Art, music & culture
Creative education, public arts, cultural memory and artistic work.
How Food Can Preserve Family History
An explanatory essay on how a Smithsonian family-food activity uses objects and conversation to explore identity and migration, while showing why one family's food traditions cannot stand for an entire culture.
Can a Familiar Object Tell a Meaningful Story?
An explanatory essay showing how close observation of an ordinary object can open questions about work, memory, and family, while distinguishing what an object suggests from what it can prove.
Historic Buildings vs. Modern Development
An evidence-based argument that modern development should usually begin with adaptive reuse and preservation, while allowing demolition when a clearly demonstrated public need cannot be met through a less destructive alternative.
Public Arts Funding and Unmet Basic Needs
An argument that governments should protect urgent basic-needs support while judging arts funding by its costs, purposes, and effects rather than suspending it automatically during hardship.
Should Public Money Support the Arts?
An argument for limited, accountable public support for arts access, with attention to education programs, competing public needs, and the limits of workforce data.
Should Art and Music Be Required School Subjects?
An argumentative essay defending a place for arts education in a broad curriculum while distinguishing its educational value from unsupported claims about test-score effects.
Why Creative Work Matters Beyond a Future Career
An argumentative essay explaining why making and studying art matter even when they are not pursued as paid work, while recognizing that art is also a field of employment.
Art as a Career and Art as a Hobby
A compare-and-contrast essay examining how purpose, obligations, and measures of progress differ when art is pursued as paid work or as a hobby.
Imagination vs. Knowledge in Professions and Academic Fields
An argumentative essay examining when imagination and knowledge matter most in professional and academic work, using land-grant education and the Hubble Space Telescope to show how they can depend on and correct one another.
Funding Major Cities: Cultural Preservation and Public Support
A qualified argument that national governments should help cities meet essential public needs, while cultural preservation and creation are responsibilities shared by urban, rural, and other communities.
Why Students Should Encounter Art From Different Communities
A developed argument for studying creative traditions across communities through attentive, contextual interpretation that resists stereotypes.
Government Arts Funding: Access Versus Artistic Independence
An argument that public funding can help the arts flourish and reach wider audiences, provided that funding is structured to protect artists from political control and preserve diverse sources of support.