Mon 9/15
The board of trustees of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the organization that distributes the money from the arts tax, held its regular board meeting at SPACES Gallery Monday afternoon. It was well attended by movers and shakers in the arts community, with many of the same people in attendance who showed up at its City Club forum in June. That forum was in response to the arts community’s concerns about the “pause” this year in the Workforce Development Grants, given to individual artists to support their ability to further their work.
At that time, it wasn’t clear what that meant for the future of the artist grants, though some expressed fear they would not be resumed, that they would be chopped into little pieces for more community art projects, or that artists would be called upon to become, as one commenter said, “social workers,” servicing the community rather than pursuing their creativity.
At this meeting, the board reported back some of their thinking about these grants, and the audience was all ears. The first and second fears were laid to rest; the board said their recommendation was that the grants be retained at the same level. The third might or might not be valid — it was hard to tell from the platitudes and vague assurances being thrown around. A new piece of jargon cropped up: they said they were looking for artists awarded the grants to be more “resident-focused.”
Since there was no clear explanation of what was meant by that, many of the commenters made the reasonable assumption that it was intended to push artists to do more community engagement projects i.e. be a “social worker.” RA Washington, co-owner of the Guide to Kulchur bookstore in Gordon Square, said it sounded to him like the artist awards were on track to become more project-based than merit-based, something echoed by others in the room who felt like artists would have to justify the work they did beyond simply its merit. And he made a suggestion, unlikely to be realized, that operating funds for institutions with large endowments like the Cleveland Orchestra or the Cleveland Museum of Art be cut, with the money redirected to midsized institutions to help them build endowments and to increase the number of individual artist grants.
Ray Bobgan, the artistic director of Cleveland Public Theatre, summed up what most of the commenters were saying when he said, “When someone comes to me and says ‘what is the public value of what you do,’ I feel like they are devaluing me and questioning me as an artist.” Cathleen O’Malley, CPT’s director of audience engagement, added that she feared “resident-focused” meant favoring art that people liked, marginalizing artists who produced risk-taking or groundbreaking work. CPT, of course, is already heavily into community outreach, education, serving the underserved, and all those good things funders like to hear these days. But the idea that that should be a standard for judging the value of art didn’t seem to sit well with most of the crowd present.
Photo by Anastasia Pantsios. Adam Tully and John Farina of the Maria Neil Art Project and Michael Gill, publisher of CAN Journal, contemplate a chandelier by artist Dana Depew at a Third Friday at the 78th Street Galleries.