Report from Isthmus’ Pint & Policy arts discussion

Thursday night Isthmus hosted “Pint and Policy Forum: Culture Crash in Madison's Arts Scene,” an informal, unplugged discussion at Barriques Coffee Trader in Madison about how to improve the local arts experience for all participants in the arts scene. Speakers included StageQ artistic director Tara Ayres, UW Arts Institute executive director Susan C. Cook, Arts Wisconsin executive director Anne Katz, Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society’s Stephanie Jutt, and Bolz Center for Arts Administration director Andrew Taylor. Isthmus arts & entertainment editor Dean Robbins was the moderator.

In the front row of the audience was Karin Wolf, the new Program Administrator for the Madison Arts Commission. I noticed her taking notes but didn’t know who she was until she introduced herself at the end of the discussion. Wolf was hired to implement a cultural arts plan for Madison and passed around a sign-up form at the conclusion of the forum for people interested in establishing coalitions and contributing ideas to the plan. She set up an e-mail distribution list the next day; if you want to be on that list you can get her contact info from the Madison Arts Commission site.Other local arts personalities in the audience I either recognized or overheard introduce themselves included Wisconsin Book Festival Director Alison Jones Chaim, Madison Center for Creative & Cultural Arts Project Manager Susan Fox, actor, writer, and theater director Sam White; playwright John Schweitzer, and actor Stephen Montagna.

Friday Wolf sent out an e-mail message to the people who signed up on her list with her summary of the major points of the discussion. I’ve included them below in bold, along with my observations.

Affordable living, working, and performing spaces for artists and arts organizations.
Stephanie Jutt talked about a converted warehouse in New York City where artists can stay at reduced rent rates, which gives developers a way to contribute to the arts. Tara Ayres pointed out that she can’t afford to produce the kinds of events at the Overture Center she used to produce at Civic Center. Rent has gone up all over the city, in fact.

There is potential for more collaboration, mentorship and stewardship in the arts.
The collaboration topic probably generated the most discussion. A couple people brought up low turnouts for artistic events and I’ve certainly been in situations where I was probably the only one in the audience who wasn’t a friend or family member of the people putting on the show, or the only person in the audience under 40. Perhaps collaboration could help.

Successful examples of collaboration that people brought up included the six Participating Theatre Companies (who produce “entirely different” kinds of shows, in Ayres’ words) at the Bartell, and the 2006 Summer Music Consortium both Stephanie Jutt and Andrew Taylor were involved with, which pooled money to buy a shared ad and placed whomever’s event was coming up next went at the top of the ad. Someone wondered if the Madison Music Project could serve as a model for collaboration among other arts groups.

Anne Katz informed us (or me at lest) of the Collaboration Council, whose mission involves regional economic development and quality of life and could potentially help bring the different players together. Susan Cook observed that individual university organizations often “prove their vitality” by putting on events and identified that phenomenon as an opportunity for collaboration, doing one event for multiple organizations. Katz later talked about the UW School of Agriculture’s Office of Community Arts Development in the 40s, which set up community choirs and helped “farmers write plays.” (When John Steuart Curry was an artist-in-residence at UW-Madison it was through the School of Agriculture.)

A singer/songwriter sitting across the aisle from me whom I failed to identify put forth her idea of a consortium of programmers for all Madison venues, creating calendars around different interest groups and holding complementary events in the daytime and evening. Jutt said that Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society held an event with about 30 arts leaders attending that had a similar discussion. The singer (her speaking voice was contralto; I think that’s the right word, anyway) took her idea a step further by suggesting a consortium of potential donors, and not just high-end donors, who would have the opportunity to promote themselves through different arts groups.

Taylor pointed about that a factor potentially working against collaboration is competition, not just for audience members but for donors, artists, and technical staff.

More financial support of existing artists, arts organizations, and festivals.
How do you sustain art was a question Taylor posed. He suggested that commercial entities other than performances spaces (bar owners, and Marcus Theaters, for example) could play a part.

An audience member educated us on the united fund model, which is something similar to a United Way for the arts but following a new model, one that invests in areas community representatives specifically identify as needing support. She pointed out that Madison has no neighborhood arts centers, for example. This concentrates competition for dollars and time downtown, even though suburbs are the fastest growing regions in the U.S. Artists are also becoming more entrepreneurial, with digital technology giving them access to means of production. She brought up the Overture Center in her remarks too: it’s a world class institution — does it hold world class festival events that attract a global audience?

Katz said Dane County is generous with an arts granting budget and that she’s “working on” the state. In response to a direct question about per capita spending on the arts she said Wisconsin is comparatively low, but that money going to the arts through things like University programs isn’t included in that calculation.

Arts education for all pre-k to grade 12 students.
Ayres talked about this in her opening remarks, saying that arts education is “essential to our cultural lives” and expressing a desire for a grassroots effort to get people away from “passive” entertainment like TV and communicating the “joy, connection, and community” in experiencing the arts. I think this is a root causes sort of thing; if people under 30 aren’t interested in arts outside of particular types of musical performance now, can arts groups afford to wait for them to develop such an interest? However, Contessa Says and Art Partners appear to be promoting arts interest among a younger set, with MadTownEvents.com taking a more event-oriented approach (as you might guess).

Cook also indicated a need to clearly communicate the benefit of the arts as well as to expand the generally accepted definition of arts beyond the “decorative.” She said the arts can be “intimidating” to students, especially if they’ve been told they weren’t good enough to participate in them. Jutt did have a success story to share, however, with an outreach project to Stoughton High School to promote interest in chamber music.

The need for what Anne Katz called a “mechanism” to make good ideas happen.
I’ve been in plenty of situations and you probably have too where the steps to making your good ideas a reality and the people who get to do the hard work of implementing them aren’t clear. Katz indicated a need for an organization, set of people, or “even a mindset” that looks at the big picture: what do we have, what do we need, who isn’t being served, how do we serve those people, how can we continue all those great things we have. Taylor urged everyone not to lose sight of the possibility and importance of individual action as we think about institutional models.

Other
That’s all for the main points Wolf identified. There were some other things I wanted to mention. As you might expect, the Overture Center was referred to in some of the remarks. Late in the evening Taylor expanded on an audience member’s description of Overture as a “shock” to the Madison arts “ecosystem.” It’s not a shock in a good or bad way but it does require a positive response. Katz urged the group not to focus on the building in discussing local arts. Katz also hit the importance of paying attention to what’s going on with local arts, since, like Kites on Ice, there’s the possibility that popular events could go away.

The following is a list of arts organizations and entities the speakers or audience members referred to during the evening:

• Arts Institute (probably best known for the Wisconsin Film Festival)
• Arts Wisconsin (motto: everyone. everywhere.)
• Collaboration Council
• Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission
• Madison Arts Commission
• Madison Cultural Arts District (MCAD; oversees the operations and programs of the Overture Center)
• Madison Music Project
• PortalWisconsin.org

Not mentioned but important: MadStage. There’s also a Madison Artists Alliance Yahoo group.

If you go to a future Pint & Policy discussion at the “T” section of the second floor of Barriques, you’ll probably want to sit close to the front if the guest speakers aren’t using microphones.