Virtual Arts Summit 2023

You can view the complete program HERE.

The complete schedule for virtual offerings can be found below.

Welcome & Open

Thursday, June 8 9:30am – 11:00am

Session Title: “Championing the Arts: Advocacy and Policy Insights from Maryland’s Leaders”

Presenters: Comptroller Brooke Lierman, Senator Sarah Elfreth, Delegate Stephanie Smith, Nicholas Cohen

Kicking off the Maryland Arts Summit, join us for an insightful and engaging panel discussion featuring esteemed Maryland policymakers. This special opening session, hosted by Nicholas Cohen, Executive Director of Maryland Citizens for the Arts, brings together Comptroller Brooke Lierman, State Senator Sarah Elfreth, and State Delegate Stephanie Smith. These influential leaders will discuss the importance of the arts in Maryland and share their expertise on effectively approaching lawmakers, developing strategic advocacy initiatives, and understanding the role of policy in fostering a vibrant arts community. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to learn from Maryland’s top policymakers and elevate your advocacy efforts for the arts and the role of policy in supporting and enhancing our community.

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Session Time Block 1

Thursday, June 8: 11:15am – 12:15pm

Illuminated Histories of the Peale Museum

Presenters: Alexandra Garove and Dr. Diane Kuthy

This presentation will share our arts-based research of the Baltimore Peale Museum, its place in the broader context of natural history collections, related curricular resources designed through a critical museology lens, and our insights and enduring understandings due to this process. Our image-based presentation will begin with a storied history of the Peale Museum, its significance in museology history, and its current innovative mission, including inclusive programming and accessible design. We will then present our arts-based research, which began as an assignment for the graduate-level course Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Issues in Art Education and culminated in the exhibition Spark: New Light, commemorating the grand reopening of The Peale.

For this exhibition, we created Illuminated Histories of the Peale Museum for this exhibition, an interactive artwork incorporating mixed media and natural displayed on   a hand-crafted light table. The installation “illuminates” the history of the museum and aims to promote a critical discourse about how aesthetic objects are perceived, collected, and categorized. Like many facets of the Western historical canon, our understanding of museums is intrinsically connected to the history of colonialism and racism. Our research reexamines this history, amplifying previously unheard narratives. The session will culminate with a discussion of ideas and implications for museum gallery teaching and K-16 art classrooms.

Participant goals include accessing local and natural history for artistic and pedagogical inspiration, gaining ideas for fusing new technology with traditional exhibition practices, and best practices in accessible design and critical museology. Participants will also have access to curricular resources we developed as part of the project. Participants can evaluate their achievement of these goals through their understanding and use of curricular resources, incorporation of accessible technologies into their personal practices or classrooms, and deeper appreciation of museology. Knowing the history and understanding the origins of museology practices can enrich the experiences of teachers and students alike.

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Session Time Block 2

Thursday, June 8: 1:45pm – 2:45pm

Seven Principles to Prioritize and Value the Professional Teaching Artist

Presenters: Denise Jones, Jennifer Ridgway, Khaleshia Thorpe-Price, Devin Walker

Since the summer of 2020, when Maryland Teaching Artists joined the national call for the arts and culture sector, the philanthropic community, policymakers, schools, libraries, retirement homes, detention centers, and all community entities to recognize the importance and value of Teaching Artists as paid professionals, they along with their colleagues from across the mid-Atlantic began deliberating over individual past and present experiences. They examined their understanding of a professional and how identifying as one might shape and transform their collective future. They arrived at seven principles for Professional Teaching Artists.

Achieving an equitable, sustainable, and vibrant arts ecosystem for Teaching Artists requires employees and independent professionals to seek fair and livable wages and compensation consistent with other fields and all stakeholders (Teaching Artists and those that hire, train, and support TAs) to adopt the 7 principles. With WEE Nation Podcast as our host, Maryland TAMA members will share personal stories to illustrate the principles of excellence, professional respect, autonomy/choice, fair pay, self-worth, control, and prepared and responsible – sharing how the principles will advance solidarity and justice in the field of teaching artistry so that Teaching Artists can remain contributors to the vibrancy and rebuilding of Maryland communities and beyond with art learning and making at the heart of healing and transformation.

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Session Time Block 3

Thursday, June 8: 3:00pm – 4:00pm

The Audio Describer As Cast Member: Audio Description At Every Performance

Presenter: Joel Snyder, PhD

This presentation will demonstrate how audio description (AD) provides access to the arts for people who are blind and can most effectively be offered at *every performance* in the run of a performance.

AD makes visual images accessible for people who are blind or have low vision. Using words that are succinct, vivid, and imaginative, describers observe, select, and then succinctly and vividly use language to convey the visual image that is not fully accessible to a segment of the population—the American Foundation for the Blind notes that 31 million Americans are blind or “have difficulty seeing even with correction”.

In 1981, a formal audio description service—the world’s first—was begun under the leadership of a blind woman at The Metropolitan Washington Ear, a radio-reading service based in Washington, DC.

Radio reading services are heavily dependent on volunteers and The Ear’s audio description service was also structured around voluntary contributions of time and effort. With support from the D.C. Aid Association for the Blind, the Audio Description Project of the American Council of the Blind proposed a more expansive audio description arrangement for two productions again at Arena Stage: an audio describer attended rehearsals for each production, met with the stage director, actors, the designers (scenic, costumes, lighting, sound) and developed an audio description script throughout the three-week rehearsal period. The script was then available for that same describer to voice at every performance beginning with opening night and with, of course, an eye on stage action as minor changes in action could occur from performance to performance.

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Session Time Block 4

Thursday, June 8: 4:15pm – 5:15pm

Digital Branding and Career Sustainability

Presenters: Ceylon Mitchell, Ruby Lopez Harper, Joshua Jenkins

This workshop is designed to teach best practices and innovative approaches for individual artists to enhance their personal brand, grow their audiences with values-driven content, and leverage revenue streams in a 21st-century landscape. Takeaways include the essential elements of an artist statement, composing a visual identity for owned media, serving your community, diving into the nuts and bolts of a social media strategy, and exploring other digital strategies.

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Session Time Block 5

Thursday, June 9: 10:00am – 11:00am

Marketing your art like “The Real Housewives”!

Presenter: Derek Pentz aka Zenobia Darling

Visual Artist and famed Drag performer Derek Pentz AKA Zenobia Darling hosts an informative lecture on how to utilize social media to promote the arts using branding and marketing theatrics employed on reality tv shows such as Bravo’s The Real Housewives as well as applying artist Allan Kaprow’s theater theories on Happenings to combine visual and performing art to great fine art marketing success.

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Session Time Block 6

Thursday, June 9: 11:15am – 12:15pm

How to Protect Black Hair in Dance

Presenter: Anastasia Johnson

This session is meant to bring awareness to the complexity and beauty of black hair to educators, studio owners, and artistic directors etc. Meanwhile sharing the necessity of having projection over black hair for their black students within the art form of dance. This Case Study presentation will challenge the societal definitions of “neatness” and “professionalism.” The goal of this interactive informational session is for participants to leave with better knowledge about black hair and to accumulate tips on how to dismantle micro-aggressions and discrimination against black students in the dance community surrounding them. This session serves as an extension of an initiative called, Color Me (__), which is centered around allowing black folks to show up as they are without subscribing to whiteness while simultaneously upholding a positive representation of blackness.

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Closing Remarks and Performance

Friday, June 9: 1:15pm – 2:15pm

Closing remarks by Amanda Morell, Deputy Director of Maryland Citizens for the Arts will be followed by a special performance by Maryland Arts Summit presenter and Director of HALO, Inc, Shana Oshiro accompanied by Dr. Brian Bartoldus, pianist. Their set will include Adolphus Hailstork’s song cycle, Songs of Love and Justice, art songs set to text from sermons and speeches by Dr. King. She will also share some words and reflections on the subject of radical community connection and inclusion. The performance will conclude with an audience participatory experience of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s rendition of “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes.