Americans for the Arts

Since 1960, Americans for the Arts has worked to ensure equitable access to a full creative life for all people. While the type and quantity of work may have varied over time, the commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion has not. In 2015, our Board of Directors encouraged a more specific, strategic, and long-term commitment to cultural equity. As a first step, we spent a year working with board, staff, and membership to develop a new Statement on Cultural Equity. Formally adopted in April 2016, it honed our commitment and goals around cultural equity, articulated our definitions and areas of measurement, and delineated bodies of work for the organization: internal capacity and competency, funds generation to underwrite the work, external education, professional development pipeline transformation, dedicated research, and investments in equity-related public and private sector policy. We pledged, in the statement, to evaluate and report out on our progress and learnings over time. Today, we are happy to share the first of those reports, which covers April 2016 to August 2018. The report is called Mapping Our Progress Toward Cultural Equity, and it is the result of a collective effort from over 60 staff members at Americans for the Arts.

To improve the perceived public value of the arts, we must connect into the places where people find value. To get members of our community to stand up and say, “We want more,” we have to tell them why “more” matters. If we’re trying to create advocates for arts and culture among the members of communities, we need to increase the occasions where thinking about the arts makes sense. Because the truth is, the arts make more things possible, from better education to greater health outcomes to a more civically-engaged citizenry—it’s just that people don’t always see the connection to the arts when change happens. Knowing people prioritize core issue areas like education, job security, housing, public safety, and health and wellness, how do we show the important ways the arts intersect with their day-to-day lives? At Americans for the Arts, our answer is the Arts + Social Impact Explorer.

The benefits of public art are plentiful: inspiration, engagement, revitalization, economic development, beauty. Public art has all too often been directly associated with the displacement of families and individuals when used as an economic development tool in historically low-income communities without proper protections in place against displacement. With a well-thought-out anti-displacement strategy in place, public art can be transformative for historically low-income neighborhoods everywhere. The Punto Urban Art Museum, a public art initiative founded by North Shore Community Development Corporation in Salem, Massachusetts, is addressing this head on as we enter a third year of programming. After seeing increased levels of engagement when utilizing arts and creativity in our community organizing work and in a temporary pilot mural project, NSCDC began to take art and placemaking more seriously as a strategy to address the community priority of reducing stigma in the predominantly low-income, majority-minority Point neighborhood.

“To whom much is given, much is required.” A stalwart in the Black creative community here in Columbus, Ohio said that to me when I started a job at a local arts council in 2015. It was a place I had always dreamed of working. Who wouldn’t want to support artists while simultaneously effecting change in their community? I was honored, and beyond excited. The support I received from my immediate creative community was immeasurable, and I carried with me their dreams, as well as my own. I could not let them down, lest I be seen as a failure. That same excitement quickly turned to dread. It wasn’t the work—far from it; I absolutely loved my job and what it meant for me personally as well as the community. However, I soon realized I was one of only two Black arts administrators in the entire city. Let that sink in for a moment … I’ll wait … Two arts administrators of color in a major metropolitan city of approximately 880,000. As far as I’m concerned—as an arts administrator with over 15 years in the sector—Columbus was failing its art communities.

My healing process occurred alongside my career in the arts—first as a student and volunteer; then as an artist and a teaching artist; and now as an arts administrator and leader. The transformation happened over the past 25 years. While the trauma is no longer debilitating, it is never forgotten. And, while the arts didn’t heal the trauma alone, theater was instrumental in helping me build the language and my own awareness of the trauma, and in seeking additional outside assistance. It is impossible for me to separate these narratives. I fervently believe that at its core, our work in the cultural sector is to build a more inclusive, empathetic, and humane society. As leaders we must recognize that many of the people we interact with on a daily basis have experienced some sort of trauma, bias, or oppression based on gender, sexual orientation, or race. It is not that hard to accomplish—just use the tools acquired through the arts themselves.

I’ve always spent a lot of time thinking about issues related to gender, identity and culture. As the first-born daughter of a Mexican mother and a Bulgarian father, I spent much of my childhood in a state of cultural confusion as I tried to navigate both of the cultures that I had inherited, and assimilate to the one that I was born into as an American. I grew up listening to opera with my dad, eating taquitos with my mom, and learning to speak English as my third language. In addition to this, I soon saw the differences between myself and my brothers in all of the cultures that we were navigating. These differences deeply affected me as a young girl. Music was my safe space: a place where identity didn’t matter. People often refer to music as the universal language, but I have come to a different conclusion. I believe that emotion is our universal, and the arts offer us a safe place to investigate what it means to be human.