Can the arts be a stimulus for democracy? The question may seem strange because, in principle, there does not seem to be a relationship between the arts and democracy. What do theater, dance, cinema, and painting have to do with democracy? Or rather, what do these artistic manifestations have to do with politics?
The short answer: They have a lot to do with each other, and …

The city of Yogyakarta, which sits between the Indian Ocean and the volcanic mountain Merapi at the heart of Java island, has long been known as one of the arts and culture capitals of Indonesia. It is the capital of the ancient Javanese kingdom of Yogyakarta, a descendant of the Islamic Mataram Kingdom.
Since the 1990s, especially after the fall of President Suharto in 1998, …

 
Amy Katherine Cannon is a writer and writing teacher living in Los Angeles. She is the author of the mini-chapbook to make a desert (Platypus Press, 2016) and her work can be found in Juked, BOAAT, and LIT, among other places.

Community theater never has been a dirty term for me. To me, community theater is about engaging your community and telling its stories. If the actors, writers, or directors get discovered along the way, by other theater companies or Hollywood or whatever, that’s great. That’s sort of what happened to me when my comedy-drama screenplay, Real Women Have Curves, was made into a 2002 feature …

A little more than 10 years ago, someone emailed me a video of the Helsinki Complaints Choir, a group of people very seriously singing about complaints that were both mundane and funny and large and significant. I watched it over and over. A few years later I saw a film about the artists behind the group, Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, who were organizing Complaints …

In the cooling evening air, Charleston, South Carolina’s notable citizens filed into Hibernian Hall on Meeting Street for the traditional banquet to close their July 4th festivities. The year was 1860, and the host, as always, was the ’76 Association, a society formed by elite Charlestonians in 1810 to pay homage to the Declaration of Independence.
The guest of honor was one of the city’s …

One of the most common pieces of advice given to new writers is “Kill your darlings.” The Australian writers Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman have turned this advice on its head. They’re not interested in killing their darlings, but they have become very interested in killing their audience.
In 2015, Kaufman and Kristoff published Illuminae, a sci-fi novel they’d spent the past few years working …

The phone rang in the office of Salvador Salort-Pons, then Curator of European Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts. “I found a Van Gogh painting outside the public library, and I don’t want someone to steal it!” said the woman on the other end of the line. “Don’t worry, though, I’ve deployed my husband to protect it.”
Six years later, Salort-Pons is now the Director …

Engagement is an important word in the nonprofit arts industry, often paired (at a minimum) with arts, audience, and community. Over the last decade, “engagement” has very nearly become worn out. Not too long ago, when “community engagement” was the hot topic in the industry, it was used to mean almost anything anyone thought was a good idea. I once saw an arts organization donate …

When can you really feel arts engagement in your bones? How do you know that you have achieved genuine engagement?
For those of us who work at the Oakland Museum of California, one moment came during our exhibition “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50,” which was on view at OMCA from October 2016 through February 2017. The realization arrived with a simple …