For the past decade, Createquity has taken a technocratic approach to covering arts policy in the United States and beyond. We’re not mindless cheerleaders for arts funding; we recognize that governing requires making tradeoffs in the face of limited resources, and have argued against certain types of government arts support in the past. Nevertheless, we believe that the National Endowment for the Arts and other targeted federal agencies do valuable work and are worth saving.

Here are some perspectives on the current budget situation that you may find of use:

Are all these cuts actually going to happen?

Probably not, but that doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real. It appears that Trump’s budget was heavily influenced by staffers from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has long targeted agencies including the NEA and CPB out of an ideological belief that the government shouldn’t be funding the arts and humanities at all. Nevertheless, the budget proposal is already running into opposition from Congressional Republicans, who are seeing it as unrealistic and poorly targeted. Furthermore, eliminating the NEA and NEH will require an actual act of Congress, not just a ratification of the president’s budget. All of that suggests it’s unlikely (though possible) that the agencies will disappear completely, at least in FY18.

That said, it seems virtually certain that we will see at least some cuts. Trump’s budget is so aggressive in so many areas that pushing back on all fronts simultaneously will be very difficult—indicative of a classic hardball negotiation technique.

How will regular people be affected if these agencies are actually eliminated?

It depends on where they live. The vast majority of foundations and individual donors concentrate their giving in the immediate geographic area around where they’re based, which means that the areas with the most wealth (largely big cities on the coasts) are also the ones that receive the most philanthropic funding. As a result, resources are few and far between for arts organizations and public radio and television stations alike in rural America.

In the NEA’s case, the agency has made a point to provide direct funding in every congressional district in the country. Perhaps even more important, though, is the NEA’s system of partnerships with state and regional arts councils, which come with a carrot of matching funds from the federal government in exchange for appropriations from state budgets to their respective state arts councils. In the years following the Great Recession when state budgets were under severe pressure, many of these state arts councils survived in no small part because of this matching fund arrangement. Meanwhile, an external assessment estimates that eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would mean 12 million people losing their access to over-the-air public television, mostly in isolated areas.

As for arts organizations, museums, and public broadcasters in other regions of the country, some will have a tough time to be sure, but the overall effect on the ecosystem would be subtle. The United States didn’t have the NEA, the NEH, CPB, or IMLS for the first 190 years or so of its existence. We believe these agencies create more value than we spend on them, but if they are eliminated, arts and culture will soldier on.

Speaking of creating value, I read that the NEA gets a return of $9 for every dollar invested. Is that true?

No, and we wish arts advocates and the agency itself would avoid using this misleading statistic. It falsely assumes that none of the matching funds leveraged by the NEA would otherwise be there for grantees if the federal funding went away. In reality, matching funds are fungible to a large degree, meaning that the non-federal money is often already committed and it’s really the government that is providing the match, not the other way around. (The big exception here is matching funds for low-budget state arts councils, as discussed above.) Framing it as a “return on investment” is even more misleading, as this implies an astronomical multiplier effect to the spending that simply has no basis in evidence.

Right. So why can’t the arts just fend for themselves on the free market?

They already do. The United States is an outlier among developed-world economies in that its arts funding system is highly decentralized and market-driven. Just 1.2% of arts organizations’ budgets comes from the federal government, so artists and arts organizations have no choice but to sink or swim in the private sector. And as noted above, for all conservatives’ trumpeting of the free market, private philanthropy isn’t very generous to the rural areas and red states that helped Trump get elected. In any case, getting rid of the NEA doesn’t get the government out of the business of funding the arts. In fact, the most significant federal arts funding sources are the Smithsonian ($840 million) and the Department of Defense ($437 million for military bands alone). Yep, that’s right: we spend three times as much on military bands as we do on the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Not to mention, it’s a little rich to complain about nonprofit arts organizations drinking from the government trough when we give away billions of dollars in free money to for-profit industries including oil & gas, corn, and airlines.

Wait, so if the NEA is so insignificant, why bother fighting for it? Wouldn’t it be easier to just take the money and create a parallel private endowment with the same mission?

Yeah, that does sound nice, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t work. Just to maintain current funding levels, which are well below the agency’s inflation-adjusted peak from 1992, one would have to raise an endowment of approximately $3 billion, which would rank up there with the nation’s largest private foundations. Interestingly, Kansas tried to do something like this several years ago—Governor Sam Brownback terminated the Kansas Arts Commission with the plan of setting up a new private entity, the Kansas Arts Foundation. The plan never got off the ground due to poor fundraising results, and the next year, the arts council was brought back to life under a new name.

The NEA’s budget is slight, but as a result it’s had to learn to accomplish a lot with a little (by federal government standards, anyway). The agency does important knowledge infrastructure work, most notably by organizing the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted every five years in collaboration with Census Bureau. The SPPA provides us with widely-used statistics about arts participation that would be extremely hard to replicate with the same accuracy in the private sector, because the imprimatur of government is so important for reliable surveys. As a government agency, the NEA also possesses an important power to help set agendas in an otherwise leaderless ecosystem. The contemporary creative placemaking movement was almost entirely incubated at the NEA under the leadership of former Chairman Rocco Landesman, which looms as one of the Endowment’s biggest policy wins in recent history.

What about the argument that the arts and media are better off operating outside the influence of government?

We largely agree with this—it’s one reason why the United States is better equipped to withstand creeping authoritarianism than democracies with more centrally controlled institutions. But as noted above, America’s arts funding system is already far too weak to make political work risky for artists in the way that it is risky in some other countries. Thus, while protecting freedom of expression could be a valid argument against increasing the agencies’ budgets by too great an amount, it is not an argument for decreasing them.

What about other agencies? Is the impact on the arts limited to the Endowments, IMLS, and CPB?

Unfortunately, no. The Trump budget is very wide-ranging in its targets, and includes relevant cuts to the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Interior Department’s National Heritage Areas, funding for after-school and summer enrichment programs within the Department of Education, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which helps fund low-income artist housing initiatives.

Is it wise to put energy into defending the NEA and these other agencies when there’s so much else going on (climate change, threats to immigrants, international relations, etc.)?

That’s a tough call, but we believe the answer is yes. The Trump administration represents a unique challenge for America today, and picking battles seems to play into its strategy. Legislators make the budget, legislators for the most part want to keep their jobs, and they respond to pressure from their constituents. So you know what to do. #SavetheNEA.

Cover photo credit: Felix Russell-Saw

From Flickr user Ian Brown: “The Twitter logo mod is from graffiti seen on a wall during [the 2013 Gezi Park] protests in Turkey.”

Let’s take a minute to stew on that. Commanders-in-chief of the United States have gotten involved in the arts before, but mostly to resolve disputes, not create them; to celebrate artists, not berate them. Moreover, unlike most of the controversies from the late 1980s and early 1990s at the height of the so-called culture wars, the contested speech did not involve desecration of treasured religious symbols or explicit sexual content. Only a statement of less than complete fealty to the administration-in-waiting.

It’s reasonable to wonder what the election of Donald Trump means for the arts. Trump’s was actually the only campaign during the primary season to answer Alyssa Rosenberg’s questionnaire about arts policy priorities back in March. His responses mostly articulate a free-market, libertarian-ish approach to arts policy and a willingness to delegate most of the decision-making to Congress, though he does state his opposition to net neutrality. (Oddly, he also makes a point to say that there is “no Constitutional obligation” for the president to host artists at the White House.) The day after the election, Americans for the Arts was out with a statement that emphasized bread and butter issues for the organization, including support for the National Endowment for the Arts and arts education. A few publications and organizations have attempted to grapple with the reality of Trump as president both before and after the election, trying to read tea leaves from random clues like the fact that he once trademarked the name Trump Art Collection but has yet to use it, or that Mike Pence’s wife is a painter.

But zeroing in on arts-specific policy is usually the wrong way to understand the most important issues in the arts, as my colleague Lauren Ruffin deftly pointed out in a recent post on the Fractured Atlas blog. Even for those who were predicting (or rooting for) a Trump win, the news of his accession to the Oval Office is a shock to the status quo of governance style and priorities for the Earth’s richest and most powerful nation. Trump potentially represents such a tectonic shift that events that would once have been considered drastic, like having the NEA disappear completely, could end up being small potatoes in the face of what’s to come.

At present, no one really knows what to expect from the Trump administration. Predictions are flying fast and furious, and run the gamut from our core institutions and policies will remain intact to Trump won’t even get through his first full term to Trump will usher in a new era of authoritarian dystopia from which we may never recover. Though wildly disparate, I would argue that these three basic paradigms – the aspirational statesman, the incompetent nepotist, and the dictator-in-chief – in combination form a good model of what to expect, as I think we have seen all of them in Trump and his team throughout the campaign and now during the transition period.

While the paradigms are not mutually exclusive, it matters a lot for our collective wellbeing which of them ends up becoming dominant, and which of them are reinforced by the rest of our governing infrastructure and society. This is true not only for the United States but the rest of the world as well. Arguably never before in human history has so much power been placed in the hands of someone with so little respect for convention and so unbeholden to anyone other than himself. President Trump is about to have at his disposal the world’s largest military and nuclear arsenal, the vast spying powers of the NSA, and a massive regulatory and law enforcement apparatus. In peacetime, the nation’s system of checks and balances — Congressional oversight committees, whistleblower protections, etc. — may be robust enough to prevent significant abuses of that power. The truly telling moments are likely to be those that take place just after a major terrorist attack on American soil, or after a naked provocation by the likes of North Korea, when US citizens will be under tremendous pressure to close ranks and show loyalty to the commander-in-chief. How we respond to moves on the administration’s part to consolidate power will be hugely consequential for the future of our democracy.

And that’s where the arts come in. If Donald Trump wants a playbook for bending the democratic institutions of the United States to his will, he unfortunately has plenty of recent examples from which to draw:

• In Russia, of course, Vladimir Putin has effectively instituted one-party rule by using the power of the regulatory state and control of the national media (not to mention, allegedly, targeted assassinations) to neutralize political opponents and grassroots opposition alike. It’s important to remember that though he now seems to rule Russia with an iron fist, Putin originally came to power via the will of the people; he was democratically elected President of Russia in 2000. Art and media are by no means exempt: Putin’s Russia shames cultural dissidents on national television, engages in modern propaganda techniques and “information warfare” to pursue its agenda abroad, and crushes local cultural planning efforts if they are too independent, just to name a few recent examples. The Denmark-based organization Freemuse deemed Russia the third-worst enemy of artistic expression in the world last year, as measured by confirmed instances of politically-motivated prosecutions, threats, and physical attacks against artists.
• In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is following in Putin’s footsteps in many ways, despite tensions between the two leaders. Erdoğan was first elected Prime Minister in 2003, and has gradually manipulated the political system to remain in power since then. Once considered a relatively moderate leader during his first years in office due to his pro-Western orientation (Turkey has been trying to gain membership in the European Union for over a decade), Erdoğan rapidly accelerated his embrace of repressive policies after the 2011 elections. A “culture war” that began that year when Erdoğan felt his daughter was disrespected during a theater performance when she was in the audience (sound familiar?) has since spurred increasing attempts to exercise political control over the state arts funding apparatus. Erdoğan used an unsuccessful coup attempt earlier this year as an excuse to crack down even more on free speech, shutting down and seizing the assets of 29 publishing houses accused of aiding the enemy, and jailing more than 120 journalists. (In researching this item, I discovered that a Turkish publication Createquity linked to when reporting on these controversies two years ago was among the victims of this purge.) The aforementioned Freemuse claims that Turkey and Russia belong, along with China, Iran, and Syria, to “a special league of countries that systematically repress freedom of expression,” with more than half of the recorded violations against artists worldwide originating in those nations.
• In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (who has already received an invitation to Washington from President-elect Donald Trump) pushed through a series of legislation and constitutional reforms tightening controls on the media with the help of an elected parliamentary supermajority following his election in 2010. The ensuing changes to the environment have prompted the watchdog organization Freedom House to downgrade Hungary’s press environment rating from “Free” to “Partly Free.” Meanwhile, a shadowy right-wing organization called the Hungarian Academy of Arts has asserted increasing control over arts institutions in the country following its transition from an independent private organization to an official government body.
• We are arguably seeing the earliest iterations of this story now in Israel, where controversial culture minister Miri Regev has made no secret of her desire to reshape Israel’s cultural establishment in her ultranationalist image. A former chief censor for the military, she has expressed contempt for the notion of an independent public media. And a group of Israeli artists and arts organizations is suing her ministry over threats to withdraw funding from organizations that refuse to perform in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and other so-called “loyalty tests.”

We see in each of these examples how the arts, artists, and media are often among the first to be singled out when an authoritarian government seeks to impose itself on the people. Indeed, when considering issues in the arts globally, freedom of expression is arguably at or near the top of the list, given that well over a billion people live under a regime in China that actively seeks to control its citizens’ access to information and ideas. With a Trump presidency on its way, that issue looms with new urgency over the United States as well. In the coming months, Createquity will be watching the administration and Congressional leadership closely for any attempts to consolidate power or exert control over the media, as these issues are now intricately connected with the health of the arts ecosystem in America.

Other arts issues and research questions that have arguably become more urgent, present, or resonant with this election outcome include:

• Under what conditions are arts for social change efforts and arts-based anti-oppression strategies effective at shifting societal attitudes towards greater tolerance and empathy for others?
• What are the ingredients of successful social movements, and do the arts have a role to play?
• Are there disparities in access to the arts and opportunities to make a living as an artist by geography, particularly in rural areas, and does this have an effect on political discourse?

If we are looking for ways the arts and artists can play a productive role in the healing of our nation, the above questions are most likely to get us there. The 2016 election laid bare not only a seething undercurrent of bigotry and xenophobia in our midst, but also just how politically and culturally segregated America has become. Are the arts part of the solution? Have they been part of the problem? We ought to find out.

Twisting a vibrant democracy such as the United States toward authoritarianism is hard work, and it’s not clear yet whether Trump will be up to the challenge. But make no mistake: we are in a vulnerable position. Support the media sources you trust, by subscribing or donating, as they will need your help more than ever. Support organizations such as the ACLU that will be looking to contain abuses through the judiciary system. Talk frequently to the Trump supporters who may be in your life and seek to understand them so they may be more inclined to understand you. Lobby your elected officials and start organizing now to prevent an expansion of the administration’s reach in Congress in 2018 and beyond, which also means getting involved at the state and local level (state legislatures will be redistricting Congressional districts for the next decade in the next two years). Watch out for any move on the part of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster – if that happens, it is a bad sign.

And finally, don’t forget to support artists. If we don’t, who will?

In the past fifteen years, the number of nonprofit theater companies in the United States has doubled while audiences and funding have shrunk. Neither the field nor the next generation of artists is served by this unexamined multiplication…There has been tremendous collective buy-in to what has become a fossilized model.

—Rebecca Novick, theater director and arts consultant

Then hear out Voice 2:

We communities of color are still trying to understand the mainstream nonprofit culture, with all its unwritten rules and regulations. We are trying to be better nonprofit players. We have to, because the game is not going to change any time soon, and those communities who don’t know the rules or who don’t practice enough are left behind… We have no choice.

—Vu Le, executive director of Rainier Valley Corps

Stop and reflect on Voice 3:

I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with our sector’s be-all-and-end-all focus on the needs of the nonprofit arts… The sector has grown bigger without getting richer.

—Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

See if you agree with Voice 4:

Funding organizations really do roll their eyes these days, when yet another nonprofit, pops up with its hands out. Reality: no one is gonna pay your tab.

—Misha Penton, opera singer, theater artist, and artistic director of Divergence Vocal Theater

Opinions about the nonprofit arts model—the fundamental legal and business structure in which arts nonprofits in the United States work—are as numerous and varied as 501(c)(3)s themselves. But one thing all of these quotes take for granted is the existence of the model itself. While that system may seem “fossilized” to some, the truth is that most arts nonprofits today are younger than most of our parents. The boom of arts nonprofits has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and it came about thanks in large part to a handful of individuals who intentionally put it into motion.

Graphic by Shawn Lent and Katherine Ingersoll for Createquity. See endnotes for additional detail on sourcing.

The story of the nonprofit model is part of the broader heritage of nonprofits, and follows a similar trajectory. A combination of intentional interventions and societal factors led to a massive expansion of the nonprofit sector in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, both in terms of size and portion of overall economic activity. Nonprofit expenses and assets actually outpaced the economy between 1994 and 2004 primarily thanks to the growth of hospitals, health organizations and private colleges. In 2012, there was 1 nonprofit for every 175 Americans.

Despite such a boom, life inside the current arts ecosystem is not all it could be. Createquity’s mission is to identify the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them, but a crucial barrier to executing on that premise is the sector’s limited capacity to create change. While the 501(c)(3) arts model offers infrastructure that, in theory, combines artistic aspiration with public accountability, the decentralization and limited scope of government policy make large-scale, systemic change in the sector difficult to accomplish. Yet Createquity’s long-range goal is to do exactly that, or at the very least to catalyze it.

One of the things that I pray for is that people with power will get good sense, and that people with good sense will get power…

—Dixie Carter as Julia Sugarbaker

To accurately predict how change can happen in the arts ecosystem, it would help to understand how change has already taken place in our arts 501(c)(3) genealogy. Specifically, we want to know whether individuals or organizations can truly and intentionally marshal change, or if a cloudy mix of circumstances is responsible for where we are today. Has transformation in the arts sector historically been calculated and choreographed, or organic and inadvertent?

It turns out that a narrow time period starting in the mid-1950s and ending in the late 1970s presents clear examples of deliberate and broad action, precipitating one of the most extensive changes in the arts ecosystem: the spread and embrace of the nonprofit model as a mechanism for cultivating and promoting the arts and culture within the United States.

But first, some time travel is in order.

THE ARTS ECOSYSTEM’S EARLY DAYS

The modern tax code, including the arts 501(c)(3) status we know today, was established in 1954, but its roots stretch back much farther. Several of our nation’s first theaters and museums were built before the American Revolution, but voluntary associations in this colonial period (as well as in the freshly independent years following the war) were limited by the strong role of the church and emboldened by the lack of federal authority over them. The landmark 1819 Supreme Court decision of Trustees of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward further constrained the government’s power to intervene in private charitable organizations and set protection for incorporated endowments, including the few for arts institutions.

From the Met to the Hull House, arts participation in 19th century America was shaped by class division. Urban wealthy elites, their formal governing sway slipping away in a democratic society, established private organizations to advance the greater good—and to preserve their class status. In the wake of civil war and the arrival of nearly 12 million immigrants, Americans formed mutual aid societies and unions, but also private schools, libraries, social clubs, and a scattering of non-commercial museums and symphony orchestras.

Donations from wealthy individuals were the most important source of support, and policymakers in the late 1800s introduced the country’s first statutory references and implementation of tax exemption for charitable organizations. In 1889, a certain Mr. Andrew Carnegie published “Wealth,” an essay pressing other tycoons to join him in donating considerable percentages of their fortunes for the good of society, including the arts and humanities. Years later, historians would credit Carnegie with conceptualizing what is now the modern philanthropic foundation.

“The Immigrants,” by Luis Sanguino in Battery Park – photo by flickr user k31thw

Even so, through the rip-roaring early part of the 20th century, the dominant vehicle for performing arts enterprises, from jazz clubs to theater ensembles, was the commercial sole proprietorship. As the socioeconomic gap became a socioeconomic crater, philanthropic support for arts nonprofits remained limited and highly localized. Coming out of the Great Depression and WWII, national foundations like Carnegie’s were primarily setting their sights on educational goals.

All the while, countless early arts pioneers, renegades, and boat rockers had the ambition to innovate on the local level, and many eventually saw the fruits of their efforts spread to varying degrees. But it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that the stage was set for sweeping transformation for the arts at the national level.

A MAN ON A MISSION

There are people who more than others constantly see themselves between past and future, …both in their own lives and in the history of mankind. And I’m one of those persons.

—W. McNeil Lowry

In the early 1950s, an executive named William McPeak participated in a study group for the Ford Foundation, which was exploring potential new structures and priorities as it prepared to become the largest foundation in the world. McPeak was pushing Ford to include the humanities in its vision for the future. One of his confidants during that struggle was W. McNeil “Mac” Lowry, a civilian journalist with the Washington bureau of Cox Newspapers who had been McPeak’s colleague at the Office of Wartime Information. Ford ultimately decided against funding the humanities when it expanded its scope from serving Detroit to focusing on social justice nationally and internationally, moving its office to New York City, but McPeak was hired as Ford’s Associate Director in 1953 and he brought Lowry on board as his assistant.

Two years into his tenure, Lowry was promoted to Program Director for Education and started suggesting ad hoc humanities grants under this education arm. They were small and few, and they were accepted. He also began writing policy papers and advocating internally for the creation of a large, full-fledged arts and humanities funding arm. This proposal was bold and unprecedented for any foundation at the time. With persistence and McPeak’s partnership, a mere four years after joining the foundation, Lowry was named director of its newly minted Division of Humanities and the Arts.

Lowry aimed to leverage Ford’s dollars and influence toward a grand vision of a robust arts field across the United States, but he started with a more tangible and comprehensible project: an inventory of the field conducted through interviews with artists and arts stakeholders, which would subsequently inform the decision on the part of Ford’s trustees whether to make the program permanent.

ripple effect – photo by flickr user Judy van der Velden

Lowry knew that his audience didn’t initially take his project very seriously. But as his assistant Marcia Thompson put it, it quickly became clear that the trustees “were not only entertained but were enormously interested in the field.” Lowry later said of his thinking,

It was not any secret to me what the little start of that program in 1957 might mean on a national basis… It’s just, you couldn’t divulge it because it was still dream and plan… This work is… a little bit like casting a stone in a puddle, but precisely which stone and precisely which puddle and for precisely which effect [is] the real creative part of it.

He and Thompson began by giving themselves the task of creating a directory with the names and contact information of every art critic and artist they could find around the country. Long before digital spreadsheets or the Internet, this was a hefty self-assignment. A former journalist with a history of telling it like it is, Lowry was willing to question loyalties and cliques. For example, he worked to extend professional arts opportunities outside major metropolitan areas even though several Ford trustees with connections to prominent New York institutions pushed back. He, along with associate director Edward F. D’Arms, traveled the country to speak with artists and stakeholders at over 175 arts companies. Lowry’s was a personal approach which gave him strong buy-in and trust from people who were actually engaged in arts work; he preferred direct correspondence with prospective grantees, including the likes of James Baldwin and Tom Stoppard. Lowry synthesized this mountain of data with more formal knowledge from economics and policy to begin to design the functions of Ford’s arts program.

Columbus, Ohio’s State Capitol from the Air (1957) – photo by flickr user Sent from the Past

Choosing to start with theater as his first arts discipline, Lowry used his new directory to send out a wide call for proposals, looking for groups (many of which were either sole proprietorships or amateur projects at the time) that seemed ready for the next step in professionalization. The focus was on smaller organizations outside the big cities because he did not want to see “money that could go to artists and artistic directors or to their outlets put in bricks and mortar.” With an investment of $9 million in 1961, the Ford Foundation had gathered steam for what would become the regional theater movement. After seven years of commercial operation, Zelda Fichandler transformed DC’s Arena Stage into one of the country’s first nonprofit theaters, primarily to receive a grant from the Ford Foundation.

One of Lowry’s primary aims was to increase the amount of professional performing arts activity in the country, but he wanted to be inclusive whenever possible. He had intended to fund a black theater when he launched the program in 1957 but was unable to locate a promising black artistic director able to get a new theater up and running. A couple years after Martin Luther King Jr. inspired the country with his dream of integration, a playwright named Douglas Turner Ward wrote an editorial in the New York Times about the need for a black theater, supporting disenfranchised artists, managers, writers, and designers. Lowry read the article and contacted Ward immediately. Shortly after, with a Ford grant of $434,000 ($3.3 million in 2016 dollars), Ward, producer/actor Robert Hooks and theater manager Gerald Krone would establish the Negro Ensemble Theatre Company in 1965.

Lowry got artists out of their comfort zones and towards professionalization, and was well aware of the consequences of him doing so. As he describes it,

[artistic producers] had to think about ‘where does this move us to the next phase?’…They took on costly activities that they had ignored before…. So they were stretched. And some of them were even shrewd enough to say in advance of a grant, ‘You’re going to stretch me, aren’t you?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m sorry, that’s an inevitable consequence of this.’”

Under his direction, arts grants now required matching dollars for the first time and arts grantees were pushed to improve their marketing practices. For example, he directly supported Danny Newman, the press agent at Chicago Lyric Opera, to evangelize the subscription model to performing arts organizations across the country.

Lowry’s legacy also stretched entire segments of the performing arts. During his tenure, Ford invested $19.5 million to help build 17 resident professional theaters between 1962 and 1976, and was the first American foundation to fund dance on a large scale ($22.5 million from 1957-1973). Ford’s largest arts investment over this time was the Symphony Orchestra Program ($80.2 million). Lowry retired from his position as Vice President at Ford in 1974, and passed away in 1993.

Mac Lowry could easily be labeled one of the nonprofit arts sector’s most significant figures of all time. No exaggeration. Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, described Lowry as “the single most influential patron of the performing arts that the American democratic system has produced.” By changing the financial incentives for artists, he directly helped to create an entire field of professional, nonprofit performing arts institutions. Thanks to Lowry, Ford became not only the first foundation to fund arts institutions on a large scale (making $249.8 million worth of arts grants 1957-1973, or nearly $2 billion in today’s dollars), but also the largest nongovernmental funder of the nonprofit performing arts.

In this position, the Ford Foundation was able to exert considerable influence on the sector. Bill Ivey notes that “the ‘Ford model’ remains the gold standard shaping intervention in America’s arts system.” Decades later, Ford is 5th on a list of the top 25 arts funders, which underscores how the number of foundations interested in the arts has grown over time, and the strength of Lowry’s legacy in philanthropy.

At the Ford Foundation, Lowry had been given wide latitude to try new things, with a significant amount of money. His success had always been boosted by internal support from McPeak, but in 1966 Ford welcomed one of its more liberal presidents, McGeorge Bundy, who came to Ford from the Johnson administration and his “Great Society” programs. Under Bundy’s leadership, Ford was an instigator of public-private philanthropy and Lowry was able to connect to the subsidy argument of federal support for the arts. Lowry later reflected that “a pervasive effect of the Ford program was the enlightenment that began to spread not only about the importance of nonprofit artistic enterprises, but more precisely their justification for subsidy.”

Lowry and his colleagues were able to ride a wave of public support and concern while acknowledging and working with, not against, broader political agendas. To Createquity, this insight seems critical to understanding why monumental change could take place when it did, and it raises the question of how such transformation could be possible in our current polarized political climate.

THREE ARTS PRESIDENTS AND A NANCY

With standoffs with Vladimir Putin and strikes at orchestras, theaters and beyond dominating modern newsfeeds, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary POTUS declaring the arts as a diplomatic weapon against Russia or sending the Secretary of Labor to personally mediate a dispute between a major arts institution and its workers. Yet in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that is exactly what happened.

As Lowry’s influence at Ford evolved, so did the operative role of the federal government in the arts. President Eisenhower, a Republican, advocated in his 1955 State of the Union address for the establishment of a Federal Advisory Commission on the Arts. This was cultural cold war: as one artistic director put it, “Eisenhower spoke of a lack of achievement in the cultural sphere: Who did we have to export in terms of ballet, opera and theatre companies? How could we compete with Russia, which had such a rich cultural spectrum of performing arts?”

Bolshoi Ballet Theatre in Moscow – photo by flickr user appaIoosa

Although Eisenhower was all talk and little action on the arts and no formal advisory body was created during his two terms, he did have one major accomplishment: the passing of the National Cultural Center Act of Congress in 1958, which would set the stage for the founding of a certain, prominent national performing arts center on the Potomac River thirteen years later.

Two years later, John F. Kennedy won the election with a party platform that included a brief mention of “a federal advisory agency to assist in the evaluation, development, and expansion of cultural resources.” Although he didn’t have a cultural agenda, the Kennedy Administration would be the one to finally elevate cultural policy to a national priority.

During his first year as President, Kennedy had the White House taking direct action in the arts. When the American Federation of Musicians Local 802 led a strike against The Metropolitan Opera during his first year in office, Kennedy sent Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to arbitrate the salary dispute that had halted the current production season. While serving as the mediator in his office, Goldberg suggested that government funds be used to help settle the Met’s $840,000 debt (that would be more than $6.6 million federal dollars today used to bail out a private arts institution); it’s a safe bet today’s Congress would not get behind that.

Possibly influenced by Jacqueline Kennedy’s love for the arts, President Kennedy expanded his public support, saying, “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose . . . and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.” In contrast to Eisenhower’s cold war logic, Kennedy’s policy vision would position arts and culture as sources of national hope and solidarity, continuing to push toward both a national center and a federal agency for arts and culture.

President Kennedy was active in the arts right up until his shocking murder in Dallas. In 1963 alone, he emphasized the importance of national recognition of the arts in a speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College; established the Advisory Council on the Arts (not appointed until after his death); and commissioned a report by August Heckscher, director of the Twentieth Century Fund and his special consultant for the arts, on the relationship between the arts and the Federal government.

Together, these resources laid the foundation for the ultimate achievement in linking federal government to arts and culture, the signing of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson chose Roger Lacey Stevens, a Broadway producer who had led the fundraising efforts for the National Cultural Center (later renamed The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), as the NEA’s first Chairman and Special Assistant on the Arts.

NEH Chairman William Adams tours the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library exhibits – photo by the LBJ Foundation on flickr

Following Stevens’s brief inaugural tenure as NEA Chairman, Nancy Hanks (not the mother of the 16th President of the United States, for whom she is descended and named), was selected to head the search for his successor. After several prominent figures had turned the position down, Hanks herself was appointed by President Nixon in 1969; according to Stevens, “they were looking for some women for jobs.” She was a Southern Republican and a Duke University graduate who began her career as a DC receptionist and later gained White House experience as assistant to Nelson A. Rockefeller and his arts programs. Afterward, while on staff at The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hanks published the influential report, The Performing Arts: Problems & Prospects (1965). By the end of the 1960s, she had both been named president of the Associated Council on the Arts (ACA) and diagnosed with cancer. She chose to remain unmarried and without children; she would later be deemed the mother of a million artists.

Amidst the burgeoning feminist movement, Hanks took the reins of a then-nascent NEA with grander aims for the agency. In her first six weeks at the helm of the NEA, she personally spoke to 200 Congressmen to advocate for her proposal to double the budget and to secure future appropriations for the nation’s bicentennial, which was more than six years ahead. Hanks was a sagacious power; her office became a lobbying machine.

She battled her cancer quietly while strongarming Congress, protecting NEA political territory, and preempting controversies for the agency. In 1970, when the NEA budget faced the ax, Hanks and her assistant individually cornered over 100 Congressmen and succeeded in swaying their votes. Julia Butler Hansen, a Democrat from Washington State and chairwoman of the House appropriations subcommittee during that term, said she needed to see letters from constituents to be convinced, so Hanks somehow got a form letter onto every theater seat in the country and, within a few weeks, had thousands of them into Hansen’s mailbox. When artists won prestigious prizes, Hanks would send out letters to the Representatives of their home states, reminding them that “good artists do not just happen.”

Hanks put a large emphasis on grants to institutions, which helped to make arts funding a bipartisan issue since many wealthy board members of symphonies and museums were Republicans like her. The concept of public subsidy for the arts was sold as a cure for the “cost disease” endemic to nonprofit arts organizations. Revenue and private donations alone could not support the sector, she believed; the income gap must be filled.

With an art-for-all-Americans ethos, Hanks supported a plentitude of smaller nonprofit arts organizations in newly funded areas such as crafts. Additionally, Hanks played an instrumental role in establishing the Arts Council of Americas to unite the more than 50 community arts councils already in existence and in expanding the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies in order to have a well-funded state council in every state and territory in the U.S. Much of the NEA’s funding was designated to run through these state councils.

Later in her tenure Hanks authorized the NEA Challenge Grants, which demanded matching contributions to leverage investment from the private sector. This was a strategy similar to those of the Ford Foundation in the 1960s and the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty.

Before Hanks, the NEA was more of a figurehead organization with a modest budget; by 1976, it was the largest institutional funder of the arts in the country. In brief, she was the savviest operator in the NEA’s history. She served two terms as the NEA chair until her resignation in 1977, and she died of her cancer six years later at age 55. A mere three weeks after her passing, President Reagan (whose economic policies were threatening the existence of the NEA and NEH at the time) signed a law renaming NEA and NEH’s erstwhile home, the Old Post Office, in Washington, D.C. the Nancy Hanks Center.

Go to Theatre Week, 1922 – photo by Washington State Library

HOW LOWRY AND HANKS CHANGED THE ARTS NONPROFIT SECTOR FOREVER

Neither Lowry nor Hanks saw themselves as artists (Hanks said her only art form was “needlepoint typewriter covers”; others said that it clearly persuasion), yet both were passionate in building towards a new arts vision for America, supporting and connecting artists nationwide. They were willing to defy the expectations and design of their jobs in order to create financial and structural support for artists. Both traveled the country for the cause; Lowry to discover promising artistic directors, and Hanks to advocate on their behalf.

Their combined legacy was to establish the current shape of the nonprofit arts sector and its mechanisms of funding. Importantly, both the Ford Foundation and the federal government brought vast new resources to the arts funding table, and directed those resources almost exclusively to nonprofit arts organizations. In doing so, not only did Lowry and Hanks catalyze the arts 501(c)(3) boom, they created the common practice of matching grants, the growth and coordination of local arts agencies, the use of grant panels, the rise of grantwriter-as-paid-employee in arts institution, and more. The influence of each can be seen in the geographic spread of infrastructure to support the arts across the country — regional theaters, dance companies, and symphony orchestras in Lowry’s case, and arts councils in Hanks’s.

They engineered the initial professionalization of the field. Publications and conferences, like those of the Theatre Communications Group which Lowry first convened, declared and disseminated best practices. The effect of these deliberate acts was characteristic of the organizational ecology concept of “legitimation”: as a particular type of organization becomes more accepted, it is established more and more frequently. By the mid-1970s, the nonprofit was set as the expected and dominant legal structure for new arts organizations.

We approached this research wanting to learn how change happens; we didn’t intend to dwell on whether the change has been good or bad. That said, there are several aspects of the arts ecosystem in America today that seem to have been shaped by from the transformation fostered by Lowry, Hanks, Kennedy, and others in the middle of the 20th century.

There is more, more, more

The timing of the boom differed by discipline, but all disciplines saw sustained growth when they began to embrace the nonprofit structure. Overall, despite government funding cuts, Reaganomics and the culture wars, the leveling of private funding, and periodic recessions since the 1980-90s, the number of arts nonprofit organizations has shown continued, though slowing, growth.

What does that growth tell us about the number of people being served by these organizations, or about the amount of art available in general? We know that as the nonprofit arts sector grows it employs more individuals; however, it is unclear whether more artists are getting paid to make art, or if there are more opportunities for artists to work as administrators, or whether more money is going to hire arts managers and educators.

Did the increase in the number of arts organizations contribute to higher levels of arts attendance? Several reports show increased activity in certain disciplines during the 1960-1980s, but it is unclear whether the number of arts products/activities actually increased, or if it was just that more arts experiences were made professional or formal in ways that allowed them to be counted.

What we do know is that as the growth of the sector appears to have yielded more opportunities and inclination for people to experience the arts. For example, there have been rising rates of spending on arts experiences in relation to total leisure spending, which can be attributed to the fact that increased institutional grant support opened up new markets.

Opportunities for (nonprofit) arts participation are available across the country

Before Lowry and Hanks, almost all professional performing arts companies were in New York City and other metropolitan hubs on the East Coast, but the geographic spread of institutional funding starting in the 1960s has supplied arts, especially performing arts, outside of major metropolises into towns where the arts are not as commercially viable. During Hanks’s tenure, NEA grants found their way into all 50 states and six U.S. territories. Analysis by the NEA performed in both 1982 and 1992 on the division between nonprofit and commercial performing arts companies showed that nonprofit organizations represented higher percentages of the sector in areas that were not centers for commercial performance.

American art is now much more than Eurocentric symphonies, museums and theaters

The notion that we should remove barriers to access of the arts is now widely accepted and seems to be a legacy of Hanks’s ethos. During the 1970s-1990s, the boomers worked to democratize the arts: careers, patronage and participation. The sector’s expansion started in the professional performing arts but then grew to support a broader range of genres and disciplines, and it’s likely that this has made a stronger mix of cultural products available to society today. Although Lowry’s early efforts were focused on professional theater, music, and dance, once the funding infrastructure was in place and the category of nonprofit arts was established, the momentum provided by the new structures and incentives fostered demands to support other artistic disciplines, and, later, the inclusion of a broader range of artistic endeavors.

“Heard” by Nick Cave, Grand Central Terminal, March 2013 – photo by flickr user j-No

The U.S. arts ecosystem is still striving for equity

Although more resources are available to support cultural activity since before the nonprofit arts sector boom, the nonprofit system seems to have benefited European cultural traditions more than others, and white artists more than artists of color. It has legitimately been observed that arts genres that have been accepted as high culture for longer periods have adopted the nonprofit form in greater numbers, whereas cultural forms that have more recently come to be seen as important have been more likely to be commercial. In 1979, only 4% of NEA grant funds were going to black arts organizations, almost exclusively through its Expansion Arts initiative. In 1994, Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, was appalled to realize that “for 135 years after the founding of the federal art collections in 1829, no work by a black American was represented in the nation’s holdings.”

It seems that movement toward true equity in the nonprofit arts sector has been weak, slow, incomplete, or put in the hands of large institutions as part a community engagement trickle-down scenario. Issues of equity in funding, leadership and audiences by race, gender, disability, etc. have manifested differently in different disciplines, but important questions linger on whether the growth of the nonprofit sector has brought with it a growth of inequality.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

The story of Lowry and Hanks is the story of the establishment. They were two individuals who, welcomed into institutions of wealth, power, and (white privilege), adroitly navigated those spaces in a mission to do good across the arts sector. Yet as more and more arts nonprofits sprung up over generations, the metrics they established spread like a gospel of the arts, not recognizing the full array of cultural expression people were already employing. It seems safe to assume that white cultural traditions were more robustly promoted and supported by Lowry, Hanks and their allies, which is why it is important to note other schismatics who were integral to further developing and supporting the arts, to problematizing the relationship between nonprofit and commercial artmaking, to diversifying access and opportunity in the field, to utilizing technology, and to increasing popularity and new audiences for the arts. Influencers and moments of change like these will be explored in upcoming Createquity features.

Many of the sector’s successes, as well as its intractable issues, stem from the dominance of the nonprofit arts model which was driven by those formative actions in the 1950s-1960s. Lowry and his peers deliberately sought to create a healthier arts ecosystem by strengthening and professionalizing arts institutions. Yet the question is worth asking whether most institutions, thus professionalized, tend to prioritize their own preservation. Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem asserts that “To the extent that any element within the infrastructure is unwilling or unable to put the goal of improving people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways first, it’s acting as a drag on the system’s capacity to change for the better. We see this problem manifesting in a number of ways, including the reluctance of cultural institutions to prioritize the interests of the ecosystem as a whole ahead of their own prosperity…” Will future changemakers be the ones who, like Lowry, are able to prioritize the entire arts ecosystem over their own institutions?

This is just the first of many articles on the capacity to create change in the arts ecosystem. We invite you to get involved in this journey by joining us for a #CreatequityAsks Twitter chat on how change happens on March 17th from 7:30-8:30pm Eastern.

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The Detroit Institute of Arts’s Woodward entrance. (Image courtesy the Detroit Institute of Arts)

After a two-year battle, a federal ruling to approve Detroit’s bankruptcy plan brought to an end the threat to auction off the Detroit Institute of Arts’s collection. The plan includes the “grand bargain,” an $800 million deal that partly consists of a $366 million investment from the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Knight Foundation, and other heavy-hitters. In the bargain, DIA supporters are providing funding to save Detroit’s public pensions, with the caveat that DIA be administered by an independent charitable trust, and not by the City of Detroit, which has owned the museum since 1919. While all hail these developments as positive, DIA still has a tough road to financial stability ahead. As it looks to shore up its finances and secure its future by raising its endowment to $400 million, DIA faces hefty legal bills incurred during the bankruptcy battle, and the daunting task of fundraising from donors whose pockets may have been emptied into the grand bargain. Regardless of what the future holds, the foundations will be keeping a close eye on their investment–the Knight Foundation’s Dennis Scholl has been appointed as an observer of DIA’s board.

Publisher Hachette Wins the Right to Set E-Book Prices from Amazon: In a multi-year agreement, “Big Five” publisher Hachette won the right to set prices for e-books from Amazon, which had attempted to pressure the company to price all e-books at $9.99. The retail giant suffered in the court of public opinion for its strongarm negotiation tactics, including long shipping delays of Hachette books, disallowing advance sales, and steering customers to similar books by other publishers. Some authors are calling for Amazon to be investigated on anti-trust grounds; at the same time, Amazon has questioned the need for traditional publishing houses in the digital era. While all sides seem to be breathing a sigh of relief over the deal, it seems clear that the fight isn’t over–publishers have long had a difficult relationship with digital retailers, and observers are think the next negotiation may be just as acrimonious.

Mid-Term Elections Offer Mixed Results for the Arts: In case you were living under a rock last month, we had some elections and the Democrats lost their shirts. So what does that mean for the arts? With the Republican-majority Congress, Americans for the Arts forecasts the passage of a comprehensive tax reform bill, which will likely impact charitable giving rules. The chairship of the subcommittee that oversees funding for the Arts in Education will change, while Representative Ken Calvert (R-CA) will continue to govern the subcommittee that controls the National Endowment for the Arts budget. Barry Hessenius predicts a possible attack on the NEA’s budget, given its symbolic weight for some in Congress, and recommends that arts leaders work to build stronger relationships with our elected officials. Meanwhile, at the state level, arts-friendly candidates suffered losses in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland. In better news, Rhode Island passed a ballot referendum providing $35 million in bonds to renovate arts facilities in the state, and pro-arts measures passed in Palm Beach County, Salt Lake City, Scottsdale (AZ), and Middlesex County (NJ).

Three Foundations Purchase Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center: The embattled August Wilson Center for African American Culture now rests in the hands of three foundations, which purchased it for $7.9 million from Dollar Bank, its mortgage holder. The Pittsburgh Foundation, Heinz Endowments, and Richard King Mellon Foundation had attempted to close on an $8.49 million deal by October 31, but the sale was torpedoed when a creditor appealed an earlier $200,000 judgment in the Pennsylvania Superior Court, and the foundations refused to proceed until the debt was settled. Dollar Bank was forced to move ahead with a foreclosure auction on November 3, which cleared the Center of its debt and allowed the foundations to complete their purchase.The Center plans to re-open in 2015 under new nonprofit leadership and will continue its mission as a focal point for African American arts and culture.

Obama Says the Internet Should Be Treated as a Public Utility: Net neutrality supporters got an unexpected boost from President Obama this November. The White House released a plan recommending that the Federal Communications Commission reclassify Internet broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which proponents argue would give the FCC the increased regulatory power necessary to protect net neutrality. The president seems to agree with this line of thinking — his administration’s plan also rejects the FCC’s proposed rules to allow for paid prioritization of Internet traffic. Just after the President’s announcement, though, FCC Chairman (and Obama appointee) Tom Wheeler stated that he favored a different approach, one friendlier to the concerns of large Internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner. The Washington Post speculates that Obama’s announcement may merely represent shrewd political positioning, since if the FCC enacts strong rules, and the Republican Congress votes to overturn them, a presidential veto would put Obama and the Democrats squarely in the camp of millions of voters who have asked the FCC for powerful net neutrality protections.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• Indonesia has named the U.S.-educated Anies Baswedan as the new Minister of Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education.
• The NEA’s Director of Folk and Traditional Arts Barry Bergey will retire after 29 years of service.
• Chorus America is seeking a new President and CEO. Posted November 22, closing date December 19.
• Kansas City’s Charlotte Street Foundation is looking for a new Director of Artists’ Programs. Posted October 29, no closing date.
• The Foundation Center is hiring for a Director of Community Foundation Services position. Posted November 4, no closing date.
• The Barr Foundation seeks an Arts and Culture Program Assistant. Posted November 20, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A study by the U.S. Trust finds a big bump in charitable giving among wealthy donors in 2014, and projects further growth.
• New research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that nonprofit employment rose during the recession.
• The BFAMFAPhD collective published Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, which asserts that “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.”
• The researchers behind the Crystal Bridges field trip experiment that we reported on back in October have released another study, this time focused on high-quality theater productions.
• A report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture looks at how well rural areas with a higher proportion of “creative class” workers fared during the recession.
• Suby Raman takes a deep dive into gender representation in America’s top orchestras.
• New research from Italy indicates that those with a need for “cognitive closure” are less likely to appreciate abstract art.

Audience members dock their canoes to watch a scene from a paddling theater production in Granite Falls, Minnesota. Photograph taken by the author.

(Rachel Engh recently received a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She currently lives in Minneapolis and is interested in exploring creative strategies to evaluate the success of community-based arts initiatives.)

Last May, nearly two hundred people paddled down the Minnesota River in large canoes, stopping throughout the three-hour ride to experience scenes depicting the bizarre true story of how Granite Falls (population 2,800) came to be the county seat of Yellow Medicine County in southwestern Minnesota. Audience members watched as local actors and musicians shared stories of Native Americans, French explorers, mussel diggers, and early politicians. Locals paddled next to tourists; kids splashed their oars in the water, and older folks went along for the ride.

The performance, “With the Future on the Line: Paddling Theater from Granite Falls to Yellow Medicine,” sprung out of a partnership among four nonprofit and public organizations: Clean Up River Environment (CURE), a local environmental nonprofit; Wilderness Inquiry, a Twin Cities-based nonprofit; the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; and PlaceBase Productions, a theater company out of St. Paul that had previously worked with the community last fall. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Minnesota water trail system, the performance highlighted two of the region’s assets – the Minnesota River and local artists – while bringing new people to experience Granite Falls.

Why artists should be part of the conversation about rural population gain

“With the Future on the Line” is just one example of how rural communities are adopting arts strategies to re-energize towns, spark meaningful conversations, and attract visitors. Patrick Moore, former executive director of CURE and an artist himself, told me he wanted to involve PlaceBase’s founders, Ashley Hanson and Andrew Gaylord, because they are “not only artists with charisma but also community organizers, getting people to think together, act together, helping people find roles to make them feel good and connect them with the larger community.”

This type of connection is what prospective transplants to rural communities are looking for, argues Ben Winchester, a researcher at University of Minnesota Extension who has studied rural population change. Small towns across the county are seeing their cohort of 30-49 year olds grow, a phenomenon Winchester has called “brain gain,” because these folks are in their early or mid-careers and bring with them education, skills, and connections to professionals outside the community. Attracting and keeping people in this age group can be an effective way to create an increased tax base, a more diversified economy, a more vibrant school system (since these people tend to have families), and new ideas and optimism. Only about 35-45% of the brain gain cohort is returning to a place where they once lived, meaning the majority of people who move to rural places have been attracted to somewhere new.

Artists can play an integral role in brain gain, both as part of an incoming cohort and as a means of attracting others. Concerted efforts by a rural area to attract artists can be an especially high-yield strategy because of the nature of artistic work. Researchers Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa argue that artists tend to be “footloose,” meaning they are not tied to a specific place and may work from home; because they often struggle to find affordable space in metropolitan areas, rural areas may be especially attractive to them. Once a rural area hosts a population of artists, they can help the region attract non-artist residents who value the arts as an amenity, and they can engage all residents in relationship-building through cultural activity.

Given this potential virtuous cycle, it is no surprise that rural communities have developed several strategies to attract, deploy, and connect artists as part of broader revitalization efforts. This article explores some of the ways rural places demonstrate their value for artists and the positive results that can follow.

Attracting artists by creating a built environment for the arts

Many small towns suffer from main streets with vacant buildings, schools without students to populate them, and housing stock that overwhelms demand. Some rural communities have adopted arts initiatives that repurpose this infrastructure into assets for artists and the community alike.

Oil City, Pennsylvania (population 10,500) started a successful Artist Relocation Program that offers artists fixed-rate financing, grants, and loans for purchasing and rehabbing property. Since 2006, the program has attracted 28 artists, 21 of whom have bought homes, and has brought an estimated $1.3 million to the local economy. Artist Relocation Coordinator Joann Wheeler notes that newly resident artists have also created gathering places, such as Art on Elm, where both non-artist residents and artists make and experience art. (Oil City’s program is based on the even older Artist Relocation Program in Paducah, Kentucky, which began in 2000.)

The Kaddatz Hotel opened in Fergus Falls, Minnesota (population 13,000), in 1914, closed in the 1970s, and sat empty until 2004, when Artspace converted it to 10 units of artist lofts. Eric Santwire was the second artist to move into the Kaddatz Artist Lofts. Priced out of his neighborhood and having difficulty connecting with the artist community in Minneapolis, Santwire, like the other initial occupants, decided to move to Fergus Falls specifically because of the Lofts. The Kaddatz Galleries occupies the first floor of the building, which means that artists can both live and show their work in one building. “The Kaddatz Galleries feels like more than a gallery,” Michele Anderson, Rural Program Director for Springboard for the Arts told me. “It’s a place where people go to strike up conversations.”

Deploying artists to tackle complex issues facing rural communities

As these examples show, having artists around can generate investment and a sense of place. A rural area can also launch initiatives that make use of artists’ ability to explore creative solutions for complex issues. This kind of innovation can make a community more attractive to artists and non-artists alike.

Starksboro, Vermont (population 2,000) established an innovative artist residency to do just this. Vermont artist Matthew Perry spent nine months in Starksboro as part of the Art & Soul program, a partnership between the town and the Vermont Land Trust that was funded with a grant from the Orton Family Foundation. Perry facilitated citizen involvement in town planning, a process usually left to elected officials, convening “roadside conversations” in which he encouraged community members to envision the future of Starksboro. Then, he and the residents turned the stories into works of art, and the impact is tangible. For example, the town funded new trails and public spaces and commissioned artists to help design them, creating important assets that make Starksboro a more attractive place to live. Although Perry didn’t stay in the community, he left behind community members who became empowered in planning processes through participating in the arts.

Elsewhere, Springboard for the Arts employs “Artist Organizers” (AOs) to infuse non-arts organizations with creative energy and unique problem-solving skills. Currently, four AOs are working in yearlong positions in the Twin Cities, collaborating with such organizations as a public school system; starting this fall, an AO will be working in western Minnesota alongside staff of PartnerSHIP 4 Health. The artist will create her own art to address public health priorities in the region and engage other artists to work on public health issues.

Beyond infrastructure and programs: building networks and strengthening relationships among artists

Housing incentives and programs that engage artists in imaginative problem-solving cannot alone guarantee a thriving arts community. Part of the reason for the success of the Oil City and Fergus Falls projects is that both offer not only physical infrastructure for artists to live and do their work but also places to meet other artists, show work, and cultivate connections with other artists and non-artist residents. It is the relationships fostered in and outside the buildings that make these infrastructure projects such strong models.

Local interactions aren’t the only way artists are building relationships, however: recent initiatives promise to connect rural artists across towns, either regionally or nationally. These associations and online platforms augment the brain gain strategies of individual rural areas by allowing artists to share resources more widely, find support from a larger network of others facing similar challenges, and seize opportunities and inspiration. They can also spread the word to new artists about funding opportunities and ways to showcase their work.

Art of the Rural, a national online platform that collects, organizes, and displays a diverse mix of artists, art projects, and arts organizations in rural places, recently unveiled its interactive Atlas of Rural Arts and Culture. Members can post stories of their own projects, adding to the 500 entries already completed, and many entries links to articles or websites that dive deeper into the stories. The creators note that the map can serve as a way to reduce isolation among rural artists, as artists can find information (including contact information) about people and organizations doing work, giving artists ways to connect with others virtually.

Another online platform, Rural America Contemporary Art (RACA), likewise seeks to connect rural artists to one another. The online magazine, which began as a Facebook group that now boasts over 1,300 members, profiles artists, advertises events, and offers feature editorials. Founder and artist Brian Fink lives in Mankato, Minnesota (population 40,000), and explains that the next “challenge is to take this idea of Rural America Contemporary Art and artists who make it and shift from a virtual community and actually do things out in the world.” Since launching the initial Facebook group, RACA has hosted gatherings for local artists to show their work, including the first ever RACA group exhibition. RACA also recently starting renting commercial space to create Open Space, a community work area for artists.

The promise of the arts for rural America

Towns aspiring to brain gain may consider large scale projects like some of those described or smaller steps to engage artists who already live in the area. In some cases, it may be as simple as setting aside some city funds to make art happen.

That’s what Granite Falls did when it invited PlaceBase Productions back to town in October to produce a third and final project. In the absence of grant support, the town came to the rescue: the city pitched in funds, along with nearly 40% of the local businesses and nonprofits. This type of support demonstrates the value residents place on the mobilization of artists in the community to address local issues and bring people together. “Granite Falls is the envy of the region,” Patrick Moore told me. With the Chamber of Commerce and the city investing in cultural tourism, young people buying property, and new businesses opening on main street, Granite Falls boasts amenities that draw people in. Although Granite Falls still faces many challenges shared by other small towns all over the country, local actors and musicians have witnessed how the town can reenergized because of their mobilization. With the community’s support, there’s a good chance that artists will continue to play an important role in the area’s future.

• Two new Presidential cabinet nominees, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, have pro-arts backgrounds according to Americans for the Arts’s Bob Lynch.
• The Atlanta Regional Commission is one of the only metropolitan planning organizations and one of the largest communities to date to attempt to bring the arts and creative industries under one roof. Greg Burbidge wonders how best to find common ground among the interests of entities as diverse as video game designers, history museums, and dance collectives.
• Kudos to Hyperallergic’s Mostafa Haddaya for picking up this very odd job announcement from the unlikeliest of places:
  

  The Department of Homeland Security, a federal agency with a projected 2014 budget of just under $60 billion, would like to retain an experienced arts administrator for its “Loaned Executive Program.” The proposed position offers a salary range of “$0.00 to $0.00 / Without Compensation” and is

  [A] special opportunity (unpaid) that provides top executive-level talent from the private sector an opportunity to share their expertise with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to fill special, discrete needs.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The founding CEO of the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, Harriet Ivey, is retiring after 15 years at the helm. The Trust makes grants to arts organizations in Indianapolis and Phoenix.
• Tom Kaiden is moving on after 12 years at the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance (including three as President) to take a position at the Arlington Alexandria (VA) Convention and Visitors Association.
• The National Endowment for the Arts’s Director of Literature, Ira Silverberg, is leaving the agency to return to New York. Silverberg had been a literary agent before joining the Endowment.
• Keith Sawyer, my favorite creativity and innovation blogger, is moving to Chapel Hill, NC to take a professorship in the University of North Carolina’s School of Education.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Guidestar, Charity Navigator, and BBB Wise Giving Alliance have joined together to combat the Overhead Myth – the idea (promulgated over the years by some of these same organizations, particularly Charity Navigator) that a nonprofit’s impact is somehow tied to the percentage of money it spends on its programs. The wide adoption of this construct has had all sorts of perverse unintended consequences in the sector, from non-transparent accounting to unsustainable management practices. Related commentary from Paul Brest, Kjerstin Erickson and (unintentionally) Janet Brown.

BIG IDEAS

• Wise words from Michael Rushton, in a post ostensibly about VIP tickets at amusement parks:
  

  I don’t feel an intuitive sense of being wronged when someone has the spending power and the desire to buy $50 bottles of olive oil, $5,000 suits, $100,000 cars. None of those purchases affect me. But if someone uses their spending power to gain position at my expense, then I object. This is at the root of complaints about the role of money in campaign financing: funds are spent by individuals and corporations wishing to advance their political agenda at the expense of other political claims. It is why we think there is something wrong with an industry that serves to collect millions of dollars preparing students to do well on their SATs: such efforts are purely designed for parents who want their children to have a better position, necessarily at the expense of others, for a chance at the limited spaces available at elite colleges. Fighting for position in these cases is worse than a zero-sum game, it’s actually a negative-sum game as resources are expended not for any increase in valuable goods, but simply to re-arrange who is at the front of the queue, either in politics or higher education.

• Sad I missed this new talk from the reliably brilliant Nina Simon, delivered at this year’s Theatre Communications Group conference in Dallas. Lots to chew on here, but what strikes me most is the combination of aggressive risk-taking and hyper-focused strategic thinking – an approach with such clear upsides and yet a frightening one for many in our field, I think.

IN THE FIELD

• Matthew Fluharty reports from the Rural Arts and Culture Summit in Minneapolis.
• A short primer on cultural districts from Erinn Roos-Brown.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The NEA has released new data on artist employment, updating its Artists in the Workforce study from 2005. In addition to summary findings, numerous tables are available for exploration.
• So people don’t always read to the end of articles – what else is new? But this is:
  

  Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing.

  That is the truth. I have to laugh sometimes at what kinds of things are said about Createquity articles on Twitter, like when Tegan Kehoe’s skeptical review of “The Artistic Dividend” two weeks ago was hailed as (a) an analysis of a brand-new study [it was published a decade ago] and (b) good news for arts advocates.