Art in the Public Interest

June 1, 2011

Dear Friends of the Community Arts Network,

This is a personal message from Linda and Steven, founding co-directors of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network.

After two years of effort to pass CAN along to an institution or a consortium, and an additional year of effort to find funding to turn the existing site into a permanent, static library, we have exhausted our options. We have no further plans for CAN. The www.communityarts.net URL now points to API’s site, www.apionline.org.

Back in 2008, we and the API board decided that CAN was so successful that it needed to grow substantially, and that API was too small an organization to support that growth. We hoped to pass it along and we offered to help train staff at CAN’s new home. Unfortunately, our announcement of that search coincided with the beginning of the current financial crisis. Long story short, though we received a great deal of support from our community, we were finally unsuccessful in finding an institution or consortium that would take the risk on a new program in these times of shrinking resources. There were many offers from individuals willing to help with various tasks involved with CAN, and we greatly appreciated those offers. But with no administrative support there was no way to coordinate that energy. We eventually folded the CAN website because even a static website requires ongoing resources and oversight.

As you know, a “snapshot” of CAN’s website was taken in September 2010, and that archive exists online at Archive.org, thanks to Indiana University. It is technically unsophisticated and somewhat difficult to search, but at least that treasury of information and thought about community arts is still available to those who need it.

There is an active CAN page on FaceBook where the community is energetically exchanging information, questions and answers. We’re so glad there is still a place for everyone to connect.

The field of community arts has grown by leaps and bounds since we started CAN in 1999. In the intervening decade, more than 50 degree-granting programs in community arts have been founded in colleges and universities around the world. We pioneered online connection for the field. We published 10,000 pages of information and critical thought about the field, written by the practitioners who are doing the work. We are very proud of all that writing. But our failure over the past 18 months to secure any future funding was a strong indication that it is time to move on.

What will we be doing? Steven is a working artist and a freelance web designer. Linda is semi-retired, reading and writing. If you think either of us can be of service to your project, please contact us. We are happily ensconced in Saxapahaw, N.C., in acres of woods and streams. We have a family of animals and a big garden. We don’t know what comes next, but we’re happy with what we have done together over the last 30 years.

We want to thank our colleagues on the API Board (Kathie deNobriga, Bill Cleveland and Robert Donnan) and our CAN co-director, Bob Leonard, for the many, many hours they put into CAN’s search for a new home. They were very generous.

And we wish the very best for all the artists, writers, activists, organizers, funders and presenters we have worked with, and we thank them for creating the wonderful world we have been part of.

Sincerely,

Linda Frye Burnham ( )
Steven Durland ( )

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