The first COPPeR Arts Summit drew 150 artistic types to the East Library on Saturday.
My favorite moment: New philharmonic director Nathan Newbrough was talking about how Colorado Springs has a “second city” complex.
NATHAN: We can’t say we’re that good because we’re not Denver. That’s bollocks!
SUSAN EDMONDSON: He said “bollocks”!
This thing was part of the wider Dream City: Vision 2020 initiative, a project designed to involve a wide swath of our community in discussions about our future.
Some good ideas came out of it:
• Create a Pikes Peak or Bust Festival on Barr Trail and the summit of Pikes Peak, capitalizing on the natural and created beauty here. I think that’s brilliant. (Kathleen Collins, who’s on the boards of everything, came up with that one.)
• Revive the arts bus to take people to arts events and call it Van GO! (That wasn’t there spelling and punctuation; I’m taking liberties.)
• Create an arts meter, next to parking meters where people could donate “common cents” to the arts. (Homeless advocates recently came up with a similar idea, and I think it could work for both causes.)
• Create an Arts Pass that would give you a bundled, discount ticket to various local arts events.
• Work more collaboratively on the administration side. Plenty of arts groups do shows together, but this idea goes a step further. Plenty of arts groups would like a paid staff worker who works 8 hours a week. Instead, several groups could share one worker.
• Develop richer arts districts.
• Build arts/community centers throughout the region.
Another important theme was inclusivity. Local artist and writer Roberta Rand wrote a fine essay about that. Here’s an excerpt. (You can read her entire essay, as well as other comments on the arts summit at the Colorado Springs Arts Blog: csartsblog.freedomblogging.com.
From Diversity to Inclusivity:
A Sticky Wicket for Colorado Springs
By Roberta Rand
Back in the heyday of Citizens Project, circa 1993, I was on my way to a meeting downtown when I came upon a long string of cars parked along Nevada Avenue, all with “Celebrate Diversity” bumper stickers strategically placed on their left bumpers. Oh, the irony – and me without my instamatic camera . . .
Fast forward to last Saturday and the Arts Summit sponsored by COPPeR. I sat at a table with the best and the brightest of the Springs creative community; dancers, musicians, painters and writers. Our assignment: brainstorm a plan to re-brand Colorado Springs as an arts-centric city. We all agreed, at least in theory, that it’s time to move beyond the “celebrate diversity” message to a new spirit of inclusiveness. After all, we’re all in this together. We are the world, right?
And yet, the prevailing view (at least among the sampling at our table), was that the real arts and artists reside downtown and on the West side. Even then, they bemoaned the kitsch factor in Old Colorado City — galleries that cater to tourists with Precious Moments collectibles and schlocky takes on Native American culture.
But it’s precisely this “us vs. them” attitude that presents the biggest hurdle to a true spirit of community among art lovers in Colorado Springs. Artists are a notoriously snobbish and opinionated bunch. Deep down we really don’t want to get along; we’d just as soon annihilate the unenlightened hicks who collect G. Harvey prints and howling coyote figurines. The same goes for those who view any culture south of Briargate as dangerous, depraved and unfit for Christian consumption.
If we are to achieve authentic status as an “arts city” — and not just a series of bastions guarded by our own prejudices of what constitutes “Art,” we must begin to relate to one another as worthy human beings connected by our shared humanity. Kierkegaard said, “When you label me, you negate me.” It’s time to get past the attitude that I am right and YOU are the enemy because we don’t share the same values, political views, religious convictions – or shi-shi Zip code. Intolerant attitudes poison liberal and conservative minds alike. As long as we persist in emphasizing the “other”-ness of people who don’t see the world as we do, the Springs will remain a collection of disjointed cultural fiefdoms.
Celebrating diversity is easy, because you can do it from a distance. Inclusivity, on the other hand, is hard work. It requires engaging with people you may not like or understand. What all of us who love creativity and self-expression must ask ourselves is whether we really do want to get along – or would rather go on as we always have, sticking with our own kind.
In response to the suggestion of sharing an administrator between organizations:
As an arts administrator, both by profession and education (Columbia College Chicago, Master of Arts Management), it’s frankly hard to imagine how three or more organizations could share a single administrative person. This presents severe challenges both for the sharing organizations and the individual that attempts to fill this role:
- During peak times, such as the top of most seasons, how do the organizations figure out who gets priority on the individual’s time? Even within an organization, individuals rarely have more than one direct supervisor due to obvious issues surrounding workload priority. This would be severely exacerbated by having the person report to several supervisors who are not even in the same organization.
- It’s easy enough to split monetary compensation, but who pays for the benefits necessary to attract and hold employees in today’s workplace?
- It is impractical and unrealistic to expect that a single individual will have all the skills, knowledge, and experience necessary to effectively run the entire administrative side of any artistic endeavor. Unless an organization is only looking for the most basic of skills, functions of this position would have to include marketing, financial, development, and operational talents that, quite frankly, just don’t typically all find themselves in the same psyche. And the individual would have to cover all these roles for multiple entities.
There are several approaches that seem better to me:
- Most importantly, I recommend that as artists, musicians, and directors, you educate yourselves about the business and operational functions of your art form. Knowing how to do your finances and what constitutes a good marketing plan will save you a lot of time and money because you’ll be able to do some of it yourself in an efficient manner. To accomplish this, you can do such simple things as auditing undergraduate accounting, marketing, development, and copyright law classes at PPCC or UCCS. You may even wish to look into an Associate’s degree in business or a similar field, such as non-profit administration.
- Temp agencies: while often frowned upon as not sufficiently specialized for work in our sector, these may be able to provide individuals who can fulfill basic office needs if that is all that is required. These present an option that allows for very part time personnel, without the trappings of running an HR function.
- Local students: UCCS, CC, and PPCC have literally hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students in their business, communications, and public administration departments that would love to intern under an arts organization. We use 10-20 interns on an annual basis from these academic institutions in a variety of ways that help keep our costs down. They often take on project-based work that frees us up to not only perform more administrative tasks, but also work on strategy and planning for the growth of our organization. Time for strategic thought often gets lost in the bog of projects and administration, and these interns help us rise above that.
My intent is not to criticize, but to offer some alternatives that have been proven to work for us.