Is it okay if I speak from here? Will that do?
I don't have a PowerPoint,
so I feel this will conceal
a little bit of my nakedness
[LAUGHTER] in terms of talking.
Just to say, I sat in on some of
the sessions that went on just before this,
and couple of quotes came in my mind that
might be good epigraphs for
this little brief chat of mine.
They're both by canonical authors.
One is Shakespeare, "Sweet are the uses of adversity."
The second is actually from Matthew, I guess,
from the Bible, "Knock
and it shall be opened up unto you."
Those are just hanging out there
in isolation and hopefully,
in brief moments that I'll explain a little bit
about the work we do at
the National Endowment for the Arts,
maybe there'll be some resonance
with some of those two sayings.
I'm the Director of the Research and Analysis office
at the National Endowment for the Arts, as you heard.
Just a little bit of a backstory.
I came to the Arts Endowment about 12 or 13 years ago,
can't believe it's that long,
as the director there of research,
and a lot has happened since then.
Just my background was,
I was actually a journalist
covering health policy in biomedical research,
and the pharmaceutical industry,
and medical device industry, in fact.
I'm sort of an outsider and observer,
but a very detailed observer of those sectors,
steeped in that jargon and those disciplines.
To jump to the National Endowment for the Arts,
which for me it wasn't much of
a cognitive switch because I've always loved the arts,
but clearly to preside over
research involving the arts
is quite a different kettle of fish.
In doing so, I had to make
a definite cognitive shift as was described earlier.
I think there's cognitive costs
sometimes in these kinds of switches.
But in doing so, I learned a lot.
Particularly, what I learned that we needed
to do at the National Endowment for the Arts,
and our staff and leadership, I have to say,
we're really profoundly supportive of this,
is to transform the way we think
about research questions in the arts.
For years before that,
I think there's been great work that
the agency had been privileged to do
on behalf of the public in promoting
knowledge about the arts.
So there's a lot of collections of, you mentioned data.
Big data doesn't happen alone, you need individuals.
But there was a lot of statistical data collections.
We could tell you the numbers of artists in this country.
We can still report those numbers.
How many people engaged with
the arts according to census numbers,
all kinds of great statistics.
It increasingly became more about framing
that knowledge and articulating
questions that could probe further,
particularly around value and impact of the arts.
When I said sweet are the uses of adversity,
what I meant there is,
as we all know, the arts,
and even if we employ
a pretty capacious definition of
the arts and think about design,
and commercial arts, and industrial design,
and media, and a whole bunch of ranges of other things.
I should just say as an aside,
we actually have measured the economic
value of the arts working
with the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and Commerce,
looking at how much it contributes to the GDP.
It's about 4.2 or 4.3 percent of the total GDP,
which is pretty significant for the arts.
That includes creative services and advertising.
It includes some of
these other disciplines I've mentioned.
But nevertheless, even if you take into
account the scale and size of that,
you find that there's not a lot of
understanding of what that sector has to offer to
society and what beyond
what we consider arts experiences,
arts education, specific services like design,
that they may be integrated in
product manufacturing and that sort of thing.
Really, we were trying to interrogate
what are the broader level outcomes.
We did a pretty extensive project a few years back,
which was essentially creating what we
call system map of the arts ecology in the US.
We looked at it from a systems lens and we understood
the arts to be embedded in other systems, of course.
If you had to map it all out,
I said I don't have any slides for you today,
but I can certainly present them to you if you'd like,
showing where we landed.
This is after several town hall meetings,
consulting a lot of stakeholders
inside and outside the arts,
and coming up with a model for how to study the arts,
and particularly, how to get at the levers of
impact where we see the arts
contributing in economic terms,
in social terms, in civic terms,
and in a host of specific areas.
What that led to is, first of all,
we started a grants program in the research office.
Up till then, and we still do this again,
is we commission studies from time to time.
One that comes to mind is in this climate
is work we did at the Santa Fe Institute where we
looked at studying creativity
in the brain and understand bringing together
really a truly transdisciplinary effort to
understand how creativity works
from a psychology perspective,
but also neuroscience, and neurobiology,
and really coming up with
some recommendations for research.
But so we do those studies,
but what we had not done really
is basically have an open call
for the research community,
for those of you in this room and others,
to come to the Endowment with
your best ideas for studying the arts.
We started this about five or six years ago,
and we made a proviso that basically,
all of our grantees have to submit a paper at the end of
the grant period to
be posted on our website, distributed by us.
But of course, they can get it
embargoed if they're seeking publication,
and we would honor
that for a period of time and so forth.
We've actually posted several reports on our website as
a result of this grant program,
and it's actually cut across numerous disciplines.
We have a great talking about what I'm not showing you,
but we have a great Venn diagram
showing what disciplines we actually,
or maybe it's a word cloud showing where
we are in terms of disciplines.
It's really all over the map.
I mean, you see, assistant professors,
associate professors, full professors,
and arts organizations,
civic organizations applying to us to conduct research
about the value and impact of the arts
using a variety of methodologies,
and as I said, coming from different disciplines.
But I think one thing that we found was
in the first few years that was happening in
common and where we decided to dig deeper was,
really it was all coming from the
social and behavioral sciences.
That was really where
the best research about
the arts was coming from. That seems to make sense.
I mean, there's some wonderful health-related research
and there's research about the arts' benefits on health,
which I'll mention in a moment, benefits for health.
But I guess what I'm trying to say is in each case,
it was a really a top-notch social science methodologist,
whether it's economics, behavioral sciences,
anthropology, you name it,
program evaluation who has really locked at the hip with
the arts practitioner or the other domain researcher.
We've really harvested a lot of those results.
One of the things we did a few years ago
was recognizing the paucity
of quasi-experimental and experimental
studies about the arts,
that is to make causal inferences about the arts.
We all have great research.
I think you all are aware of much of
it that not only the NEA is supported,
but others have, talking about
the plausible impacts of the arts,
but they're often couched as correlational studies,
talking about the arts' potential benefits
for the workforce or for,
you name it, really a lot of domains.
But what we're really trying to do now is
move closer to causal inferences,
not just employing the cookie-cutter
randomized controlled trial approach,
but also inviting novel methods for
studying to reaching arguments
about causality in the arts.
Getting back to this "Sweet
are the uses of adversity" quote,
what I'm trying to say is we were in
a position where we were compelled to really
bust silos and work across
disciplinary lines to get the best talent really,
to do this kind of work for us and with us.
If you think about
the National Endowment for the Arts, you,
of course, know they fund arts projects. I hope you know.
They fund arts projects all around the country to
support creativity and broader arts engagement.
But we wanted here to focus on where could we
invest in really other sectors to come into the arts,
and to the arts people too to connect with those sectors.
This program was a way of doing that,
and it seems to have worked out in that all of
our research projects typically show great,
I don't know if they're fully
transdisciplinary all the time,
but they're certainly multidisciplinary
if not transdisciplinary partnerships.
Not just within the social sciences,
but also often with non-social science research expert,
and looking at questions around value and impact.
Some of the bigger grants that we've given lately in
this quasi-experimental grant line,
there's a pyre grant dollar
amount tag to that with a match as you noted,
some of those projects have to do
with things like community engagement.
We're dealing with an arts intervention
deployed in a community setting that's being studied,
maybe in a longitudinal manner or we're
looking at arts intervention in a classroom,
or we're looking at things like substance abuse
or creative arts therapies,
which is a big area for us.
There are a lot of those kinds of
studies starting to percolate.
I won't say a lot, I should rather
say a modest amount now coming up,
and we're certainly getting a lot of
applications for those kinds of studies.
The other thing we did is we moved beyond simply,
we love the grants program,
but we moved beyond this open call method,
to something a little bit more directed where we said,
okay, so our theory of change,
our analysis of where we see
the arts ecosystem that I've just
described suggests that there,
you could think of three distinct buckets of impact.
It's just very generalized,
but if you think about the impacts of the arts,
you can think about the arts and this is borne out by
literature having a positive influence on,
let's call it social-emotional well-being and health.
You could see another stream of impact,
narrative on talking about the arts
related to cognition and creativity and learning.
You can see a third strand having to do with
social and civic engagement
and entrepreneurship and innovation.
I've conflated some terms there.
But what's important to realize is
we basically said we're particularly
interested in multi year studies and research programs.
Not just grants, not just one-off projects,
but centers of excellence
to be created around these three domains.
We put out a call three years ago.
Now we're up to the point where
I think in January or February we'll be announcing,
will be up to about 12 of
these so-called National Endowment
for the Arts Research Labs.
We stipulate in these lab awards that there has to be
this trans-disciplinary research approach
demonstrated in the project descriptions
in the applications,
there has to be a partnership
with a non-arts entity and an arts entity.
We do raise the bar a little bit,
but we also are putting in more money for
these projects to invest in.
Something akin in a very modest way with what's being
done by the National Institutes of Health or NSF.
That's an area on our own trying to
catalyze this trans-disciplinary work.
I've refrained from signing particular projects.
I will say that if you go to the arts.gov,
I think it's slash research,
you'll see a whole host of things there.
Allow me just briefly describe some of them.
Some of them are publications in fact.
I've actually thrown a sampler up in the front if
people want to pick up copies
or maybe some still available.
We've worked with other federal agencies, basically.
Again, sweet are the uses of adversity is you go to
the larger federal funders and say,
"Hey, is there a way we can pony up and work together?
Here's why it's in your interests, NSF,
or Department of Education or Department of Agriculture,
to study these issues from an arts lens."
One of the things we did is we created
an interagency task force
on the arts and human development,
which spans around 19 or so federal entities
across the government.
They meet every quarter and
we occasionally do projects together.
We commissioned a workshop from
the National Academy of Sciences on the arts and aging.
What is the research state of research there.
Our most recent accomplishment
which I'm very proud of on behalf of,
I guess government is we worked, Francis Collins,
the director of National Institute of Health of course,
and prior to that,
as you know, the one who helped map the human genome,
if not primarily responsible.
He announced on the stage at
the Kennedy Center that the National
down for the Arts and the National Institute of Health
are together going to support
new funding opportunities for
studying music in health and healing.
Those three new funding opportunities
were just announced.
That itself came out of not only this task force we have,
but also work we've been doing with
the Kennedy Center and
Renee Fleming, the well-known soprano.
The Kennedy Center to
understand how music works in the brain.
Some of these partnerships beliefs.
This gets to my second saying,
knock and you shall enter.
I think we're finding that a lot of
times in the arts and you probably see this Ben,
we're a little prettier than we may think
we are when we talk about
the arts to other organizations, other sectors.
I'm not saying we, as in the royal we,
but I think the arts has
the ability to fulfill gaps that oftentimes
aren't as apparently filled by other disciplines.
A lot of it has to do with the human factors element,
the design component.
But a lot of it has to do with communications,
it has to do with data visualization,
it has to do with the whole stream of things that
we often talk about when we talk about the arts.
Not least of which is creativity.
It has to do with engagement,
engaging with the public,
and finding ways to engage audiences.
I'll just say that one of
the other resources that's out there that I mentioned
is a guide we created a few years back on how
to conduct community engaged
research on the arts and health.
That gets back to something that was said in
a session earlier today about,
for partnerships to really occur in research,
to listen to the
who you might call the research subject and
get them involved in designing
the research questions get them in the room.
We do a lot of work around
creative place-making. The NEA does.
Taking a community-based approach to designing
research strategies to investigate
the arts and health is something we're interested in.
Sticking with the health theme,
and I'll end soon is just to say that
one of the more high-profile efforts,
the National Endowment for the Arts
is privileged to be involved with,
and I'm pleased to be able to help with
this is something called Creative Forces,
which is our work with the military and
Department of Defense and Department of
Veterans Affairs and dealing
with people coming back from the wars with
these invisible wounds that often do
require beyond standard care.
Require integrated care and
sometimes complimentary and integrated care,
which includes what we provide,
creative arts therapy, art therapy,
music therapy, dance therapy, etc.
We also study these and
evaluate the success of these programs.
Again, this is an opportunity
where we find that when we do knock the doors do open.
I think I would encourage everyone to try to be bold
about it and be willing
for the doors to shut a few times, certainly.
But if you're bold about it as well as if you recognize
that sometimes you have to
make the case because you don't have any other way.
We needed to get the best research behind
these questions and we needed to
cultivate it through seed funding,
through our grants programs.
We've since seen a lot of
these grantees turnaround and then apply to NIH or
NSF or Department of Defense or
some other foundations and
on the backs of some of our modest support.
We're proud of that track record too.
I think that's more or less,
I'm sure I've left off some things.
There's also a great report there about our work with
US Department of Agriculture where we looked at
rural arts, innovation and design.
Again, starting
with the social sciences and behavioral sciences,
but targeting an arts related question
to understand why the arts matter to our lives.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]