Provocations

Thoughts on power, equity, and the future of cultural leadership. Check back often for new entries!

October 21, 2025

When You Have/Are a “Bad Boss” (And In What Ways): A Taxonomy

By Emil J. Kang

Over 35 years in the arts, I've worked for bosses, worked alongside bosses as peers, observed bosses from various vantage points, and been a boss myself. I've reported to boards, university presidents and provosts, foundation presidents, and consulting clients. I've watched leaders rise, plateau, and fall. And I've made my own share of leadership mistakes.

What follows isn't distant analysis. It's pattern recognition from inside the struggle, including recognition of my own patterns. Leadership critique that exempts the critic is just performance.

This provocation is about self-reflection and the necessity of saying uncomfortable truths. We need to name the ways leadership fails because silence around these patterns perpetuates them. The question isn't whether you'll fail in some of these ways. The question is whether you'll be honest about it, accountable for it, and working to mitigate it.

This taxonomy is about behaviors, not positions. These patterns appear at every level. A program coordinator can be controlling. A CEO can be conflict-avoidant. A board chair can be mercurial. Anyone who influences others' work, development, or wellbeing can exhibit these behaviors. I've never met anyone exhibiting only one of these patterns. Most people are composite failures, cycling through different behaviors depending on context, stress level, or which stakeholders they're managing.

I've struggled with writing this piece for months, really for a lifetime. This is an unfinished symphony. But the incompleteness doesn't excuse us from the work of trying to understand it.

The Emotional Reality

Much of the frustration, anger, sadness, and insecurity you feel as an arts worker can be traced directly to these leadership behavior patterns. You might think the problem is you. But often, the problem isn't you. It's the behavioral patterns you're experiencing. Naming it correctly is the first step toward reclaiming your power.

If you misdiagnose the problem as your inadequacy, you'll exhaust yourself trying to be good enough for someone whose behavior patterns make "good enough" impossible to achieve. But if you can accurately identify which behavior patterns you're experiencing, you can make clear-eyed choices about how to respond. Understanding these behavioral patterns is an act of self-protection and self-empowerment. It lets you say: this is not about my worth. This is about their behavioral patterns. I can choose how to respond. It gives you permission to trust your own perception. Your feelings are information, not evidence of your inadequacy.

Why These Behaviors Emerge

Insecurity sits at the top. Most leadership failures trace back to insecurity about competence, status, belonging, or whether you deserve the role. Narcissism manifests when leaders believe their own mythology. Anxiety about survival or judgment creates leaders who can't think strategically. Fear of failure or exposure makes leaders hoard information and avoid risk. Modeling is perhaps most insidious. Every boss has a boss. We replicate what we've experienced unless we consciously choose otherwise.

Exhaustion and burnout erode everyone's capacity. When depleted, you default to your worst patterns. Systemic pressures can force even well-intentioned leaders into dysfunctional behaviors. Understanding these root causes helps you assess whether someone's pattern is characterological or circumstantial. It also helps you understand your own patterns.

Part I: The Taxonomy

The Mercurial "Boss" // You never know which version will show up. One day expansive and visionary, the next critical and withdrawn. Their mood determines organizational reality. Daily experience: Constant vigilance and anxiety. Walking on eggshells. You stop trusting positive feedback because it might evaporate tomorrow. Root cause: Unmanaged stress, burnout cycling through coping mechanisms, or volatile emotional regulation. The problem isn't any single pattern but the lack of consistency. What you can do: Document everything in writing. Build peer relationships for reality-checking. Don't over-invest emotionally. Create stability in your own sphere. When it becomes intolerable: When unpredictability makes work impossible, when you're managing their volatility instead of advancing the mission, when the anxiety affects your health. My own "boss": This hits hardest. I worry my staff had no idea which version would show up. When leading through pressure or burnout, I've cycled through controlling, reactive, visionary, and withdrawn in destabilizing ways.

The Controlling "Boss" // Micromanagement. Can't delegate. Needs to be involved in every decision. Creates bottlenecks. Daily experience: Infantilized. Your expertise is discounted. You become passive because initiative is punished. Root cause: Insecurity or anxiety. They fear losing control means losing relevance. What you can do: Build trust incrementally. Provide visibility without requiring approval. Document your rationale. When it becomes intolerable: When it prevents professional development, damages confidence, or makes you unable to act. My own "boss": When leading high-stakes initiatives early in new roles, I've over-controlled. Sometimes it was necessary. Sometimes it was anxiety disguised as standards.

The Reactive "Boss" // Lurching from crisis to crisis. Whatever is most recent gets attention. Strategic priorities shift constantly. Daily experience: Whiplash. Projects get deprioritized before completion. You can't build momentum. Root cause: Anxiety about stakeholder approval, insecurity about judgment. They mistake activity for leadership. What you can do: Become the institutional memory. Document decisions and rationale. Create continuity in your sphere. When it becomes intolerable: When reactivity makes completing anything impossible, when staff burn out from pivots. My own "boss": When overwhelmed by competing demands, I've let the loudest voice dominate. I've shifted priorities based on which stakeholder seemed most urgent.

The Credit-Taking "Boss" // Presenting others' work as their own. Using "I" when they should say "we." Visible for success, absent for failure. Daily experience: Invisibility. You do the work while they get recognition. You feel used. Root cause: Narcissism or deep insecurity. They need constant validation. What you can do: Document your contributions. Build your external reputation. Make your work visible beyond this person. When it becomes intolerable: When it damages your professional development, affects getting your next job, or constitutes intellectual theft. My own "boss": In public presentations, I haven't always been clear about who did the work. The line between representing institutional success and claiming individual credit blurs.

The Visionless "Boss" // Managing but not leading. Responding to problems without connecting them to larger purpose. Meetings feel like status updates. Daily experience: Treading water. Plenty of activity but no momentum. The organization drifts. Root cause: Exhaustion, fear of committing to a direction, or being promoted beyond capacity. What you can do: This pattern creates space for leadership from below. Propose vision. Document what works. When it becomes intolerable: When lack of vision creates harm through missed opportunities, staff attrition, or organizational decline. My own "boss": When exhausted or facing resistance I didn't know how to overcome, I've retreated into management. I've maintained when I should have transformed.

The Political "Boss" // Every decision filtered through "how will this play?" Making decisions based on optics rather than impact. Daily experience: Cynicism. Good ideas killed because they might make someone uncomfortable. Moral compromises rationalized as pragmatism. Root cause: Fear of losing position, funding, or board support. What you can do: Understand the constraints they're navigating. Make mission-aligned decisions politically viable. When it becomes intolerable: When politics completely overwhelm mission, when compromises make the mission unrecognizable. My own "boss": I've made decisions influenced by donor preferences rather than merit. I've told myself I was being strategic when sometimes I was just being cowardly.

The Conflict-Avoidant "Boss" // Won't have difficult conversations. Avoids personnel decisions. Lets dysfunction fester. Prioritizes short-term harmony over long-term health. Daily experience: You watch situations deteriorate. Underperformers protected at high performers' expense. Accountability is rare. Root cause: Anxiety about confrontation, fear of being disliked. What you can do: Address problems directly in your sphere. Model difficult conversations. Document patterns. When it becomes intolerable: When avoidance creates genuine harm, when toxic behavior goes unchecked. My own "boss": I've delayed difficult personnel conversations. Sometimes that was generosity. Sometimes it was avoidance disguised as generosity.

The Absent "Boss" // Rarely present, physically or emotionally. Doesn't know what's happening. Checked out while still collecting a paycheck. Daily experience: Functionally unsupervised, which sounds appealing until you need guidance. When crises hit, they're unreachable. Root cause: Burnout, loss of interest, or being overwhelmed by competing demands. What you can do: Step into the leadership vacuum. Build relationships with others who can provide support. Document what you're doing. When it becomes intolerable: When absence creates harm, when you're blamed for decisions they should have made. My own "boss": During burnout or when pulled in too many directions, I haven't been as present as my team needed.

The Inequitable "Boss" // Having favorites. Applying different standards. Offering opportunities selectively. Daily experience: If favored: guilt and discomfort. If not: anger and invisibility. Either way: organizational injustice. Root cause: Unconscious bias, narcissism, insecurity, or modeling inequitable treatment. What you can do: Name patterns. If favored, use that access to advocate for equity. Build coalitions. When it becomes intolerable: When inequity is severe and systematic, when it breaks along lines of identity. My own "boss": I've had unconscious affinities that shaped whose ideas I listened to, who I developed, who I gave opportunities to.

The Exploitative "Boss" // Expecting constant availability. Normalizing overwork. Framing exploitation as passion. Asking for sacrifice while protecting own boundaries. Daily experience: Exhaustion. Emails at all hours. Guilt when you maintain boundaries. The awareness that you're being used. Root cause: Narcissism, insecurity, modeling, or genuine belief that the mission justifies any sacrifice. What you can do: Hold boundaries. Model sustainable work. Name the exploitation. When it becomes intolerable: When it damages your health, when colleagues break down, when it's systematic. My own "boss": I've sent late-night emails. I've asked people to work weekends. I've normalized intensity as excellence.

The Defensive "Boss" // Can't admit being wrong. Deflects responsibility. Dismisses feedback. Becomes argumentative or punishing when questioned. Daily experience: You soften every critique until it's meaningless. You watch mistakes compound because no one can name them. Root cause: Deep insecurity masked by defensiveness. They equate being wrong with being inadequate. What you can do: Frame feedback as questions. Use third-party examples. Document suggestions. When it becomes intolerable: When defensiveness creates organizational harm through unaddressed mistakes, when it stifles innovation. My own "boss": I've deflected criticism when I should have listened. I've treated feedback as attack when it was care.

The Idea-Dismissive "Boss" // Doesn't make space for others' ideas. Asks for input but has already decided. Only embraces ideas they believe originated with them. Daily experience: Your ideas get shot down reflexively. You stop preparing proposals because they won't be considered. Root cause: Insecurity about their own ideas, narcissism, or genuinely believing their judgment is superior. What you can do: Build coalitions before proposing. Pilot ideas in small ways. Protect your creativity. When it becomes intolerable: When dismissiveness makes you stop thinking creatively, when only one person's ideas matter. My own "boss": I've dominated strategy conversations because I believed my experience gave me superior judgment. I've been quicker to see problems than possibilities.

The Preemptive-Failure "Boss" // Predicts ideas will fail before they're tried. Points out problems without equal attention to possibilities. Under-resources initiatives they're skeptical about. Daily experience: You propose something and immediately hear ten reasons it can't work. When things struggle, you hear "I told you so." Root cause: Fear and anxiety. They've been burned and are trying to prevent that pain. What you can do: Acknowledge concerns while proposing mitigation. Start small. Frame experiments as learning. When it becomes intolerable: When the pattern kills all innovation, when nothing new gets tried. My own "boss": I've been better at seeing problems than possibilities. I've under-resourced initiatives I was skeptical about.

Part II: The Composite Reality

Most people exhibit multiple patterns at different times. The patterns cluster predictably. The defensive "boss" often also dismisses others' ideas and predicts failure preemptively. The controlling "boss" often struggles to make space for others' ideas. Understanding the specific patterns helps you calibrate your response: A visionless but supportive person requires different strategies than someone visionary but exploitative. It helps you assess whether the situation is salvageable: Multiple moderate issues might be navigable. One severe dysfunction might not be. Defensive behavior combined with idea-dismissiveness and preemptive-failure thinking can be nearly impossible to work around. And it helps you understand what you're vulnerable to replicating: We absorb others' behavioral dysfunctions.

Part III: The Self-Assessment Imperative

If you're going to critique these patterns, you need to examine which ones you exhibit. Where do you recognize yourself? When stressed, which pattern do you default to? Can you admit when you're wrong? Do you make genuine space for others' ideas? Which critique feels most uncomfortable? (That discomfort might be information.) The hard truth: You probably exhibit some of these patterns. Everyone does. The question is whether you're aware of it, working on it, and willing to be accountable for it.

Part IV: Working With Each "Boss"

Mercurial: Document everything. Don't over-invest emotionally. Create stability in your sphere. Controlling: Build trust incrementally. Provide visibility without requiring approval. Reactive: Be the stabilizing force. Document decisions and rationale. Credit-Taking: Build your external reputation. Make your work visible. Visionless: Offer vision from below. Document what works. Political: Make mission-aligned decisions politically viable. Conflict-Avoidant: Model direct communication. Document patterns. Absent: Lead from where you are. Build other support relationships. Inequitable: Name patterns. If favored, advocate for equity. Exploitative: Hold boundaries. Model sustainable work. Defensive: Frame feedback as questions. Document suggestions. Idea-Dismissive: Build coalitions before proposing. Pilot in small ways. Preemptive-Failure: Acknowledge concerns while proposing mitigation. Start small.

Part V: When Multiple Patterns Compound

The difficult situations involve multiple reinforcing patterns. The visionless "boss" AND conflict-avoidant "boss" creates drift plus festering dysfunction. The defensive "boss" AND idea-dismissive "boss" AND preemptive-failure "boss" creates an environment where nothing can improve. Assess carefully: Are these temporarily overlapping? Characterologically linked? Systemically reinforced? Mercurial cycling? Compounded behavioral failures are harder to work around and more likely to require you to leave.

Conclusion: The Taxonomy as Tool and Invitation

Understanding which behavioral patterns you're experiencing gives you strategic clarity, realistic expectations, navigation tools, self-awareness, and exit criteria. Most importantly: You can stop asking "Is this person bad?" and start asking "Which behavioral patterns am I experiencing, what does that mean for how I respond, and how long can I sustain this?"

These questions prepare you to behave differently when you have influence over others, because you'll remember what it felt like to experience these patterns. Even though you inevitably will exhibit some of them, because leadership is hard and everyone fails at parts of it. The question is whether you'll be honest about your behavioral patterns, accountable for them, and working actively to mitigate them. That's the difference between struggling with leadership and being someone people can't work for.

An Invitation

This taxonomy is incomplete. It represents patterns I've observed over 35 years, but it's filtered through my vantage points and blind spots. What behavioral patterns am I missing? What have you experienced that doesn't fit? What combinations create particular challenges? What patterns appear differently in different contexts?

I invite you to add to this taxonomy. Share the patterns you've observed or experienced. Name the behaviors that need naming. Add your own honest accounting. This work requires collective wisdom. Together, we can create a more complete picture that helps everyone navigate these challenges more skillfully, lead more consciously, and build healthier organizations.

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October 12, 2025

Culture as Development Strategy: When New Venues Don't Serve Existing Ecosystems

On the difference between building for communities and building for real estate value

By Emil J. Kang

I just saw William Kentridge's stunning production at Brooklyn's new Powerhouse Arts. The work was extraordinary, full of visual imagination, historical layering, and emotional depth. It's exactly the kind of art that reminds you why this work matters.

What I'm less sure of is whether the institution presenting it will strengthen Brooklyn's cultural ecosystem or inadvertently undermine it.

Not all new venues are the same. There's a real difference between adaptive reuse and luxury new construction, between a venue that gives local organizations a home and one that competes with them for audiences, funding, and attention. Powerhouse sits in a renovated power station. That's promising. But the question that matters most is this: will it become part of Brooklyn's existing cultural ecosystem, or another competitor within it?

We've seen both models before, and the difference between them determines whether new venues add capacity or quietly drain it away.

The Pattern We Keep Repeating

This story isn't new. It's the same pattern that built Lincoln Center.

In the 1950s and 60s, San Juan Hill was a vibrant Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side, full of families, small businesses, and cultural life that helped shape American music. Then came "urban renewal." Thousands displaced, eighteen city blocks razed. What replaced them was Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Culture was used to justify displacement. Magnificent architecture rose on the ruins of a community. And while the rhetoric of "urban renewal" has faded, the mechanism remains. Today we call it "activation" or "revitalization." But again and again, culture becomes the agent of transformation, while the people and organizations who created that culture get priced out.

Culture in Service of Real Estate

Developers have long understood that "arts and culture" can increase property value. A new cultural venue lends credibility to luxury development, offering the illusion of civic virtue and community investment. Sometimes the arts organization understands the trade-off; sometimes it doesn't.

Either way, the pattern repeats: culture attracts capital, capital raises costs, and the artists who made the place desirable can no longer afford to stay. The cultural brand survives, even as the cultural ecosystem disappears.

The Shed, PAC NYC, and Powerhouse

The Shed is the clearest example, built as part of Hudson Yards, a $25 billion luxury development. It presents bold work, but its larger purpose serves the project's real estate logic. The culture is an amenity, not the anchor.

PAC NYC is more complicated. Built on the World Trade Center site, it isn't about speculation but about memorial. The intention is noble, but the question remains: in a field starved for operating support, could those same resources have strengthened the ecosystem more effectively through existing organizations?

And then there's Powerhouse Arts. I don't know the ins and outs of its business model, governance structure, or funding sources. I don't know what conversations have happened internally about community accountability or what commitments have been made to Brooklyn-based organizations. What I do know is that adaptive reuse offers potential, a chance to preserve the past while serving the present. But adaptive reuse alone doesn't guarantee community benefit. What matters is who gets to belong. Which Brooklyn-based organizations will call Powerhouse home? Will it provide affordable, long-term space for local groups and artists, or will it become another venue competing for the same limited resources?

What Real Investment Looks Like

If our goal is to strengthen cultural ecosystems rather than inflate property values, we'd make different choices.

We'd fund existing organizations already rooted in communities, not just new buildings. We'd preserve affordable performance and studio space. We'd invest in artists directly, with housing, health care, and income stability. We'd treat culture as community infrastructure, not an economic branding exercise.

That's what actual cultural investment looks like: supporting those who already make meaning where they live, rather than building new monuments to attract people who don't.

Better Models Exist

There are examples worth studying. National Sawdust is adaptive reuse done right, a former sawdust factory turned into a home for experimental music. Its success is measured by artistic vitality and community connection, not real estate returns.

Another approach to adaptive reuse: convert industrial space into affordable artist studios rather than creating another presenting venue. Give artists the infrastructure they actually need: affordable, long-term work space. This recognizes that the crisis isn't a lack of venues to show work, it's a lack of affordable space where artists can make the work in the first place.

When I led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, my board chair was a real estate developer who understood that his success depended on ours. He invested in the neighborhood, not to extract value but to ensure the orchestra's long-term health. His return came through community vibrancy, not property speculation. That alignment of incentives produced genuine partnership, not extraction.

The Choice Before Powerhouse

Powerhouse Arts has the chance to follow that path: to become infrastructure for Brooklyn's cultural ecosystem rather than another competitor within it. The distinction lies in governance, programming, and purpose.

Who will Powerhouse Arts serve? Will it dedicate space to Brooklyn-based organizations at below-market rates, giving them long-term security? Will it embed local artists and cultural workers in its structure, or simply import art that flatters its architecture?

True transformation would look like Powerhouse Arts dedicating major space to existing Brooklyn organizations like BRIC, 651 Arts, Roulette, Bushwick Starr, or Issue Project Room. It would mean creating affordable studios to address the space crisis forcing artists out of Brooklyn. It would mean establishing an anti-displacement fund to counter the very forces it might otherwise accelerate.

The Broader Context

While hundreds of millions get spent on new venues, existing arts organizations struggle with basic operating support.

Dance/NYC reports that 40% of dance organizations in the city operate on budgets under $250,000. These organizations make extraordinary work with minimal resources, serve communities that major institutions often overlook, and take risks that larger organizations can't.

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a 50-year-old institution that shaped American poetry and gave voice to communities systematically excluded from mainstream culture, nearly closed. HERE Arts Center, La MaMa, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, BAAD!, and dozens of other organizations that actually make culture face perpetual financial crisis. The list goes on and on.

The resources exist. The philanthropic capital is there. The question is how it gets deployed.

The Larger Question

I know this critique will upset some people. The staff and leadership at The Shed, Powerhouse Arts, and PAC NYC work hard to present excellent art. Developers and funders genuinely believe they are contributing to civic life. Artists who rely on these platforms may feel caught in the middle. I understand. I've run large institutions. I know how hard it is to turn down resources, to balance mission with opportunity, to reconcile ideals with reality.

But the questions still matter. When hundreds of millions go toward new venues while existing organizations struggle to survive, we have to ask what we're building and for whom. When culture is linked to development that transforms neighborhoods, we have to be honest about who benefits and who gets displaced. When new institutions compete with, rather than strengthen, existing ecosystems, we have to ask whether we're advancing culture or simply expanding its footprint for someone else's gain.

These questions make people uncomfortable, but they should. The tension between art, capital, and community has defined American cultural infrastructure for seventy years. The language changes, but the pattern persists. Lincoln Center was built on the displacement of San Juan Hill, and we're still building cultural venues that serve development interests more than existing communities. At some point, we have to stop repeating it.

Culture should not be an instrument of displacement. It should be a strategy for community power.

We don't need more venues. We need better choices about how they serve, who they house, and what ecosystems they strengthen.

Powerhouse Arts still has time to make those choices.

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October 6, 2025

Leading From Where You Are

Because Leadership Is Behavioral, Not Positional

By Emil J. Kang

Leadership is one of the most misunderstood words in organizational life. We often confuse it with title, hierarchy, and authority, with the people at the top who set direction and make decisions. But real leadership rarely depends on position. It is behavioral, not positional. It is expressed through action, not appointment.

Every organization faces moments when those at the top falter. A leader hesitates, loses confidence, or cannot see beyond the immediate horizon. Fear replaces imagination. Caution becomes inertia. When that happens, institutions begin to drift. Yet these are also the moments when genuine leadership can emerge, not from hierarchy, but from within.

Leadership belongs to anyone willing to take responsibility for purpose. It lives in the colleague who steadies a team in uncertainty, the staff member who insists on integrity when expediency would be easier, or the person who keeps the work honest when others look away.

Sometimes this kind of leadership begins under imperfect conditions. You may find yourself in an organization where the person in charge cannot lead or where decision-making has slowed to a crawl. The natural impulse is to wait for new direction, a better manager, or a clearer mandate. But waiting rarely restores purpose. Leadership begins when we act in alignment with our values and aspirations, regardless of title or authority.

Of course, not everyone can act freely. Many stay because they need stability, a paycheck, and health insurance. Those needs are real. The challenge is to preserve integrity within constraint and to lead in small but meaningful ways even when circumstances limit your power. That might mean modeling the behavior you wish you saw at the top: curiosity, clarity, and courage. It might mean creating pockets of imagination in bureaucratic environments or building trust among peers when communication from above falters.

This is leadership as stewardship, not rebellion. It is not about defying authority but about caring for purpose. It means holding onto what the work stands for when others forget and knowing when your influence still matters, and when your staying only sustains stagnation.

The arts and nonprofit sectors are especially prone to this tension. Many stay out of love for the mission. Sometimes that devotion sustains important work. But love without renewal becomes resignation, and resignation becomes complicity. True leadership requires both commitment and courage, the courage to keep the mission alive in form, not just in name.

Over time, I have learned this myself. Earlier in my career, I believed I alone was responsible for the vision. I thought it was my job to name the future and rally others to it. Yet my ideas rarely endured. They sparked briefly, then faded when I moved on to the next initiative. I now see that vision is not a solitary act but an organizational one. It cannot live only inside one person, no matter how inspired. Vision must become a shared culture, renewed and expanded by everyone who inhabits it.

The strongest leaders understand this. They do not fear initiative; they invite it. They know that when others lead from where they are, the whole organization grows stronger. Power is not diminished when shared. It is strengthened.

Leading from where you are is not about replacing someone else’s authority. It is about taking responsibility for your own agency and recognizing that the health of any organization depends on the everyday choices of its people, the decisions to speak up, to support, to challenge, and to stay curious.

Leadership is not something you wait for. It is something you do. It begins wherever you are.

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October 2, 2025

The Future of Performing Arts Presenting: From Transactional to Relational

When Communities Want Collaboration, Not Just Consumption

By Emil J. Kang

Many of us have been watching the same scene play out in board rooms across the country for decades. The conversation always starts the same way: declining audiences, aging subscribers, empty seats. Someone inevitably asks, "How do we get more people to buy tickets?" Then comes the familiar litany of responses: better marketing campaigns, dynamic pricing strategies, pre-show talks to make the work more "accessible."

But what if we've been asking the wrong question entirely?

During my years leading Carolina Performing Arts, I noticed something that troubled me. Our most celebrated productions, the ones that often garnered rave reviews and filled seats, often left no lasting trace in the community once the curtain fell. But there were other projects, quieter ones, where something different happened. Artists would spend weeks embedded with students, community members would attend rehearsals, conversations would continue long after opening night. These weren't our biggest box office successes, but they were our most enduring ones.

The difference wasn't in the artistry. It was in the relationships.

For too long, the performing arts sector has been chasing an impossible dream: competing as commercial entertainment without the infrastructure, resources, or network effects of actual commercial enterprises. We've turned mission-driven presenters into amateur commercial operators, reducing organizations with deep community purpose to show-by-show reputation management. The predictable result has been declining ticket sales, greater dependence on wealthy donors, and growing distance from the very communities we claim to serve.

Yet what if we've misdiagnosed the crisis entirely? What if people want art as much as ever, but they don't want only to be customers?

I think back to those community members who kept coming back to our artist residencies, who brought their friends, who talked about the work months later. They weren't seeking entertainment. They were seeking belonging. They wanted to be part of building something meaningful, not just consuming something polished.

The mission-based presenting field has actually been evolving toward this understanding, though we rarely acknowledge the progression. In the early decades, presenters distinguished themselves by bringing contemporary work that challenged audiences, positioning themselves as cultural risk-takers rather than repertoire programmers. This evolved into organizations becoming producers themselves, commissioning new work rather than just selecting from existing options. More recently, we've seen the rise of artist residencies, where organizations began valuing creative process and sustained engagement as much as final products.

But I believe we're on the cusp of something more fundamental: a shift toward organizing not around finished artistic works at all, but around ongoing relationships between artists and communities. Call it Presenting 4.0, where mutual discovery, learning, and collaboration become the primary work, with performances emerging as moments within larger relational ecosystems rather than endpoints in themselves.

During my time at the Mellon Foundation, I watched this pattern play out across hundreds of organizations. Those that treated community engagement as a marketing strategy struggled to build lasting connections. But organizations that placed relationship-building at the center of their artistic practice created sustainable impact that extended far beyond any single project or grant period.

The financial implications of this shift go to the heart of our sector's sustainability crisis. Traditional presenting models are watching ticket revenue shrink as a percentage of their budgets, forcing ever-greater dependence on contributed income. This creates a vicious cycle: the fewer people who experience the work directly, the more organizations must rely on wealthy donors who may have little connection to the actual artistic practice. The result is programming that serves donor preferences rather than community needs.

Relationship-based presenting flips this dynamic. When people invest in ongoing creative ecosystems rather than individual events, they create revenue streams that blur the traditional distinction between earned and contributed income. More importantly, they invite broader participation in shaping what gets created and how, especially from voices historically excluded from arts programming decisions.

I want to be clear: live performance will always move some of us profoundly. I can still be brought to tears by Mahler's Third Symphony or Martha Graham's Lamentation. But we can no longer rely on a shared cultural canon or inherited arts education to cultivate widespread appreciation for these works. Instead of lamenting this change, we should embrace the opportunity to create new conditions for aesthetic discovery, where people encounter what moves them through direct participation in contemporary creative practices.

This transformation requires everyone to rethink their roles. Artists become collaborators, facilitators, and cultural organizers, not just performers. Audiences become participants rather than consumers. Donors invest in relationships and creative capacity rather than just underwriting individual projects. Board members must experience and model community relationships rather than remaining distant overseers. Even funders need to support ecosystem-building rather than just funding discrete deliverables.

None of this will happen overnight. Communities have been shaped by decades of transactional cultural consumption. People need time and practice to discover the deeper satisfaction that comes from collaborative creative relationships. Smart organizations will move gradually, weaving relationship-based programming alongside traditional presenting until community investment and engagement shifts the institutional balance.

The stakes couldn't be higher. Organizations that cling to purely transactional models face a future of shrinking audiences, increasingly fragile finances, and growing irrelevance to the communities they serve. But those willing to embrace the messiness of genuine collaboration, to measure success through the depth of relationships rather than the polish of products, have the opportunity to become truly indispensable.

Not because of the events they produce, but because of the creative capacity they help communities cultivate and sustain. This is where the future of mission-based presenting lies. The only question is whether we have the courage to build it.

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September 20, 2025

Lost Horizon: When Leaders Can't See Beyond Tomorrow

By Emil J. Kang

There's a particular kind of institutional suffering that's easy to recognize: organizations where talented staff leave for unclear reasons, where board meetings become exercises in managing decline, where strategic planning yields cautious incrementalism. These are organizations trapped by visionless leadership, and the cost is higher than most people realize.

The Slow Drift

Leaders without vision don't usually fail dramatically. They fail slowly, through a thousand small decisions that prioritize immediate concerns over long-term purpose. They become excellent administrators of declining relevance, optimizing operations while the organization's reason for existing gradually erodes.

Without clear direction, decisions get made reactively. Resources flow to whoever makes the most compelling short-term case. The organization becomes a collection of activities rather than a mission driven entity. Staff members can't articulate how their efforts connect to larger purpose. The most capable people leave first, seeking organizations with clearer direction.

The problem becomes acute when visionless leadership combines with scarcity mindset. The more an organization struggles, the more leadership retreats into operational thinking. Vision starts to feel like a luxury they can't afford, but without vision, they remain trapped in the very constraints that created the scarcity.

I learned this firsthand during my time leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra through severe financial crisis. Every board meeting focused on cash flow and cost-cutting. In that environment, I simply didn't know what vision to articulate or even if I had meaningful answers to offer. Looking back, it seems almost ironic that from my first day at UNC I had confidently spoken about wanting "the arts to be as big as basketball" - a vision that everyone could repeat and rally around. Yet facing organizational crisis at DSO, I found myself unable to articulate any compelling future, paralyzed by the immediate pressures that made dreaming feel irresponsible.

At the time, I lacked the understanding or confidence to recognize that the absence of compelling vision was making our challenges harder to navigate. Without a clear picture of the future we were working toward, every decision became purely defensive. We were managing decline rather than working toward transformation. I didn't have the tools then to understand that effective crisis leadership requires dual awareness: managing today's urgent needs while cultivating tomorrow's possibilities.

Vision as Developed Skill

Visionary leadership can be developed. The absence of vision isn't usually a character flaw but often results from organizational cultures that discourage expansive thinking, leaders overwhelmed by operational demands, or institutional histories that punished risk-taking.

During my time at the Mellon Foundation, the most inspiring grantee meetings were when leaders could contextualize their funding needs within a context of the change they sought to create. These leaders didn't just explain what they needed money for. They articulated how their work would transform their communities or field, connecting immediate needs to long-term impact in compelling ways.

The contrast with leaders focused solely on operational requirements was stark. Organizations seeking funding primarily to maintain programs or cover overhead struggled to make compelling cases, not because their needs weren't real, but because they couldn't articulate how meeting those needs would create meaningful change.

Many leaders have vision but lack safe spaces to express it. They've learned to suppress expansive thinking because past experiences taught them that dreaming publicly leads to criticism. Others can imagine different futures but struggle to communicate those possibilities compellingly.

Creating Conditions for Vision

For staff and board members working under visionless leadership, the challenge becomes creating conditions that invite vision to emerge. This might mean suggesting retreat formats that encourage long-term thinking, or asking strategic questions that help leaders articulate assumptions they haven't examined.

Teams can become generative forces by developing innovative approaches within their spheres of influence, demonstrating what becomes possible when people move beyond scarcity thinking. Board members have particular leverage in requesting vision, making visionary thinking a governance expectation rather than something leaders need to justify.

This doesn't mean abandoning crisis management or operational responsibility. Organizations facing genuine crises need leaders who can navigate immediate challenges effectively. The most effective leaders maintain dual awareness: they can manage today's urgent needs while simultaneously cultivating tomorrow's possibilities. Vision doesn't require ignoring current constraints but working through them toward something better.

Building visionary capacity requires creating iterative processes where leaders can test ideas in lower-stakes environments. This work becomes particularly crucial for emerging leaders who need opportunities to practice articulating vision before they're in positions where their ideas carry institutional weight. Too often, professional development focuses on technical competencies while neglecting the courage required to imagine different futures and the communication skills needed to share those visions compellingly.

The Stakes

In a sector facing unprecedented challenges, we can't afford institutions that drift without purpose or leaders who manage decline rather than pursue transformation. Visionless leadership isn't just a management problem but a crisis of institutional potential. Every organization led by someone who can't articulate a compelling future is a missed opportunity for cultural impact and community engagement.

The solution isn't to replace these leaders en masse but to create conditions where visionary capacity can develop and flourish. This requires acknowledging that vision is a skill that can be learned, a practice that can be improved, and a responsibility that can be shared.

The question isn't whether your leader has vision. It's whether your organization is creating conditions that invite vision to emerge, develop, and guide decisions. The future depends on getting this right.

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September 5, 2025

Measuring What Matters: Why Arts Assessment is Broken and How to Fix It

By Emil J. Kang

The arts world has long been obsessed with measurement. Every grant application demands metrics. Every program requires evaluation frameworks. Every artistic initiative must justify itself through data points, attendance figures, and impact assessments. But rather than abandoning assessment altogether, we need to fundamentally rethink what we're measuring and why.

The problem isn't measurement itself. It's that we're measuring the wrong things in the wrong ways. We've become fixated on outcomes we can easily count rather than changes that actually matter. We've prioritized immediate, attributable results over the complex, long-term transformations that define meaningful artistic work.

What if we approached arts assessment the way we approach other forms of research and development? What if we measured with curiosity rather than defensiveness, with learning rather than justification as our goal?

The Case for Measuring Intentions

Instead of obsessing over impact, we should start by rigorously assessing intentions. What was the artist or organization actually trying to accomplish? Did they articulate clear goals that emerged from genuine community engagement or artistic inquiry? Were these goals appropriate to their context and capacity?

During my time at the Mellon Foundation, I encouraged all prospective grantees to articulate their intentions with unusual specificity. Rather than accepting vague statements about "community engagement" or "artistic excellence," I asked organizations to define exactly what they hoped to achieve and why those particular outcomes mattered to their specific context. This process often revealed gaps between stated missions and actual priorities, forcing applicants to clarify their thinking before we even discussed funding.

The results were illuminating. Organizations that could articulate clear, contextually grounded intentions consistently produced more meaningful work than those with impressive but generic goals. The clarity of intention became a predictor of success more reliable than past performance or institutional prestige.

Measuring intentions forces a different kind of accountability. It requires artists and organizations to be thoughtful about purpose before they begin work. It acknowledges that different artistic practices serve different functions and should be evaluated according to their own terms rather than universal metrics.

A community theater group working to build social cohesion among recent immigrants should be assessed differently than a contemporary dance company exploring movement innovation. A poetry program addressing trauma should be measured differently than a public art project designed to activate economic development. Each deserves rigorous evaluation, but evaluation that honors their distinct purposes.

Process Quality Over Outcome Quantity

We should measure how work gets made, not just what it produces. Process quality indicators might include:

• Community responsiveness: How meaningfully did the project engage with stakeholder input throughout development?

• Artistic rigor: How thoroughly did the work explore its creative questions? What artistic growth occurred?

• Collaborative depth: What relationships were built? How did creative partnerships develop?

• Adaptive learning: How did the work evolve in response to what was discovered along the way?

• Resource stewardship: How thoughtfully were financial and human resources deployed?

These process measures often predict lasting impact better than immediate outcome metrics. A residency program that builds deep artist-community relationships may not generate impressive participant numbers, but it creates infrastructure for ongoing cultural engagement that extends far beyond any measurement period.

Systemic Indicators That Actually Matter

Rather than measuring isolated projects, we should assess broader ecosystem health:

• Cultural infrastructure development: Are new venues, networks, and platforms emerging? Are existing ones becoming more sustainable?

• Artist career development: Are local artists finding pathways to advance their practice? Are they staying in or leaving the community?

• Cross-sector collaboration: Are arts organizations working meaningfully with schools, health systems, social services, and other community institutions?

• Innovation and risk-taking: Is experimental work being supported? Are new artistic forms and community engagement models being developed?

• Accessibility and inclusion: Are barriers to participation being identified and addressed? Are decision-making processes becoming more democratic?

These systemic measures capture the cumulative effect of multiple interventions over time rather than trying to attribute specific outcomes to individual projects.

The Data We Can Actually Collect

This doesn't mean abandoning quantitative data. But we can collect numbers that tell more meaningful stories:

Instead of just counting participants, track participation patterns: Who returns? Who brings others? Who takes on leadership roles? Who develops ongoing relationships with the organization or other participants?

Instead of just measuring satisfaction, assess behavioral change: Do participants seek out other cultural experiences? Do they engage differently with their community? Do they develop new skills or confidence?

Instead of just documenting attendance, track network effects: How are relationships forming through the work? What collaborations emerge? How do participants engage with the work beyond formal programming?

Instead of just reporting immediate outcomes, follow trajectory indicators: How do participants describe the experience months or years later? What long-term changes do they attribute to their involvement?

Making Space for the Unmeasurable

The most sophisticated assessment frameworks acknowledge their own limitations. They create space for stories, observations, and insights that can't be quantified. They include artist reflection, community testimony, and expert qualitative assessment alongside quantitative data.

They also recognize that some of the most important artistic work resists measurement entirely. The child who sees a dance performance and becomes a movement therapist fifteen years later. The community member who attends a poetry reading and finds courage to leave an abusive relationship. The teenager who participates in a mural project and develops a lifelong commitment to social justice.

These transformations happen in unmeasurable spaces between intention and outcome, between experience and application. They emerge through processes that unfold over time, across relationships, through encounters that can't be isolated or quantified. Good assessment honors these limitations rather than pretending they don't exist.

Learning, Not Justification

The goal of arts assessment should be learning, not justification. Organizations and funders should use evaluation to understand what's working, what isn't, and why. They should ask questions that help improve practice rather than simply documenting activity.

This requires shifting from a defensive posture to a curious one. Instead of trying to prove value, we should be trying to understand value. Instead of generating reports that justify past decisions, we should be gathering insights that inform future ones.

The Human Cost of Getting This Wrong

When we measure the wrong things, we get more of them. Organizations optimize for metrics rather than mission. Artists design work that generates good data rather than meaningful experience. Communities receive programming that looks impressive in reports but doesn't serve their actual needs.

The psychological toll is real. Artists develop chronic anxiety about relevance and value, measuring their worth through frameworks that were never designed to assess artistic merit. Organizations develop institutional cultures focused on defensive justification rather than creative risk-taking.

A Different Framework

The question isn't whether to assess artistic work. It's whether our assessment methods serve the work or force the work to serve them. Good measurement should support better artistic practice, stronger community engagement, and more effective resource allocation. It should help artists and organizations understand their impact and improve their effectiveness.

But this requires measuring with sophistication, acknowledging complexity, and embracing curiosity over certainty. It requires trusting that meaningful artistic work creates value that extends far beyond what can be captured in quarterly reports.

The arts deserve assessment frameworks as nuanced and thoughtful as the work they're meant to evaluate. Not because measurement doesn't matter, but because it matters too much to get wrong.

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September 11, 2025

Seeding the Future: Why the Best Leaders Build Others, Not Empires

By Emil J. Kang

I recently received a message that made me reflect on how we measure leadership success. A former UNC student, now working in philanthropy and cultural planning, wrote to thank me for my recent provocations and for the time I spent with her as an undergraduate back in 2008. She described how our conversations helped her network with local arts leaders, landing her first job and setting her on a path that now includes working with private foundations, convening arts funders, and developing strategic cultural plans.

This message arrived the same week that Harper's Bazaar published "The Harlem Renaissance" by Salamishah Tillet, featuring a striking two-page photograph of curators and cultural leaders who all developed their practice under Thelma Golden's mentorship at the Studio Museum. Among others, the list includes Legacy Russell, Jessica Bell Brown, Naima J. Keith, Lauren Haynes, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Christine Y. Kim, Rujeko Hockley, Rashida Bumbray, Naomi Beckwith, Kimberly Drew, and Thomas Lax, all of whom I've had the privilege to know and work with while I worked at the Mellon Foundation.

I feel privileged to know these alumni not because of their connection to Golden, but because of their stellar leadership in their own right. During my time at Mellon, their excellence was evident in every interaction, every proposal, every program they developed. Only later did I fully appreciate the common thread of their Studio Museum experience and what it revealed about Golden's approach to leadership development.

The convergence of these moments crystallized something I've been thinking about for years: we've been measuring arts leadership all wrong.

The Empire Building Trap

For decades, we've celebrated leaders who build bigger budgets, expand facilities, grow staff, and accumulate prestigious board members. We idolize "upward mobility," treating career progression as a ladder to be climbed rather than depth to be explored. This approach treats leadership as a zero-sum game where success means outperforming peers and accumulating resources.

When empire building and ladder climbing become the primary measures of success, they create perverse incentives. Leaders begin optimizing for their own recognition rather than their community's needs, prioritizing résumé building over relationship building. We celebrate leaders who accumulate power rather than those who distribute it.

Generative Leadership in Action

But there's another approach, exemplified by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum. For over two decades, Golden has demonstrated "generative leadership": creating more leaders rather than accumulating followers. Instead of using the institution as a stepping stone, she dedicated herself to realizing its full potential through deep, sustained relationships with communities, artists, and cultural movements.

Golden's commitment culminates in the museum's anticipated reopening after complete institutional transformation. Rather than moving on when construction challenges arose, she stayed to see through a $300 million capital campaign and the creation of the museum's first purpose-built facility. Her approach treats the institution not as a monument to individual vision, but as a platform for developing and launching careers.

During my time at Mellon, I worked with nearly a dozen former Studio Museum curators now scattered across the globe, leading institutions and mentoring the next generation. Each carried forward approaches and values developed under Golden's guidance. This wasn't coincidental but strategic. Golden understood that lasting change happens through distributed leadership, planting seeds for a future cultural landscape rather than constructing monuments to herself.

The Ecosystem Effect

This reveals the genius of generative leadership: it creates network effects that extend far beyond any individual institution. Former Studio Museum residents and fellows now work worldwide, bringing methodologies and commitment to artist development they learned through Golden's mentorship. This multiplier effect transforms multiple organizations and communities. It's the difference between monument construction and ecosystem cultivation.

What makes Golden's approach particularly significant is how rare it remains across cultural sectors. University arts programs continue prioritizing institutional reputation over student career development. Symphony orchestras and theaters measure success through subscription growth rather than artistic careers nurtured. The absence of Golden's generative approach represents a massive missed opportunity for systemic transformation.

The Real Challenges

The challenge with generative leadership is that its impacts resist traditional measurement and require navigating complex power dynamics. From my own experience, I've found three distinct contexts with different success rates.

With students, I've been most successful at creating lasting impact. The professor-student relationship is fundamentally developmental. With artists I've supported through programming or grantmaking, the relationship is explicitly about career development. With staff, however, it's been much more challenging. When you control someone's salary and performance reviews, the power imbalance can make mentorship feel transactional.

This is what makes Thelma Golden's legacy even more remarkable. She has somehow managed to create conditions for generative leadership within the most challenging context: as a supervisor and institutional leader. The fact that so many former staff members have flourished suggests she found ways to transcend typical hierarchical constraints.

This distinction reveals that generative leadership isn't just about individual intention. It's about creating structural conditions that enable authentic mentorship to flourish.

The Path Forward

Current and aspiring arts leaders face a choice: measure success by careers launched rather than empires built. This requires institutional structures supporting long-term thinking, boards understanding the value of investing in people, and funders willing to support career development infrastructure.

Every time I receive a message like the one from my former student, I'm reminded of what really matters. Not the budgets I managed, titles I held, or grants I awarded, but the lives I had the privilege to touch. The true measure of leadership success isn't how much money we raised or how many titles we accumulated. It's how many people we helped find their path and create their own impact.

So here's the challenge: Look in the mirror. How many people have you truly helped to launch their careers? Can you point to a dozen former students, staff members, or emerging artists who are now thriving because of the time, attention, and pathways you provided?

Thelma Golden can. The evidence is literally on display in Harper's Bazaar.

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August 21, 2025

Breaking New Ground: Arts Leadership Meets Venture Innovation

By Emil J. Kang

I'm thrilled to announce my appointment as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the Yale Ventures Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale University, one of the first arts leaders to be appointed. This role places me at the intersection of two worlds that have traditionally operated in separate spheres—arts innovation and venture development.

Working alongside Jim Boyle and Frances Pollock through the Cultural Innovation Lab, I look forward to exploring how we can create enterprise infrastructure specifically designed for artists—moving beyond the traditional nonprofit model to develop new pathways for sustainable creative practice. This isn't about turning artists into conventional entrepreneurs—it's about creating conditions where creative innovation can develop with appropriate support, community engagement, and risk tolerance.

The timing couldn't be more urgent. As traditional cultural institutions face unprecedented pressures and communities desperately need creative solutions to complex challenges, we must build new models that support artistic innovation with the same rigor and resources we apply to other forms of entrepreneurship.

My work at Yale Ventures is designed to address what I see as a fundamental infrastructure gap that has long constrained artistic innovation. The goal is to break the cycle of scarcity and institutional dependence that has trapped too many talented creators and instead build ecosystems where artistic vision can translate into sustainable, community-serving enterprises.

This appointment represents a recognition that cultural innovation deserves the same serious investment and developmental framework that we provide to biotech, fintech, and other emerging sectors. But as I've been explaining to colleagues in the venture world, the challenge isn't what most business leaders assume it to be.

The Innovation Gap: Why Artists Don't Get Startup Treatment

The question that haunts every conversation about artists and entrepreneurship is the wrong one entirely. Business leaders, investors, and even well-meaning arts administrators consistently ask: "How can artists better monetize their creative work?" But this assumes the problem lies in the final transaction—the moment when art meets market.

The real crisis happens much earlier, in the vast creative wilderness that precedes any sellable product.

The Infrastructure Gap

When a biotech entrepreneur has a breakthrough idea, they don't immediately worry about how to price their eventual drug. They know there's an entire ecosystem designed to support the journey from concept to market: incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capital, research partnerships, regulatory guidance, and communities of fellow innovators who understand the unique challenges of their field.

When a tech founder envisions a new platform, they can access co-working spaces, mentorship networks, prototyping resources, user testing frameworks, and multiple rounds of funding specifically designed for different stages of development. The infrastructure assumes that innovation requires time, experimentation, failure, iteration, and community—long before any revenue appears.

But when an artist has a transformative vision—whether for a new kind of performance, a community-engaged installation, or an entirely novel art form—they face a landscape built around two primary options: secure institutional validation (through galleries, theaters, or nonprofit organizations) or figure it out alone.

This infrastructure gap isn't just an inconvenience. It's the root cause of the "starving artist" mythology and the scarcity mindset that keeps creative innovation trapped in cycles of desperation and dependence.

The Institutional Validation Trap

Most artists who achieve any level of stability do so by learning to navigate existing cultural institutions. They develop grant-writing skills, cultivate relationships with curators and artistic directors, and gradually internalize the aesthetic and political preferences of funding bodies. This process often works—it provides resources, community, and validation.

But it comes with a cost. Artists begin to imagine their work through the lens of what institutions will support rather than what communities need or what their own vision demands. They develop what we might call an "institutional validation reflex"—an unconscious tendency to seek permission from established systems rather than building new ones.

This reflex is understandable. In a landscape where independent artistic practice often means isolation and financial precarity, institutional affiliation offers both material support and social legitimacy. But it also constrains imagination. Artists begin to self-edit before they even create, anticipating the preferences of grant panels and selection committees.

The Scarcity Mindset Spiral

Without infrastructure that supports experimentation and risk-taking, artists operate from a position of chronic scarcity. Every project must succeed. Every grant must be won. Every opportunity must be maximized. This creates a conservative approach to creative risk that's antithetical to innovation.

Contrast this with how tech entrepreneurs approach failure. In Silicon Valley, failure is not just tolerated but celebrated as a learning experience. "Fail fast, fail often" isn't just a slogan—it's built into the funding model. Investors expect that most ventures will fail, and they structure their portfolios accordingly.

But artists are expected to succeed consistently from the beginning. Grant applications require detailed outcomes and impact measures. Residency programs demand finished works. Even artist-entrepreneur programs often focus on helping creators monetize existing work rather than supporting the messy, uncertain process of developing new artistic practices.

What Artist Enterprise Infrastructure Could Look Like

Imagine if artists had access to the same kind of developmental ecosystem that supports other forms of innovation:

Creative R&D Labs where artists could experiment with new forms, technologies, and community engagement models without the pressure to produce marketable outcomes. These wouldn't be traditional residencies with predetermined timelines, but open-ended research environments.

Artistic Venture Studios that provide not just funding but the operational support artists need to build sustainable practices: business development, legal guidance, technology resources, and access to diverse revenue models beyond traditional arts sales.

Community-Centered Incubators designed around the reality that many of the most innovative artistic practices are inherently collaborative and community-engaged. These would support artists in building the social infrastructure their work requires.

Creative Capital Networks that operate like angel investor groups but understand that artistic innovation often requires different timelines, success metrics, and forms of return than purely commercial ventures.

Artistic Accelerator Programs that help artists develop both their creative practice and their capacity to build sustainable enterprises around that practice—not by compromising their vision, but by creating infrastructure that supports it.

Beyond Monetization

The goal isn't to turn every artist into a entrepreneur in the conventional sense. It's to create conditions where artists can develop their work with the same kind of sustained support, community engagement, and risk tolerance that we provide to other forms of innovation.

This means recognizing that artistic innovation often generates value that can't be captured through traditional market mechanisms. The social impact of community-engaged art, the cultural knowledge preserved through traditional practices, the healing potential of creative expression—these outcomes require investment models that understand return beyond financial profit.

The Urgency of Now

The current moment demands this infrastructure more than ever. As traditional cultural institutions face funding cuts and political attacks, as communities grapple with isolation and disconnection, as we confront challenges that require creative solutions—we need artists who can build new forms of cultural infrastructure.

But we can't expect them to do so while operating from scarcity, isolation, and institutional dependence. We need to build the scaffolding that allows creative innovation to flourish.

The starving artist trope isn't a romantic reality—it's a policy failure. It's the predictable result of an economic system that supports innovation in every sector except the one most essential to human meaning-making and social cohesion.

It's time to build something different. Not because artists deserve charity, but because communities deserve the full potential of creative innovation. And that innovation requires infrastructure, investment, and the same kind of serious commitment to experimental development that we provide to every other form of human problem-solving.

The question isn't how to monetize art. The question is how to build an ecosystem where artistic innovation can thrive, experiment, fail, iterate, and ultimately create the cultural solutions our communities desperately need.

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August 25, 2025

What If the Arts Were the Point?

Reclaiming the Transformational Purpose of Higher Education through the Arts

By Emil J. Kang

Higher education is in a moment of reckoning. Public trust is eroding. Budgets are tightening. Political scrutiny is intensifying. The liberal arts have long been the foundation of American higher education, but they are increasingly seen as expendable. Within this context, the arts often find themselves on the margins: praised rhetorically, but rarely prioritized.

When institutions do support the arts, it is often through integration. Students encounter creativity through general education, or in service to other disciplines. The arts are used to foster innovation, wellness, communication, or "soft skills." These efforts are valuable, but they are not sufficient. We need to stop treating the arts as enrichment and start recognizing them as infrastructure.

The Arts as Infrastructure

In higher education, infrastructure typically means buildings, networks, systems. These are the things that allow the rest of the institution to function. But what if we understood infrastructure more broadly? What if the arts were understood as essential to the university's intellectual, emotional, and civic architecture, just like libraries, laboratories, and learning management systems?

The arts are not simply things we do in addition to learning. They are ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of building community. They enable students to make sense of complexity, to express the inexpressible, and to imagine alternative futures. They train people to listen, to interpret, to hold contradiction, and to pursue meaning. These are not soft capacities. They are structural. Just as campuses invest in physical infrastructure to support research, teaching, and student life, they must also invest in the cultural infrastructure that enables creative, ethical, and collaborative thought.

This means creating robust academic departments that support deep study and artistic production, hiring artist-scholars with full institutional support where artistic practice is valued equally with traditional scholarship, including advancement and promotional structures that recognize creative work as research, and providing dedicated spaces for making, performing, and reflecting rather than just showcasing. It means ensuring campus-wide access to artistic methods for all students, regardless of major, and pursuing integration that doesn't dilute the disciplines, but amplifies their reach.

Crucially, this infrastructure must prioritize relational rather than transactional arts experiences. Too often, universities treat the arts as content to be consumed. Students attend performances, view exhibitions, or take classes for credit. But the transformative power of arts infrastructure lies in sustained relationship: students working alongside practicing artists over time, communities of makers learning from each other, and creative processes that unfold through ongoing collaboration rather than discrete events.

There is also a risk in treating the arts as a cash machine, where success is measured primarily by ticket sales, enrollment numbers, or revenue generation. While financial sustainability matters, reducing arts programming to profit centers undermines the very infrastructure we need to build. When institutions focus primarily on what sells rather than what transforms, they create programming that may be popular but lacks the depth and risk-taking that make arts education transformational. True arts infrastructure requires investment in work that may not immediately generate revenue but builds the cultural and intellectual capacity that serves the institution's broader mission.

This relational approach means artist residencies measured in years, not weeks. It means students engaging in multi-semester creative projects that build deep skills and lasting mentorships. It means community partnerships that evolve over decades, creating genuine cultural exchange rather than superficial outreach. These relationships cannot be purchased or programmed. They must be cultivated through sustained investment in people, processes, and patient development of trust.

We Need Both Depth and Breadth

Some institutions have invested in campus-wide engagement at the expense of supporting arts majors and faculty. Others defend academic arts departments without making space for cross-campus collaboration. But we cannot choose one over the other. If we neglect arts disciplines, we lose the depth and excellence that make integration meaningful. If we silo the arts, we deny their potential to shape how every student learns.

We need both. Scholar-artists and video game designers. Studio art majors and curious engineers. Musicians and policymakers. Choreographers and climate scientists. Each one enriches the other. Together, they form a truly educated public.

The Strategic Opportunity

There is a leadership opportunity here. The institutions that will thrive in the next decade are those that reimagine infrastructure not only in terms of technology or buildings, but in terms of human capacity, cultural relevance, and imaginative reach. In a time of artificial intelligence, climate anxiety, and civic fragmentation, our students don't just need credentials. They need to develop the ability to think metaphorically, act empathetically, and adapt creatively.

This is not an argument for sentiment or nostalgia. It is a case for relevance, strategy, and public value.

For university leaders navigating political scrutiny and budget pressures, arts infrastructure offers concrete advantages that skeptics can understand. Institutions with robust arts programs consistently demonstrate higher alumni giving rates, stronger community partnerships, and more effective crisis response capabilities. When Brown University launched its Arts Institute, alumni donations to the university increased by 23% within three years. When Arizona State University invested heavily in arts integration across disciplines, their retention rates improved and they attracted national attention for innovative programming that differentiated them in an increasingly competitive market.

Arts programs also provide measurable workforce preparation that addresses economic criticism directly. A 2023 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that graduates with significant arts training scored highest on creative problem-solving, communication, and adaptability. These are the skills most in demand from employers across all sectors. These aren't "soft skills" but core competencies for an economy increasingly defined by rapid change and complex challenges.

Perhaps most importantly for institutions under political attack, arts programming creates visible community value that generates goodwill across ideological divides. When universities present community theater, host local artists, or engage students in public art projects, they demonstrate their commitment to place-based service in ways that transcend partisan politics. Town halls may debate diversity initiatives, but they celebrate student orchestras and community art exhibitions.

A Final Word

The arts are not peripheral. They are foundational. They are not a bonus. They are a necessity. And like any true infrastructure, they require investment, upkeep, and integration not for their own sake, but for what they make possible.

So let's stop asking how to "fit" the arts into a constrained system. Let's ask what the university could become if we designed the system around the arts in the first place. What if the arts weren't just part of the story? What if they were the point?

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August 31, 2025

The Excellence Question: Who Gets to Define It?

By Emil J. Kang

Excellence has always been a loaded word in the arts. Its often wielded as a marker of value, a justification for exclusion, or a shorthand for taste. Some invoke it to argue that high standards require narrow access, that broadening participation risks mediocrity. Others reject the term altogether, viewing it as a coded defense of elitism and oppression. But both positions, in their own ways, miss the point.

Excellence is not a neutral concept. Its not a fixed standard hovering above culture, waiting to be discovered. Its a construct, defined by people, shaped by tradition, and measured against values that are far from universal. When we pretend otherwise, when we speak of excellence as if it were objective and settled, we obscure the real question: whose definition are we using, and why should it be the only one that counts?

Throughout my career in the arts, from leading Carolina Performing Arts to overseeing grantmaking at the Mellon Foundation, I have seen how expanding our understanding of excellence does not diminish artistic rigor. It strengthens it. In every instance where we invited new voices, new traditions, and new ways of making and evaluating work, the results deepened, not diluted, our standard of quality.

The Illusion of Universal Standards

The problem is that legacy institutions have long operated under the illusion that excellence has a singular, universal definition. Conservatories taught generations of students that mastery meant refining European classical technique. Galleries prioritized work that aligned with the Western art historical canon. Orchestras constructed seasons as though the canon itself were both immutable and complete. They applied quality metrics that often had more to do with pedigree and polish than with vision or originality.

We see, again and again, how these frameworks fail to account for innovation. When Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, it was met with outrage. Audiences rioted. Critics labeled it barbaric. It did not meet the standards of excellence at the time, yet it became one of the most influential musical works of the century. What we now recognize as groundbreaking was initially rejected because it did not conform to prevailing standards.

This reveals a fundamental challenge: our evaluative frameworks are often incapable of recognizing excellence when it arrives in unfamiliar form. We default to what we know. We reward what we understand. And we do so in ways that exclude perspectives, practices, and communities whose contributions do not fit institutional norms.

The Joy of Discovery

True excellence often begins with not knowing, with the joy of discovery and the vulnerability of encountering something unfamiliar. But most arts institutions have structured themselves to validate recognition, not curiosity. They serve audiences who want to feel affirmed in their knowledge, who want to hum along with melodies they recognize, who find comfort in identifying techniques they were taught to admire. Institutions become less about cultivating wonder and more about confirming taste.

The most excellent artistic experiences I have witnessed have not catered to that impulse. They have created space for surprise. They have demanded attention. They have made audiences, and funders and curators, do the work of discovery. Excellence, in that sense, is not about settling debates. It is about opening them.

Excellence as Expansion

This view of excellence as expansive rather than exclusive is not theoretical. When we celebrated The Rite of Spring at 100 at Carolina Performing Arts, commissioning twelve new works from artists around the world, it succeeded not because it adhered to a singular standard but because it welcomed multiple interpretations of what innovation could look like. Each artist brought their own culture, technique, and definition of mastery. The excellence was not uniform. It was plural.

At Mellon, we saw this same pattern emerge. Centering equity did not lower our standards. It raised them. By expanding the grantee pool to include community-based organizations, Indigenous artists, and experimental artist-run spaces, we surfaced forms of excellence that had long gone unrecognized. These were not fringe practices. They were simply outside the field of view of institutions that had never learned how to see them.

Building New Infrastructure

This does not mean abandoning rigor. It means building the institutional capacity to recognize rigor across a wider range of traditions and practices. At UNC, we created residency programs like DiSTIL and Creative Futures with this in mind. These were structured to recognize excellence in community engagement as much as in traditional artistic craft. They made room for artists to define their own standards of mastery while participating in broader artistic conversations.

At Yale Ventures, where I now serve as Entrepreneur-in-Residence, the challenge is creating systems that enable artists to pursue excellence on their own terms. The goal is not just helping artists monetize their work, but building infrastructure that enables imagination, rewards risk, and sustains innovation. Other sectors provide this kind of developmental support. The arts deserve the same.

The Real Standard

The most important question is not whether we believe in excellence. It is whether we believe excellence can be defined in more than one way, and whether we are willing to build institutions capable of supporting that multiplicity. Excellence is not threatened by difference. It is enriched by it.

The real standard is this: can we recognize outstanding work across difference? Can we hold rigor and relevance in the same frame? Can we develop new vocabularies of value, shaped in collaboration with the communities we aim to serve?

Excellence to whom? The answer must be, to all of us. It must be defined not behind closed doors, but out in the open, where artistic power meets cultural imagination and where the highest standards are set not only by history, but by the futures we dare to build.

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August 14, 2025

The Sophistication Trap: Why High Art's “Audience Problem” Isn't About Audiences

By Emil J. Kang

What I'm about to argue will likely seem obvious to most performing arts leaders, artists, and thoughtful observers of the arts landscape. Yet somehow, despite this apparent obviousness, our major cultural institutions continue operating as if the opposite were true.

For decades, symphony orchestras, opera companies, and ballet companies have wrung their hands over the same existential question: How do we attract more diverse and younger audiences? Board meetings have been consumed by this puzzle. Consultants have been hired. Marketing campaigns have been launched promising that classical music is "not stuffy" and opera is "more accessible than you think."

Everyone involved seems to understand, on some level, that the disconnect runs deeper than marketing or pricing. And yet, season after season, we continue programming as if the solution lies in better messaging rather than fundamental reimagining.

So what if we've been asking the wrong question entirely?

What if the problem isn't that people lack the sophistication to appreciate Puccini or the resources to afford orchestra tickets? What if the problem is that we refuse to acknowledge that these art forms were designed by and for a very specific population—and when they fail to resonate beyond that population, we blame the audience rather than examining the art itself?

This will be a difficult conversation for many reasons, not least because there are talented young musicians and musicians of color who have devoted their lives to mastering these traditions and who understandably hope that their artistry can attract their contemporaries and communities. Their investment in these forms is real, their skill undeniable, and their desire to share this music with people who look like them is both moving and valid. But perhaps the question isn't whether they can make classical music relevant to their communities—perhaps it's whether our institutions should be asking them to carry that burden in the first place.

The Architecture of Exclusion

Ballet, opera, and symphony orchestras emerged from the cultural and economic contexts of European aristocracy and American Gilded Age wealth. They were not created as universal languages but as markers of refinement, education, and class distinction. The ritual of attendance—the dress codes, the behavioral expectations, the venues themselves—was as much about social signaling as artistic experience.

When we program a season of Beethoven, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky and then wonder why it doesn't draw significant Latino or Black audiences, we're being willfully naive about cultural specificity. These composers wrote for courts and concert halls where people who looked like those audiences were servants, not patrons. The music carries that history in its very DNA.

This doesn't mean the music is without value or beauty. But it does mean that its failure to speak to everyone isn't a failure of sophistication on the part of those who remain unmoved. It's evidence that cultural expression is rooted in particular experiences, worldviews, and social contexts.

The Sophistication Defense

Perhaps the most insidious response to declining and demographically narrow audiences has been the sophistication defense: the suggestion that these art forms represent the pinnacle of human artistic achievement, and that those who don't connect with them simply haven't developed adequate cultural literacy or refined taste.

This argument positions European classical traditions as objectively superior to other musical forms—jazz, gospel, hip-hop, mariachi, Indian classical music, or any number of other sophisticated musical traditions. It suggests that there's a hierarchy of culture, with Western classical music at the apex, and that proper education will inevitably lead people to recognize and embrace this hierarchy.

But sophistication isn't about climbing a ladder toward European aesthetic ideals. A master of Hindustani classical music, a bebop innovator, or a master drummer in a West African tradition possesses sophistication that rivals any conservatory-trained violinist. The difference is that we've institutionalized one tradition's definition of excellence while treating others as interesting but ultimately lesser forms.

The Accessibility Illusion

The other common response has been to make high art forms more "accessible"—shorter programs, casual dress codes, pre-concert talks, crossover programming. While well-intentioned, these efforts often miss the deeper issue. They assume that the barrier is logistical rather than cultural, that if we just remove enough friction, universal appreciation will follow.

But accessibility isn't just about making something easier to consume. It's about relevance, representation, and resonance. When the stories being told, the aesthetic values being celebrated, and the cultural references being made consistently exclude your experience and worldview, no amount of casual Friday programming will bridge that gap.

Moreover, these accessibility efforts often feel patronizing to the very communities they're trying to reach. The implication is that the art form is inherently valuable and universal, and if people would just give it a chance (with proper hand-holding), they'd discover its worth. This maintains the hierarchy while offering the appearance of inclusion.

Beyond Diversification

The real question isn't how to diversify audiences for European classical traditions. It's whether cultural institutions should be investing the majority of their resources in maintaining and promoting art forms that serve an increasingly narrow slice of the population.

What if, instead of spending millions trying to convince 25-year-olds that Wagner is relevant to their lives, we invested that same energy and funding in developing, presenting, and institutionalizing the musical traditions that actually emerge from and speak to diverse communities?

What if our major cultural institutions became laboratories for contemporary artistic expression rather than museums for 18th and 19th-century European culture?

This isn't about abandoning excellence or "dumbing down" programming. It's about expanding our definition of what constitutes artistic excellence and recognizing that cultural relevance isn't a character flaw—it's how art has always worked.

The Path Forward

Cultural institutions have a choice. They can continue the decades-long project of trying to make 200-year-old European art forms relevant to 21st-century diverse audiences. Or they can acknowledge that these forms serve a particular constituency and design institutions that serve the full spectrum of artistic expression and cultural community.

This might mean programming seasons that are 70% contemporary and community-rooted rather than 70% classical repertoire. It might mean hiring artistic directors from hip-hop, electronic, or world music backgrounds. It might mean fundamentally rethinking what a "symphony orchestra" or "opera company" could be if it weren't tethered to historical European models.

The sophistication trap keeps us stuck in a cycle of lamentation and forced relevance. Breaking free requires admitting that not all art is for all people—and that this isn't a failure of the people. It's simply how culture works. The failure is in building institutions that assume otherwise and then blame audiences when reality proves stubborn.

True sophistication might be recognizing when it's time to let new forms flourish rather than demanding that old forms find new life in contexts where they were never meant to grow.

# # #

August 11, 2025

You Don’t Need a Nonprofit to Make Your Work Matter

Too many artists think they need a nonprofit to make their work legitimate — and too many end up giving away their ownership, time, and focus in the process. Fiscal sponsorship can be a smarter alternative, but the sponsorship world itself is in dire need of greater transparency, accountability, and purpose. This provocation asks a hard question: are we building structures to protect the art, or just more systems that consume it?

By Emil J. Kang

Somewhere along the way, artists were sold the idea that to be taken seriously, they need a nonprofit. File the paperwork, form a board, write a mission statement — and suddenly, the work has “legitimacy.” Funders will take your calls. You can apply for certain grants. You have a tax-exempt number that signals permanence and purpose.

What they don’t tell you is what it costs.

When you turn your art into a nonprofit, you give away more than you think. You give up sole ownership of your intellectual property — your work now belongs to the organization, which is legally its own entity, with a board of directors that has ultimate authority. You give away your time — hours once spent creating are now spent fundraising, filling out compliance reports, managing board politics, and attending endless meetings. You give away your attention — shifting from the practice of making to the business of sustaining an institution. And, perhaps most dangerously, you give away your ability to make decisions solely in service of your vision, because the institution’s survival quickly becomes its own priority.

This isn’t to say that nonprofits are bad, or that they can’t serve artists well. But too often, the assumption is automatic: if you’re an artist with an idea, you “need” to start a nonprofit. That assumption is not only wrong — it’s harmful. The reality is that a nonprofit is a legal and governance structure with obligations, limitations, and consequences that can swallow the very work it was meant to serve.

The good news? You have options.

Fiscal sponsorship allows you to receive grants and tax-deductible donations through an existing nonprofit, without creating your own. You retain your identity, your ownership, and your focus on making — while leaning on an existing infrastructure for compliance and administration. That said, the fiscal sponsorship community itself is overdue for a refresh. Too many sponsors operate with little transparency, uneven service quality, or unclear accountability. Artists often find themselves in relationships where the sponsor benefits more from the administrative fee than the artist benefits from the partnership. The promise of fiscal sponsorship — to reduce administrative burden and provide genuine institutional support — will only be realized if sponsors hold themselves to higher standards of service, clarity, and responsibility.

Cooperative models let you share resources with other artists — space, equipment, marketing, staff — without giving up ownership or creative control. They allow for collective decision-making without imposing the rigid hierarchy of a nonprofit board.

Social enterprises or LLCs let you generate income from your work, pay yourself fairly, and partner with nonprofits when it benefits your mission. You can still apply for certain grants as a for-profit entity (especially through fiscal sponsors), while retaining flexibility to shift or adapt without board approval.

A nonprofit is not a badge of honor. It’s a tool — one of many — and like any tool, it’s only worth using if it fits the job. If your goal is to protect your creative vision, you may need fewer bylaws and more boundaries. The question isn’t whether you can create a nonprofit — it’s whether you can keep making your art once you do.

# # #

August 7, 2025

When the Institution Becomes the Art

What Happens When We Prioritize Structure Over Substance

By Emil J. Kang

In the nonprofit arts world, we talk about the power of creativity, the centrality of artists, and the importance of cultural access. We claim to value risk, experimentation, and vision. We champion new voices and bold work.

But behind the curtain, much of our energy—our time, our funding, our staffing—goes not toward the art itself, but toward preserving the institution that houses it.

We spend months refining strategic plans, polishing board presentations, and reworking org charts. We pour energy into development language, capital campaigns, and brand refreshes. We optimize operations. We fine-tune messaging. We chase relevance. We protect reputation.

None of this is inherently wrong. Institutions need structure, clarity, and sustainability to function.

But there’s a moment—often quiet, often unspoken—when the institution stops existing for the art, and begins existing as the art. When the real creative labor becomes navigating bureaucracy, managing appearances, and sustaining a legacy that may no longer reflect the world outside its walls.

We mistake performance for purpose.
We substitute the container for the contents.
We become stewards of an architecture instead of champions of a mission.

When the Institution Becomes the Product

We see this everywhere:

• Artists are underpaid or under-supported while executive teams grow in size and scope.

• Programming decisions are driven by donor priorities rather than curatorial ones.

• Risk is avoided, not because the work isn’t worth doing, but because the optics aren’t worth managing.

• Community partnerships are announced with fanfare but resourced like middling side projects.

• The grant report takes more effort than the work it describes.

We build narratives about inclusion, innovation, and transformation—but spend our days defending a model built for a different time.

Eventually, artists notice. So do audiences. And so do the people inside the institution who quietly begin to wonder: Was this what we signed up for?

The Real Cost of Institutional Preservation

When the institution becomes the art, several things happen:

• The work becomes thinner, safer, more polished—less urgent.

• Staff burn out navigating internal politics instead of building shared purpose.

• Boards see success as endurance rather than impact.

• Funders begin to reward stability over imagination.

• And the public sees through it all and stops showing up.

The paradox is painful: the more we try to preserve the institution, the less alive it becomes. And the less alive it becomes, the more energy it demands just to keep going.

At some point, we stop asking what the institution is for and only ask how to keep it running.

A Way Back to Purpose

We don’t need to destroy institutions. But we do need to remember what they were built to hold.

Arts institutions are not ends in themselves. They are vessels—temporary, evolving, imperfect—meant to support people, practices, and possibilities that transcend their walls.

So the question isn’t how to save the organization. The question is:

• What is it still in service to?

• Who is it accountable to now?

• What could it become if we stopped protecting it and started reimagining it?

This is the creative work that matters—not just on stage or in galleries, but inside leadership, strategy, and governance. Institutions should be among the most dynamic spaces in cultural life—not the most fragile.

A Final Word

We are not here to curate the illusion of progress.
We are here to make space for what matters.

So let’s stop preserving institutions as artifacts.
Let’s start treating them as creative tools.
Let them be malleable. Let them be temporary. Let them breathe.

Because when the institution becomes the art, the art—and the people who make it—begin to disappear.

Let’s not let that happen.

# # #

August 4, 2025

Why the Executive Director–Board Chair Dynamic Deserves Immediate Attention

The Most Overlooked—and Overloaded—Partnership in Organizational Life

By Emil J. Kang

In every nonprofit, there’s a relationship that quietly shapes everything—but rarely gets the attention it deserves. It doesn’t show up in strategy decks, on meeting agendas, or grant reports. It’s not evaluated regularly and it’s almost never resourced. But it holds more power than most people realize. It’s the relationship between the Executive Director and the Board Chair.

This one dynamic often determines whether an organization hums or stalls. Whether a leader thrives or burns out. Whether the board functions as a supportive body or becomes a second job the ED has to manage. And yet, for all its influence, we continue to treat this relationship as something that should simply work on its own—without coaching, without feedback, without reflection.

Too often, the expectations placed on this pairing are both enormous and unspoken. The ED is expected to be visionary and tactical, externally facing and internally grounded, accountable to the board and responsible for staff. Meanwhile, the Chair is expected to be a thought partner, a supervisor, a translator, and a guardian of institutional values—all while serving in a volunteer capacity, often without any training in nonprofit leadership.

The result is a dynamic that’s overloaded with pressure but under-supported in practice. When it’s strong, it can anchor an organization through change, challenge, and uncertainty. When it’s strained or misaligned, it can quietly erode trust, create confusion, and destabilize the leadership from within.

I know this from experience. As a young Executive Director, I inherited board chairs I didn’t choose—well-meaning people, but not always the right partners for the moment. Sometimes they were placed in the role out of seniority, donor status, or internal politics. I was expected to “manage the relationship,” even if there was no alignment in approach, communication style, or vision. I learned early how much effort went into managing up before you could manage anything else—and how quickly misalignment at the top could spill across the organization.

And even as a more seasoned executive, I encountered Chairs who, despite good intentions, misunderstood their role. They saw themselves not as champions of strategy, but as authors of vision. They wanted to lead direction, not steward it. And in doing so, they subtly displaced the very leadership they were meant to support. Worse still, I’ve experienced Chairs who treated the board’s failings—its lack of engagement, internal dissonance, or unclear direction—as the Executive Director’s fault. In those cases, even a successful ED—someone leading boldly, navigating complex terrain, and delivering on mission—found their work diminished, their accomplishments unacknowledged. When the board faltered, blame flowed downhill. But when the organization thrived, credit mysteriously dispersed. That kind of dynamic is not just demoralizing—it’s corrosive.

Then there are Chairs who simply avoid the hard parts of the role altogether. They struggle to make decisions, delay action when clarity is needed, and fail to hold their fellow board members accountable. Dysfunctional dynamics are left to fester. Underperforming or disruptive trustees go unchecked. And rather than confronting governance issues directly, these Chairs quietly hand the burden to the Executive Director—expecting them to be the diplomat, the enforcer, and the adult in the room. But EDs are not responsible for managing the board. That’s the Chair’s role. When Chairs abdicate that responsibility, the ED is forced to absorb tension that isn’t theirs to carry. It’s a recipe for resentment and burnout, and it often leaves the board wondering why leadership feels misaligned—when the root issue is simply a Chair unwilling to lead.

What makes this relationship so tricky is the ambiguity built into it. The Board Chair is technically the ED’s supervisor—but can also be the ED’s closest confidant. They represent the board’s authority, but also serve as the ED’s ally in navigating board dynamics. That ambiguity can work beautifully in the hands of two emotionally intelligent, mission-aligned partners—but more often, it creates tension, especially when roles aren’t clear and communication isn’t intentional.

I’ve seen EDs withhold information from their Chairs for fear of being micromanaged. I’ve seen Chairs insert themselves into day-to-day operations because they quietly lack confidence in the staff or haven’t been given a clear scope. I’ve seen high-functioning organizations lose momentum, not because anyone was failing, but because this one relationship was misaligned and nobody knew how to talk about it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could treat the ED–Chair relationship as a central piece of organizational infrastructure—something to be built, maintained, and occasionally repaired. That would mean offering onboarding and coaching not just for EDs, but for Chairs, and even better, for both. It would mean carving out protected time for the two to align—not just on tasks and timelines, but on values, tone, and approach. It would mean creating mechanisms for feedback, not just from one to the other, but from staff and board members who feel the ripple effects of this relationship in their everyday work.

Too often, we choose Board Chairs based on tenure, influence, or wealth rather than their capacity to lead in partnership. But the best Chairs aren’t always the loudest voices or biggest donors. They’re the ones who understand that leadership is relational. They show up with humility, consistency, and the willingness to listen and evolve.

This work is especially important now, in a sector grappling with burnout, equity gaps, and trust deficits. Executive Directors—particularly BIPOC, women, and first-time leaders—are often navigating the pressure to transform institutions while still managing legacy structures and personalities that resist change. A misaligned Chair can become yet another layer of friction. But a well-aligned Chair can be a lifeline—someone who creates space, deflects unnecessary noise, and helps the board evolve alongside the staff.

While the burden of balance shouldn’t fall solely on the Executive Director, there are steps an ED can take to help build and sustain a strong Chair relationship. The first is to treat the relationship as something that requires intentional design—not just functional interaction. Schedule regular, candid one-on-ones—not just about decisions and deliverables, but about how the relationship is working. Be explicit about what kind of support you need and where you want your Chair to lead—particularly when it comes to board accountability. Share wins and challenges early, and invite feedback before there’s a problem. And perhaps most importantly, clarify the boundaries: What belongs to the board? What belongs to staff? And what belongs to this unique, high-trust partnership?

It’s not always easy, especially when the Chair isn’t aligned. But small, early interventions can prevent long-term dysfunction. Don’t assume your Chair understands how best to support you—help them learn, and invite them into that growth alongside you.

So if you’re a Board Chair, ask yourself: Am I leading in a way that empowers or constrains? If you’re an ED: Does my Chair know what I actually need from them, and have we ever talked about it explicitly? And if you’re part of a board: When was the last time we checked in—not just on what our ED is doing, but if our ED and Chair are showing up well in this relationship?

Too many great leaders have left roles not because they weren’t effective, but because this single relationship failed them. Too many organizations have stalled not because of strategy or money, but because of confusion at the top.

It’s time to stop treating the ED–Chair relationship as incidental. It’s not. It’s structural. It’s cultural. And it’s worth getting right.

# # #

July 29, 2025

When "Lack of Funding" Becomes the Answer to Everything

Why We Can’t Let Scarcity Thinking Replace Vision

By Emil J. Kang

As a former funder, I’ve often asked leaders what’s getting in the way:
Why hasn’t this project launched?
Why isn’t the strategy evolving?
Why did the community partnership stall?
Why is the team burned out?

And nearly every time, I get the same response:

“We don’t have the funding.”

Let me be clear: funding does matter. Many organizations are navigating real precarity, stretched staff, and historic underinvestment. The structural barriers are real.

But something else is happening, too.

“Lack of funding” has become the reflexive answer to everything.
A kind of shield. A placeholder. A wall between aspiration and action.

The Risk of Believing It Too Fully

When every challenge is attributed to money, we risk losing the very thing funding was meant to support: vision.

Vision becomes deferred.
Boldness becomes conditional.
Imagination becomes indulgent.
And leadership becomes risk management.

We stop dreaming out loud because we’re afraid of being unrealistic.
We stop naming what we really want because we’re afraid no one will fund it.
We stop doing the thing that drew us to the work in the first place—imagining a different future.

What We Don’t Mean

This is not about telling under-resourced leaders to bootstrap harder.
This is not a call for magical thinking or martyrdom.
This is not about ignoring injustice or pretending money doesn’t matter.

It’s about asking an honest question:

Have we let the idea of scarcity become more powerful than the actual constraints?

When Scarcity Becomes the Operating System

The danger isn’t just in budget cuts.
It’s in how scarcity reshapes behavior:

• We scale back before we’ve even tested the idea.

• We write proposals based on what we think funders will say yes to—not what communities need.

• We decline opportunities for fear of not being able to sustain them.

• We maintain programs we don’t believe in—because they’re funded.

• We stop asking for what’s needed—because hearing “no” has worn us down.

At some point, the lack of funding doesn’t just limit the work—it becomes the work.

A Different Invitation

What if the question wasn’t, “What can you do with what you have?”
But: “What do you want to do, regardless?”

What if we asked:

• What would this look like if money weren’t the first constraint?

• What vision are you holding back because you assume it won’t be funded?

• What would be worth doing even if it’s hard to pay for at first?

• How might imagination itself attract the support you haven’t yet found?

As Funders, We Have a Role Too

We must take responsibility for the habits we’ve helped create:

• Rewarding incrementalism over transformation

• Making sustainability a precondition for support, instead of a goal

• Asking for clarity without making space for uncertainty

• Claiming to want boldness while quietly incentivizing safety

We don’t get to ask for vision if we only fund feasibility.
We don’t get to demand imagination if we punish risk.

But we do get to ask:

Are you letting the lack of funding become your reason for not dreaming?

A Closing Thought

The absence of money is a barrier.
But the absence of imagination is a crisis.

Vision is not the result of abundance.
It’s the reason we fight for it.

So the next time you start with, “We can’t because we don’t have…”
Try starting with:
“What if we tried anyway?”

And let’s see who’s ready to fund that.

# # #

July 31, 2025

The Virtues of the Drunken Walk: Why a Nonlinear Career Might Be the Most Honest One

by Emil J. Kang

I remember sitting in a darkened theater at TEDGlobal in Oxford back in 2009, listening to a speaker I was certain had introduced himself as a professor from Stanford’s d.school. He was talking about innovation, but what I remember most was a phrase he used to describe the creative process: “the drunken walk.” He meant it as a compliment—a metaphor for the circuitous, instinct-driven, unpredictable journey that ideas (and people) often take before they become fully legible to the world.

The moment he said it, something clicked. That was it. That was the story of my career. I underlined the phrase in my notebook and carried it with me, repeating it to colleagues, students, and even boards of directors when they asked how I ended up wherever I happened to be. I used it in speeches. I built it into lectures. I never forgot the phrase—but I did forget the man. Recently, I tried to find him. I Googled “drunken walk career Stanford TED” and got nothing. No speaker. No paper trail. No evidence that anyone officially coined it.

So, if you're out there, sir: thank you. Your phrase has become part of my story. And if no one else claims it, I’ll carry it forward—because if anyone has lived the drunken walk, it’s me.

My Career as the Quintessential Drunken Walk

By most conventional standards, my career defies logic.

I led a major American symphony orchestra at age 31.
I spent 15 years in higher education without a PhD or tenure.
I founded a performing arts program outside an urban center and built it to international prominence.
I directed one of the nation’s most influential arts and culture grantmaking portfolios without formal training in philanthropy.

Not one of these moves followed a master plan. They came from listening, responding, and leaning into the unknown—again and again. The drunken walk is not a detour. It’s a discipline of presence.

Certainty Is Overrated

The traditional career narrative is a linear fantasy: get the right degree, climb the ladder, earn the title, repeat, and cash in. But real life is rarely so symmetrical. People change. Institutions shift. Values evolve.

A nonlinear career—one that arcs and twists—is more than a survival strategy. It’s a refusal to reduce work to a résumé. It is an act of agency in a world that craves predictability.

The drunken walk teaches you to navigate uncertainty not with fear, but with fluency.

The Case for Cross-Pollination

We’re taught to pursue depth: to specialize, drill down, and master our lane. But sometimes it’s breadth—not depth—that makes innovation possible.

The most powerful ideas often emerge not from perfection, but from cross-pollination. When an orchestra executive thinks like an urban planner. When a grantmaker borrows from choreography. When a professor applies lessons from Bharatanatyam to board governance.

My career has unfolded through these collisions. Not because I chased disruption, but because I followed what sparked my curiosity, even when it didn’t "fit."

Each turn—whether into orchestras, universities, or philanthropy—gave me new tools and new perspectives. Not everything connected right away. But over time, the intersections became the edge.

A straight path might build expertise. But a crooked one? That builds imagination.

The World Isn’t Linear, So Why Should We Be?

Our culture fetishizes continuity. We’re told to specialize. To stay in our lane. To build tenure in one domain.

But the world we live in isn’t linear. It’s messy, adaptive, and relational. A drunken walk career mirrors that reality. It builds muscles for ambiguity, systems thinking, and pattern recognition.

In philanthropy, this helped me see that artists weren’t just grantees—they were economists, care workers, and civic agents. In education, it helped me bridge the divide between intellectual production and emotional impact. A nonlinear life fosters lateral wisdom—the ability to connect what others keep siloed.

Retrospective Logic

At the time, many of my choices raised eyebrows—or quiet questions. Why leave the orchestra world just as my profile was rising? Why consult after leading one of the largest arts portfolios in private philanthropy?

But none of these moves were accidents. They were recalibrations—toward people, toward values, toward the work that felt most alive at the time.

The drunken walk career doesn’t always make sense in the moment. It makes sense in retrospect. It rewards reflection over prediction.

Wisdom Through Wandering

Eventually, people stop hiring you for what you’ve done and start seeking you out for how you think. If you’ve walked many paths—with intention and humility—you bring more than experience. You bring perspective.

Those who’ve wandered tend to be more patient with complexity. More fluent in context. More attuned to contradiction. They know how to pivot, how to co-create, how to listen. They understand that leadership is less about control and more about capacity—the capacity to hold difference, tension, and uncertainty without collapsing.

That is wisdom. And it doesn’t come from staying on the rails.

Conclusion: Let the Walk Be Worth It

To be clear: the drunken walk is not about chaos or aimlessness. It’s about surrendering the fantasy of control in favor of authentic direction. It’s about trading prestige for purpose, certainty for curiosity.

If your career doesn’t look like a ladder, good. Maybe it’s conceptual art. Maybe it’s a poem. Maybe it’s a life.

Some people follow a plan. I followed questions. I followed people I trusted. I followed discomfort. And eventually, I followed myself.

# # #

July 28, 2025

What If Your Board Is the Problem?

Understanding How Board Dynamics Differ—and Why One Model Can’t Serve Us All

By Emil J. Kang

Reckoning with the Quiet Power That Shapes—and Sometimes Stalls—Institutional Change

A few weeks ago, I sat across from the executive director of a respected cultural institution. She looked exhausted—not from the daily grind alone, but from carrying something heavier: the unspoken weight of institutional inertia.

“We’ve tried everything,” she told me. “Strategic planning, community partnerships, new programs, new donors, consultants. We’ve reorganized staff roles. But still—nothing feels like it’s truly changing.”

Then came the hesitation. And the truth.

“I think the problem might be the board.”

She’s not the first leader who’s said this to me. And she won’t be the last.

In the nonprofit and cultural sectors, we speak openly about many structural challenges: underinvestment in leadership, unsustainable expectations of staff, public distrust, racial and economic inequity. But we rarely scrutinize one of the most powerful structures in the building:

The board.

The Most Unexamined Force in Institutional Life

Boards wield immense, often invisible influence. They hire and fire executive leadership. They approve or stall new strategies. They set priorities, define risk, and shape public positioning. And yet, board culture remains largely undiscussed—even sacrosanct.

In an industry that demands change from everyone else—artists, staff, audiences—boards often remain the least examined, least diverse, and most static structure of all.

It’s time to name the possibility that many are too cautious to say aloud:

What if your board is not just underperforming—but actively standing in the way of your mission?

Two Governance Realities

To tackle the problem, we must acknowledge that not all boards function the same way. Governance reform fails when it assumes a one-size-fits-all model, ignoring the deep contextual differences between types of institutions.

Legacy White Institutions

Museums, orchestras, foundations, and universities—often rooted in elite civic or philanthropic traditions—typically have boards that:

• Recruit from homogenous, affluent networks

• See themselves as stewards of reputation, tradition, and endowment

• Prioritize control over collaboration

• Expect innovation from staff, but preservation in the boardroom

• Struggle with equity work when it threatens legacy or comfort

In these settings, the board is often the most powerful and least accountable entity in the institution.

Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)

CBOs emerge from different soil. Often born of grassroots efforts, mutual aid, or cultural resistance, their boards may:

• Include those with deep ties to the community or movement

• Be volunteer-run and under-resourced

• Struggle with governance capacity or founder entrenchment

• Share strong personal relationships with staff and constituents

• Operate from relational trust more than formal policy

In these spaces, the challenge isn’t resisting change—it’s sustaining leadership and structure without being co-opted.

Each presents different governance dynamics—and each requires different strategies.

The Myth of the Universal Board

Many reform efforts still assume one dominant model of governance: the “high-performing” board composed of well-connected professionals who donate generously and offer expertise.

But what if you serve a community where the “wealthy gentry” don’t exist? What if your organization is rooted in cultural resilience, not capital accumulation? What if proximity to the work is more important than proximity to money?

This is not a shortcoming. It’s an opportunity.

We don’t need to replicate elite governance models. We need to reimagine power-sharing from the ground up.

Power Beyond Capital

Communities have always had forms of capital that are ignored in traditional boardrooms:

• Moral authority from elders, educators, faith leaders

• Cultural fluency from artists, language keepers, and tradition bearers

• Organizing skill from mutual aid, tenant unions, and movement leaders

• Operational wisdom from small business owners and service workers

• Social trust earned through proximity and accountability

A board built from these forms of leadership may not be wealthy in dollars—but it is rich in vision, legitimacy, and relevance.

What We Can Do (Depending on Who We Are)

For Legacy Institutions:

• Decenter wealth as the default qualification. Open seats to cultural workers, activists, artists, and organizers.

• Build governance structures accountable to community, not just donors.

• Compensate board members for their time, especially those historically excluded from wealth.

• Educate boards on institutional history, systemic inequity, and the difference between control and accountability.

• Embrace discomfort as a condition for transformation.

For Community-Based Organizations:

• Define governance around your mission, not around compliance alone.

• Create advisory or co-governance councils rooted in lived experience.

• Clarify roles while honoring relational culture.

• Invest in board support: facilitation, peer learning, and community-rooted leadership development.

• Reject the pressure to emulate the elite—design from your values instead.

Emerging Models to Consider

• Governance Councils: Bodies made up of staff, community members, and artists with real decision-making authority.

• Distributed Boards: Strategic, financial, and program advisory groups that share power horizontally.

• Community-Nominated Panels: Rotating collectives drawn from stakeholders and compensated for their insight.

• Staff-Board Hybrids: Models where those doing the work have a seat at the table—not as guests, but as peers.

• Mission-Led Models: Governance that centers proximity, purpose, and accountability to people—not just to funders or law firms.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Without real change, the outcomes are predictable:

• Leadership burnout, especially for BIPOC and first-generation leaders

• Talent loss due to values misalignment

• Community distrust

• Performative equity

• Strategic paralysis masked as stability

And beneath all of that: the erosion of public purpose in favor of private comfort.

A Closing Invitation

Governance is not a technical problem—it’s a moral one.
Boards are not neutral—they are expressions of what an institution values, who it trusts, and what it’s willing to change.

If your organization feels stuck, ask the deeper question:

Who really holds power here? And what would it look like to share it?

We can’t build equitable institutions using inequitable models of leadership.
We can’t fight exclusion while gatekeeping our own governance.
We can’t expect transformation if the board is unwilling to transform.

So ask it clearly, and ask it now:

What if your board is the problem? And what new future might be possible if you started the work of reimagining there?

# # #

July 23, 2025

Beyond the Product: Valuing the Artist’s Humanity

By Emil J. Kang

Much of the conversation in the arts world focuses on institutions: how nonprofits can be more equitable, more sustainable, more responsive. But we also need to widen the frame. Institutions don’t make culture—artists do. And if we’re serious about equity and sustainability, we must extend that same concern to the individuals at the heart of our field. That means not just analyzing systems, but honoring the lives of the people inside them.

In a culture obsessed with the new—new works, new premieres, new names—it’s all too easy to reduce artists to the value of their most recent output. Applause is abundant at opening nights. Critics rush to offer hot takes. Funders clamor for "innovation." But in our eagerness to consume what artists produce, we often overlook something essential: their humanity.

Artists are not vending machines of brilliance. They are people—complex, evolving, sometimes uncertain, often under pressure. The process of making art is not linear. It demands solitude, experimentation, failure, and recovery. And yet the systems we build around artists rarely account for this. Instead, they incentivize constant production and public performance, rewarding output over insight, deliverables over depth.

Too often, we fail to see artists in the full dimension of their lives—as caregivers, community organizers, neighbors, cultural stewards. Many artists hold multiple roles that sustain not just themselves, but the people around them. They raise children, care for elders, teach, show up for their communities. Their creativity is not just expressed in their work, but in how they contribute to the ecosystems they inhabit.

What if, instead of asking “What are you working on next?” we asked, “How are you holding up?” What if residencies were structured not just to extract a new piece, but to restore the artist? What if we viewed the artist’s being as just as vital as their doing?

This is not an argument against ambition or excellence. It’s a reminder that meaningful work often comes from well-being, from community, from the courage to pause. When we treat artists as whole people—with inner lives, histories, and needs—we make space for the kind of work that lasts. Work that isn’t driven by fear of irrelevance but by a deep engagement with the world.

Valuing an artist’s humanity means respecting their time and their rhythms. It means honoring their commitments beyond the stage or studio. It means not asking them to perform their identity for our comfort. It means seeing them not as a means to an institutional end, but as co-creators of culture, worthy of dignity whether or not they’re currently “producing.”

We cannot advocate for equity in the arts while commodifying the very people who animate it. We must build systems that don’t just present artists—but protect them. Not just spotlight their output—but sustain their lives.

Let’s shift the question from what’s next? to what’s needed?

That’s where true support—and true transformation—begins.

# # #

July 21, 2025

In Search of the Unicorn: Rethinking How We Recruit Board Members

By Emil J. Kang

Every nonprofit says they want a “diverse, engaged, and strategic” board. But what they usually mean is: someone wealthy, available, and agreeable.

Too often, board recruitment feels like a desperate game of compromise. We need someone with access, but not too opinionated. Someone with influence, but no ego. Someone with money, but no strings. In short: a unicorn. And when that unicorn never arrives, we settle. We tap our friends. We recycle names. We let our networks decide our future.

But here's the real danger: the people who most need to be on our boards are rarely in the rooms where board recruitment happens.

The process itself is broken. It’s informal, opaque, and often driven more by affinity than by alignment. Many boards still rely on “who do we know?” instead of “what do we need?” There’s rarely a matrix, rarely a skills gap analysis, rarely a serious conversation about governance as leadership — not oversight, not fundraising, but real generative thought partnership.

And when we ask current board members to name their successors, we double down on the problem. We reproduce the same class, race, and professional backgrounds, again and again. The board becomes an inner circle — self-selected, self-reinforcing, self-satisfied. Even when well-meaning, this approach assumes that proximity equals potential, and that social capital is the only kind that matters. It’s a system designed not to change.

We ask potential board members for their bios, but not their values. We invite them to galas before we invite them to listen. And when they don’t “fit,” we blame culture clash — when really, the culture hasn’t changed in decades.

Too many organizations recruit for comfort, not transformation.

And yet: the board holds enormous power. They shape who gets hired. What gets funded. What risks are taken. Who is heard. Who is protected. If we want our organizations to evolve, our boards have to evolve first.

So how do we widen the circle?

We start by changing the prompt. Instead of asking, “Who do we know?” we ask, “Who should we know?” We make board recruitment a public process — not a private handoff. We post openings. We partner with community leaders, not just consultants. We host listening sessions before we extend invitations. We name the values and lived experiences we seek, and we name the power we’re willing to share.

We also prepare the board to receive new members differently — not as guests, but as co-authors. We orient not just to bylaws and budgets, but to culture and history. We assign mentors. We design onramps. And we commit, in writing, to changing how decisions get made.

This means rethinking not just who we bring in, but how. It means moving beyond the idea that good board members are simply generous donors. It means looking for lived experience, community ties, operational insight, even creative intuition — not just business credentials. It means welcoming people who might ask hard questions, not just clap politely.

It also means we must stop recruiting for “representation” while refusing to change our norms. You cannot diversify a room without redistributing power inside it.

The strongest boards I’ve seen aren’t the ones with the most prestige — they’re the ones that understand their role as stewards, not saviors. Partners, not patrons.

So what if we stopped looking for unicorns?

What if we built boards like we build ensembles — with chemistry, rigor, friction, trust, and above all, purpose?

That wouldn’t just change who leads our organizations.

It would change what our organizations are capable of becoming.

# # #

July 18, 2025

Legacy Is Not a Succession Plan

Why the Hardest Part of Leadership Is Letting Go

By Emil J. Kang

We’ve all seen it: the beloved founder who stays too long. The board paralyzed by nostalgia. The institution caught in limbo—grateful for its past, but unable to imagine a future without it.

Succession planning is one of the most critical and neglected responsibilities in arts leadership. Especially when the leader being succeeded is also the founder, the architect, the visionary.

But let’s be clear: longevity is not a strategy. And legacy is not a plan.

In too many organizations, legacy is treated as something to preserve rather than something to redistribute. Successors are chosen to protect the institution’s image, not to evolve its identity. Boards prioritize continuity over relevance. And the departing leader is revered, while the incoming one is measured against an impossible standard: Be like them—but also fix what they left behind.

This is a trap—for the organization, the successor, and the field.

Founders often say they want to “leave it better than they found it.” But what they rarely say—what boards rarely ask—is: Better for whom? And who gets to decide what’s next?

Too often, boards treat succession like a ceremonial handoff. But succession is not ceremonial—it is structural. And that makes it the board’s responsibility.

When boards avoid the hard questions—when they refuse to interrogate whether the founder's values still serve the mission—they become complicit in stagnation. When they appoint a successor without redistributing authority, restructuring the organization, or preparing staff and stakeholders for change, they set that leader up to fail.

Worse, some boards see succession as a threat. They retain decision-making power but offload blame. They frame new leadership as "evolution," while quietly demanding replication. And they abandon their own accountability, using legacy as a shield.

Let’s be clear: boards must lead the succession conversation. Not as gatekeepers, but as stewards of future possibility.

That means:

• Defining leadership not by familiarity, but by vision.

• Structuring the transition to empower—not constrain—the next leader.

• Letting go of expectations that reinforce comfort over relevance.

• And honoring legacy not by preserving it, but by releasing its grip.

Because the greatest legacy a founder can leave is not their name on the building, but a structure that can evolve without them, a board that can confront its own fears, and a future that doesn’t look like the past—and doesn’t need to.

Legacy is not what you leave behind. Legacy is what you make possible when you step aside—and when the board lets you.

# # #

July 13, 2025

Evolving the Nonprofit

By Emil J. Kang

Leadership transitions in the arts are often framed as moments of renewal. A new person arrives, and with them, the suggestion of change. But too often, we focus on who is stepping in, without asking what they are stepping into—or whether the structure itself is still serving its purpose.

The nonprofit model—especially in the cultural sector—was built for a different era. It was constructed around philanthropy-as-patronage, governance by proximity, and the idea that stability equals success. For decades, these assumptions went unquestioned. But the world has changed. And our institutions, in many cases, have not.

Even the boldest leaders can only work within the constraints of the system they inherit. If that system is designed to protect the status quo, then no appointment—no matter how visionary—can fully deliver transformation. And yet, we continue to install leaders into legacy models as though the job is simply to maintain and polish, not to reimagine.

So instead of asking who leads next, maybe we should ask:
How do we evolve the nonprofit?

What if the next generation of cultural institutions weren’t organized around hierarchy, legacy, and inherited privilege—but around service, accountability, and civic impact?

What if we imagined structures that prioritized:

• Shared power over elite proximity

• Transparency over tradition

• Public relevance over private recognition

• Distributed leadership over singular authority

What if boards were designed to represent communities, not just endowments?
What if artistic programming responded to public need, not donor demand?
What if governance wasn’t the quietest room in the building, but the most generative?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are urgent ones.

Because every time we applaud a new appointment without examining the framework that person is stepping into, we risk reinforcing a system that no longer serves the moment.

I’m not interested in symbolic leadership. I’m interested in structural evolution.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about this—how we got here, what needs to change, and where bold institutional imagination might take us. One upcoming essay is called Culture Is Civic Infrastructure—a rethinking of the nonprofit’s role not as an elite outpost, but as a public good.

The future of our institutions depends on the questions we’re willing to ask now—not just about people, but about power. Not just about succession, but about design.

And if you’re asking the same questions—or building something new—I hope we’re in conversation.

# # #

July 10, 2025

Leadership vs. Stewardship: What the Arts Need Now

by Emil J. Kang

In the American cultural sector, we confuse management with vision. We reward stability over courage. We elevate stewards and call them leaders.

I write this not as a provocation for its own sake, but as a call to rethink how we define—and more importantly, recognize—leadership in the arts.

For too long, our major institutions have selected executives who preserve inherited structures rather than reimagine them. They maintain budgets, sustain relationships, and deliver season brochures on time. These are not insignificant tasks—but they are not, in themselves, leadership. They are stewardship.

Leadership, by contrast, is imaginative. It is willing to risk comfort for truth. It invites disruption when the systems in place no longer serve the people they claim to represent. It asks deeper questions: Whose stories are being told? Whose communities are being served? Whose future are we building?

The problem isn’t just individual. It’s systemic. We have built a field in which boards hire familiarity. Search firms propose only the known quantities. Donors reward the calm hand, not the bold voice. And so, we recycle the same names, celebrate the same résumés, and wonder why the public grows more distant from our institutions.

We live in a time of cultural reckoning—across race, economy, democracy, and history. And yet, much of our leadership continues to operate as if we are managing orchestras in 1995, museums in 1985, or foundations in 1975. We perform inclusion, but fund the same ideas. We announce equity, but protect legacy. We say we want change, but reward continuity.

I’ve spent the last 30 years working across philanthropy, higher education, performing arts institutions, and government. I’ve witnessed firsthand how impact is often sidelined in favor of optics. I’ve watched leaders who challenged the status quo be passed over for those who promised “stability.” And I’ve seen the slow erosion of public trust in cultural institutions that no longer speak to the urgency of people’s lives.

This is not cynicism. It’s clarity.

The next chapter of the arts will not be written by those who simply inherit buildings. It will be authored by those who are brave enough to tear down walls—metaphorical and literal—and build anew. The leaders we need now will not be afraid of ambiguity, discomfort, or dissent. They will embrace them as part of the creative process of institutional reinvention.

We must recognize and reward these leaders. We must fund them. Appoint them. Trust them. Because without them, the arts will continue to drift—safe, familiar, and increasingly irrelevant.

It’s time to stop mistaking stewardship for leadership.

The future demands more.

# # #

What deserves provocation?

The most urgent questions in arts leadership are certainly not only mine to name. If you’ve been wrestling with a tension in the field - a stubborn contradiction, a structural hypocrisy, a silent truth - I want to hear it. I may feature your prompt (anonymously or credited) in a future provocation.

Please share a sentence, a scenario, or even a few words that deserves interrogation. Thank you!