Thu 12/28
Transparency. It all comes down to transparency. That seemed to be the consensus of the local artists and others connected to the area arts scene gathered at the Happy Dog at the Euclid Tavern Wed 12/28/16 for an informal panel and discussion session surrounding the radical changes made to parts of the county’s funding for the arts by its overseer organization, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture (CAC).
The sleeping beast of the arts community awoke when the CAC board dropped the bombshell at its November meeting that it was proposing to end the Creative Workforce Fellowships, given to individual artists to allow them to focus on creating new work, and replace them with another type of grant, open to anyone in the community with an idea for promoting “social change.” In addition, it “fired” the grant administering organization, the locally based CPAC, and hired a Washington D.C. firm to oversee the new grants (That firm backed out when the blowback from the community arose.)
The meeting was convened by Happy Dog co-owner Sean Watterson and Zygote Press co-founder/executive director Liz Maugans. They were joined on the panel by artists Christine Mauersberger, RA Washington and Darius Steward, all of whom were recent recipients of the Creative Workforce Fellowships.
Most of those gathered at the Euc were critical of the changes, supposedly driven by concerns about diversity, as demeaning to artists and their creative practices, and felt the real diversity issue was failure to spread the word widely enough about the fellowships, not that they needed to serve a completely different purpose.
“What was the problem with the fellowship in the first place?” said Washington, an African-American artist. What were your critiques? There hasn’t been a mechanism to let people in the community know about programs. They don’t get word out to artists.”
Mauersberger described the new grants CAC is proposing, saying that for a $10,000 grant for the year (cut from $15,000 in the last round, which was cut from $20,000 in earlier years), artists would be expected to attend business seminars, collaborate with other grantees, pitch their idea to the community and organize a GoFundMe campaign to fund it, all to pull of a single event whose ability to make any real change was questioned by many in attendance.
Steward, who is Black, said “In my community, that’s what we expect — one day and over. I feel like it’s dropping the ball completely. The funding was cut gradually. The money I got relieved me of a lot of things but I could not go out and do this thing. Giving people less money and making them jump through all these hoops is pointless.”
Added Washington, “Social change — they’re going to have to spend a lot more money than that. I want some aspect about it to be, is our work pleasing? Is our work good? They don’t have enough money to deal with social change. If they want to do social change, we can point to organizations that do that.”
That seemed to be the consensus — that CAC was set up to do arts and that it didn’t have the knowledge, resources or mandate to address social change in a meaningful way. And, as several speakers pointed out, there are many funders for community needs, but the arts levy was passed because arts funding from private donors increasingly took a back seat to those needs.
“There’s money for sports teams,” said Watterson, referring to the “sin” taxes passed to fund their facilities. “It doesn’t get siphoned off for social change. This was passed for the arts but now they’ve decided to be a social change agency, starting with the smallest portion. Is this what the voters voted for — are they an agency to do social change?
Again and again, speakers both on the panel and in the audience returned to the question of why, after renewing the levy last year based on previously stated goals and programs, CAC decided to change those a year later with virtually no public notice. It was brought out that when CAC revised its mission statement this past summer, it removed transparency as a core value, something that many of those attending found alarming.
“As a journalist and voter, what is grinding my gears is the bait and switch,” audience member Karen Sandstrom offered. “CAC went back to the voters with I’m sure this plan in mind and weren’t transparent. I’m bummed as a voter and someone who believes in the transparency piece. Is there an appetite for holding CAC’s feet to the fire? Are there ideas people have about pressing them?”
She was only one of many attendees who expressed frustration with the entire process, the lack of openness and the unceremonious way the decision was dumped on the arts community.
“The part of the process that was most disappointing was hearing about it at Thanksgiving and then pushing it through over the holidays,” said Maugans. “I’ve been connected to CAC on multiple levels and that felt like a slight.”
Artist/educator Daniel Levin said, “I have no idea if there is a mechanism to be heard, to have a dialogue and not just listening. What I see with CAC is an impenetrable wall.”
Washington tapped into something many in the arts community had been privately saying: that Karen Gahl-Mills, the executive director of CAC, was acting in an autocratic manner.
“To me it felt like [the shift in direction and the hiring of an out-of-town organization] was personal. It felt personal to me between Karen Gahl-Mills and [CPAC’s] Tom Schorgl,” he said.
“Karen Gahl-Mills is a service provider to the community,” he said. “That is not a hierarchal position. The tone of the interaction has not been service-oriented. If they change the tone, we can have a conversation about transparency. If we have a discussion about transparency, we can have a discussion about how to go forward.”
CAC board member, artist Gwendolyn Garth, was in the room and got up to speak at the end, asserting that she ‘s down with more transparency too.
‘We need to come together and devise a new fellowship,” she said. “I was against the money coming out of the community going to D.C. We all need to sit down and talk about it. There’s too much division.”
The next meeting of the Cuyahoga Arts and Culture board is Mon 2/13 @ 4pm at Ideastream. It is open to the public and members of the artist community are urged to attend to send a message that transparency is a core value for the community and that the arts community needs to be involved in a conversation about any changes.
A Facebook page is available for those interested in following and participating in an ongoing discussion: facebook.com/Alliance-for-Artists-in-Cuyahoga-County