at the museum by 9 a.m., for the first of many 12-hour workdays. On the spot, they not only conceived the New Museum sculpture so that pieces of it could fit inside the elevators and through the doors of a nearby studio owned by the museum; they also developed a brand-new, lighter-weight method of building, applying the clay to prepared pieces of polystyrene.

Standing in the studio one morning with Ms. Joo, Mr. Rojas added proudly that even some of the polystyrene itself was acquired “thinking on our feet,” scavenged from the New Museum’s Carsten Holler show, which recently closed.

“What’s he’s saying,” Ms. Joo said, smiling, “is that they were going through our trash. But, hey, you know, we’re cool with that.”

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This article from Lisa Petrilli in the Harvard Business Review (reproduced below) has some great perspectives and tips on how introverted people can learn to have confidence in meeting people - this is a skill that CAN be learned, and is crucial toward helping you move forward in your career and life.

A useful “take away” / sound bite was left in the comments to this article: 

Tension is who you think you should be.  Relaxation is who you are.
Tension is in who you think you should be. Relaxation is in being who you are.

Lisa Petrilli

Lisa Petrilli is CEO of C-Level Strategies, Inc. and author of The Visionary Leadership Blog. She can be reached at Lisa@CLevelStrategies.com.

I learned the critical importance of networking, and discovered my natural aversion to it, early in my career. I was a new college graduate working in the strategic planning division of a $10 billion company, and our business unit had been invited to a retirement party for one of the top executives. The gentleman retiring was someone I’d looked up to during my brief tenure, and I wanted him to know he’d made an impact on me.

While I wanted to attend the party, as an introvert I usually avoided these types of events because they made me uncomfortable. Knowing there would be a lot of senior executives at this party made me even more fearful. In the end, I tamped down my fears and went. When I arrived I found a relatively empty room save for the executive’s friends and close colleagues. That night, because of the small turnout, I had the pleasure and advantage of engaging in one-on-one conversations with some of the company’s top executives, an experience that would prove crucially important in advancing my career.

That evening I learned the importance of networking and realized I had to figure out how to engage in business events in ways that were comfortable for me. I went on to discover an array of strategies introverts can use, ultimately writing “The Introvert’s Guide to Success in Business and Leadership”. Because I figured out how to embrace networking I found myself in the plum role of leading one of the highest visibility company teams as a new marketing manager at the age of 26, and representing the company at a United Nations conference in Geneva. I went on to run a $750 million business and negotiate pharmaceutical contracts with top global companies, all in a way that worked effectively with my introverted preferences.

Here’s what worked for me:

I learned to appreciate my introversion rather than repudiate it.

I have met so many introverts in business who talk about introversion as if it’s a malady that one must get over in order to be successful. This is wrong. Introversion is simply a preference for the inner world of ideas because this is where we get our energy. By understanding and accepting this preference, introverts can optimize time spent with their ideas to refine them and recharge. This allows them to be as powerful and persuasive as possible when networking situations arise.

I recognized that one-on-one conversations would be my lifeline during networking. Generally speaking, business events — and particularly networking events that require engaging with groups — are demanding for introverts. An antidote to this, I learned, is to seek out conversations with one individual at a time. When I approach events this way I have more productive conversations and form better business relationships — and I’m less drained by the experience.

I stopped being afraid to be the one to reach out.

My inner introvert used to think that making the effort to introduce myself was risky. I worried that my target would not be interested in talking with me or that I would make them uncomfortable. I learned over time that when I extended my hand with a smile and an introduction my effort would be reciprocated, even when I approached executives above my rank.

Social media makes this is easier than ever. Reach out via LinkedIn, Twitter and even Facebook to people who will be attending conferences or networking events you’re going to and let them know you’re looking forward to meeting them. This pre-introduction leads to a more relaxed and productive in-person connection. By reaching out, you open the door to potentially rewarding business collaborations, and you do so on your own terms.

I learned to prioritize time to re-energize.

While it can be tempting to go from a networking lunch right back to work, or from a networking cocktail event right to a dinner, if you’re an introvert and you do that you won’t be able to bring your best self to your next commitment. Take the time to recharge, whether by walking from the lunch back to work, or by finding 30 minutes alone between cocktails and dinner.

Introverts who avoid networking are making a critical career mistake. Being an adroit networker is non-negotiable — and not as hard as it might seem.

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“Connecting…is about using a genuine love of meeting people and making friends to engage and assist one another.”

“The willingness to reach out to someone you don’t know is crucial to the art of connecting, and especially important in uncertain economic times.”

“Joining clubs and organizations is a terrific way to find like-minded people, but only go when you have an interest — and don’t attend endless networking get-togethers.”  This is the same point I make for artists interested in showing their work in certain galleries - only go to shows that you enjoy, and don’t force yourself to hang out at shows or galleries that you don’t like - you’ll only be unhappy and discouraged - and you’ll send off negative energy that will drive people away from you, rather than bring them toward you.

“Perhaps one of the most important attributes of a connector is a willingness to help and to reach out even if there is no obvious or immediate payback.”  This is where the “genuine interest” thing comes in.  When you truly feel happy to help out others, regardless of what (if any) benefit may come to you, people really sense it.  Ironically, being genuine in this way may be the best way to invite good things to come back to you - even while you are OK with the possibility that there may be no return in the future.  The important thing is not to be calculating - people sense when someone has an angle - and artists can often be especially sensitive in this way, running in the other direction (I recently heard an artist complain - “he behaves like a businessman, not like a curator! I don’t like him!”).  If you can generously share information, connections, relationships or anything else that might benefit others, you will find that such goodwill comes back to you, sooner or later.    Plus, you’ll feel good for having helped someone else.

We all know people like them, people who seem to know everyone. They’re always able to help — or if they can’t, they know someone who can. You meet them for the first time and in 15 minutes, you’re talking with them like you’re childhood friends. They’re successful, smart and funny, with a likable touch of self-deprecation. And they’re interested in everything.

Who are they? Connectors. Take Maryam Banikarim, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Gannett, publisher of USA Today. She has a perfect job for a connector — she helps link Gannett’s various newspapers and media outlets “and bring the pieces together.”

“I like people and am genuinely curious,” says Banikarim, 42. “I like stories and want to make connections. But I didn’t know the word for it until my husband read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and said, ‘I finally have a word for you — a connector.’ ”

As Gladwell writes, “sprinkled among every walk of life . . . are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.” Gladwell describes them as having an ability to span many different worlds, subcultures and niches.

Traits such as energy, insatiable curiosity and a willingness to take chances seem to be the common thread among connectors — as well as an insistence that connecting is not the same as networking.

“Networking I see as a means to an end,” says Jill Leiderman, executive producer of the late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live. But connecting, she explains, is about using a genuine love of meeting people and making friends to engage and assist one another.

Connectors show a willingness to venture outside their comfort zones. For example, comedy writer Josh Bycel (shown top) visited a Darfur refugee camp six years ago, and on the way home he came up with the idea of raising money for a medical clinic for the camp. In three weeks, he had collected $50,000.

That idea grew into a nonprofit called OneKid OneWorld, which aims to connect schools in the United States with those in Kenya and other developing countries to provide everything from books to clean water.

“I’m a comedy writer. I don’t know anything about building schools,” says Bycel, 40, who lives in Los Angeles. “But I’m interested in learning. You need to get out and make connections outside of your own world. Being interested in lots of different things by definition allows you to be a connector.”

The willingness to reach out to someone you don’t know is crucial to the art of connecting, and especially important in uncertain economic times. Those who are in mid-career and may have worked for one company for years should learn connecting skills before they need them.

For instance, most people’s natural inclination is to seek out friends at meetings and mealtimes. Banikarim says not to do that. “It’s easy to sit with someone you know,” she says. “It’s hard, but more interesting, to sit with someone you don’t know. This is not like high school. It’s not just the losers who don’t have somewhere to sit.”

It may seem as if connectors are born, not made, but that’s not necessarily true. Banikarim was forced to learn to reach out to people from an early age. She moved with her family from Iran to Paris in 1979, then to Northern California, where there wasn’t an Iranian community. “I was often that new kid,” she says. When she started college at Barnard, “I knew it was either sink or swim. The first week of school, I joined every club and went to every meeting. I ended up as freshman class president.”

Joining clubs and organizations is a terrific way to find like-minded people, but only go when you have an interest — and don’t attend endless networking get-togethers. Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, says he has never been to an official networking event. Instead, he advises, join organizations that focus on the events and activities you love.

“I have a friend who is the executive vice president of a large bank in Charlotte,” he writes in his book. “His networking hotspot is, of all places, the YMCA. He tells me that at 5 and 6 in the morning, the place is buzzing with exercise fanatics like himself getting in a workout before they go to the office. He scouts the place for entrepreneurs, current customers and prospects.”

Of course, when you’re walking into that first meeting or class and facing a bunch of strangers, the instinct is to flee. That’s all right. The point is not to ignore the fear, but acknowledge it — and then work through it.

“I sort of just run into fear, as I run into chaos,” says Banikarim, whom The New York Post named one of the 50 most powerful women in New York City in 2008 when she worked at Univision. “You breathe deep, and you have to remember that everyone is scared.”

Perhaps one of the most important attributes of a connector is a willingness to help and to reach out even if there is no obvious or immediate payback.

That means thinking long-term. Jen Singer is the founder of the blog Mommasaid.net, author of five books, a Pull-Ups spokeswoman and an undeniable connector. “The biggest mistake people make is they think ‘if I help this person, that will happen immediately.’ We have to stop thinking in linear terms,” she says.

Helping others out doesn’t mean you can’t hold some things back. Singer, 44, uses the word “coopetition” — a combination of competition and cooperation — to describe her philosophy. “I think this generation understands you share, but also protect your own interests — you don’t give a key to everything you have. It’s a line you have to learn to walk.”

Finally, a connector also occasionally has to disconnect. Leiderman says her boyfriend “has taken away my Blackberry so I can super-connect with him.”

SecondAct contributor Alina Tugend writes the award-winning ShortCuts column for The New York Times and published her first book,Better by Mistake, in 2011.

Agnes Gund

President Emerita and Chairman, International Council of The Museum of Modern Art

One of the mysteries of the arts is how an artist becomes an artist. We know that very few trained and talented visual artists actually make careers in the arts. We know, heartbreakingly so, that even very dedicated and inspired artists fail to claim and hold attention for their work. The problem may be more acute for visual artists than for those in other fields perhaps because there are so many visual artists (compared to composers or choreographers, for example) and also because there is a commercial frame around the visual arts. The market sets a daunting standard for success. Many visual artists must believe, as one said to me recently, that “… there’s no real field to break into… every single artist is a different story.”

There are certainly initiatives that are meant to ease the emerging artist’s way. There are competitions, open calls for exhibitions, artist residencies, fellowships and apprenticeships which are arrayed (almost overwhelmingly) on web sites like NYFA Source, but they are hard to sort through and sometimes costly. There are some artist-run galleries and non-profit spaces that are open to less known artists. But making a match is hard and, if it does happen, making it matter is harder. For unacknowledged or under-acknowledged artists, young and older, art can be a lonely and difficult business.

And it is a business. Conscientious curators and collectors visit studios, keep their eyes open, encourage talent when they can. It is hard for them, too.

Seeing all of this for so long — for as long as I have been interested in art — I am becoming a little bit encouraged by some positive trends. Three movements in particular may provide some relief to our sprawled and underserved population of artists: 1) The growth of local or hometown opportunities for artists; 2) The rise of unexpected exhibition places; and 3) Artist-to-artist initiatives.

Local or Hometown Opportunities for Artists. I like the basic philosophy of Artadia, a competition that picks some artists each year to fund and feature. What makes Artadia a different competition, as it says of itself, is that it “… leaps beyond clichés of second-city angst.” It makes grants to artists within their home cities and ties them to the local major institutions, asserting in this way that to be an artist in Houston or Atlanta is as important as being an artist in New York or Los Angeles. Artadia’s basic principle is important in that it serves many more artists than those that actually get its grants.

Cleveland provides another wonderful example. Cleveland’s renowned and revered Museum of Art has joined with a donor/collector couple to refashion an old plant into a new museum “branch” in Ohio City, across the Cuyahoga River. This branch will address community needs and, importantly, encourage local artists. Working with local, living talent is a new mission for Cleveland’s major museum — a truly “contemporary” mission. Another example: the Portland Museum of Art runs a biennial for Maine artists, only. Every two years, the state’s lively art scene is recognized, professionalized, promoted by this major institution, lifting Maine art from a traditionally “amateur” category to a new place. At the Wassaic Project in upstate New York, the residency program has places reserved specifically for local artists who commute from their homes to the studios and join a cosmopolitan art community. The residents’ work is showcased in Wassaic’s summer festival, another unusual benefit.

In all these cases (and there are many others), artists are being claimed and acclaimed at home. It becomes a little less essential for artists to run away, to relocate, to become just one more artist on a crowded coast.

Unexpected Exhibition Places. Of course, museums and galleries and art spaces will continue to ground the art world. But certainly the public — as well as artists — also benefit when art is encountered in other everyday situations. The New York Times and USA Today have reported in recent articles that hotels across the country are mounting art as an amenity for their guests, providing a unique and stimulating environment. Individual hotels and hotel chains are commissioning art, running competitions, and collecting to get the work they want. Some hotels are defining themselves by finding local artists. At a historic hotel in rural Pennsylvania, for example, only local artists are on the walls and one of the major hotel chains has actually mandated that works by local artists are shown at each of its locations.

Hospitals and health institutions are increasingly buying art or encouraging donations of art to warm their corridors, giving both patients and visitors comfort. While major institutions lead the way, smaller, local hospitals and health centers are doing this as well. Restaurants and stores, recreation and health facilities, theater lobbies also do this, often looking widely and intelligently at the artists around them to find work they value either for purchase or for temporary exhibition.

Public art provides great opportunities for work to be seen and experienced. Sculpture in our parks and plazas is now a well entrenched public benefit in American places. According to Americans for the Arts, many of the 5,000 local arts agencies across the country help to encourage and organize art in public places. But new art forms are emerging that integrate the arts even more inescapably into the public consciousness and into public belief. For an Austin, Texas State Park, for instance, a local sculptor, Chris Levack, was commissioned to design ramps on which the skateboarders ride and do tricks and are watched by the public — Mr. Levack actually made skate-able sculpture. Suddenly, people in that park (skaters or not) know that art is around them and for them. In New York City, when the unused Governors Island (800-yards from Manhattan) became an historic redevelopment site, artists were given a major part in it. There are studio spaces for resident artists, art activities, exhibitions and celebrations, many opportunities for the city’s less known artists.

In these ways, more and more, public art is rooted into everyday life. Artists are designing play equipment, routing water ways, using environmental features, reimagining history, challenging passers-by to pause and think about their whereabouts. In such ways, artists encompass us — the public — becoming less avoidable, more essential.

I wish that an interesting practice of the George Gund Foundation would be picked up and imitated by other institutions. Every year for its annual report, the Gund Foundation commissions a photographer “… to highlight a Foundation priority or area of interest.” The artist produces true, enduring images of the Foundation’s interests and concerns in Northeast Ohio. Readers know the work of the Foundation better because of each artist’s images. Many other institutions could capture realities through art as Gund does and foster artists in the process. When art inhabits unusual spaces like reports or programs or calendars or ads, audiences and artists grow.

Artist-to-Artist Initiatives. A third growing trend I sense is that established artists are more often shouldering less-established artists. At the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City outside Manhattan, the sculptor Mark di Suvero has created a park in which other sculptors show their work; a place where park-goers, parents and children, community people, and the art establishment can get to know new artists. He also offers residencies, internships, and jobs for artists, giving them the tools they need to move ahead on their own.

Eric Fischl, another prominent artist, is mounting a national program that will put distinguished artists with emerging artists in typical American places outside the urban downtowns — places where people live and shop and play. These artists, distinguished and emerging, will get to know each other and cultivate new audiences at each site. Versions of this basic idea — banding big name artists and newcomers together to spread interest in the arts — are being developed in other cultural initiatives as well.

No one can say for sure that these initiatives will increase opportunities for striving art makers. But it is heartening to know that the art establishment is stretching, that a variety of institutional efforts are being made to put emerging artists into view. It is good to know that interest is increasing for artists in their home towns and communities. It is good to know that wise and rewarded artists are mounting innovative projects to find future talent. It is just possible that ideas like these will spread, offering fresh opportunity and hope and pathways to emerging artists.

A salute, then, to the institutions and the individuals, from hotels and museums to donors and artists, that are helping to put creative people in front of us, bringing their talent from wherever it is to wherever we are. We can hope that many many more such efforts take hold, expanding possibilities for artists and for the rest of us.

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