Peter Everwine, in the American Life in Poetry, an internationally distrubted newsletter featuring the great poets of our country.

To have the pleasure to hear Peter Everwine read his poetry is to appreciate that this gentle and thoughtful man is an extraordinary writer.

His awards include winning the Lamont Poetry Prize for Collecting the Animals in 1972; the Stegner Fellow from Stanford, the Fresno Arts Council's Horizon Award, the 2008 Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize XVII, and a fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim.

Ted Kooser, the U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-06, writes in his column for American Life in Poetry, that "Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing.
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Great poems are great stories.  Here he reflects a specific and unique experience of his own youth, yet when I read Rain I was reminded of my love for my father, our family's many camping trips, laying awake in a tent and listening to the sounds of the night in the Soronan desert.  Where does this poem take you?

Barry Hessenius recent blog post, The Six Most Important Conversations for the Arts in the Next Five Years, is an astute perspective on the state of the cultural arts sector crafted from a long and impressive career.  Hessenius was appointed Director of the California Arts Council by Governor Gray Davis in March 2000 and was a member of his

Cabinet, he was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the California Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, an advisor to the National Policy Committee of Americans for the Arts and the President’s Committee for the Arts & Humanities, along with many more appointments and leadership positions in the sector.  His blog is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the issues affeting the sector.

Alan Brown, of WolfBrown - a consulting firm specializing in the cultural sector, sent out information on their newest studies on donor giving.  While it is focused on Bay area donors, the information is applicable to donors everywhere.

What Motivates Donors?

Over the past year, Rebecca and I have been hard at work on a major study of Bay Area donors.  The results were released last week, and we've created a special page on our website where you can download the results.  There are three reports:

The Key To Developing A Social Media Strategy

Social Media Explorer - Jason Falls

Social media is starting to take hold with brands, companies and organizations everywhere. While there are still stragglers, and it is probably incorrect to say most companies are getting with the program, a good number of them are.

At Eastman, when we were building the Institute for Music Leadership's capacity in music entrepreneurship, we created a prize to encourage idea formation, the New Venture Challenge (http://www.esm.rochester.edu/iml/entrepreneurship/newventurechallenge.php).  In the first round we received only one idea that could be described as innovative and addressing a need or potential market.  Although since then the New Venture Challenge has engendered many good ideas and plans, after that first round we questioned why this had happened.  Our answers centered around the fact that music students, especially those studying classical forms, in their experience had rarely been asked to produce anything creative, or even think about how they, through their art form, could invent something new, and useful.  It became clear to us that in order to teach entrepreneurship to music students, we would need to focus heavily on idea formation.

Mas Masumoto and the family farm peaches are featured in the upcoming July issue of Martha Stewart Living Magazine.  Ten pages of photos and images from the farm and a delightful story about  Mas, Marcy, Nikiko and Korio Masumoto and, of course, PEACHES. Then two more pages of peach recipes from Marcy and Nikiko and the magazine food editors.

The Masumoto Family invites you to a “Mas and Martha” party – were there will copies of the magazine available and you can preorder their artisan organic PEACHES.  Friday, June 18th from 3:00pm to 9:00pm at the Sierra Nut House located in Villaggio Center in Fresno, Calif. Jo Ann Sorrenti from Sierra Nut House is planning on cooking recipes from the Martha Stewart Living magazine and they will be available for sampling and purchase. In addition, copies of Mas’ books, the magazine and PEACHES will be available.

 

On June 1st, 2010, the Los Angeles City Council voted to move the proposed Nonprofit Lease Subsidy Council File into the Arts, Parks, Health and Aging Committee.

A large study of classical music audiences, published in October 2002, found that people attend live orchestral performances for many reasons beyond the music itself. In fact, the study identified seven distinct values that audiences place on the live orchestral experience, with only one directly related to artistic or educational goals.

Here's an excerpt from the study's final report:

Some people use classical concerts to entertain visiting friends and family members ('occasion value'), while others use concerts as a means of nurturing and sustaining their personal relationships ('relationship enhancement value'). In focus groups, classical consumers quickly start talking about the 'healing and therapeutic value' of classical music and the 'spiritual or transformational value.' These layers of benefits and values surround the actual artistic and educational experience, which is what orchestras sell.

Understanding the range of values that drive audiences to engage in creative experience is a fundamental requirement for arts marketing, development, education, and community outreach. Only recently have such studies started to dig into the question.

Ailing Museums Seek 'Bailouts' From Universities

Tottering under years of budget deficits, accumulated debt, and declining donations, several of the country's small and midsize museums are turning to the art-world equivalent of a bailout and forging partnerships with academic institutions, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Museums' financial problems follow years of ambitious expansions, generous executive pay packages, and questionable real-estate investments undertaken during the real-estate boom. To finance that spending, many museums took on significant debt — only to have the floor fall out from under their endowments in 2008 when the stock market crashed. In response, some museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, and the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California, are turning to universities for help, in some cases handing over artwork and moving to new locations. According to many museum directors, a university is more likely than a private collector to keep a collection intact and maintain public access.

Fresno State supercomputer boosts research power - By Mark Grossi / The Fresno Bee

Equipped with a powerful new supercomputer, Fresno State soon will join the worldwide hunt for the Holy Grail of physics - an explanation for the birth of the universe.

The university, alongside Stanford, MIT and Yale, will be among a relative handful of places where scientists and students can analyze data from the world's biggest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

The supercomputer - actually, many computers linked together - will be part of a computational center, expanding Fresno State's capability to do complex work, such as study DNA, model climate and analyze earthquakes.

It's all happening through the efforts of 44-year-old particle physicist Yongsheng Gao, who joined the Fresno State physics department in 2007.

His reputation and work are known at the Hadron Collider, where he worked for five years in the 1990s on an experiment for his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

"We have this opportunity because of Yongsheng's standing," says Andrew Rogerson, dean of science and mathematics. "We're very lucky. This is the kind of research that students in the United States need to learn."

• Creating Critical Mass - John King, Co-author, Tribal Leadership
• Fresno Brand Platform – Suzanne Bertz Rosa
• Engaging Audiences, Ron Eichman, General Manager, Fresno Grand Opera
• Redeveloping Downtown Fresno
• The Role of Art in a Healthy Community - Amy Kitchner, Alliance for CA Traditional Arts
• Public Broadcasting, -Paula Castadio, PBS Board of Directors
• The State of Historic Preservation - Karana Hattersley Drayton, Director, City of Fresno Historic Preservation Program
• The History of Fresno County, Elizabeth Laval, Pop Laval Collection
• The Intersections of Science & the Arts - Dr. Andrew Rogerson, Dean CSUF College of Science & Mathematics
• The State of Film – Ray Arthur, City of Fresno Film & Entertainment Commission
• Cultural Arts Policy - Brad Erickson, California Arts Advocates

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