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One State: Together in the Arts Session Summaries | Speaker Biographies | Photos
Bill Strickland established Manchester Craftsmen's Guild and Bidwell Training Center in 1968 to help combat the effects of economic and social devastation experienced by the youth of his inner-city Pittsburgh neighborhood. Just as the introduction to art had helped to change the course of his life, Strickland hoped art would inspire similar change in his community. Mr. Strickland is a MacArthur fellow, former NEA council member, and recipient of the Coming Up Taller Award and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Arts Leadership and Service Award. He has served on numerous boards of directors including the Mellon Financial Corporation, Americans for the Arts, and Harvard Business School. He has lectured on the arts and arts education, community development and social enterprise at the Kellogg School of Business, Harvard Business School, Harvard School of Education and Stanford Business School. Strickland will share his remarkable story of personal and community growth through the power of the arts during his keynote address on May 18.
Richard Powers is the author of nine novels that explore connections among disparate disciplines such as photography, artificial intelligence, music composition, molecular biology, game theory, virtual reality, and American business. His books have received various prizes, including the Rosenthal and Vursell Awards (both from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters), the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians, the Corrington Award; a PEN/Hemingway Special Citation; TIME Magazine's Book of the Year, the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union, and Britain's W. H. Smith Literary Award. He is a MacArthur fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, and the winner of the 2002 John Dos Passos Prize for literature. His most recent novel, The Echo Maker, recently won the 2006 National Book Award. He is a Swanlund Professor of English and Professor at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois. On May 17, Powers will participate in an unprecedented discussion: The Machine Awakes: a Writer and Composer in the Digital Age. A dozen years ago, just as the University of Illinois was releasing the very first Web browser, Mosaic, Powers wrote Galatea 2.2, a retelling of the ancient Pygmalion fable for the era of artificial intelligence. In his story, a complex neural network is trained to read and respond to literature, and in the process, it acquires a strange variety of machine intelligence. This year, the composer Stephen Taylor set an extract from the book to music - an aria sung in the voice of that emerging consciousness, the digital Helen. This session will mark the Midwest premiere of the piece, after which Mike Ross, Director of the Krannert Center, will join Powers and Taylor in a conversation about their collaboration and a discussion about what the digital transformation of the world has done to the stories we tell about ourselves and to our creative potential for reshaping those stories.
Barbara Schaffer Bacon co-directs Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts that fosters civic engagement through arts and culture. Barbara has worked as a consultant since 1990 and prior to that served as executive director of the Arts Extension Service at the University of Massachusetts. Her work includes program design and evaluation for state and local arts agencies and private foundations nationally. Barbara has written, edited, and contributed to several publications including Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy; Case Studies from Animating Democracy; Animating Democracy: The Artistic Imagination as a Force for Civic Dialogue, Fundamentals of Local Arts Management and The Cultural Planning Work Kit. An arts management educator, she has served as a primary instructor for the Fundamentals and Advanced Arts Management seminars. Barbara is a board member of the Fund for Women Artists and an advisor to the New WORLD Theater. She serves as president of the Arts Extension Institute, Inc. and chairs her local school committee. On May 18, Barbara will lead an exploration of how artists and cultural organizations can use their creative capacities to encourage and facilitate greater civic participation in their communities.
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