Executive Director Readout: Fourth Annual Research Summit

May 19-20, 2026, New York 

The pandemic exposed many flaws and vulnerabilities in the arts and culture sector, including gaps in networked, data-related knowledge infrastructure as well as shockingly limited knowledge about some of our sector’s core work and impacts.

CultureSource sees an urgent need for change, in part because post-pandemic, our organization is more often being asked by our members and partners what’s happening and what to do next—and we need better answers.

Our Annual Research Summit convenes 30 national and Michigan-based researchers, scholars, and strategists (“thinky” people) in the arts for dialogue about our field and the knowledge generation that advances it. The participant list is at the end of the document.

From our homebase in Detroit, CultureSource works to advance creative and cultural expression across Southeast Michigan, and we root our national service in our local practice of day-to-day working alongside leaders tackling their most complex challenges and navigating opportunity.

We continue hosting this national summit to 1) improve local arts service, 2) prepare and mobilize for future crises, especially in the wake of Covid, 3) surface and give air to ideas, and 4) keep usefully calibrated to the gnarliness of complexity in our work.

Each year, we leave the summit with themes and questions that pull our work into hyper-contemporary realities of the arts and with new guidance and reinforced partnerships for greater impact. This work of translating macro trends into useful on-the-ground strategy is difficult, but it is also a charge of our agency aiming to be sustainably available to the creative community in Southeast Michigan.

A note about “research”: In the context of the Research Summit, research broadly relates to data collection, sharing, and sensemaking, and is done by people who are called consultants, strategists, researchers, evaluators, practitioners, academics, and policymakers. Summit attendees (the “thinky people) characteristically spend a lot of time considering what’s happening, why it’s happening, what’s telling them something is happening, and what it means. They focus on knowledge, insights, and trends, and reporting on that information to aid leaders and artists’ decision making.

Summary and highlights of insights surfaced at the summit

1. Basic questions still exist about our field’s work in research: Are people reading what is produced, is newly generated field knowledge changing on-the-ground practices, is field research’s often defensive positioning dooming it from the start? Tackling these will require even more people to diverge from mainstream thinking and challenge assumptions underlying the practices and structures. 
2. Some of the biases of research practices in our field influence a large amount of field research efforts and exist largely because of field insecurity and survival goals. Examples: overmining data from narrow dimensions of the arts field, overly investing in economic- and political-related studies, and strongly preferring positive studies and positive outcomes about the arts.
3. Summit participants reported hearing disheartening cyclical (and cynical) conversations during the summit more than messy positive progress reports regarding persistent challenges in our field. It was unresolved whether this was to be expected or troubling.
4. Seemingly few data show that scholarly and advocacy focuses on the “creative economy” have generated sustained, significant, or substantive impacts in the arts—despite robust financial and promotional emphasis of the concept.
5. Unbundling, de-implementation, and letting go are concepts inherent to transactional and adaptive arts landscapes. In social impact arts spaces, those concepts are untenable—and that aversion is creating a preserved yet “hollowed out” sector that is fragile and downstream with diminishing novelty.
6. Philanthropic arts grantmaking remains fraught, especially below the surface of shiny grant announcements. Too many funding recipients do not know how to manage money (even with capitalization data in hand), and too many funding givers do not know how to build helpful and not oppressive accountability into their financial support (without seeming untrusting). Additionally, grants from governments and foundations are disproportionately inaccessibility to individual or unincorporated activity (given IRS rules). 
7. In the arts, ambiguity about the words “sector” and “field” as well as concerns about inclusivity, exclusivity, belonging, “tent” size, all inhibit arts people from leveraging collective people power. Grassroots organizing principles offer the arts useful guidance in establishing alignment tables and acceptable enough definitions. (The looping questions, what is our field? and do we have a sector?, are also time-consuming and draining.)
8. Ecology and economics (their principles, definitions, models, theories) can offer the arts useful tools for understanding markets and systems dynamics; however, outside of intensely transactional arts markets, there is loose and convenient usage of those fields’ terminologies and best practices. For instance, though a term like capitalism can elicit strong emotion, imprecision and misunderstanding about it limit the leverage of activation.
9. Where do the arts belong in society and in individuals’ daily lives? Responding to this requires articulating a fundamental role for arts and culture that could de-center professional activity or disrupt institutions. Creating forums for exploring whose cultural needs get met could generate new alignments and investments as well as new tensions over scarcity and cessation. Avoiding these conversations because of their tension keeps the arts, especial social impact arts, distanced from good health.
10. AI’s mainstream emergence is amplifying long-existing issues in the arts related to crediting authorship, giving consumers more choice, enhancing access to creativity tools, endangering formation of social bonds, and more. Rather than opting out in protest, our field needs more people to engage and be part of shaping these tools productively and ethically.

The summit spurred more questions than answers about the future of our field

1. What are the implications if tech advancements in the arts do what they did in agriculture: making low-nutrition, cheap food abundant and making human-cultivated, organic food expensive and artisanal? Is human-led research on a path to becoming “artisanal”?
2. What new practices are needed to move data into action more commonly? Or should there be more acceptance that people are most often wanting arts-related research to confirm rather than shape/guide their choices?
3. Where is there space in the arts sector to safely surface and wrestle with paradox and hard truths? Would new infrastructure help with this, and what kind of insulation would it need? 
4. In contemporary society, how might we think about the interplay of locally-focused, nationally-focused, and placeless digitally-focused arts activity? Is there a hierarchy of experience that universally matters?
5. Where should we be concerned about algorithmic perfection and AI removing friction in the arts? What is the point of friction and how little is too little?
6. Is precarity a natural, indelible feature of the arts and culture sector, especially if the value of art remains subjective and “in the eye of the beholder”? What are the tradeoffs of making arts sector work less precarious and how might we judge if the tradeoffs are acceptable?
7. The availability of attention seems to be diminishing, and increasingly it may need to be captured through more powerful and regular dopamine hits. What should we be exploring about the ramifications of this development now—on individuals, society, and the arts?
8. How might dissolution or market/mission failure be de-stigmatized in social impact arts? What practices inside of the arts and what resources outside of the arts need to change to enable this? 
9. What is important to know and articulate about the differences and permeable lines between marketplaces and civic exchanges / philanthropic ecosystems? What might understanding this unlock?
10. What forms of creativity art distinctively human? Is that even a useful question, does it matter?

These points are not CultureSource’s comprehensive strategy, but rather a reflection on how the themes and questions from the convening might influence our work practices

1. Double-down: commission more research, generate more knowledge about our local arts ecosystem, and pursue more access to privately-held data.
2. Establish research sharing plan at the beginning of a data collection / knowledge generation project, and temper expectations for insight adoption while still pushing for it.
3. Invest in cross-sector partnership strategies that more immediately illuminate the transformative power and value of the arts in the eyes of resource givers.
4. Engage artificial intelligence systems and experts to ensure positive (and arts-friendly) development of laws and cultures around the tech and avoid dramatic sector job, asset, and culture loss.
5. Related to the abundance made available through ever-strengthening digital algorithms and AI, prepare arts professionals for a rapidly shrunken landscape of transactions in traditional arts, and conversely, for a rapidly increasing landscape of emerging arts-related service, practices, presentation, and creation—in social impact and commercial contexts.
6. Toggle between monitoring the horizon of professionalization in the arts (rife with uncertainty) and maintaining day-to-day accessibility to current professionals with real-time business development and management questions.
7. Monitor time allocation and attention trends of Americans and share findings with arts professionals for short- and long-term activity pivots.
8. Surface more opportunities and capacity for creatives to connect artistically with people in their homes or facilitate artistic experiences outside of controlled facilities.
9. Advocate for governments to embrace culture as central to the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of the communities they serve.
10. Host more spaces for having honest, tradition-challenging, difficult conversations about the arts and culture sector—spaces where complexity can be brought to the surface and held in the air and for extended periods of probing.

Below are the 30 “thinky” people who participated in the 2026 summit