Metcalf Fellow on Arts and Society
David Maggs
Canada’s arts landscape is facing massive change. Growing demands around equity, digital fluency, climate change, and most recently, a devastating pandemic, have rendered business as usual impossible. While society has transformed in recent decades, Canada’s nonprofit arts sector has struggled to keep pace.
While pandemic relief funding has prevented the full consequences of these upheavals from being felt, there is increasing recognition that a return to the status quo for the arts sector is neither feasible, nor desirable.
This fellowship builds on the work of David’s Metcalf Fellowship and his paper, Art and the World After This. A central premise of the paper is that when we attempt to address the various disruptions affecting the arts sector separately, we get stuck treating the symptoms and fail to recognize both the underlying pattern of transformation shaking the world right now, and the role the arts might play within it.
As the Metcalf Fellow on Arts and Society, David will nurture and support the desire in Canada’s arts sector to both move with, and shape ongoing patterns of transformative societal change. He will work with the Foundation and the communities we engage with — both inside and outside of the arts and culture sector — to lead dialogue and convenings, expand on existing research, and explore promising practices to cultivate a healthy and vibrant arts sector in Canada.
Metcalf Fellow on Arts and Society
At the heart of Art and the World After This lies two crucial questions: what does a cultural sector do? And what should we do with a cultural sector? This fellowship will give David a robust opportunity to delve into these large and timely questions, advancing some of the promising ideas outlined in the paper.
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