Page 37 - APAP - Inside Arts - Conference 2020

has spanned decades and earned him countless accolades. He’s
the executive director of Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts in Danville, Kentucky – where he gets some of his best ideas and suggestions just by keeping his door open.
“I treat everyone like a co- worker,” says Hoffman. “There’s really no hierarchy except when we have to make hard decisions. If you allow yourself that vulnerability to really hear what your co-worker
is suggesting regardless of their experience level, it’s going to help your organization grow, build morale and allow people to feel like they’re legitimately part of a team.”
Hoffman, Rognlien, Aronson and Squires all identified marketing and promotion as a crucial crucible for this kind of thinking. Although younger workers tend to be savvier with social media, they tend to overestimate its import among folks from older demographics. It takes steady-handed and open-doored mentors such as Hoffman and Aronson to remind them (us) (me) of the bigger picture.
In the past few months, Torralba too has been grappling with her own positioning as a mentor, a mentee,
a student and a teacher. She finds herself asking one future-forward question over and over again: “What kind of elder do I want to be?”
“I’ve learned to be empathetic,” she says. “I’ve learned that the edges are softer, and that the
more malleable they are, the more opportunities there are for there to be some kind of space of coming together. Learning to work across ages is a way of remembering that we are the age and time we are right now, but we are also all of the ages before us. We are also nine; we are also five; we are also three – and we are becoming 45, 63, 78, 83. I am
a mentee and becoming a mentor, and I am aspiring to become an ancestor.”
Maybe I’m naïve – but I find myself wondering what the world might become if we all aspired to ancestry. We might not be that great at expressing it, but we in the rising generation are tremendously grateful to those who take on
that heavy mantle of mentor. For
instance, Chee tells me mentors like Ariel Dumas (a staff writer
at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) played a crucial role in her development as an artist.
“I met [Dumas] back when I was a wee little intern at their show,” Chee says. “I think a lot of young women, especially those who are
of color and/or are queer, are more likely to second-guess ourselves and our abilities because, well, have you been outside? So when someone like Ariel believed in me and supported me, it truly made me think, ‘Whoa! Maybe I can actually pursue this career.’”
My eyesight has always been pretty awful, but as I’ve grown older, the lines between things have started to blur together: mentor/ mentee, novice/expert, coworker/ friend. As Torralba says: The edges are softer. Rognlien and I might get coffee next month. Aronson: You’re doing great, man.
Jake Stepansky is an artist, activist and administrator based in Austin, Texas. He is the Operations Manager of Forklift Danceworks and a graduate from Harvard. As a 20-something, he is obsessed with Venmo.
CONFERENCE 2020 INSIDE ARTS 35