It doesn’t matter how much city officials tout Providence as an arts and cultural destination – if the goods aren’t there, or if the arts and cultural organizations can’t make their budgets work, the efforts won’t pay off in the end.
To that end, and in response to the Americas for the Arts study that quantified the arts annual $111.8 million contribution to the city’s economy, Mayor David N. Cicilline last month announced the formation of the “Arts Investment Advisory Council” and charged it with developing strategies to support and maintain the city’s arts and culture nonprofits.
The council will seek input from the sector’s stakeholders. And they have plenty to say.
Bert Crenca, artist, director and founder of AS220 and AS220’s Dreyfus Hotel – two mixed-use gallery / artist resident / restaurant / bar locations, both in Providence – said a united arts fund that makes it easy for corporations and individuals to make donations to a single source could help a great deal.
The challenge would be finding a way to distribute the funds using a well-tested process such as the one the R.I. State Council on the Arts has for project grants and general operating support grants, he said. The fund would have to be well-structured and well-managed.
“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Crenca said.
The result could create a source of much-needed guaranteed general operating support, which nonprofit arts and culture organizations could incorporate into their budgets each year, or use for capital improvement projects such as maintenance and fire code upgrades so that they could increase capacity.
Even a very successful nonprofit, the Trinity Repertory Company, needs to raise funds for fire code upgrades in addition to about $2.5 million each year to produce the plays it stages, said Michael Gennaro, executive director of the theater company.
“All of us, we need contributions to survive,” he said. “It’s just part of our business model.”
Especially as public funds for the arts have all but diminished during the past several years, nonprofit art organizations have had to depend on individual and corporate giving for survival, said Tony Estrella, artistic director of the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket.
Gennaro said he is encouraged by Cicilline’s creation of an arts investment advisory council because it gives an opportunity for economic growth of the arts and culture industry in Providence.
“That’s a connection that needs to be made between the public and private sector,” he said. “The [council] gives us the opportunity to speak to those sectors, communicate our message about the support we need.”
The goal of the council is “really about building additional corporate support,” Cicilline said.
In addition, the council will create a one-stop-shop for people interested in perusing a calendar of events, purchasing tickets to a show or event, making reservations at a restaurant, booking a hotel room or making donations to arts and culture organizations.
It will also develop a communications strategy that communicates the importance of the arts to the city’s economy and way of life, Cicilline said. But the real strength of the council is the fact that it is manned mostly by representatives from the private sector.
“Anytime you’re trying to communicate a message it’s always helpful to have peers communicating it,” he said. “So for other businesses and people in the corporate community to hear from the Arts Investment Advisory Council, which is made up of their colleagues, I think it will strengthen our ability to communicate this message and give added credibility to their work.”
Drake Patten, executive director of the Steel Yard, a nonprofit industrial arts collaborative that offers workshops and fabricates a line of urban furniture, said it’s important for arts organizations not only to communicate needs to the council, but also find ways to share a “seat at the table” on corporate boards as well.
She said the arts are often viewed as second-class members of local economies, but they have a great deal to contribute in terms of “a unique way of problem-solving and making change.”
“We need to talk across sectors and take leaps of faith together,” she said, adding that this kind of leap could help the Steel Yard get a mortgage for its site (the nonprofit is trying to purchase the site from Clay Rockefeller and Nick Bauta, who bought it in 2002 for $1.4 million in order to get the Steel Yard going).
“What I want to see is a group of financial institutions and business leaders saying, ‘We’ll make this happen because we recognize that diversifying our own portfolio of investments means cutting across all sectors and recognizing that [arts organizations] are contributing to this economy,’ ” Patten said.
Paula Martiesian, artist and co-chair of Gallery Night Providence, said there could be more support in building a solid customer base for for-profit visual artists and galleries in the city.
“We need to look regionally for an audience that supports us,” she said. “For that you need a good marketing dollar.”
Martiesian said though the city is doing a good job of attracting national media attention for Providence as an arts and culture destination, she worries it might be a cart-before-the-horse scenario, at least when it comes to finding galleries in the city.
“The gallery scene here struggles, but with the amount of talent here it should be huge,” she said.
Crenca said companies and developers could play a role in increasing sales of original local art by filling new and existing hotels with local artwork.
Doing so would make hotels “another visible demonstration of the liveliness of the arts scene in the city,” he said, adding that it could apply to public space as well. “Instead of thinking of galleries in the traditional sense, think of every public space as a potential gallery for local work.”
Exposing more people to original artwork leads to the appreciation of art, he said, which leads to purchase, which “puts money in the pockets of the artists who are the ones who are fundamentally creating the scene.”••
