We are happy to share the exciting development that our colleague Erik Takeshita will be joining us at ArtPlace as a Senior Fellow on loan from the Bush Foundation.
Erik’s first interactions with ArtPlace were through his role as board chair of Springboard for the Arts (an organization in which ArtPlace has twice invested), as well as when he was working at the Local initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and launched their national creative placemaking work.
Erik then joined the Bush Foundation as Community Creativity Portfolio Director in August of 2015 and quickly brought the foundation into the ArtPlace partnership. As part of some changes at the foundation, Erik will now be able to bring his twenty-some years of culturally rooted development experience to help ArtPlace’s work in an even more hands-on way over the next 18 months.
Before Erik was at LISC, he was a senior policy aide to the mayor of Minneapolis, where he advised the framework for a 10-year Plan for Arts and Culture, and led an art center in Honolulu, Hawai’i, helping to revitalize the city’s downtown. He serves on numerous boards and commissions, and is nationally recognized for managing high-impact initiatives that express a community’s unique culture through the arts. Erik holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School—an opportunity he pursued through a 2005 Bush Leadership Fellowship.
Please join us in welcoming Erik!
You can find all team bios and contact information here.