Panelists at the first daytime program of North by 35 Music Conferette settled on a catchphrase when talking up the future of the arts in North Texas: “cross-pollination.”

The five panelists agreed that for the arts to thrive and evolve in Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton, artists and art enthusiasts need to go to each other’s shows, promote each other’s work and spread the word.

“You can’t import culture,” said Robert Milnes, dean of the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design. “You have to grow it locally. It’s important to have things like Art Conspiracy, where all of these people can get together and it goes from there. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t.”

Art Conspiracy was established to be a one-time fundraiser for an arts nonprofit by panelist and Art Conspiracy President Sarah Jane Semrad. The group had its fifth annual art party in West Dallas in December; it brought in $25,000. Semrad said that success has had everything to do with cross-pollination.

“We had a lot of help from KERA’s Art & Seek [service],” Semrad said. “So much so that at T-minus two days out from the event I was like: ‘Please stop talking about it.’ We ended up with 2,200 [people] in this sketchy, cramped warehouse. Artists came wearing clothes and T-shirts they’d made the night before, and of course the coat-and-high-heels crowd was scandalized. But it went over really well and we were able to make a big contribution” to Resolana, an arts program for incarcerated women in Dallas County Jail and the Dawson State Jail in Dallas.

Panelist Kevin Roden, the host of Denton’s “Drink and Think” meetings and member of the Historic Landmark Commission of Denton, said that cross-pollination and collaboration could be what towns need as an antidote to what he called “hyper-specialization” in everything from education, the nation’s workforce and other institutions.

“You have science students who just want to do science, and they only want to study science,” said Roden, who also is the assistant director of student life for the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, a residential program at UNT.

“You have the same thing with literature students who want to study just one area of literature,” Roden said. “I think it’s important to think back about the history of mathematics and science. Mathematicians and scientists all had an integrated education. They were as equipped in Shakespeare as they were in Newton.”

Panelist Michael Seman, the festival’s panel coordinator, said cities should reach out to their cultural communities. Moderator Lyndsay Knecht Milne presented the idea of a “music czar” to Seman.

“If the city had a music czar, I’d tell them to listen — listen to everything that’s going on,” Seman said. “Know your stakeholders. If there was a music czar, or if it were me, I’d go to every house show, every club gig and listen to everything.”

Panelist Vicki Meek, the manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center, said artists and creative thinkers have to “be bold” to promote a growing cultural scene. That means crossing multiple barriers: barriers separating art disciplines, barriers separating the nonprofit and for-profit worlds, and racial barriers.

“My art life is in Houston,” Meek said. “In Houston, when I go places, I see everybody. I see black folks, I see Latinos, white folks and Asians. In South Dallas, I go places and I only see white folks. I go somewhere else and I only see Latinos. I go to another place and see only black folks. And I don’t see Asians at all; they’re invisible.”

Seman said the same divisions keep Denton’s cultural landscape segregated.

“On the south side of Denton, there’s a thriving hip-hop scene that’s outside of where we are [in the independent music scene]. As this event continues, I think we have to reach out to those musicians.”

Roden said racial barriers show up throughout the city.

“I think the African-American and Latino communities deserve to be reached out to,” he said. “For me, the question goes further. Why don’t I see more African-Americans hanging out on the Square and hanging out downtown. And that leads me to the question: What do we have downtown for them?”

Milnes said getting people across barriers doesn’t have to come in the form of programming.

“Some of this has to happen around purposes,” he said. “When you have groups of people working toward shared purposes, a lot can happen. Take what has been done in Philadelphia within the film community: People got all of this equipment together, and everyone who needed equipment went to this group. People got to sharing over that. So some of this is going to have to be driven by shared purposes.”

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com .