Arts authority founder left his mark
There was always a Calgary arts community.
By being one of the people behind the 2005 creation of the Calgary Arts Development Authority, Terry Rock gave the arts community an organization. He gave it a framework.
Rock was even one of the group that gave it that name.
“We got in trouble for the word authority,” he says. “(People said) oh — that’s not (a) very nice (word) for the arts.
“So I said, that’s our last name — Calgary Arts Development is our first name.”
Rock, the institution’s first presi- dent and CEO, is stepping down at the end of the month to move on to other, unspecified pursuits, after eight years on the job, leaving incoming president and CEO Patti Pon to guide the organization to its next stage of development.
All of which might lead a lot of Calgarians to ask: What, exactly, is an arts authority anyway?
It’s a non-profit organization owned by the City of Calgary. It serves as a hub that connects this city’s arts sector to opportunities, networks and funding. It leads strategic initiatives in issues surrounding the arts (such as this city’s chronic lack of affordable arts space).
Perhaps most critically, it connects the arts sector to the city’s other sectors.
“(In 2004), (then mayor Dave) Bronconnier was pushing the province for funding (the Municipal Sustainability Initiative),” Rock says, “and he said, we need a bucket for culture.
“There’s going to be a bucket for conservation,” he adds, “and a bucket for recreation and (I need an organization that tells me) what goes in that bucket?” (An arts bucket list?) Calgary Arts Development helped spearhead the city’s bid to host the Juno Awards in 2008. It was behind the successful bid to have Calgary named a cultural capital of Canada in 2012.
After about a decade and a half of no spending on arts infrastructure in this city, Rock and CADA initiated the creation of cSpace, an arms-length artspace developer, paving the way (with major financial input from the Calgary Foundation) to purchase King Edward School, which is being transformed into a multi-use arts incubator.
Recently, CADA lay behind the creation of the Arts Plan, an initiative that invited all Calgarians to engage in the process of creating a long term arts plan for the city.
It’s also led the way in consulting with the International Avenue Business Revitalization Zone to launch new arts spaces in northeast and southeast Calgary, and assisted Storybook Theatre and Front Row Players in their efforts to build a new theatre space at the Beddington Community Centre in northwest Calgary, in an effort to spread the city’s artspaces beyond the downtown.
Following the devastating June flood, Calgary Arts Development turned to InvestYYC, the crowd funding platform it took over from Calgary 2012, to create the Alberta Arts Flood Rebuild, a project designed to help affected artists and arts organizations get back on their feet.
Calgary 2012 Executive Director Karen Ball and a former CADA colleague of his says one of Rock’s largest legacies is the organization itself.
“The idea of an arts development authority,” she says, “as opposed to an arts council — Terry is the father of that idea, and (has) proven it in real time, in the right community to be one that works.” (Essentially, an arts council is beholden to its members, while an arts authority is beholden to the voters.)
“It allowed Calgary,” she says, “to develop an organization that can be a real strategic thinker for arts development in this city which has been really exciting for Calgary.”
For Mary Rozsa de Coquet, president of the Roza Foundation and founding co-chair of CADA, the authority created a way for the arts to take a place at the table as an equal partner with the other city sectors.
“The establishment of this agency created a whole new way of looking at the arts from a municipal funding perspective,” Rozsa de Coquet says.
“Partnerships with places like Economic Development. and Tourism Calgary and the school board have become more interesting,” she says, “and (those sectors are now) far more interested in the promotion of the arts.
“The arts have become part of (what we think of as) complete communities,” she adds. “(In Calgary, there’s a) broader understanding of what investment in arts is, and can be.”
For Alderman Brian Pincott, an artist himself — before he was a politician, he was a lighting designer — Rock’s greatest legacy is that he built an institution that started a conversation about arts in this city that’s only growing louder.
“Initially, it was a way to rationalize funding and create a rationalized, arms-length funding agency for the arts,” Pincott says.
“What it has actually meant,” he adds, “is that there is a strong promoter and advocate for the arts in Calgary, and I think that that is Terry’s greatest legacy.”
Possibly the way in which the organization has found a way to successfully merge the arts sector in the overall mainstream of city life is because Rock came to it from a non-arts perspective.
He was a business professor at the University of Calgary (who did his Ph.D in Texas) who was more of a sports fan than arts guy when Alderman Bob Hawkesworth got him doing the research that preceded the creation of Calgary Arts Development.
While he actually did some acting in Texas — playing a crooked Baptist minister in a production of The Foreigner in Lubbock — Rock was not what you might call much of an arts patron.
“(When) we came to Calgary, I don’t think we bought one ticket to anything live,” he says. “We might have gone to some music, and you know, would I have, should I have (gone to see some shows)? Yeah.”
Eight years running the organization that champions the arts transformed him personally as much as the city.
“I will (now) be a subscriber to everything possible,” he says. “I’ll probably go to more (arts) stuff, actually, because I won’t have work commitments where I have to be at events that aren’t actual art.
“I’ll be a donor,” he says, continuing. “(And) it turns out I’m an art collector, which I didn’t know — I have no more room on my walls.”
While there are critics who lament the absence of such things as individual artist grants (CADA plans to introduce those in the coming years), there’s no arguing that CADA, and Rock, changed the conversation about the arts in this city, says Ball.
“What happened was,” she says, “over the course of the development of the arts authority, people started to understand that something was happening in Calgary.
“(It was) something new, something innovative, something dynamic — and I credit Terry with being able to position arts development, to be able to take risks, to be flexible, to be able to be a real strategic adviser to council and city leadership.
“That, I think, it’s his biggest legacy,” she says, “and it’s a huge legacy, not just for Calgary, but for arts councils and arts leaders across the country.”