San Diego Fine Art Society

San Diego Fine Art Society dba Art Pulse, is a service organization dedicated to creating the infrastructure missing in San Diego County... the services and programs that helps make a region great. They are concerned with creating a healthy arts ecosystem. Not all of this work is visible. Art Pulse has helped dozens of artists gain confidence, professional skills, and productive successful lives/careers through the Artist Mentor Program, founded in 2009. It has been working for over a year to create an arts and culture events database (an Artsopoiis site) that will have hundreds of arts organizations, venues, and events listings - all free and publicly accessible. This program launches in July 2013. The money, time and effort that has gone into this service has been bourn solely by Art Pulse for the region's benefit. Art Pulse has been working with NBC on a weekly arts and culture television show that launches July 6th with host and executive producer Barbarella Fokos, whom many people may know from the San Diego Reader column "Diary of a Diva." The show has been endorsed by Mayor Filner and the City of San Diego and will include coverage of the arts of Baja. Art Pulse believes in arts journalism and has partnered with The Espresso Newspaper to provide an arts section called Culture Buzz, led my Managing Editor Amy Granite, former arts writer for San Diego CityBeat. In Culture Buzz, cinema, visual arts, music, dance, urban arts, and even short fiction submissions are published monthly and distributed to 2,200 locations around the county. The writers area all paid fair market value for their contributions and the publication is free. Pulse Gallery, in Point Loma, is a professional fine art gallery in which Art Pulse showcases regional artists work. Artists receive an 8 week show and two full page, full color ads in Riviera Magazine, along with two opening receptions and a Q and A, panel discussion or other event that takes viewers deeper into the exhibition. Pulse Gallery is now in its third year. At the end of 2010 Art Pulse was asked by Americans for the Arts, the nation's largest nonprofit arts organization, to represent San Diego County in the largest research study of its kind ever conducted in the United States on the economic impact of the nonprofit arts industry on our economy. The study took over a year, thousands of dollars and hundreds of volunteer and staff hours. Results were released in June of 2012: San Diego County's nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $665 million in annual economic activity-supporting 20,374 full-time equivalent jobs and generating $70 million in local and state government revenues. Workshops were hosted throughout the county to help arts leaders use the data we found in their advocacy efforts to increase funding for the arts. All of this was free of charge. The report can be downloaded for free from the Art Pulse website. Art Pulse supports arts in education, and partnered with the San Diego County Art Educators Association to showcase the Senior and Advanced Placement Art Exhibition at Pulse Gallery and its executive director, April Game, serves on the SDCAEA board of directors. Art Pulse was part of the team that created Arts Empower, a initiative modeled on Arts Advantage in Orange County and Arts for All in Los Angeles, that will endeavor put art into ever k-12 school in the county. Art Pulse went to Washington DC in April for Arts Advocacy Day and spend a day with San Diego County's legislators urging their support of an expanded National Endowment for the Arts budget and encouraging them to participate in the STEAM Caucus. Art Pulse has worked tirelessly for six years building cultural infrastructure to support the health of the arts ecosystem in San Diego County and will continue to do so, with pride and with a considerable measure of success. For more information visit www.artpulse.org

Where is the programming? Promises made, but San Diego has seen nothing.