County Exec Chris Ronayne Can Improve Cuyahoga Arts & Culture With New Board Appointments
As we’ve previously shared, and as is beginning to be noticed in the grassroots arts community, recent board meetings of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the organization tasked with grant-making decisions for the arts tax money, have devolved into open bickering. Meanwhile, artists have looked on frustrated as the whole grant-making process is ignoring their needs for an alternative agenda unrelated to helping stimulate a high-quality arts creation in northeast Ohio.
There’s an opportunity coming up to improve that dynamic and make the board more responsive to the artists whose work creates a strong local arts scene. Two of the five board members’ terms expire this month, and new county executive Chris Ronayne is charged with replacing them, with confirmation by county council.
Jenita McGowen and Michelle Scott Taylor are two whose terms are expiring. While McGowen is the only board member who actually has been an artist (a dancer), that was years ago and since then her main interest as been sustainability, not relevant to this organization. And she may have lost interest in being part of CAC: she hasn’t shown up at a board meeting since October. The other outgoing board member is Michelle Scott Taylor, whose specialty is education, and while she has extensive experience in some of CAC’s pet areas such as diversity, she has no connection to the area arts scene.
The board is lopsided with people whose main area is something else and whose understanding of the area’s arts infrastructure seems to be lacking. Of the other board members, Nancy Mendez comes from the nonprofit/education sector & has no visible ties to the arts community. On the other hand, Charna Sherman, while a trial lawyer and not an artist, has used her personal resources to jumpstart many arts initiatives in the area and has served on boards of arts organizations such as FRONT International Triennial, DANCECleveland and the Cleveland Institute of Art. Karolyn Isenhart, now executive director of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, is another long-time arts supporter who was an auctioneer at Rachel David Fine Arts for a couple of decades, and is board chair of the Lakewood Arts Festival.
Ronayne has the chance to rebalance the board with people who are elbow-deep in the local arts infrastructure and understand it, who know what artists can do and what resources they need to do it. Obviously, since Scott Taylor the only Black person on the board of an organization obsessed with diversity, equity and inclusion at the expense of the arts, at least one of the new appointees would need to be Black. But that’s no problem: there’s a fertile field of Black arts practitioners here with expansive knowledge of and advocacy for the arts scene beyond their own practice. You could easily find one or two — or ten.
In any case, it’s past time for these board appointments to go to people with first-hand knowledge of what arts tax money can do for northeast Ohio and a willingness to advocate for the ultimate creators of a vibrant arts scene — the artists.
The next board meeting is Wednesday April 19 @ 4pm at Trinity Commons. Let’s hope the dynamic has been improved by then.
COMMENTARY by Anastasia Pantsios, photographer, writer, and editor of CoolCleveland. She also contributes to visual arts quarterly CAN Journal.