Americans for the Arts

Rebecca Novick

In the chapter I contributed to 20under40: Reinventing the Arts & Arts Education for the 21st Century, I highlighted a theater company called 13P, a group of 13 playwrights who came together with the intention of producing one play by each of them and then disbanding. In that context, I was celebrating their interest in a mission that could be accomplished in a limited timespan, but they also serve as an astoundingly successful example of an organization centered on artists and driven by the agenda of its founding artists.

The 13P model relies on placing its resources in the hands of each playwright in turn, and hiring administrative and producing help show by show, depending on the needs of a particular project. In Minneapolis, the Workhaus Collective is exploring a similar model while in residence at the Playwrights Center (also a good example of a larger organization offering umbrella services to a smaller one). 

Jeanie Duncan

The Challenge: Assessing the Organization’s Relevance

According to the latest statistics maintained by Americans for the Arts, there are about 5,000 local arts agencies in the United States. Many of these agencies take the form of a United Arts Council. And while there are some common structural and operational similarities, I like to say that, “If you’ve seen one United Arts Council, you’ve seen one United Arts Council.” At its best, a United Arts Council is specifically designed to serve its particular regional community through a distinctive and unique blend of programs and services.

The United Arts Council of Greater Greensboro’s (UAC) portfolio of services and programs includes fundraising, grantmaking, marketing, and advocacy. The UAC was established in 1961 by the business community as a united fundraising effort for a core group of arts organizations. For more than 40 years, the UAC has operated an annual campaign (known within the industry as a “United Arts Fund,” or UAF), which at its fundraising peak in 2008 raised $1.62 million. In this regard, Greensboro’s UAC is like most across the country: It’s both a fundraising engine, cultivating and securing contributed revenue largely from the local private sector, and a chief grantmaker to the local arts sector, investing approximately 90 percent of funds granted into a small, defined group of member agencies. 

Claudia Bach

We might look more critically at how our current structure lumps radically different entities into this  single basket labeled the nonprofit arts organization: very large institutions such as the Metropolitan Opera or the Getty Museum; regional theaters and community art centers; tiny fringe theaters, artists’ start ups, and community festivals all share nonprofit arts organization status. Some of these, especially the longstanding institutions, seem to handle the 501(c)(3) structure with success. At the other end of the spectrum we find artistic work that seems to have woken up to find itself carrying a big heavy carapace made up of 501(c)(3) regulations and practices.

Perhaps it is time to stop assuming that one 501(c)(3) basket is the right container for all nonprofit arts entities. Maybe we can start to sort arts groups into a greater diversity of structures while still assuring that we have mechanisms to encourage artistic work and access. Here are some things I find interesting as we navigate this terrain. 

Valerie Beaman

Arts incubators are not a new model, but it seems to me that recently some of them have taken on a new joie de vivre. I attribute this to the fact that they are no longer necessarily focused on developing artists into new 501(c)(3) organizations, but empowering ordinary mortals to try their hand at creating something for their own imagination and amusement.

The success of organizations like Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward is confirming research which finds that the younger generation wants to participate in art, not passively observe it. 3rd Ward is a for-profit membership organization which provides space, back office services, food, galleries, a supportive community, and top-of-the-line creative resources, including photo studios, media lab, jewelry studio, wood & metal shops, along with a huge education program. You don’t have to be a member to enjoy the classes, but membership gets you access to the studios. 

Kate Marquez

There is no question the arts are essential to build community in dynamic, lasting ways. However, arts organizations are constantly defending this concept. Unfortunately, in today’s economic climate it seems the best way to keep the arts alive is to attach monetary terms to their worth.

Southern Arizona Arts and Cultural Alliance (SAACA) has found there is more to gain than lose by venturing down this avenue and building lasting partnerships with businesses, for the sake of preserving art and supporting artists and musicians.

When local government funding was no longer available, due to budget cuts, SAACA turned to the business community to collaborate on events and programs. SAACA began to build arts-related partnerships, creating benefits for all parties that continue to unfold and grow. 

Diane Ragsdale

There’s an old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial that ran back in the 1980s. It first showed a baker’s alarm clock going off in the wee hours of the morning and then the baker shuffling into the shower, and then into the bakery, all the time muttering “Time to make the donuts...The donuts!" When the alarms go off at the homes of artistic and managing directors of nonprofit arts institutions across the United States, I imagine them waking up and sighing “Time to meet more donors...The donors...The donors!"

There’s a lot of talk these days about transformation of the arts sector. But before we consider what we might look like in the future it might be worth reflecting on the fact that the arts sector has undergone enormous transformation already. Many institutions have evolved from rough-and-tumble clans filled with artists running around in blue jeans to...well, to professionalized bureaucracies filled with fundraisers striding around in suits. We were prodded into this transformation by corporate types who perceived our way of doing business as chaotic and, therefore, ineffective.

But what if the corporate types were wrong decades back when they told us that becoming more like them would make us more stable and, therefore, better able to fulfill our missions? 

Rebecca Novick

Asked to write about new business models I find myself instead thinking of un-business models. How can we move the business from the center where in fact the art belongs? Not move the money, which is always necessary to some degree, but the business, the unholy preoccupation with systems and structures and buildings and the perpetual employment of administrators.

I have the honor to be involved in a project that is striving to do this, a big, messy, ambitious collaboration with spiritual aims and practical struggles, led by a playwright and shepherded by his family of collaborators. Soulographie: Our Genocides is an international project organized by playwright Erik Ehn to bring together the 17 plays he wrote in the last decade about various genocides. Teams in ten cities are producing one or more of the plays locally, in preparation for performances of the full cycle at La Mama in New York City in November 2012. 

Helena Fruscio

We can all see the business models changing – for-profits with a social mission, nonprofits with a business models that include historically “for-profit” ventures, and sole proprietors, small business owners, and entrepreneurs devising new plans, products, and businesses at a breakneck speed.

In Berkshire County, a rural community with a population of about 120,000 in western Massachusetts, we have started a movement that encompasses and supports the needs of this swiftly changing business dynamic.

It starts with the acknowledgment of the new businesses dynamic and then working to shift the focus on the core and driving values of the emerging field: Creativity. 

James Undercofler

Perhaps the most significant and radical departure from the traditional 501(c)(3) (NFP) are the direct to consumer internet businesses, such as artistShare , Etsy, etc. In addition, philanthropy/investor sites such as Kickstarter are revolutionizing giving.

The direct to consumer businesses are organized either as limited liability corporations (LLCs) or individually-organized entities (individuals file IRS, Section C, 1040). Assessment of risk determines whether to form an LLC or not. What’s particularly interesting about these sites is their range: from those that involve “audience” in the artistic process, to those that aggregate artistic products in an almost social network sort of way. From my limited knowledge of their net revenue, I do know that some of these sites are producing significant profits to their owners/creators.

Some assert that the “new investors/donors” resulted from Hurricane Katrina and the massive earthquake in Haiti, that technology that made it easy to give small amounts through one’s cell phone. 

Colin Tweedy

I sense a sea change in the way the arts are funded. There is no doubt that many countries in Europe are cutting their culture budgets. A recent leader in the Financial Times concluded:

“Cultural organisations also need to do more to help themselves. A new act is unfolding in the drama of arts funding – and artists must play their role to the full.”

Arts organisations are entrepreneurial by nature. Many of the largest arts organisations are becoming more commercially savvy.

In London, where the lion’s share of all private cultural investment is raised, major bodies have seen the light. The Royal Opera House joined forces with RealD, a film and production company to provide 3D movies of their productions worldwide; the National Theatre is producing films of its block buster productions to 380 cinemas across the globe. The public grant percentage of their income has been reducing annually. 

Paul Miller

Founder’s Beware! Do you have a great idea to found a program to help others in need or benefit a worthy cause or a unique artistic goal? If so please ask yourself the following questions:

•    Should you establish a nonprofit, a for-profit, or a low-profit organization?

•    Are your ideas protected?

•    Do you have a clear exit strategy?

•    If you’re successful and your project takes off, will you be ready to deal with people who have  power and resources and are used to getting their way but who do not understand the creative process? 

Claudia Bach

The nonprofit arts organization. An ungainly set of modifiers. But in the pre-professionalized mid-1970s, when I had to create my own bachelors degree in arts administration, I felt like I was part of an exciting evolutionary force, helping to grow the structural integrity and value of the arts within the conceptual and legal arts nonprofit corporate framework.

At that time it appeared to be a boundless horizon: a corporate structure where artists could gather force to develop and publicly share their work, communities could access entertainment and elucidation, and where we could rest assured that cultural legacies would inspire us and be preserved for future generations. I don’t think I, or my fellow travelers, questioned this as a common good. It was the chosen path and our work was to use it to good advantage in service of the arts. 

Diane Ragsdale

In his book The Revolutionary Stage, Joseph Zeigler states that Arena Stage in Washington, DC, began as a for-profit corporation by selling shares totaling $15,000 (at seven percent interest) to 300 Washingtonians. As part of doing research related to my dissertation topic—the impact of economic forces on the American resident theater movement—I recently read a speech called “The Long Revolution” written in 1978 by Zelda Fichandler, founder of Arena Stage.

She writes that she founded the theater in 1950 as a regular profit corporation, in order to better maintain control of its artistic policy, and that the theater became a nonprofit seven years later “in order to become eligible for gifts and grants, especially from the Ford Foundation which entered the field that year.”

Ms. Fichandler elaborated on the transition to becoming a nonprofit, saying:

“[…] we made all of our expenses at the box office for roughly the first fifteen years of our existence. It was as late as the mid-sixties when we conceded that we couldn’t continue to do this, but had to become a deficit-producing organization.