Perhaps it’s the buzz of the fast-approaching Super Bowl that has me thinking about how art and sports are more alike in this sports town of Cleveland than we might think. The parallels are how foundations, city and county arts agencies, and other regional cultural leadership insiders model the professional sports franchises’ power structures.
I wrote “We Are the Champions” a few weeks ago for CoolCleveland’s Culturati column about the true champions in town. The op-ed celebrated the countless artists, creative businesses and nonprofits that truly hold the key to championing the arts in this region. This town has experienced a rivalry between two factions the AFL (the Arts Fearless Leaders) and the ACN (Artists, Creative Businesses and Nonprofits). The current AFL make the offensive calls while never having played the actual game. The AFL sit comfortably in their lofted loges, developing arts and culture for the region.
For the last decade, Cuyahoga County’s AFL has huddled together trying to figure out the next “Hail Mary” for building new arts agencies, lobbying down in Columbus, pitching alternative public arts funding ideas, and trying to raise some dough for the campaign for November’s Cuyahoga County levy with zero ACN representation.
The City of Cleveland’s ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) arts funding that began with artists advocating for the recovery of artists found that the AFL had their own ideas how to spend the money. The Artists for ARPA, led by Assembly for the Arts, began as an activist campaign created to help artists in this rescue, but was swiftly appropriated by the AFL for what looks more like the same old project support grants, working with large institutions/organizations and, yes, even sports teams were mentioned, and the much-needed direct support for artists got sidelined. I hope any project that can support artists succeeds but the efforts of individual artist advocacy once again has been intercepted and redrafted by the heavy hand of City Planning (which smells like foie gras to me).
The AFL team creates the façade of wanting to partner with the ACN but their continued actions prove otherwise. The ACN want true representation in any partnership, but it does not look like the AFL’s “Art Modell model.” Art Modell was the former owner of the Cleveland Browns, who years ago packed up the team and took them to Baltimore for a more lucrative payout. Any real authentic interest the AFL has for true partnership with the ACN that includes deep listening, trust-building and equitable decision-making seems as impossible as the Browns winning the Super Bowl.
It occurred to me that maybe the AFL are broken and need restructuring? If that’s the case, many teams get rid of the head coach for fresh vision and a clean slate? Perhaps they look inside their franchise and identify how the AFL can be informed in what a truly mutual accountable partnership can look like in this region. Meanwhile, out on the field, the ACN’s coaches, players and workforce continue to focus on trying to deliver a win here in the region. We Are the Champions, remember? How can the AFL partner with the ACN in supporting each other in these efforts? This could be a real moment for the AFL but they have to stop this top-down, insular business-as-usual. If the AFL wants to be the championship arts town then maybe they need to look in the mirror to make these changes. The AFL prefers to project the mentality with their cultural capital, “It’s not us, it’s them.”
The ACN’s playbook wants representation that fuels agency> which feeds action> which activates public support> which cheers on the spirit of this region>which ultimately builds stronger support for the arts in full. Excitement for the arts comes directly from those on the field making the plays and taking the hardest hits. The ACN wants to work with the AFL, not for them. This power imbalance is ‘The Fumble” over and over and over again.
The optics don’t help either, where the swanky AFL loges, offices, salaries, healthcare plans, retirement packages, new buildings and access to the other power brokers becomes even more debilitating and painful to those players on the field being asked to do everything for free. Nonprofits can’t even get general operating support for their staff or office spaces, let alone the overhead costs and privileges that the AFL receive up in their fancy seats. ACN needs unrestricted resources to best support their work so meaningful projects and programs can happen independently without Art Modell calling the plays.
The current AFL is a mess. The boards and staff of public arts agencies have been infighting and disrespectful to the ACN and to each other. The AFL are all spinning their plates in different directions looking for credit wherever they can find it to splash on social media. The AFL is an echo chamber and their current playbook of individual artist support is at best sloppy, slapdash, and confusing.
City planners and the City of Cleveland just joined the AFL team so they can call some of their own plays. The Transformation Arts Fund, known as TAF, has the same old AFL partnerships with the same old ballers. This is all REPLAY. The artists on the TAF advisory are luckily the ACN’s swan song and will hold AFL to the fire. The TAF advisory, despite the original ARPA program being co-opted by the AFL, has nothing but my utmost respect. There is hope that this can be a silver lining playbook for the future of this work. The catch here is that ACN’s advisory committees just don’t get implemented after the AFL decisions have been made.
The ACN has become so used to the triple-coverage by the AFL that all energy chokes them out of any further interest in working towards a partnership. There are glimmers of hope. Amid all these discouraging scrimmages, moCa Cleveland just presented their new Strategic playbook. moCa has had some tough seasons but in this rebuilding year they have repositioned their bench with integrity and inclusion, and most wonderful to see is artists at the center. moCa’s new vision is called “ART In Progress NOW.”
- ARTISTS & ART come first, because they are our axis. We emphasize how they both guide us to meaning and impact.
- WE also are a key focus of this vision, both as individuals and as audiences.
- THE UNFAMILIAR can be a space, a place, an experience, a recognition, or a moment of transition.
- To OPEN is to be vulnerable & available for transformation.
- To CONNECT is to share, exchange, even bond.
- NEW POSSIBILITIES embrace the limitless potential of pushing towards what could be.
So……meanwhile, while the well-paid Cuyahoga County arts and culture lobbyists are down in Columbus confused as to how they should shape their next ask for arts taxation dollars moving forward.
The AFL have been waffling between vapes? Weed? Alcohol? Scratch that, the sports teams already have dibs on some of those revenues! The ACN, too tired to fight, can only imagine a vision that looks like “The Wave,” where Clevelanders stand together, yell and raise their arms around and around, beautifully celebrating all of us in the stadium together with equal footing- enjoying it all together. Instead, the artists throw up their hands in frustration, bruised and battered in the fray, losing yet another season from the same old game.
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. www.lizmaugansart.com
4 Responses to “CULTURATI: The Art of the Replay”
Susie Underwood
Thanks, Liz. If anyone is unfamiliar with the campaign she mentioned, Liz and others did a lot of work creating and distributing postcards with artwork by local artists that were used to urge the City Of Cleveland to designate 10 million of the ARPA funds to the arts. It ended up being 3.2 million. My question is, why wouldn’t the city ask the people, like Liz, who were advocating for the money, for advice on how to use it?
ARPA money was meant to serve as a stopgap remedy to help businesses get through the pandemic. I know a lot of artists who lost income due to the lack of events and other opportunities. Why was this money held by the city instead of distributed as quickly as possible? Why did they think individual artist grants weren’t a worthwhile way to spend the cash? Who steered the funds towards public art legislation, when we already have multiple orgs in town (LAND, Graffiti Heart, the city’s public art program, CDCs, Destination Cle) that get plenty of cash for public art in this city?
Now artists have 2 months to come up with “transformative” projects of $250-$500k. Most artists are not going to have the time to refocus their entire artistic practice around this one, huge project. So, most will see this fund and say, “not for me”. Maybe if they could apply for $20k or $50k, then more artists could benefit and it wouldn’t be so intimidating. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be allowed in the legislation.
Just a reminder to anyone who feels like this is just another example of grumpy Clevelanders who love to complain: We aren’t trying to make enemies here – we are trying to help out our fellow artists. So stop making me grumpy, Cleveland.
John A Sargent III
Hi Liz, You are such a champion for the arts in Cleveland. There must be any number of conversations and observations underlying the emergence of this article. You or someone should name names of the AFL who presume to serve the needs aspirations of the artists arts and culture in this area. This is political and the art ends up serving propoganda and political expedience. They may or may not even be aware? Nothing like being revealed by evidence & facts. Thanks for bringing the conversation this far.
Will Sanchez
Well written and the analogies are fitting!
Stephen Calhoun
Is there something like the problem of ‘institutional ego’ and its allied elitism, and its insider’s branding around who knows best? Proudly fighting over scraps is like a meaningless last game on the schedule between tanking teams.
Liz, isn’t our untapped super-power the experience and grit and intelligence and the ‘chops’ of artists? How do we organize the self-selecting artist/agents of change? This is far from a question that answers itself. Artists as group (genre!?) are hard to organize, for sure.
But, at the same time, their time and intelligence and creativity sum to be an undeniable LARGE asset of the cultural ecology of our region.
Do we have a handle on the critically complex relations among people and institutions in our cultural ecology? For example, have we deconstructed ideological functions (and histories) discoverable in the transactional sorting necessary to address equities and diversity? One challenge here is to make the dialogues public.
You already know what I believe: we need to organize 100,000+ hours worth of artists’ time and set this to foundational and then to transformational tasks.