Cultural conversations

CORALVILLE - The Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs is listening.

As the organization seeks to revitalize its home base in the State Historical Building of Iowa, its officials are crisscrossing the state to connect with the people it serves.

More than 50 folks gathered at the Coralville Public Library on Thursday morning (7/24/14) to discuss the needs of local arts, cultural and historical groups and how the DCA can help them meet those needs. Another 'community conversation” was held Thursday evening at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids.

'We want to be a more relevant resource to you,” DCA Director Mary Cownie told the Coralville gathering. 'Everything's on the table. We're taking a holistic approach to this. ... It is not just the brick-and-mortar piece (in Des Moines). We're working on a business plan and an operations plan ... to make sure the building functions and is sustainable so we can serve all of you.”

Plans will be formalized this fall and be presented to the Legislature in the next session, for funding consideration.

Communication has been a recurring theme among the community discussions held thus far: helping groups get the word out about their activities and helping them navigate the changing face of media, including social media.

The DCA's role 'is to promote arts, culture and history throughout the state, and also to be a catalyst for that creative sector of our community and to promote quality of life,” DCA Deputy Director Chris Kramer said. 'We know that if you were to take away all of these great things going on in our communities, you'd take away the character, you'd take away the personalities and you wouldn't give people something to do.

'We want to make sure our state continues to be very culturally vibrant, that we not only recognize our roots, our heritage and our native presence, but also to recognize all the immigrants that populate our state” and share their stories not only from a historical perspective, but also provide them as a legacy for young people.

Among Thursday morning's small-group suggestions were increasing outreach through Iowa's 99 counties with traveling exhibits; collaborating with schools to create more hands-on opportunities with art and history; upgrading technology and digitizing documents for easier public access; adding signage along major roadways for points of interest 'off the beaten path”; and helping cultural groups network across the state.

Devin van Holsteijn, institutional relations manager for Orchestra Iowa, said similar themes were discussed in the evening session.

These conversations already are building bridges between groups on the local level.

'It gives you an opportunity to meet people,” Chuck Swanson, Hancher's executive director, said at the Coralville forum. 'I met a lot of people I didn't know. You find out about what they're doing, you find out the things they're passionate about, you can share the things that you're passionate about, and to me, that's one of the benefits of this. We all live so close.

'I enjoy a gathering like this, just to connect even further with people from our local community,” he said. 'But I also think we all need to work in terms of communicating better. We need to find a way of telling our stories, and really, there's a ton of great things happening, and we need to let the world know.”

His colleague, Sean O'Harrow, director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, agreed it's important to put modesty aside and spread the word beyond Iowa's borders and bring people and money into the state.

'We have tens of millions of people driving I-80 and I-35,” he said. 'My gosh - an opportunity. For 5 1/2 hours, we've got their attention. ... We should really promote what we have to offer in terms of cultural tourism and why they should get off and experience what we have in our cities. There needs to be a concentration on bringing resources into Iowa from outside of Iowa, and maybe the Department of Cultural Affairs and what we offer as a state could benefit.

'We often think we don't have great things to offer other people across the world, that things are better in New York or whatever,” O'Harrow said, citing that the recent Los Angeles exhibition of the UI's massive Jackson Pollock 'Mural” shattered attendance records at the Getty - 'the richest museum in the world.” And now the groundbreaking painting can be seen in Sioux City.

'That should show people in Iowa that we have things that people are interested in, and that we need to use that to our advantage. … We have to stop being so low-key about things. We have to really toot our own horns and promote what we have that's good in Iowa.”