The Canada Council for the Arts is 50 years old this year. There are two things you can do to celebrate the success of this institution that has done much to cultivate the arts in Canada, making Canada a leader in cultural production:
1. Go to the Arts Challenge website and sign up to track fifty arts experiences that you will have this year, and encourage others to do the same.
2. Contribute to the Canada Council’s strategic plan. You can read the document online and comment on it, and all comments will be taken into consideration before the final strategic plan is presented to the Canada Council’s Board of Directors in October of this year.
I know I’ll be contributing to both of these efforts, and I think it is very clever that the Council has sought both an intellectual conribution (in the form of commentary on their draft strategic plan) as well as more general awareness-raising (in the form of a challenge to experience more art this year). If you sign up for the arts challenge, look me up under the username “MKultra”.