On Fragility & the Work We Do Together

Originally published in the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association's In Studio Magazine for Spring 2019 Art-A-Whirl. Read it online and see the whole magazine at: https://issuu.com/nemaa/docs/instudio.issuu_174f545728df44/12

“Thank you. Thank you for being an artist. Thank you for making your work. Thank you for choosing this life which can be hard. And hard to explain.”

Those are the first words of Andrew Simonet’s lovely, practical meditation Making Your Life as an Artist, and it seemed an appropriate place to start this train of thought. In this seemingly fragile moment with so many of our arts organizations it also feels important to point out that being an artist is something carries on as organizations come and go. As Simonet shares from his own life, it is not easy, and takes time, luck and non-arts jobs. Despite advantages of state and philanthropic funding in Minnesota, being an artist as a career is difficult, so thank you.

It is hard to be an artist, and it is hard to run arts organizations. We are here in this moment with a weary litany of names of organizations, tied in with our work histories and cultural identities, that have taken a beating. Intermedia Arts, the Soap Factory, Creators’ Space, Red Eye Theater, Zenon Dance, Patrick’s Cabaret, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, Art Shanties, and NEMAA itself have all featured in the past year in stories of arts organizations undergoing profound, sometimes cataclysmic change.

There has already been beautiful and insightful writing about the challenges of running an arts organization from this list; Executive Artistic Director Scott Artley’s essay “The Final Act” on Howlround.com about sunsetting Patrick’s Cabaret, and Heart of the Beast Executive Director Corrie Zoll’s “Challenges of our Field” blog post that accompanied their January announcement of scaling back operations and seeking partners to co-produce the May Day Festival. The particulars of those stories have resonances for both personal careers and organizational futures, so let us step back, take a breath, and ask what’s next.

Compared to what?

It is tempting in this moment to throw up our hands and assign a narrative that ties all these organizations together – it’s all boards/funders/real estate’s fault! – but the reality is more nuanced than that. The life and lifecycles of artists and arts organizations have historically been marked by precarity, because our arts labor and the value we produce through creative and cultural work is poorly valued as a commodity in the society in which we live. Any one of us can list venues, galleries, and theaters that have shaped our scene and come and gone, from New French Café to Speedboat Gallery, from Art of This to Bedlam Theatre.

That precarity is not unique to our life as artists or to our arts organizations. Kate Barr, President & CEO of Propel Nonprofits points out that if the narrative of our current situation is that everything is fragile, she asks, “The question is, ‘Compared to what?’ We have a tendency with small arts organizations to compare to larger arts organizations, and that’s the wrong comparison.” Instead of comparing to larger arts organizations with broad and established donor bases and earned revenue streams, the more apt comparison is to small business startups, Barr argues.

Life in small business is risky. Citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Small Business Administration notes, “About two-thirds of businesses with employees survive at least 2 years and about half survive at least 5 years.” That still approaches zero over time, and is indicative of the churn and grind in small business. When revenues drop as a small business owner, you pay yourself last. In response to market demand, restaurants often change menus, concepts, and hours, while stores stock specific items that they know will sell.

In this sense, small businesses may have more flexibility and opportunity to build a market and audience than many art-driven enterprises, where personal or group aesthetics, or commitment to a method or technique drive our work. A Butoh dance group will not become a commercial photography studio because it is more profitable. But it does underscore that it is no secret that arts business models are fractured and limited. Ticket and arts sales alone do not cover the real costs of operating spaces and paying living wages. Grants are unpredictable. Dedication to a single discipline or practice is no guarantee of an audience. As individual artists we often have to rely on other jobs to make ends meet, and for our organizations this means we have to be compelled to seek partners in space and operations to support our work.

More broadly in our culture, we are in the midst of conversations about dignity decoupled from labor, how nations support their populations in the face of automation, globalization, and widening wage gaps. Artists need to embrace those conversation and advocate in them. Part of our challenge now is to reconsider how we frame the lifecycles of our work and organizations as iterative and ongoing, and how to adapt our expectations as best we can to succeed in our current moment and in the future. Some organizations have second lives, and from those organizations come people with knowledge and capacity for the next challenge. Even in this moment there are producing and presenting organizations that are expanding – see Juxtaposition Arts, Ananya Dance Theatre, and Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center. Not every organization will last in perpetuity, and if we can celebrate the run, that gives us more resiliency for building the next, less fragile thing together.

Do less with more

As artists we are so adept at doing more with less. We can find materials to create with, turn a chair into a whole theater set, write miracles with 26 characters and some punctuation. These skills serve us well as artists, but they do not always serve us so well in our organizations. In fact, the impulse as a working artist to stretch your resources turns into an organizational liability. Organizations with underpaid staff will perpetually lose those staff and their institutional knowledge, and that turnover and instability decrease the resiliency and capacity of an organization to absorb funding shocks. Low wages also perpetuate the racial and ethnic disparities that are entrenched in our nonprofit and social systems, in Minnesota and nationally. Barr from Propel notes, “Most of the philanthropy in small nonprofits comes from the staff, most of that pie chart is unpaid labor.” That’s not a good thing for the long term health of our organizations.

All-volunteer organizations suffer the same fate, but on a recurring basis, constantly having to reinvent themselves. New initiatives like RaiseMN, GiveMN’s fundraising support consultancy, are working to build greater capacity in small arts organizations, but organizational leaders need to re-prioritize keeping people and building reserves so their organizations can stay responsive. Boards especially need to both embrace their governance and advocacy roles within nonprofits, which means artists educated on financials and non-arts advocates with a deep care for artists and their work. As Anna Becker, Interim Executive Director of NEMAA put it, “If arts organizations continue to accept that low wages are a given, then we are telling our peers, staff, potential applicants, and the world, really, that the work we are doing is of a lesser value. We perpetuate the myth that the arts are superfluous, and the public and funders will treat us that way.”

This is also true about the services we provide and the art we create in organizations. There is an old joke about a doomed businessman who claims, “I may lose money on every unit, but I make up for it in volume!” Part of making that shift possible to doing less, but doing it better, is also tied to the way we expect our organizations to behave and the output we expect from them. Zoll from Heart of the Beast notes this pressure on arts organizations has risen as our culture at large has expanded to include an infinite number of preferences and options for communication and responsiveness. “I feel a high expectation for top-notch organizational capacity in financial management, fundraising, evaluation, human resources, communication, marketing, strategic planning, and program management, not to mention the expectations around actual production of art,” he notes. “We could use some compassionate changes from funders and others in acknowledging that we are stretched thin and offering more support and/or fewer requirements when it comes to funding proposals, reporting, and timelines.”

Finding the places to work

Urbanist Jane Jacobs famously noted that “New ideas need old buildings,” but it might be better said that new ideas need available buildings. “Old” in the equation is a stand-in for the disused warehouses, empty storefronts, and vacant houses that have so long been the incubators of creative work. But that ideal doesn’t necessarily hold true anymore – it certainly hasn’t in New York or San Francisco for the past two decades, and the cranes that have been rising in mid-size American cities like Denver and Austin are now on view in the Twin Cities. This real estate pressure is here, and artists alone will not confront this. We have to be in solidarity with affordable housing advocates, entities like community land trusts and co-operatives, and pushing for policies that keep people in the places they have built. This is especially true as artists seek to move into affordable spaces in new neighborhoods. It is one thing to renovate a warehouse in an industrial area, it is another to take up space in historically marginalized neighborhoods, or to be a bellwether of gentrification or displacement.

So what is possible now? To extend a restaurant metaphor, so many small arts organizations are running hot dog carts or food trucks. But what does it look like if we are able to run more food halls? We have successful examples of this already in the cities – Open Book on Washington Avenue as a collaborative venture to house literary organizations, so many of the studio buildings like Northrup King, Q.arma, and Casket Arts that have made the Northeast arts scene viable and vibrant. The success of these ventures has been predicated on long-term relationship-building, joint fundraising, and ownership invested in the creative community – the 2018 Minneapolis Creative Index has narrative insight and mapping data on creative workspace in the city highlighting those relationships and clusters.

We know though that the presence of supportive landlords is no guarantee of continuity in the face of rising real estate pressure. Decisions to end leases or sell buildings have impacted Patrick’s Cabaret, Red Eye Theater, the artists of Lowertown St. Paul in recent years. And the rental model for theaters also faces its own challenges – if all the organization to whom you would rent are facing financial pressures, and your costs are rising along with inflation, then your natural tenants may not be able to afford your space.

In the face of these pressures, this moment calls on us to deepen our relationships and reach out to our neighbors in adjacent sectors. We can wait for the right landlords to appear, or we can start the conversations that lead to co-operative or collaborative spaces. A theater scene shop and a fashion designer both have need of sewing machines. Rehearsal space for musicians can double as space for writers. Dancers and theaters can share space. Many of these spaces already exist, but because of inefficiencies in management and access, cannot be used broadly. Efforts like Fourth Wall MSP are piloting partnerships that share rehearsal space, facilitated by technology. Part of what will make this work further possible is a willingness to see space not as a commodity owned by a single entity, but as a platform that enables the community as a whole to grow. This means flexibility, transparency, and patience with our fellow artists.

Expand what “public art” means

We are also in a moment where we have an opportunity to push for a broader understanding of what public art really means in the life of a city, and how it should be funded. The Knight Foundation’s Soul of the Community research from 2010 worked to measure what drives community attachment, which they describe as “an emotional connection to a place that transcends satisfaction, loyalty, and even passion.” The three most strongly correlated drivers of attachment that the research found were also things that are generated through creative and cultural events – Social Offerings, Openness, and Aesthetics.

With this in mind, it’s time for us to reconsider the line items in cities’ budgets dedicated to public art, and push beyond the upkeep of built infrastructure and placement of new sculptures and fountains. “The City of Minneapolis currently doesn’t have an avenue for funding festivals and events,” Becker says about Art-A-Whirl, “though they have helped by offering free services in regards to police presence, traffic management, garbage, and permitting.” Festivals like Art-A-Whirl, Art Shanties, and the May Day Parade – all of which were impacted through not receiving Minnesota State Arts Board festival support -– undoubtedly create social offerings, contribute to the openness and connection of the city, and drive the aesthetic understanding of the places we live.

Poet, artist, activist and Minneapolis City Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins is open to the possibility. “As the City moves towards an a more equitable future that seeks to highlight cultural districts as destinations,” Jenkins notes, “it is important that we acknowledge events like the May Day Parade or Art-A-Whirl as public art institutions, that while ephemeral, do more to build community, civic, and cultural pride than murals and sculptures sometimes offer.” Expanding direct support for ongoing events like open studios and art crawls, activity which the City not only benefits from in terms of activity but also in terms of marketing narrative, could be transformational for our arts community.

By that same token, the festivals mentioned above bring out between 40,000 and 60,000 people to their events. The challenge of engaging those people throughout the year in ways that can turn into revenue or other opportunities is real, but as we look beyond the unpredictability of grants and philanthropic support, we have to be asking about other business and sponsorship opportunities. If that sounds like it contradicts the “do less with more” principle, on the surface it does. But a strategic, patient framework that builds ongoing engagements and seeks new opportunities, managed by people resourced in their work can make a world of difference. With deeper ongoing engagement, the loss of a single project grant can turn from a cataclysm to a manageable setback. And if we can continue to advocate to philanthropy that general operating support and long-term commitments make for healthier organizations and greater impact, then we can live up to the promise of Minnesota’s vaunted arts support.

None of this is simple. None of this will be achieved by one artist, one administrator, one politician, community or funder. It must be done with broad and reciprocal relationships, equity, and patience. Shifting framing, funding, and policy take dedication and care for each other through disagreements and setbacks. But I believe it will be done, because this is the moment we are in, because of the artists and organizers who have come before us, and mostly because I believe in the capacity of artists to turn fragile and human circumstances into powerful connections that bring us together.