
That’s it. We’ve done it. Enough with the blog posts already! This field needs more. And we gotcha. What started with our intention to send out a national quarterly newsletter quickly became too big to fit easily under that heading. What with technology being what it is, what with there being a lot to be said, and our Membership Director having a keen design eye, it all rolled together and suddenly, it was a small magazine! We have a magazine! The TAG Quarterly was born.
Our first issue came out in late June 2015 for the summer, on the heels of the Americans for the Arts conference in Chicago, and focused on Arts and Incarceration. It is available here for you to download and enjoy, gratis. This quarter we will focus on National Arts in Education week with a “Back to School” theme, stocked with the most comprehensive listing to date in the US of professional development and training opportunities for artists who teach. It will be delivered to your inbox this week, part of our celebration of National Arts Education Week! Make sure you are on our mailing list so it gets to you. And forward to a friend, post it to Facebook, and generally feel free to share the bits you find compelling and useful. This is for you and we want you to use it, engage with it, and hopefully be entertained by it. We will focus on a general topic or feature per issue, and also have some running columns, such as the Business of Being a Teaching Artist, Field Developments, and the like. Have an idea for something? Shoot it our way!
Nick Jaffe, the editor in chief of Teaching Artists Journal (the only professional journal for this field, a dang good read– and by the way, available with a mean discount for TAG members) has long called for further publications from and for teaching artists. We are answering that call. And if you have something you’d like to add to the conversation, please do so! Teaching Artists Journal, and now we here at Teaching Artists Guild, are always looking for submissions. So are the other great teaching artist organizations out there! Engage! Communities that are visible become more powerful. Interact with each other, and help us build networks, deepen our conversations, and broaden our vision to encompass each other. We must and can find each other in this wide swath of the world. And we at TAG hope to make that part easier. This is a big small field. There is room to make it into what you want and need. There is room to dip your toe in the water, speak up, ask questions, and connect. Let’s shape this together.
We’ll still be here in this space with blog posts, brief articles and interviews so you can get to better know our work and keep up to date on Teaching Artists Guild, but you can look for a nice little digital gift every 3ish months, full of national updates, tools, and teaching artists in the trenches writing about what matters.
Enjoy!