The Joan Mitchell Foundation is one of our partners this year. In case you’re wondering, Joan Mitchell was a leading American abstract expressionist painter. The eponymous foundation is based in NYC and it celebrates her legacy in various ways, including educational programs like their Artist in Residence and Emerging Artist Grant programs.

As you may know, IF considers the future of art, creativity, and innovation as important areas of concern for our society today and in the future. We work to foster thoughtful public policy discussions on that subject and have several discussion guides devoted to it, including on The Future of the Arts & Society. We also work to foster creativity through our discussion process. We see our IF discussions as a way to engage people in the creative generation and exploration of ideas. 

In November 2017, two IF Fellows—Jeff Prudhomme and Ieva Notturno—trained twelve brilliant, creative young artists at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in how to use IF style discussions in their upcoming Youth Creativity Summit in 2018. We approached this intense 2-day training with our usual learning-by-doing philosophy, meaning that the 12 artists each facilitated discussions among their peers about different aspects of creativity. In our whole group and individual feedback sessions, we explored the core elements and techniques of interactive small group discussions. We look forward to learning how the discussion process proves helpful for a successful Summit.