It’s the Two Year Anniversary of 20UNDER40′s Call for Chapter Proposals

The original 20UNDER40 Call for Chapter Proposals

Today, June 15, 2011 marks the two year anniversary of 20UNDER40‘s historic call for chapter proposals. Two years ago, as the story goes, my good friend and computer whiz Margaret McKenna and I sat in the front room of my Somerville, MA apartment clinked our wine glasses and launched what would soon become a new movement to advance the future of the arts and arts education. After Margaret keyed in whatever mysterious code it was that launched the website, I then sent the 20UNDER40 call for chapter proposals to over 100 colleagues in the field, and likewise posted the call on at least a dozen list serves. Though we knew we had something exciting on our hands, neither Margaret, nor I, nor anyone kind enough to listen to me prattle on about this “idea I had” knew what was about to happen next.

Two years, 304 submissions, dozens of public appearances, and 1,000+ copies in print later, 20UNDER40 has become a phenomenon that is still gaining momentum.

It’s important for me to give thanks to everyone who has helped this project be what it is today. This includes all the brave young arts professionals who submitted their ideas for consideration, the wonderful authors who appear in the book, and all of the editors, supporters, marketing people, and 20UNDER40 fans out there who have cheered the project on, volunteered countless hours, donated funds, spawned deep discussion, and made the anthology a success. Thank you.

While it is important for me to express my gratitude to all of the people who have supported the project, I also want to tip my cap to all of the folks who have opposed the very idea of the anthology. I could have never known that a simple call for chapter proposals would incite so much controversy. I have always enjoyed the critical discussion where it has been conducted in a constructive manner, and I look forward to future debate. At the core of 20UNDER40 is the drive to add to field-wide discussions about the future of the arts and arts education. And while some conversations are easier to have than others, I do believe we need to talk about all of the challenges (and opportunities!) we face as a field. It is only through such healthy dialogue that our field can grow, change, and flourish in the decades to come.

A stack of 20UNDER40 historical documents lay buried deep in a closet at the project's Somerville headquarters.

As I ramble around the arts sector it always heartens me to meet people I have long admired and to hear that they have been reading 20UNDER40. As great as it is to be introduced to field leaders such as Carol Fineburg—who recently showed me a copy of 20UNDER40 on her Kindle device when I met her at a teaching artist convening in New York—I am also equally surprised at how few young arts professionals actually know about the project. While I agree that 20UNDER40 can always do more to market itself (as anyone who has ever tried to draw an audience knows, you can never do too much marketing), I feel that news of the project not reaching its target audience is less a symptom of an inadequate PR campaign, and more an exhibition of the field’s lack of connection, poor infrastructure, and spotty professional network. Overall, I still believe that the field struggles to develop and effectively disseminate literature. And while there are no lack of conferences to go to, and even no lack of journals to read, there is no central place, no one source for information the field relies on to share information, engage with ideas, and participate in generative debate. If there is one thing working on this project has taught me (and indeed, there have been many), it is that the arts sector is woefully fractured and does a poor job of educating itself as a field. In this regard we have a lot of work to do—and it’s time to start doing it.

But despite the challenges we face in the arts—we also have great opportunities in front of us, and an overwhelming supply of hope.

Though it has only been two years (and the publication has actually only been available for just over seven months), I already feel as though 20UNDER40 has made a significant impact on the arts sector. In the short time in which this project has been out in the world I have noticed a revitalization of the emerging arts leaders movement, an increasing presence of young people at our field’s conferences, an inclination towards including concepts and collaborators from outside the arts, and even new ideas (like crowdsourcing and participatory culture) entering into discussions that would have previously been restricted to traditional approaches to long standing problems. I think it is great to see these changes happening, and I am excited for the momentum that is building to help redirect our discussions and further adapt what we do in the arts to not only meet the needs of contemporary culture—but to define the very notion of what contemporary culture is.

One of the biggest questions I get when I am out on the road is “what’s next?” or “when’s the next call for submissions?” While I appreciate the enthusiasm expressed by young arts leaders eager to give voice to their ideas in subsequent editions of 20UNDER40, I still think there is a lot of mileage we can get out of the ideas already expressed in the current volume. I encourage you all to engage with those ideas, to spin them around, challenge them, and talk it up. And then when all of your talking is done—do something. Words are great, but only action will move our field forward.

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