While in Denver, Colorado, Venue had the pleasure of making a childhood fantasy come true: an all-day backstage pass to the city's public library, complete with a private introduction to room after room full of maps, books, paintings, photographs, architectural drawings, and other collections documenting the people, places, and events that shaped the settlement and growth of the western United States.

The Denver Public Library building, designed by Michael Graves & Associates.

From a meandering tour of the new Postmodern library building, designed by architect Michael Graves in the 1990s, to a covetous browse through the city's old fire-insurance maps produced by the Sanborn Map Company, via a quick mention of the Denver Police Intelligence Files and a thorough bibliography of reference materials related to Denver's saloon cats, it was an exhilarating day of flipping through card catalogs, stepping behind closed doors, following off-limits stairways up to archives not usually open to the public, and learning more not only about the history of Denver and the West, but also about library science, more generally, and about our guide for the day, Senior Special Collection Librarian Wendel Cox, more specifically.

Venue's vote for best card catalog entry ever—a Franz Feneon-worthy novel in two lines, filed under "Horses. Biography."—was brought to our attention by Wendel Cox.

There's no real way, however, without writing our own Ulysses of the Denver Public Library—describing every unexpected turn of conversation, every artifact, every cross-connected historical reference (rabies to quarantine to the library's medical collections) and every other thing seen, read, or pored over in nose-to-paper levels of detail during the day—to encapsulate all that took place during Wendel's enthusiastic introduction to the collections; so, instead, we'll just focus on a few particular highlights, cartographic in emphasis and origin.

Senior Special Collection Librarian Wendel Cox shows us a hand-drawn map of New Mexico and Utah.

First, the fire maps.



The Sanborn Map Company produced, between 1866 to 2007, some of the most extraordinary and historically useful maps of the urban United States available in any collection today.



Almost all major municipal libraries in the country maintain voluminous back-stocks of them, their heavy pages over time thickened past the point of bendability by endless glued layer after layer of property updates, infrastructural upgrades, new construction, and the entire re-routing of streets and whole neighborhoods at a time.



Peeling, partially unstuck, and warped into curling waves like oceans, the pages play host to a century or more of built structures, renovations, and replacements, keeping close tabs on what can be insured, for how much, and under what circumstances.



These Sanborn maps are as near-total a catalog of the city's development over time as can be cartographically imagined, with almost every square inch built up into thick scabs of structures upon structures, upon even more structures.

Every pasted edge conceals a preserved strata of earlier revisions and additions, all but daring us to pick at it (we resisted), tempting us to pull ever so slightly at the looser corners, to lift up the surface layer and reveal the other city—there is the city and then there is the city, as novelist China Miéville might describe it, the two, surreally, existing in the same place at the same time—that lies beneath today's Denver, with its competing but complimentary property lines, a city out of synch with itself as you peel away the layers of history.



Each page, as Wendel showed us, turning carefully through the old volumes, is like a plank of wood at this point, archaeologies of layers laminated into something almost more like furniture.

These are books as Kafka might imagine them: enormous, absurd, and so preposterously heavy with the details of local history as to be physically unmanageable. They are books that could wound the librarians who handle them, slipping discs and offsetting spines, causing even historians to second-guess turning their pages.



But this (exaggerated) sense of physical threat is, of course, echoed in the book's content: as we navigated Denver's neighborhoods, we developed a sense for the city as a place of fire risks and dangerous proximities, a city of escape-assisting back alleys counter-balanced by wood-framed meeting halls, its spaces rated for their performance during events of conflagration.

And, in the process, we saw the city as a series of surfaces built up over time, fractally expanding across the Front Range.



The second thing—of many things—worth mentioning was a decidedly less antique item from the collection: a map and pamphlet, produced by the U.S. Geological Survey and compiled by Glenn R. Scott between 1972 and 2004, called Historic Trail Maps in Eastern Colorado and Northeastern New Mexico (you can download the accompanying 45mb PDF here).



As the map's introduction, written by former USGS Director Charles G. Groat—who recently resigned from the University of Texas in a controversy over financial ties to the fracking industry—explains, many of the "historic trails that were the primary pathways used by pioneers to open the Western United States" have been forgotten or erased entirely.

These trails, he continues, "have names that remain familiar today—Santa Fe, Overland, Cherokee, Trappers, Republican Fork, and Smoky Hill Trails. Some of those historic trails have long-since vanished or are now only faintly visible on today’s landscape."

Scott's map and pamphlet are thus an act of preservation, the USGS explains, saving for future generations the wide range of "historic marks left on the land by Native Americans, trappers, prospectors, early road builders, and settlers from about the 1820s to about 1900."

Put another way, Scott made a map of lost roads.

A long slice of the Glenn R. Scott's USGS map, showing lost roads, trails, and camps to the south and east of Denver, Colorado.

As Groat writes in his introduction to Scott's work, the routes and place-names gathered on the map tell the human history and usage of the Coloradan landscape:

Features of the maps include trails used by Native American tribes and trappers before the arrival of European settlers. As the westward movement continued, trading posts, immigrant and prospector trails, stagecoach lines and stage stations, wagon roads, and railroads marked that expansion, and those features are shown on the maps. From the cattle trails and trails over mountain passes to the towns and military camps and forts, the settlement and use of these lands are captured for posterity. Routes taken by prospectors during the great 1859 Gold Rush to the Pikes Peak gold fields are portrayed, as are the world-famous mining camps that followed, including Central City, Blackhawk, Idaho Springs, Georgetown, Fairplay, Aspen, Breckenridge, Leadville, and Cripple Creek. In addition, the routes traversed by early explorers such as Zebulon M. Pike, Stephen H. Long, and John C. Fremont are shown on the maps. The maps reflect the Hispanic and French heritage of much of the region, and the rich history of New Spain, Mexico, and France are imprinted in the names of numerous mountain ranges, prominent peaks, valleys, rivers, and towns.

Scott's own story, meanwhile, is fascinating—equal parts folklore and geological survey of the American West:

Beginning in 1964, Scott realized that in addition to relating the geologic record there was an entirely different story he also wanted to tell. He was fascinated by the historic trails he encountered during his geology fieldwork—trails used by Native Americans and by pioneers and prospectors who settled in Colorado and New Mexico. He resolved to document those trails before they forever vanished. Using aerial photographs, long forgotten historical archives, and other historical texts, he located historic trails all over eastern Colorado and northern New Mexico, and in 1972 he published the first of his 11 historic trail maps.

Indeed, in a nicely circular reference, Scott himself writes that "most of the information I used came from the Denver Public Library, where I was a volunteer in the Genealogy and Western History Department." At the risk of over-using the analogy, he was a kind of James Joyce of the eastern Rockies, going back through deeds of sale, acts of incorporation for now defunct road-building companies, and, no doubt, Sanborn maps, in search of old ways across the landscape.

In a much longer pamphlet listing the sources used for his map, Scott gives some examples of the sorts of narrative coordinates that are all that remains of certain trails:

Starting at Bergen's house and down the gulch southeastward by the Hendershott's house to Myer's Mill on Bear Creek thence by the most practicable route by Luther's place and Parmalee's sawmill to the Turkey Creek Road at the mouth of the gulch opposite Parmalee's water mill on Turkey Creek.

Or:

From Boulder City, Boulder County, up and along north side of North Boulder Creek as far as practicable and best route to Central City, Gilpin County.

To which he occasionally adds his own surreal story-form updates, as if the information presented is now that much clearer:

Route was changed as follows: from American Avenue on the west bound- ary of Empire City extending 3 miles up the south bank of Clear Creek, then crossing and extending 3/4 mile up the north bank, recrossing and then 700 feet up the south bank, recrossing and then continuing up the north bank on the route designated in the original article, then up to and thru Vasquez Pass, then on the original route to Bangs or Corral Creek, the western terminus in the original article, then outside the area.

Perhaps most evocative of all, there are also entries that simply read:

Route unknown.

These are the "old ways," as author Robert Macfarlane describes the similarly forgotten trails and routes that spider the landscape of the United Kingdom. In his book of that name, Macfarlane writes that, "once you begin to notice them, you see that the landscape is still webbed with paths and footways—shadowing the modern-day road network, or meeting it at a slant or perpendicular. Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, warns, snickets—say the names of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite—holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths."

The incantatory geography that Macfarlane refers to is in Britain, but, as Glenn R. Scott's map shows, the prairies, hills, and mountains of the American southwest have their own slowly eroding memory bank of old ways seamed into the ground by human feet, horses, and post wagons.



Briefly, Scott's labyrinthine explorations of trail folklore and historical cartography in Colorado also brings to mind a story published nearly five years ago in The New York Times, on an effort by Vermont's towns and cities to catalog their "ancient roads."

As the Times explained, a 2006 state law had given Vermont residents a strong incentive to rediscover their state's buried and forgotten throughways by allowing municipalities to claim them as official town lands (thus ensuring that they remain as public lands, unable to be claimed by private landowners). As a result, the Times reported, "citizen volunteers are poring over record books with a common, increasingly urgent purpose: finding evidence of every road ever legally created in their towns, including many that are now impassable and all but unobservable."

These "elusive roads"—many of them "now all but unrecognizable as byways"—are lost routes, connecting equally erased destinations. In almost all particular cases, they have barely even left a trace on the ground; their presence is almost entirely textual. They are not just lost roads, in other words, mere unstable geographies flashing in and out of county land registers. They are road that have been deterrestrialized: scrubbed from the surface of the earth.

As the Times acknowledges, "Even for history buffs, the challenge is steep: evidence of ancient roads may be scattered through antique record books, incomplete or hard to make sense of." Accordingly:

Some towns, content to abandon the overgrown roads that crisscross their valleys and hills, are forgoing the project. But many more have recruited teams to comb through old documents, make lists of whatever roads they find evidence of, plot them on maps and set out to locate them.

Like something out of the geography-obsessed poetry of Paul Metcalf—part map, part deep social history, part regional etymology for re-reading place names as the myths that they are—the descriptions found in these old municipal documents are narrative, impressionistic, and vague, perfectly in tune with what Glenn R. Scott found in Colorado.

Returning to The New York Times, for instance, these descriptions "might be, 'Starting at Abel Turner’s front door and going to so-and-so’s sawmill,' said Aaron Worthley, a member of the ancient roads committee in Huntington, southeast of Burlington. 'But the house might have burned down 100 years ago. And even if not, is the front door still where it was in 1815? These are the kinds of questions we’re dealing with.'"

As Wendel told us, these sorts of cryptic references to lost byways are not only of interest to local historians—attorneys form another interest group who consult the Denver Public Library's archives with some frequency. In Vermont, too, the Times reports that these acts of perambulatory interpretation came to be part of a much larger, although fairly mundane, attempt to end "fights between towns and landowners whose property abuts or even intersects ancient roads."

In the most infamous legal battle, the town of Chittenden blocked a couple from adding on to their house, saying the addition would encroach on an ancient road laid out in 1793. Town officials forced a showdown when they arrived on the property with chain saws one day in 2004, intending to cut down trees and bushes on the road until the police intervened.

The article here goes on to refer to one local, a lawyer, who explains that "he loved getting out and looking for hints of ancient roads: parallel stone walls or rows of old-growth trees about 50 feet apart. Old culverts are clues, too, as are cellar holes that suggest people lived there; if so, a road probably passed nearby." Think of it as landscape hermeneutics: peeling back the layers in the map to reveal a vanished landscape.


"Botanical Profile representing the Forest Trees along the route explored by Lieut. A. W. Whipple, Corps. of Top. Eng., near the Parallel of 35º North Latitude, 1853-1854." Prepared by J. M. Bigelow, M.D., Botanist to the Expedition. U.S. Pacific Rail Road Exploration & Survey, War Department.

Wendel led us on through the archive's sedimentary record of human movement across the Coloradan landscape, from a filing cabinet stuffed full of railroad timetables and accident records to an overflowing folder of newspaper clippings on Denver International Airport conspiracy theories. A mournful subsection focused on anticipatory documentation of future erasures: a gorgeous 1854 botanical profile of a proposed U.S. Pacific railway route and the business-like binders of the much more recent I-25 environmental impact assessment.



Our day in the Denver Public Library was itself a kind of lost trail, as we noted with amusement that various quirks of the building made it hard to remember which stairwell we had taken to get to a certain floor—and, thus, whether we could even access that floor or the collections Wendel Cox had in mind for us—and it became abundantly clear that even libraries have their own kind of curatorial folklore, a personal but by no means written down knowledge of where to find certain books, objects, files, or collections, what those artifacts, in turn, mean for other things encountered in the archive, and how certain narrative strands tie a library, and a landscape, together from within.

Many thanks to Myra Rich for suggesting that Venue should meet with Wendel Cox, and for making the introduction, as well as to Wendel himself, for sharing his time and knowledge so generously. This post contains a few paragraphs previously published on BLDGBLOG.

Dennis Scholl is a former accountant and sometime casino card-counter turned Emmy-award winning documentary producer, as well as a boutique winemaker who now distils artisanal mescal in Oaxaca. He is also currently Vice President of Arts for the Knight Foundation, where his initiatives include “Random Acts of Culture,” a program that surprises passers-by with pop-up opera and ballet performances in unexpected spaces.



As someone who went to his first museum at the age of 22 and became an art collector six months later, Scholl is passionate about the ways in which arts and culture enrich our lives and communities, but he is equally committed to inserting them into the fabric of cities—bringing the arts to people where they are, rather than requiring people to come to arts.

His focus on the value of shared, transformative cultural experiences fits with the Knight Foundation’s own research findings on the most important reasons why people become attached to a particular city, in which social opportunities, aesthetics, and a sense of openness and inclusivity frequently rank above jobs, demographics, or amenities.

Venue caught up with Scholl at the end of the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival to talk about the art world equivalent of farm shares and veg boxes, the hits, misses, and future of the “Random Acts of Culture” program, and the importance of field trips. The edited transcript of our conversation is below.

• • •



Nicola Twilley: You’re were invited here to the Aspen Ideas Festival to speak on a panel called “Making Cities Sing.” What does a singing city look—or, I suppose I should say, sound—like for you?

Dennis Scholl: I was joined on the panel by Rocco Landesman, the chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts, and Darren Walker, who is the head of culture for Ford Foundation. The moderator was Richard Florida, who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, and the question that he put to us is, “How do you make a city sing?” Not sing in the literal sense, but rather, “How do you make a city have a kind of vibration where it’s in harmony and people are feeling good about it?”

Of course, all the panelists come from a cultural background, so we spent a lot of time talking about what we’ve each done in culture to try to create that particular environment in a city—to try to create engagement amongst citizens in communities.

For my part, I talked about one of the programs I started at the Knight Foundation, called “Random Acts of Culture.” “Random Acts of Culture” takes opera singers and puts them in the farmers’ market. It takes ballet dancers and puts them in the airport. And sometimes we take a 650-member choir and put them in Macy’s in the Wanamaker Building with a 20,000-pipe organ and get them to perform the “Hallelujah” chorus.



It’s all spontaneous to the public. It’s obviously very thought-through in terms of our behind-the-scenes organization, but the idea is to have a surprise performance in a very surprising place. Our goal is to reconnect people to the classics—so in one sense, we’re quite traditional. The performers are all professional artists and we pay every artist for every performance. But we feel that the model of an 8pm start at the Symphony Hall on a Saturday, where you either come or you don’t, just doesn’t fit today’s lifestyle that well. People’s attention spans, their free time, and their constant digital engagement all make our lives so much more fragmented.

So we decided to try to take the symphony out of the symphony hall and put it into the streets—and the response has been incredible. We have well over ten million YouTube views for the “Random Acts of Culture” that we’ve filmed so far. There have been many, many copycats, which we love, and if you include the YouTube views for those, the total is well over fifty million online views of spontaneous cultural, classical performances in very interesting places. Now we’re turning it into a documentary, too—I was actually up very late last night looking at a rough cut of a film we’re making about the program.

Twilley: How did “Random Acts of Culture” originally come about?

Scholl: Somebody sent me a video from Valencia, Spain. I clicked on it, and it was in one of those big, open marketplaces. There was a guy selling a piece of ham to somebody. I was very close to clicking it off. But, suddenly, he bursts out into song, singing opera. So I keep watching. Then he steps out from behind the counter, and across the counter from him is a woman selling something—coffee beans, I think. She begins to sing, and she comes out from behind her counter. They’re doing this beautiful duet and a crowd begins to gather. Suddenly more people step out of the crowd and begin to sing. And it goes on and on and on, and at the end of it, the crowd goes wild, people are bawling—crying is a very common occurrence when it comes to “Random Acts of Culture,” in person or on the web. At the very end, holds up a sign, in Spanish, that says, “So you think you don’t like opera, huh?”



I was just so taken by it. I wondered what would happen if we did it over and over and over again with lots and lots of disciplines in very unique places. We did one in Miami, where Knight is based, and the audience response was immediate and electric. So we went to our Knight Foundation Board of Trustees and told them that we’d like to do one thousand “Random Acts of Culture.” Now, that was a mistake, because I could have told them that I wanted to do one hundred “Random Acts of Culture” and they would have been just as happy! But I’m a “go big or go home” kind of guy, and once we committed, we had to deliver. Yesterday, we completed Random Act #943. [As of February 1, 2013, 1244 “Random Acts of Culture” have been completed.]

Twilley: That’s exciting—you’re nearly there.

Scholl: We’re in the home stretch. I believe we’ll be done by the end of the year. It’s been a wonderful project. We’ve gotten thousands of emails, and most of them begin with, “I’m sobbing as I type this.” It’s just been a joy.

We’ve now done them in eight different cities across America—the cities where the Knight brothers used to own a newspaper—as well as a few other places, like yesterday’s performance here at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I think we’ve really created a sense of community, and we’ve put a lot of artists to work in a way that has been profound for them, too. There’s normally this big separation between the people in the seats and the people up on the stage, and auditoriums have big lights so the performers can’t even see the audience for the most part, so for them to stand this close to somebody and sing opera is a trip.



Geoff Manaugh: What types of performances have you done so far? Is it only opera?

Scholl: We’ve done opera, we’ve done flamenco, we’ve done ballet, we’ve done gospel, we’ve done jazz, we’ve done classical—we’ve done all sorts of things. For the two performances here at Aspen, there were two unusual Chinese instruments played by Wu Tong, a Classical Chinese performer who is here this week. He played the sheng, which is almost like a panpipe. They’d probably kill me for saying that! [laughter] Then he played the bawu. I can’t even describe what that’s like. You’ve just got to see it. It looked like he was playing an octopus, basically; it’s a very unusual instrument. I’d never seen anything like it before. The crowd went crazy—there were 2000 people in the music tent, and they just went nuts.



Manaugh: Is there any particular place—or even a particular art form—that you’d like to use for a future “Random Act of Culture” but you haven’t quite figured out yet how to make it work?

Scholl: The biggest problem we’ve had so far is doing something within the visual arts. We’ve gotten a couple of good ideas, but we haven’t quite been able to crack the code there. In comparison, the performing arts are so immediate. However, we do have one good idea we’re working on from an artist in Miami who came to me and asked about it, so we might crack that one.

As for locations, we’d very much like to do something classical at a sporting event, and we haven’t pulled it off yet. We were going to try to do one in Akron, but, logistically, it’s very difficult. I don’t want to do it out in the halls when everybody goes to get a hot dog. I want to have people stand up in the stands and just begin to perform. We haven’t quite been able to conquer the logistics—maybe we need to wait for the seventh-inning stretch or something like that. But we won’t quit until we get one of those done, for sure.

Twilley: What happens after you reach one thousand?

Scholl: We have some incredibly big surprises coming for the last handful of them, in terms of scale, which will be exciting. I think it actually has a life of its own. In the eight cities that we focused on, the performers have formed strong partnerships. Venue-wise, Macy’s was our opening partner. They’ve been wonderful to work with, and you really haven’t lived until you’ve stopped traffic in Macy’s six times in a day during a Saturday shoe sale. Many of those partnerships will go on.



Twilley: I’m curious about how well such a physical, immediate project lives online, too. Was that the plan originally?

Scholl: Very much so. I knew that we couldn’t make the kind of investment we were going to make if only between 50 and 100 people were going to see these performances each time. By filming many of them—we’ve filmed close to 100 now—and putting them up on the web, we’ve touched millions and millions of people.

We did a big one in Philadelphia that got a lot of international media attention, and what was amazing was that, after watching it, people started clicking onto all the other ones we had online. People would literally sit there and go through all 30 of them that were on at the time, or all 50, or all 70. Even ones that we didn’t think were going to get much traction have 175,000 views now.

Manaugh: Aside from “Random Acts of Culture,” how else do you make a city sing?

Scholl: One of the things that happened here in Aspen this week is the thirtieth rendition of something called Community Supported Art. It’s a really beautiful project that was started by a woman named Laura Zabel in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is one of the Knight cities where we have the art program. She has an organization there called Springboard for the Arts that finds ways to increase artists’ value in and to their community.

I’m sure that you’ve heard of community-supported agriculture—the idea that you buy a farm share, and you get a box of whatever’s fresh throughout the year. For Community-Supported Art, Laura’s gotten a series of artists to each make an edition of 50 objects. Some of them go all out and make 50 originals; some of them make a print of 50; some of them will make a record or an mp3. Meanwhile, she sells shares for $350. The CSA supporters show up at a pick-up point, and the artists are there, and the subscribers get nine works of art. The idea is that it’s not for the cognoscenti of the art world. It’s for everybody. And the artists get paid—it’s a modest amount, but the artists get paid.

The real payoff is the connection between the people who are brave enough to buy a share, not knowing what they’ll get, and the artists. This helps demystify the process of collecting art, which is really important to us, because it can be a very elitist activity. It also introduces the artist to 50 new potential patrons. Many of the artists who have participated in Community-Supported Art have received subsequent commissions from people who really like the tiny object they received and want something more.


CSA "harvest" in St. Paul, MN. Photograph by Scott Streble.

It’s really a way of connecting artists with their community in a way that’s different than their current relationship. We’re not trying to get $350 for a CSA from art collectors, because that’s not what they pay for art. We’re trying to get $350 from people who are curious and who want to take a chance. Because once you’re in, and you have nine works of art, then all of a sudden, you’re a collector, too.

In St. Paul, they sell out in five minutes now after announcing it, every time they do it. We asked if we could help ramp it up to more cities. We funded the creation of a playbook. Now, if you want to do a Community-Supported Art program in your city, you just sign up and get the playbook. From there, it doesn’t cost anything to run, and there’s even a little money in the fee structure to cover your admin time.

It’s now been run thirty times across America, and there are fifty more CSAs pending. We actually did one here at the Ideas Festival as a demonstration project. I reached out to six very good Aspen artists, and they agreed to do six objects for a Community-Supported Art edition here. We did a small, twenty-person share, which was a mistake, because we probably could have sold one hundred. People loved it. So now the artists are very excited, and I bet you they’re going to do it again by themselves.

There’s an organic, grassroots element to it where, once you show somebody how to do it, it can be self-perpetuating.


CSA shares awaiting pick up in St. Paul. Photograph courtesy Knight Arts.

Twilley: There’s an interesting overlap between the Community-Supported Art and “Random Acts of Culture” in terms of the idea of surprise. In both examples, you don’t know what you’re getting in advance.

Scholl: Yeah, that’s my thing. It’s something that I care about greatly. I think you have to leave room in your life for happy surprises, and that’s something the arts are really good at delivering.

Another thing, though, that we have a lot of concern about at the Knight Foundation is community arts journalism. We don’t fear for New York or LA or Chicago. There will always be lots of arts coverage in those cities, because they’re dense in populations who care about those things. The New York Times had more than 400 dance reviews last year. But around the country, in some of the cities that the Knight Foundation works in, in terms of the traditional media covering culture, it ranges from not very much to none at all.

Working with the National Endowment for the Arts, we created a contest called the Community Arts Journalism Contest. We asked people in the eight Knight communities of Akron, Charlotte, Detroit, Macon, Georgia, Miami, Philadelphia, San Jose, and St. Paul, Minnesota, to give us their best idea for community arts journalism. We asked for ideas that we could fund that would create more community arts journalism in people’s communities—and better community arts journalism.


CriticCar Detroit. Photograph courtesy Knight Arts.

We thought we’d get just a few entries from each community and we’d fund the best one. We got 233 responses—long, deep, detailed responses—which blew our minds. We’ve chosen three to fund. One is called Critic Car, in Detroit, which is a mobile van that has a booth in it where you can film interviews. It will be parked in front of a dance performance or in front of a gallery, and you’ll be able to go in and give your thoughts about the show.

We’ve funded a joint venture in Philadelphia with Drexel University and the Philadelphia Daily News to create a lot more arts journalism using college students. And we have a really complicated and significant initiative in Charlotte, where the Charlotte Observer has, in essence, donated two additional pages for cultural coverage. They’re working together with an alliance of public TV and radio and online partners and the local state university.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this is that Rocco was so impressed by the response that he has agreed to add it to list of things that the NEA will fund out of their regular grant program, starting in March. Then, we've committed that if people in Knight communities win, and there’s a match required, we’ll cover that.

Twilley: One of the things that’s really interesting about the Knight Foundation is that the cities in which you operate—cities in which the Knight brothers once owned newspapers—are quite varied in terms of geography, demographics, industries, and so on. Do your programs play out slightly differently in each of the different cities?

Scholl: It took me a while to figure out what they all had in common. What these communities all have in common is that they are all in states of significant transition. Detroit is going in one direction—which I believe is up. Some of the other communities are not fully developed in some cases, or have come off of their highs. They’re all in flux. There is a different level of cultural sophistication in each of them, and I found that very complex to work with, certainly.

We definitely tweak projects as we expand them, to make sure they respond to the particular community. For example, we started a project five years ago in Miami that we call the Knight Arts Challenge, in which we invite anybody in the community to give us their best art idea. If we like it, we’ll fund it. After three years, the project was so successful that we expanded it to Philadelphia. But that’s a project that we’ve continually managed and tweaked because the community’s gotten so engaged. One thing we found—and this shouldn’t have been a revelation, but it was—is that the best art ideas don’t necessarily come from 501(c)(3)s. For me, that was a Eureka moment, because so much funding goes to those kinds of organizations, but art comes from artists.

The latest twist to it is that, out of this year’s Miami finalists, we are picking five up-and-coming artists or organizations and offering them a separate prize based upon the community’s support. We’re going to give them an extra $20,000 just based on who votes for them. We think that this’ll be another way to really have the community be engaged in the selection process.


Microteatro Miami, a 2012 Knight Arts Challenge winner, is presenting a series of short plays in nine shipping containers. Photograph via the Miami New Times.

The Challenge—along with many other things, such as Art Basel—has had a really significant impact on Miami, in terms of how the community perceives itself as culturally. I’ve lived in Miami for almost fifty years, and it wasn’t exactly a cultural oasis when I was growing up there. But the recent achievements are dramatic: we have a Frank Gehry building for the New World Symphony, we have a brand new Herzog & de Meuron building coming out of the ground for the Miami Art Museum. We have a science museum underway with Grimshaw doing the design. We have a Herzog & de Meuron parking lot. We have a Zaha Hadid parking garage. We have an Arquitectonica parking garage.

We do things a little different down there when it comes to architecture, but we do them. It’s been a really incredible…you can’t call it a renaissance, because it never happened before. It’s been an incredible cultural awakening. And I think the Knight contest, with its open invitation to people to express themselves culturally, has been very meaningful.


Random Act of Culture in Miami; photograph courtesy of Knight Arts.

Manaugh: I’m curious about the idea of bringing the arts to people, and how that requires you to expand the toolkit of traditional cultural philanthropy. For example, could you have even more of a long-term impact on a community not by funding an arts performance but by paying, say, for free guitar lessons for every 15-year-old in town?

Scholl: Arts education is a difficult minefield to deal in, but we believe that one of the things that kids remember is field trips. That really sticks. We’ve done a couple of things in that direction. We have funded a ten million dollar grant to the Miami Art Museum to make sure that every single third-grader in Dade County—27,000 kids—will go to that museum every year in perpetuity.

The other thing we support is in very close cooperation with the superintendent of schools in Miami-Dade County, which is the fourth-largest school district in America, with 327,000 students. He has a plan called the Cultural Passport in which every grade, K through 12, gets aligned with a cultural institution in town. In kindergarten, you might go to the Miami Children’s Museum, and, in first grade, you might go to the Performing Arts Center, and, in second grade, you might go to the ballet, and, in third grade, you’re going to go to the Miami Art Museum. By fifth grade, you might go MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. Each of the institutions gets assigned a grade, and it’s a pretty great experience. We’ve given well over a million dollars to support that, and we were able to take the number of kids participating in that program from 55,000 to 110,000.

It’s not guitar lessons, but it is universal!

A selection of works from Dennis and Debra Scholl’s personal art collection is currently on display at the Nevada Museum of Art, Venue’s parent institution. Featuring 40 works by 18 artists, Hook, Line & Sinker is “an exhibition of drawings construed in the widest sense, as an anthology of practices deployed by artists to configure the world,” and is on display through April 28, 2013.