Accelerating change

Herberger Institute is the largest comprehensive design and arts college in the country, a cultural village of 6,000 students, staff and faculty who come together at ASU to expand their skills and learn what it means to be artists and designers. But Herberger Institute is also a laboratory space where field partners in a wide range of sectors gather to consider the role of art and design in an increasingly complicated world. The arts and cultural sector is rapidly changing due to audience demographics, technology and cultural consumption patterns. For our Institute to remain relevant, we must engage in broader issues of the field that impact how arts and design are shifting and evolving.

The National Accelerator for Cultural Innovation is the Institute’s engine for coordinating, administrating and leveraging our national work and making sure that we create long-term impact and visibility in the broader cultural field. The Accelerator’s mission is to identify people and practices that demonstrate the power of art, design and culture to advance public good and create more equitable communities. The Accelerator is designed to elevate and scale important innovations and innovators in arts and culture by creating powerful learning modules and tools via ASU’s global education tech platforms, connecting artists and policy actors from other sectors in use-inspired research and policy, building public media around powerful stories and exemplars and routing this all back to our students, so that they learn to leverage their skills in new and powerful ways.

2018-19 was dedicated to designing and building this powerful new model. We assembled a national leadership team, led by Jen Cole. And, in its inaugural year, the Accelerator launched several key partnerships and on-going programs that advance and demonstrate how artists and designers are working powerfully at the intersection of social change.

Under the Accelerator, with investment from the National Endowment for the Arts, Herberger Institute established the Practices for Change fellowship. The fellowship is rooted in the belief that creative practices have the ability to radically transform non-arts sectors such as health, transportation, planning, justice and the environment.

The Accelerator welcomed seven Practices for Change fellows from around the country to ASU’s Tempe campus in the summer of 2019. The fellowship supports this cohort of leaders who are using creative practices to advance work in sectors beyond the arts. It also aims to spotlight creative equitable work that is embedded within community development and to better understand how to support artists/designers working in non-traditional ways with new partners to transform practice and public policy for public good. During the year-long program, fellows will work in tandem with ASU faculty and staff as well as mentors with Center for Performance and Civic Practice (CPCP), co-founded by Institute Professor Michael Rohd, to expand their own practical work and document practice and policy learnings from their real-life experiences. The fellows will contribute to case studies, a podcast and a national convening in 2020 where they will connect with others working in the “middle ground” between artistic practice and public policy.

The Accelerator continued a partnership with the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Southwest Folklife Alliance around building a healthy ecology for artists and designers to work on community change projects in Arizona. The Arizona Creative Communities Institute, or AZCCI, is a state-wide effort in nine communities where artists, public officials, community leaders and business leaders are working together on artist-led community development projects. Projects range from longterm work with Border Arts Corridor in Douglas to a partnership with the City of Tempe organizing podcasts and artist performances on the free public transit service, Orbit. The goal of the project, funded in part by a grant from the Surdna Foundation, is to understand how to advance artist-led change work in urban, suburban and rural communities. To document the project and learnings, Herberger Institute, Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Southwest Folklife Alliance produced a podcast series and artist-essay project documenting the myriad ways artists are leading change in our region. The series officially launches in Fall 2019.

The Accelerator continues to advance other work, including the Projecting All Voices program, an effort funded by the Mellon Foundation to invest in and advance the careers of artists who have been traditionally under-represented in the Southwest, and the Studio for Creativity, Place and Equitable communities, a project supported by the Kresge Foundation to deepen teaching and learning about creative placemaking, to create and document industry standards for how art and design can transform community development, sustainability, public policy and other “adjacent fields” and to document and replicate new ways community leaders can define and measure the social impact of art and design projects.

2019-20 Practices for Change Fellows