Charting a Common Arts + Media Movement for the Future

I’ve been referring to the period between the November election and the Obama Inauguration as the “circle of confusion,” a film term describing a fuzzy area caused by the light rays not coming into perfect focus. Such was our post-election state. There were countless conference calls brainstorming the future of America, of nonprofits, of the media and visual arts. White papers, briefs, and manifestos were flying all over the Internet, fueled by catch-phrases like “first hundred-days” and “shovel-ready.” The economy, worsening by the day, only added to this manic activity.

Then came the Inauguration. This was a crystallizing moment, as we witnessed perhaps the most profound event for our nation in a generation. Finally—a leader with intelligence and vision, a uniter, and an African American. After the last eight years, it felt like waking from a nightmare. For the first time in what seems like forever, we have hope and can believe that our government and our country will work for all of its citizens.

When the dust began to settle, we found ourselves facing our gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Foundations were telling our members that support would be down significantly in the next three years. When we polled our members about the economic effect of the current downturn, 65% reported that grant amounts were reduced; 47% reported that individual donations had decreased; and 60% reported using their cash reserve to supplement these losses. Even more surprising, 41% reported delays in payments of awarded grants, and—something I have never seen in my twenty-seven years in the field—46% reported cuts in already awarded grants. At the same time, 81% reported increased partnerships as a response to the economic downturn; as our history shows, as a field we know how to work together.

Now, more than ever, we need to come together and chart a common agenda to forge our collective future. It was with this motivation that Yolanda Hippensteele, producer of CommonWealth, this year’s NAMAC Conference, and I visited Boston in February for a meeting called by the Center for Independent Documentary, the Conference’s host organization. Twenty-one groups representing media arts and visual arts organizations, academic institutions, and funders attended that meeting and participated in a brainstorming session about panels, presenters, and funding. The energy in that room was contagious—ideas emerged highlighting new technologies, workforce development, and collaborations, among others. With these ideas swimming in my head, I flew to Washington to join Helen for a series of advocacy meetings.

When I landed, the military was still posted throughout Reagan Airport, and it was an eerie 70 degrees in mid-February, but the spirit here seemed much lighter. Not surprising, the talk was all about Obama. From the frenzied activity at bars and restaurants, you would never know that the country was spiraling down in an economic recession yet to reach bottom. Coming from a tourist-industry city like San Francisco, where hotels and restaurants had been lightly populated for months, this was a shocker. An overwhelming sense of landing on another planet struck me, or more aptly perhaps, I felt like I was at Sundance, except that everyone was a suit. Like at Sundance, everyone had a deal to pitch; the difference here was that everyone was after the same funding source, the federal government. We learned new terms like “grasstops,” very popular in D.C., where everyone sees him or herself as, well, a top. In spite of this, Helen and I were able to connect with our allies at the Media and Democracy Coalition and Public Knowledge, who helped us tease out our Campaign and Policy Training Institute idea. We hope to hold the Institute in conjunction with our Conference, provided that funding helps us to reach that goal.

While meeting at the National Endowment for the Arts, we learned firsthand that the arts remained in Congress’s stimulus package thanks to efforts led by our colleagues at Americans for the Arts (AFTA). In addition to meeting our tried-and-true media arts program staff—Ted Libbey, Mary Smith, and Laura Welch—we were joined by Wendy Clark of the visual arts program; Robert Frankel, acting deputy chairman for grants and awards; and Patrice Walker Powell, acting chairman for the agency. With the arts remaining in the stimulus package, the NEA planned a rapid deployment of funds into the field. Indeed, since then, the NEA has been lauded throughout the government and in public meetings around the country for the speed and simplicity in which they conceived and initiated the application process for disbursing these job-related dollars to our sector. These tireless public servants deserve your support, too. If you have not done so already, drop them a note or email expressing your gratitude for the work they do on our behalf.

When Helen and I returned for Arts Advocacy Day in late March, we experienced another crystallizing moment for us as leaders, one we wish to share with the field. You must do everything in your power to attend Arts Advocacy Day in 2010. There are a number of reasons for this; chief among them is that the media arts are not represented within the general body of attendees. As the ascendant art form, one that links and connects communities, tells untold stories, and pushes the boundaries of visual expression, we must have a greater voice within this confab of arts leaders. You need to be speaking with your elected officials in their D.C. offices and to their D.C. staffs to advocate for your issues back home. At every meeting Helen and I attended with our Northern California delegation (twelve of us in all), Congressional aides repeatedly asked us, “What do NEA support and stimulus arts dollars mean for jobs in my district?” AFTA’s ingenuous slogan for this year, “Arts = Jobs,” helped us explain how the arts support not only artists, but carpenters, electricians, ushers, and the many others who labor in support of putting work in front of audiences.

Another reason to attend this annual event is to participate in AFTA’s National Arts Action Summit, which occurs the day before meetings with legislators. This daylong immersion provided us with meeting strategies, talking points, and team-building that kept our advocacy work on-message (jobs, arts education, increased funding for the NEA/NEH) and our message concise. We learned how to ask the right questions. By the end of our team’s second meeting we had our routine set; by our fifth and final meeting, we were downright smooth.

The final, and perhaps most valuable, reason for attending Arts Advocacy Day is to build relationships with other local and state arts organizations. These relationships will be increasingly important, as government dollars for workforce development and capital projects will be administered through state and city governments via federal block grants. Building those relationships to ensure your place at the table and be part of those disbursements will be key to your organization’s survival as you weather this uncertain economic reality. Many of you may already advocate at your local, regional, and state level. From my perspective, the value of D.C. advocacy in general and Arts Advocacy Day specifically is the feeling of participating in a national movement that impacts all of our well-being.

For all of you who are part of the media and visual arts communities, building a movement requires that you come to Boston and participate in CommonWealth. As a field, we are diverse and complex. We span from community-based arts organizations serving emerging populations—immigrant, LGBT, people with disabilities—working on important local concerns like poverty, social justice, and broadband equity, to major cultural institutions exhibiting world-renowned artists who inspire us with their vision and ability to grapple with global issues like Diaspora, hunger, and economic disparity. We encompass youth and senior creators, participants and consumers, visionaries and connectors, and practically everything in between. Our future in the nonprofit arts sector will be formed by our determination to work together across differences, to ensure that the work we do remains of value to the communities, audiences, and artists that we represent and serve. As President Barack Obama said in March:

We’ll recover from this recession, but it will take time, it will take patience, and it will take an understanding that, when we all work together, when each of us looks beyond our own short-term interest to the wider set of obligations we have towards each other, that’s when we succeed, that’s when we prosper, and that’s what is needed right now. So let’s look towards the future with a renewed sense of common purpose, a renewed determination, and, most importantly, renewed confidence that a better day will come.

Join us in Boston at CommonWealth to chart our course together!