The Art Effect

MC WOLFMAN

MC Wolfman (aka Dan Betro) is a New York born artist  working as an Illustrator and Background Artist, creating work for clients like Red Stylo Media, Print Syndicate, SBC Advertising, Viceland, Thrillist, McGarryBowen, MC CHRIS, and Cartuna. mc-wolfman.com

Domino Bliss

Domino Bliss is an illustrator and tattoo artist currently working at Revenant Gallery in Hopewell Junction, NY. instagram.com/dominotwist

PROGRAM MANAGER, EMPIRE PROGRAMS

We are seeking an engaging, experienced Program Manager for our Empire Programs. The Empire Programs Manager is responsible for directing, coordinating, overseeing, and evaluating the successful implementation of The Art Effect’s anticipated 12 Empire programs. This position supervises between six and eight Teaching Artists/Assistant Teaching Artist teams. This is a full-time (40 hrs/week) position with health benefits and 401k option. Salary commensurate with experience. Applications will be accepted up to and including October 1st, with interviews occurring the week after, with an anticipated program start date of October 15th. Responsibilities and Tasks

• Designing learner-centered, constructivist project-based learning units focusing on visual arts and media arts.
• Developing curriculum and assessment materials to create a reusable lesson archive.
• Leading teams of teachers in planning, implementing, and evaluating media/arts education curriculum for elementary and middle-school aged students and subbing in for teachers when needed.
• Managing program interns to oversee all production/post-production in programs.
• Assisting with professional development for teachers.
• Maintenance of attendance records, activity logs, and other administrative duties that may be relevant to program, along with liaising between parents, administrators, and The Art Effect.
• Grow the program’s reach and potential to better fulfill The Art Effect’s mission.
• Coaching teachers with regard to The Art Effect pedagogy and reflective/adaptive self-directed improvement.
• Upholding and training teachers in following site-specific disciplinary policies.
• Meeting weekly with teachers to help them gather supplies, paperwork, fine-tune day by day curriculum, answer questions, brainstorm big-picture directions.
• Meeting with on-site school literacy coaches to confer about linking after-school program to in-school curriculum/best practices for using media education to reinforce/strengthen literacy skills.
• Compiling/inputting/filing student paperwork, assessments, enrollment, and attendance info.
• Drafting outcomes reports, session-by-session, overview as well as site-by-site.
• Writing copy/organizing pictures for web updates and social media posts.

Requirements for Position

• A Bachelor’s degree in education, arts education, media arts, filmmaking/video production, visual arts, or a related field is required (a Master’s degree in education, arts education, or media production is preferred)
• The ability to juggle multiple overlapping high-stakes priorities at once
• A minimum of two years coordinating and directing a team, particularly teams working with children or youth
• Excellent communication, leadership, and interpersonal skills
• A demonstrated track record of effectively teaching a diverse range of learners
• A vision for sustaining and expanding The Art Effect’s transformative pedagogy across all Empire Programs

To Apply: Please send cover letter, résumé, and work samples or sample lesson plans to sarahtimberlake@thearteffect.org

Closing the Loop: Listen for Good Round One

The Art Effect is Listening for Good! “Last year we provided some feedback about the state of the Art Institute… I wanted to thank you for making so many improvements, including the suggestions we made. We were impressed by the year over year improvement. It shows you listened and are an organization that listens.” — Art Institute parent Here at The Art Effect, we value the input of the students and families we serve. This past year, we initiated the first of what will become many organization-wide feedback loops through the Listen for Good grant, made possible by the Fund For Shared Insight. For our first round of Listen for Good, we created a survey and kept it open from December 12th 2017 through March 30th 2018, sending it to over 400 past and present program participants for a selection of The Art Effect’s programs: Dutchess Arts Camp, Art Institute, MADLab, and Spark Studios. We heard back from 160 people about a wide variety of issues, including schedule and structure of programs and classes, effectiveness of different teaching/learning strategies, and more. Here’s what you told us:

• When responses are viewed as a whole, we’re doing an above average job on all questions….

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) system is a standard feature of the Listen for Good survey, enabling The Art Effect to compare results to an industry baseline to get a sense of how we’re doing when compared to other arts and education organizations across the country. A high NPS means that our constituents are highly likely to recommend The ARt Effect to a friend, and, by extension, they are satisfied with our program services. The Art Effect netted an overall NPS of 68 (above the national benchmark). Our NPS score of 68 means we have more people who actively promote our organization than the average arts organization. In addition, half of respondents say we meet their needs extremely well. 135 of 160 respondents say our staff always treat them with, and a majority of respondents (130 of 160) say it’s extremely easy or very easy to get services at our organization. We are very proud of this!

• Our program audiences are segregated across racial lines and higher-income groups are overrepresented.

Cross-tabulation reveals our program audiences are diverse, but separated by how clients racially identify as well their relationship to our organization. For example, we found through this survey that our Arts Institute and Dutchess Arts Camps programs serve audiences who are primarily white, and our Spark Studios and MADLab programs serve audiences who are primarily people of color. The Art Effect stands for diversity, inclusion, and so we plan to use this feedback as an opportunity to ensure that our programs are equally accessible to all people, regardless of race, class, gender, and other demographics. This information also helps us realize the nuances of how this programmatic segregation plays out and helps us to learn more about the people we serve and how their situations influence how they rate The Art Effect. For example, when counted as an average, our NPS is 68, above the national benchmark. However, when the results are cross-tabulated by race, it emerges that white respondents rated us an NPS of 74, Latinx respondents rated an NPS of 63, and Black/African-American rated NPS of 52. We first interpreted this to mean that the white folks we serve are largely enthusiastic “promoters” of our work, while most people of color we serve are largely passive. However, because our programs are also predominantly segregated by race, this could also mean that some programs are much better than others. In fact, neither of these assumptions are exactly true. When we closed the loop with Spark Studios and MADLab program youth (who are predominantly Latinx and Black/African-American) and asked for insight as to why they gave us such a low NPS, it turned out that, contrary to what we’d thought, they said they were unlikely to recommend the program because they viewed it as theirs and wanted to keep it for themselves. Though the NPS was low, we now understand that the wording of the question (likelihood to recommend) signified something to students that we had not considered.

• Small logistical improvements can make a huge difference to how an overall program flows and feels.

If you participated in any Dutchess Arts Camp, Art Institute, or community program such as MADLab or Spark Studios in 2018 we want to hear from you! Please take the following anonymous survey. It should take no more than 5 minutes to complete: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PWRCLVF. If you have any questions, please call 845.471.7477 and someone can assist you.

Did you miss After Hours?

After Hours: Summer Edition

We had so much fun celebrating the kickoff of our After Hours event series in April! We hope you’ll join us for this month’s summer edition of After Hours on Thursday, July 26th. Your ticket provides you with unlimited tastings from craft breweries, local distilleries, and amazing food vendors, as well as chill music and unique youth art! Enjoy tastings from vendors like Hudson Valley Marshmallow Company, Salt Point Meadery, Taqueria Los Ortiz, The Educated Chef, Tied House, Inc., and more! Listen to a special acoustic set performed by Absolute Zeros! Tickets are on sale now: thearteffect.org/store/after-hours THANK YOU TO OUR AFTER HOURS SPONSOR: Thursday, July 26, 2018 5:30 – 7:30 pm Poughkeepsie Underwear Factory 3rd floor

Local Library Partner Receives NEA Grant

Congratulations to the Poughkeepsie Public Library District for receiving the NEA Big Read Grant earlier this month! The NEA Big Read is a national initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, which broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. A list of all of this year’s Big Read recipients can be found at arts.gov.  “This program encourages people to not only discuss a book together, but be introduced to new perspectives, discuss the issues at the forefront of our own lives, and connect with one another at events,” commented NEA Acting Chair Mary Anne Carter. “We are thrilled to once again receive an NEA grant for the Big Read,” says Library Director Tom Lawrence. “But this is really a grant to our entire community since our local Big Read would not be possible without the enthusiastic involvement of so many partner organizations.”  The National Endowment for the Arts announced Big Read grants totaling $1 million that will be distributed to 79 communities across the country in 2018-2019. Poughkeepsie Public Library District will receive $15,000 to coordinate the community-wide reading program this Fall. One of the Poughkeepsie Public Library District’s community partners for this Big Read is The Art Effect, a non-profit organization focused on supporting personal growth, fostering self-expression, and enhancing human services through the arts to build a shared sense of community. The Art Effect has a strong history of collaboration with the libraries of the Hudson Valley thanks to its Mobile Media Lab programming, media and arts workshops that reinforce digital and visual literacy while patrons engage in art and media-making. These two-hour, 10-15 person, contract workshops facilitated by a professional teaching artist are booked and paid for by the library and are free to the public. Sometimes for more intensive programming, libraries have booked two back to back for a 4 hour session, or scheduled multiple sessions over a series of weeks for longer projects. Thanks to the NEA Big Read grant, The Art Effect has 10 two-hour workshops available to book free of cost for libraries looking into offerings and activities for their patrons that can dovetail with the Big Read’s book selections. Workshops can also be custom-made to suit a library’s particular needs and specific requests. Get your library on the list and reach out to us to book a workshop today! Email maryellen@thearteffect.org if you are interested in bringing us in or for more information about our offerings.

DAC Welcomes Deborah Coconis as Millbrook Program Director

Deborah Coconis is the newest addition to our lineup of Program Directors for Dutchess Arts Camp. She will be leading the program’s Millbrook location. Local to the area, Deborah has been living in the Millbrook area for the past fourteen years. She studied both theater and visual arts in college and later apprenticed with master mask maker, Eric Bornstein. She combined the two arts as a mask-maker and performer with Behind the Mask Theatre in her native Boston, and has taught the mask making techniques to many. Locally, she has made and performed her masks at New Year’s Eve Millbrook for many years. She continues her passion for acting as a touring performer to school-aged children with the Center Players on Tour‘s production of Rip Van Winkle, and most recently directed their touring show of The Pink Refrigerator. She has starred in numerous roles at the Center for Performing Arts Rhinebeck and was a company member and School of the Arts instructor at Half Moon Theatre in Poughkeepsie. Deborah serves as the current director of Millbrook Community Preschool at Grace Church, where she has taught for the past ten wonderful years. She finds preschool, and teaching in general to be a natural creative outlet for her artistic sensibilities, especially as a performer.  Dedicated to community arts enrichment, she has served as a board member for the Millbrook Arts Group for the past ten years. She looks forward to bringing her awesome experiences as an instructor at the Poughkeepsie Dutchess Arts Camp for the past five years closer to her home and student friends and families in Millbrook. Meet Deborah this summer at Dutchess Arts Camp in Millbrook!

Another MARVELous Mural

Students at the Art Institute designed, created and delivered these two incredible murals to The Children’s Home of Poughkeepsie last week: Thank you to the members of the National Art Honor Society of The Art Effect: Chloe Mosbacher Anthony DiBattista Max Von Der Horst Claire Wu Leyla Cerella Shapiro Oliver Gresch Emily Canning Yan Lam Molly Stark Andrew Mark Amelia Audette-Diaz Maya Henderson Fall registration for The Art Institute is now open! Learn more here.

RECAP: Reel Expressions 2018

Another great year of the Reel Expressions International Teen Film Festival! In its sixth year, the festival featured youth-produced films – narrative, animation, experimental and documentary – from the Hudson Valley and around the world! This film festival highlights youth creativity, features a teen perspective on many important issues, and showcases the incredible work done by the next generation of media-makers. Thank you to our host for the evening, Ayo Nish!   A very special you to Kate Ketner, a student of The Harvey School, who designed our 3D printed Sparky Trophy! Our 2018 Reel Expressions winners: 2nd Runner Up: Void by the team at Wide Angle Youth Media’s Mentoring Video Project 1st Runner Up: In the Trees by Will Nordstrom Grand Prize: Junction by Alexia Salingaros Thank you to all of your submissions. We’ll see you in 2019!

Photos from Reel Expressions 2018: