Our busy summer and fall of travel is winding down with just one more big trip for the team, this time to Italy. November and December will see plenty of work on remote projects, but it is a good time of year to slow down a little, be at home and catch up on all of the things that get put off. It also means we have more space for calls with people across the field.

Miss talking to us? Have a conundrum you are pondering? Need some off the wall advice? Not sure how to untangle a knot? Let’s talk. Between Linda in Latvia and Stacey in California we can find a time whether you are a night owl or an early bird. One of us is always up! 

Who do we want to build relationships with—and why? Creative Futures recently helped board members and senior staff at the Reser, a five-year-old arts center in Beaverton, Oregon, explore these questions as they look toward the organization’s next chapter. Together, we identified a shared vision for community engagement at the Reser: intentionally building authentic, sustainable, and mutually beneficial relationships. Clarifying what we mean when we say “community” and guiding values for engagement are often the foundation for an organization planning to expand or deepen its relationships. 

EU Heritage Circle: We are grateful to be partnering with Newcastle University and a wide team of practitioners across the EU on projects that promote dialogue around dissonant and contested heritage. The project has brought together a diverse group of thinkers and projects from Malta to Ukraine. We appreciate how thoughtful the project planners have been about the need to build dialogue and understanding of difference within the project community as well as externally with communities. To support this, the Creative Futures team led a remote workshop on communication and careful dialogues for the project community when they gathered in Budapest. We are excited to join in person in Italy for a deeper dive into productive disagreement, non-extractive partnerships, and guiding values for the project. 

Creative Futures is pleased to begin a strategic planning process with the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in New Berlin, NY.  For more than a decade, the foundation has supported artist residencies in a 19th century barn which has been transformed into a 21st century artist residency. Artists-in-residence participate in a unique opportunity to explore the widest, most innovative range of materials and technology available today for professional artists working with paint, honoring the legacy of the Golden Family, founders of Golden Artist Colors.

Locally…

Although we work in so many places, it’s always terrific to work on a local project.  Over the past several months, Linda has managed the creation of a new traveling exhibition Out of the Shadows: Slavery and Freedom in Delaware County, NY 1790–1870, about the rural upstate county where she lives. It’s a topic that has never been discussed, and the exhibit curator, Diane Galusha pulled together the slim threads of family stories. But how to make these small threads into an exhibit?  We commissioned a local artist, Robin Kappy, to create what we called imagined portraits of specific individuals. All too often exhibits present facts and figures, but here, we wanted these people, absent from the country’s history for so long, to seem alive to viewers to honor these stories.

Every exhibit developer spends a great deal of time agonizing over perfect labels–that visitors may or may not read. We’ve seen some that have really sparked our interest lately.  In Latvia, where Linda is a Fulbright Scholar this fall, several stuck out to her.  At the National Museum of Literature and Music, the permanent exhibit explores procrastination and creation.  In each artist section, a label also tells us about specific procrastination techniques.

• “Procrastinates by watching the sunset and disappearing into the trees.”

• “Procrastinates by chopping firewood.”

• “Procrastinates by doing crosswords puzzles.”

• “Procrastinates by feasting on his spouse Marija’s roasted chicken.”

And at Riga Bourse, a new exhibit, Cornucopia, explores the meaning of abundance (both hidden and visible) in the museum and in art.  They had a wonderful dialogic question:

“What is the object or ritual in your everyday life in which your own understanding of abundance resides?”