The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

you have that apprehension, when you have
that, “Oh, what are they going to think?” kind
of feeling. Pause and remember why you are
trying to do what you are trying to do; feel the
strength of those others, absent and present.
I want to leave you with a particular way to do
this. It is related to a concept you may have
heard about called liminality. The concept
relates to one being poised on the doorstep
of something. I read this somewhere, and I
regret that I cannot tell you the actual source.
This is not my wisdom, but I am wise enough
to accept it. It is the notion of doorways, so
that any time you pass through a doorway,
pause for a moment and think about what is
my intention as I enter this room, as I leave this
place to go to the next place. Even when I
get in my automobile, when I am playing with
this idea of doorways, I think about as I am on
my way somewhere, “What is my intention?”
And I am open to changing that intention
as I get there, but it is this kind of mindfulness
that I spoke of earlier, this present-moment
awareness. In this moment, what am I intending,
and how might I accomplish that?
Paul Flores: I wanted to say a few things
based on the summaries that I heard, which
were all cool. Thank you so much for thinking
about what you were going to say. One
thing that I thought about coming into this
weekend was leadership, and I came up with
two categories—one of trailblazers and the
other of nurturers. Trailblazers are those folks
who go and do it and who are always at the
forefront of things and make paths for others
to follow. Nurturers are those folks who nurture
and help, and that is their leadership style. I
think there are many categories of leaders.
But I do want to say this: I am a firm believer in
mentorship—mentorship as the way of leading
and the way of introducing new leaders. I think
that there are a lot of folks in here who have
mentored or been mentored. I myself have
been mentored on several different occasions. I
am here because I have a mentor; Tony Garcia
has helped me do a lot of things in my career as
a leader as well as an artist. I want to say that I
think all of you and all of us need to figure out a
way to actively pursue somebody to mentor. To
me, if you are creating, administering, studying,
it’s up to you and your job to find someone
whom you can nurture as well and show them
your trail so that they can go farther than you.
That is something you cannot be scared of
doing—giving up your control on certain things
that you have done and showing someone
how to go farther than you. I believe that’s
the job of the mentor and the mentee; his or
her job is to take what has been learned from
you and blow it up and go even further, take it
beyond. I feel like a lot of leaders are afraid of
that, afraid of putting all their time and history
and effort into having somebody else take it
and run. But you only have one life to live here.
That is what you should be doing. So don’t
resist the folks who are at your door, knocking
on how they want to go farther than you.
Don’t block them. Actually nurture them, take
their energy, even if it looks a little cocky and
confident. Figure out a way to help them along.
Samuel Aguiar Iñiguez: I want to talk about an
expectation that I had here. I am going to use
the analogy of a marriage center, where you
go to get a bride or you go to get a husband
when you are looking for a relationship. I came
here looking for a certain kind of relationship,
meaning I came here, I knew what my strengths
were, and I knew what my weaknesses were,
and I knew some certain aspects about myself
that I wasn’t sure of, but I had a good idea.
And as I leave here, I think we are all leaders
here. I have seen everybody interact with each
other, I see everyone networking, and we are
looking for those qualities that we are missing
in each other. We are looking for qualities to fill
the gap, the void, to mend or fulfill the qualities
that we have. When we leave here today, I
think all of us have done a good job in finding
people at this symposium that we are going to
definitely stay in touch with because we need to
collaborate, to connect our artistic values and
ideals to make something happen as leaders. I
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