Apri 15, 2008
The management behind the arts
 (Photo by Jeff Watts) |
As Sherburne Laughlin took the helm as new director of the Arts Management program, some of the area’s top leaders in the arts came to AU in December to discuss the future of arts management and brainstorm about AU’s role in preparing the next generation of professionals. Participants in the Arts Management Roundtable said that AU, which has long been highly regarded in the field, benefits from its Washington location and its proven track record in connecting students to mentors and rewarding internships. At the event were leaders in organizations that have often hired AU students or welcomed them as interns, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennedy Center, the Music Center at Strathmore, and the National Children’s Museum. |
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There was a time when arts management sounded like an oxymoron.
That’s what Sherburne Laughlin was told when she mentioned, in the early 1980s, that she wanted to pursue a career in the field.
Arts management? What could that be? How could someone manage the arts—that creative, inspiration-driven, out-of-the-box world of artists, actors, and dancers?
The notion that management and the arts were once seen as incompatible is itself a quaint idea in 2008. In today’s climate, it’s clear that running a successful arts organization takes business savvy as well as inspiration. Without grants, marketing campaigns, permanent staff, boards of directors, and long-term strategies, the show can’t go on.
Laughlin did, indeed, go on to a successful career in the field that some people thought was an oxymoron. Now she’s head of AU’s master’s program in arts management, which may well be the oldest in the country, and is certainly among the best known. It was founded in 1974, when the National Endowment for the Arts itself had just been founded and theatres, dance companies, and arts institutions were starting up around the country.
AU’s first class in arts management included Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage; Joy Zinoman, founder of the Studio Theatre; and Gail Humphries Mardirosian, now head of AU’s Department of Performing Arts. Jack Rasmussen, now director of the AU Museum, joined the program in 1977.
The program’s reputation had reached Europe by the time Laughlin was living there in the late 1980s. Always a demanding program, it requires 45 credit hours, a larger load than most master’s degrees. It also includes a required internship that takes advantage of one of the program’s biggest draws: its Washington, D.C., location. On the whole, the program takes more than two years to complete. “You can do it in two years, but you’re a tired person,” Laughlin says.
The program’s long history and its location were both magnets for current master’s student Andrea Klotzsche, who has worked for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and will soon intern at the Kennedy Center. “Having the city as a balance to theory is definitely a great complement,” she says.
Like many students, she’d started out on the creative side of the arts. Klotzsche was initially interested in theatre, but decided she preferred behind-the-scenes work to the spotlight.
Jennifer Guzman, another first-year master’s student, studied painting as an undergraduate. “But I knew studio art isn’t where I’d always be,” says Guzman, who was a gallery director in Ann Arbor, Mich., before coming to AU.
“The networking program is unbelievable. We’re kind of in the epicenter of national organizations. Even if you don’t plan to stay in D.C., the connections are going to be so important,” says Guzman, who plans to return to the Detroit area in the future and work in its small but thriving arts scene.
Laughlin herself entered the field with a business background. Growing up in North Carolina, she studied economics on her father’s advice, but loved music and initially became a classical music announcer on radio. (Her southern accent was trained out of her by the radio business, she says.)
Later, she took her Yale MBA and love of the arts into a career in nonprofit management. She has served on arts panels, consulted on nonprofit issues from governance to strategic planning, and taught for 12 years in AU’s arts management program before taking the helm this academic year.
Several changes lie ahead for arts managers, she says. One is attracting a younger audience. Supporters of the arts tend to come from an older generation, and it’s hard to know whether that’s because people become more supportive of the arts as they age or whether younger people simply haven’t been reached.
“This generation is more decided in its likes, and we have to recognize that,” says Laughlin.
One wave of the future, she says, is a multidisciplinary approach. Arts managers have to be generalists who understand a variety of fields. And that’s not just a matter of knowing about both theatre and dance. They also need to think outside the box.
Laughlin recently sat on the panel for a grant application in which dancers and geneticists were working together to express scientific findings artistically. That, she says, is the kind of creative work that an arts manager can make happen. Good arts managers, after all, know that arts management is an art in itself.
And that’s not an oxymoron. For arts institutions, it’s the secret of success.
