Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts

How do people in the creative arts prepare for, and participate in, civic life? This question is central to anyone involved in arts education and in the creation of public policy for the arts. Celebrity endorsements of political candidates and controversies over NEA funding aside, the role of the artists - student and professional - must increasingly be couched in terms of the social: artists make art, but they also exercise their cultural citizenship as explainers, teachers, and advocates. This volume will be developed at NYU, where the Tisch School of the Arts (not coincidentally founded in 1965, the year the NEA came into being) is one of the country's premier institutions for arts education. Mary Schmidt Campbell and Randy Martin are putting together a volume that will explore the central questions of "artistic citizenship," a term they create here to explore a unique and powerful form of civic identity. The list of contributors, all of whom have or have had some connection to the Tisch School, include the novelist E.L. Doctorow, performance artist Karen Finley, film and television scholar Toby Miller, Arvind Rajagopal, theatre guru Richard Schechner, cultural theorist Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Deborah Willis, George Yúdice, and the African writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo.