The Cultural Dynamics Summit convened hundreds of arts leaders at Drexel University to discuss the civic role arts can play in government.
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Alba Martinez, Philadelphia's director of commerce, sat on a stage at Drexel University on Tuesday looking out at an auditorium filled with hundreds of the region's arts leaders.
The former investment executive at The Vanguard Group and onetime salsa songwriter said artists are entrepreneurs that the city needs to nurture with free business training and access to resources.
"Information is power and time is money," she said. "I saw Vanguard as fundamentally a giant process machine. It's all in the process. One of the opportunity areas for Philadelphia is to improve the process of how we do business."
Martinez was invited to speak at the Cultural Dynamics Summit, a conference organized by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and PA Humanities, as part of their ongoing effort to position the arts sector as an essential civic function, which local government needs to embrace.
Alliance President and CEO Patricia Wilson Aden has been shifting the narrative around cultural support toward the notion that the city needs arts engagement.
"The role of arts, culture and the humanities have never been more urgent," she said. "The arts have always been a powerful tool for healing, bridging divides and helping communities thrive."
While this summit has been planned for several months, the head of the William Penn Foundation, Shawn McCaney, tied its urgency to the results of the recent presidential election and the perceived possibility that a Trump administration may be a threat to the country's humanities.
"It's hard to ignore the fact that so many of our fellow citizens have recently voted for a national vision fueled by rhetoric of hate, fear and darkness," he said. "People continue to ask, 'How could so many thinking people do the unthinkable?'"