I was at a ceremony last week in Akron to receive the Arts Patron Award. The Arts Alive Awards at Summit Artspace, given out since 2002, has recognized community projects, lifetime achievements through the Summit Artpace Champion, Arts Educator, Emerging Artist, Idea Leader, and Outstanding Artist in Visual Arts, Theater, Dance, Music, and Literary Arts. It was an impressive event designed to move people through galleries, artist studios, and other gathering spaces, giving them the opportunity to network and meet each other. There was not a lot of pomp and bling. Instead, the food was locally sourced and good, with an abundance of appreciation for everyone involved in making Akron a better place to live.
There were no fiefdoms or hierarchy positioning, that is, as a collective organization, Summit Artspace has successfully recognized community leaders, not just nonprofit CEOs and their board members. I say this recognizing that the Arts Patron Award came as a complete surprise. I am grateful for the recognition but more importantly, I am filled with optimism that as a creative community, we have a lot to learn, and a lot to give back to our artists, educators, and supporters. Too often, we ask the wrong people for help. Nonprofit organizations throughout the city serve our community well, and it’s not their fault that we remain divided and indifferent to the process, but we must keep trying.
Cleveland has a 14-mile stretch of coastline that awaits droves of people each summer. The beaches and parks are ripe for as much arts and culture as can be delivered because this treasured lakefront represents the most welcoming diverse space in the city for every person who visits the North Coast. Our waterfront is free, accessible and open to the public, and every Clevelander (and beyond) can enjoy and interface with the lake and mother nature.
For three-to-four hospitable months, the arts and cultural community could bottle these vibes and benefit from them for the rest of the year. The activities — live concerts, performances, poetry, art festivals, movies in the parks — can link Clevelanders to all the brick-and-mortar spaces, places and venues, across the many distinctive Cleveland neighborhoods where art happens 24/7/365. Art and culture can be a WONDERLAND because it changes people’s attitude about a city. It makes the locals value what the cultural workforce does, and they in turn, amplify this out into the world.
The arts and cultural WONDERLAND can exist here. Cleveland is ripe for getting this right. The City of Cleveland has been betrayed by our disparate silos and bureaucracies, burying the arts deep into its portfolio. Google the city’s website and search arts and culture, and it sadly reflects its low ranking on the list of priorities. Arts and Culture has been underfunded and undervalued. Cleveland’s cultural workforce has been impacted by this mindset and repeatedly told ad nauseam that “expanding the pie” is needed.
An employee-owned company could be a better inspired model where cultural workers share ownership in the cooperative success of the City’s arts zeitgeist — lock, stock and barrel. The city could think of the cultural workforce like traditional shareholders, where they all are making the decisions together. Increased engagement provides the workforce empowerment because they get to be involved in decision-making and because they are part owner, resulting in higher productivity and yield for the cultural industry, creative economy, representation at city hall and improved quality of life for all Clevelanders.
Often, the usual suspects square the contracts at the city, hospitals, libraries (city and county), community development corporations and other 1% for the arts projects that seem hardly worth the attempt for other organizations and collectives to even apply for. It is intimidating when the decisions are made already by the same handful of usual suspects stacked on every city arts agency and foundation. The message that exists is that they just know better. They have intel and the ears of all the other usual suspects. Cronyism is an infection that blocks the possibility and potential for others to exercise their skills and talents. It is defeating and breeds more nepotism that cripples the cultural spirit of others and gives way to a feeling of complacency, fatigue and business as usual.
The city should promote a culture of meritocracy, where decisions are based on merit, qualifications and performance, rather than personal relationships or in-group affiliations. We should adopt a human-centered economy that trickles up from the people. This can help to counteract insider-group favoritism and cronyism. Are there equitable ways to implement cultural work for these possibilities that provide an employee-share concept, spreading the love to others so they can have the same bragging rights for getting the job, contract, opportunity? There must be a new way of dealing with contracts, promoting these opportunities and processes more widely and clearly, and diversifying the implementation of projects in Cleveland. It is bound to have different outcomes and a diversity of cultural workers represented. It provides the ability for others to build their brand and make a living.
People in Cleveland are hurting, and the epidemic levels of loneliness and isolation that our citizens are experiencing need the support of the arts and culture community more than ever. Our cultural workforce is desperately needed at the frontlines of our health and human service sector and the people they serve. Artists are independent businesses that are teaching entrepreneurship, skill-based learning and design-thinking to youth, creative seniors, people in re-entry programs, residential treatment, mental health spaces, and all kinds of other community groups that find art and music and video production and poetry as a healing balm that adds spice and insight to their lives, voice to the unseen, and pride and accomplishment to Cleveland’s most vulnerable. In turn, the investment and value being placed in the cultural workforce employee-share concept provides others to see their work as essential. An essential creative WONDERLAND.
Currently, a liminal moment exists in the Cleveland arts and culture landscape with a new-ish mayor, county executive and arts strategist. A friend recently just told me about an employee-owned company called Evergreen Cooperative Laundry that is planning a $1 million expansion in its Glenville laundry facility so it can better serve the growing demand for its commercial laundry services. The expansion allows it to better serve its existing customers as well as add new customers. The laundry is under the umbrella of Evergreen Cooperatives, a nonprofit with a mission of starting employee-owned companies, creating jobs and building wealth for worker owners.
The theoretical employee-share model could be the momentous and inspired shift and sea change that the arts and cultural landscape needs here in Cleveland. While the repeated “Expanding the Pie” mantra prevails, the “pie,” being the most commonly used and recognized data visualization (the parts of a whole) reflects the idea of “getting more or less of something.” It’s the wrong message and limits the ecosystem to competing factions vying for a bigger piece of the action. As the current emphasis is on diversity and equity in the arts, this WONDERLAND employee-ownership model would reverse the trend of relying on insiders and usual suspects, and make our arts and culture richer with more diverse participation.
Instead, when projects are being developed or when hiring artists, the larger nonprofits, schools and universities could engage with more emerging artists, rather than just the usual suspects. The new arts guard administrating and making policy at the city and county, (including Cleveland’s new arts strategist), have the opportunity to broaden the scope of artistic engagement, simultaneously increasing diversity and strengthening one of our key economic industries. We should hold them to it for the benefit of our region. The outcome is unified confidence, meaningful relational connectivity, and benefits to attracting others to this prime space for more creatives to come, within a vibrant, shared decision-making effort that lifts us all in unison as a choir, a dance company, a theater production, a band, a group exhibition, a beautiful city-wide festival of the arts.
Creative start-ups, creative businesses, independent venues for music and performance, individual artists, maker-spaces, health and human service arts programs, arts programs in schools, nonprofit cultural organizations and the large anchor institutions all just have to work together, with this employee-share thinking and take stock in sharing the democracy and vibrancy that happens all summer long on the shores of the Great Lake Erie.
Liz Maugans is a Cleveland-based artist, mom of three great kids, a social justice advocate, an educator, a gallerist, and curator. Maugans co-founded Zygote Press, the Collective Arts Network, the Cleveland Artist Registry and the Artist Bridge Coalition. Currently, Maugans is the Chief Curator of the Dalad Collection and Director of Yards Projects at Worthington Yards. Maugans teaches Artist-in-Communities and Museums and Collections at Cleveland State University and is Chief of Community Engagement at Art Everyspace. Maugans sits on the Board of the Collective Arts Network and Refresh Collective. Her work is represented by Hedge Gallery at 78th Street Studios. https://www.lizmaugansart.com
One Response to “CULTURATI by Liz Maugans: Take a Stake in Cleveland’s Creative WONDERLAND”
Dale A. Goode
LIz, “EXCELLENT ARTICLE!!!!!!!!” You should ,”E-MAIL-BLAST!!!!!” too everyone that you know in the creative community. from the,”Mayor Bibb!!!!!!”, on down too everywhere that, “CAN MAGAZINE!!!!!’ is read and delivered. “THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!” ‘SENDING-LIGHT!!!!!!!” Dale A. Goode.