The ravaging effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the reckoning with racial injustice continue to reverberate throughout the arts sector, with most institutions still reeling. This moment demands visionary and decisive action, and it demands a reliance on the freedom of spontaneous creativity with the certainty of intentional conviction—a.k.a. jazz improvisation—to secure the survival of our arts ecosystem, even without the certainty of a notated score or blueprint for what comes next. As Miles Davis once said, “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note—it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” A spontaneous creativity is especially critical for the institutions most at risk.
By no means does my reflection here seek to divide or to diminish the struggles unfolding across the broader arts and culture sector. I believe that we must work together and create solutions as a wider collective. But this reflection is aimed at prioritizing resources for those communities and institutions historically overlooked and most in need during this ongoing crisis—institutions and communities directly in the line of fire. These institutions have focused on immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, the disability community, women and girls, and the economically disadvantaged. By increasing support in these areas, we can realize a ripple effect that ensures “all boats rise” across the sector, as we fight for the very soul of our democracy, and indeed, the soul of our civilization.
I am inspired by the work of PolicyLink founder Angela Glover Blackwell, whose championing of the “curb cut effect” provides a powerful lens for this advocacy. The curb cut on sidewalks was originally designed to assist people with disabilities. But this simple, yet profound intervention has proven to benefit everyone from parents with strollers to bikers, travelers, and workers. The principle behind the curb cut effect is that policies aimed at uplifting the most vulnerable often lead to societal benefits that ripple outward, strengthening the collective whole.
“There’s an ingrained societal suspicion that intentionally supporting one group hurts another,” Glover Blackwell wrote in “The Curb-Cut Effect” for the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2017. “That equity is a zero sum game. In fact, when the nation targets support where it is needed most—when we create the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully—everyone wins. The corollary is also true: When we ignore the challenges faced by the most vulnerable among us, those challenges, magnified many times over, become a drag on economic growth, prosperity, and national well-being.”
Leaders who serve historically disadvantaged cultural institutions and communities are not lacking in vision, skill, imagination, or the cultural nuances and sensibilities that can only come from within our communities. What is required now are sustained investments and an unshakable belief in our capacity to lead, to be critical changemakers and thought leaders, and to dynamically contribute to a vibrant, flourishing arts ecosystem that anchors a civilization at risk.
Technology is critical to our future, but it is not the next frontier. The construction of larger and more advanced buildings plays a vital role in the growth and expansion of our ecosystem, but they are not the next frontier. The defense and lasting strength of our most fragile institutions and communities—that is the true frontier ahead of us. That is the building of a civilization. A. Philip Randolph, leader of the historic 1963 March on Washington, reminded us that “a community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.”
Without well-orchestrated and highly coordinated interventions and partnerships among the philanthropic, corporate, community, and arts and culture sectors, these long-standing fragile institutions may shutter, recalling the time when federal funding cuts in the 1990s meant that 87 percent of Black theatre institutions at the time were unable to keep their doors open. Just in New York City, eight African American theatres closed in the 1990s, as Samuel A. Hay recorded in African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Without the larger arts and culture sector protecting the very institutions that hold and embody the rich diverse narratives that are our great pluralistic and democratic experiment, the arts and culture sector could very well become part of the cultural monolith that we are trying to push back against—one that builds empires and not civilizations.
I understand that equity is not a monolithic or singular construct, but a complex and multifaceted intersectionality. It is woven through the threads of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, faith, and so much more. This nuanced, holistic understanding is the frontier we must embrace if we are to advance together. So many institutions across this vast and beautiful cultural sector have stood resolutely at the intersection of social justice and the arts, serving as guiding lights for marginalized voices to be heard and celebrated. Now, as we face this pivotal moment, we must stand poised to redefine the very role of arts institutions and reach a resounding radical consensus—to challenge the status quo, to reimagine our purpose, and to set about “imagining a world,” in the words of Audre Lorde, “in which we can all flourish.” With the need to exercise unprecedented courage, conviction, and an indefatigable commitment to building a civilization that will live past our time—as one plants trees under whose shade they may never sit—we can rise to defend this right, stand against the forces that seek to dismantle it, and shape a future where healed femurs abound, standing as a living testament to our shared humanity and the unbreakable strength of a collective will to heal our fragile and fractured democracy.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alice Walker admonished: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” I would humbly recommend a few actions that can be taken now. I am confident there are many more.
- A National Cross-Sector Arts Task Force: This task force would bring together national leaders from philanthropies, corporations, communities, and the arts and culture sector with a focus on a strategic, multi-year plan to invest in arts institutions that are specifically in the line of fire at this time: immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community (particularly trans people), the disability community, women and girls, and the economically disadvantaged.
- Community Standing with Community: Community leaders, community members, and businesses can seek out vulnerable institutions and invest in them: buy tickets, donate (giving at every level is meaningful), and create sponsorships and partnerships to build resiliency and greater connections among the community. Volunteer! If there is a skill or pro bono service that can be provided to move an institution forward, provide it. Make Some Noise! For these vulnerable institutions who may be in danger of closing their doors in silence, don’t let it happen. Share their website and upcoming events on social media to keep them alive and well. Use your influence. Share with your followers.
We have the power to reimagine the world, but only as a collective. In the midst of World War II, Pulitzer-winning writer Katherine Anne Porter penned a sentiment in 1940 that resonates with the struggles we now face—words that provide hope, encourage us to take the long view, and propel us forward…together:
In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.
Dr. Indira Etwaroo is a producer, director, scholar, and arts and culture executive. She is artistic director and CEO of Harlem Stage.
Source Link
