How to honour artists in Waterloo Region?

Here’s a proposal to start the conversation

The cultural calendar for June usually includes the annual Arts Awards Gala and Ceremony, but that’s not happening this time around.

Fortunately, the current trustees of this long-standing tradition have assured us that, after a two-year hiatus, it will return with fresh energies and updated form around this time next year.

Arts Awards Waterloo Region began as the Kitchener-Waterloo Arts Awards. The original impetus came from city hall in Waterloo and in Kitchener. While it is true that the juries charged with selecting the honourees were made up of representatives from the various award categories, anyone could submit a nomination. And the core funding has always come from these two of the region’s eight municipalities.

The intention, then, has always been to provide a way for the public at large to celebrate and honour “what the arts contribute to our community and how it enriches our lives — how it adds vitality to our spirits, broadens our horizons and defines our culture.”

This is markedly different from, say, Hollywood’s Oscars. In that case, we see an industry, formally organized and represented as the “academy,” recognizing and honouring its own through a long established formal process.

There isn’t, and never has been, anything like an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences dedicated to advancing and representing the arts in the greater Waterloo Region. There could and maybe should be such an entity. If there were, it would be possible to imagine a consultation and deliberation process through which the arts community could honour our own.

By the same token, it is also possible to imagine something reciprocal to Arts Awards Waterloo Region as we have known it: a consultation and deliberation process through which the arts community could recognize and honour outstanding contributions to the cultural vitality of our communities from the public at large.

Call it an academy, an association, a network, or whatever. In a field so broad and diverse, it will probably have to be a network of networks. However shaped and constituted, some kind of structure through which people involved in making the arts happen in our communities is a prerequisite for this and many other worthy prospects.

My preference would be a network of networks that would connect everyone involved in making arts, culture and heritage endeavours of every sort happen here in the communities of Waterloo Region.

An association of this scope, if assembled, would quickly overflow the capacities of the Maureen Forrester Recital Hall, the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Hamilton Family Centre combined, readily take up all the seats in the Raffi Armenian Theatre, and maybe even fill most of the Aud.

If and when we ever gather in this way, or even if we just found a way of effectively communicating among us, I will propose:

First, that we conceive, organize and launch an ongoing program through which arts, culture and heritage supporters and practitioners in the greater Waterloo area can recognize and honour outstanding contributions to the cultural vitality of our communities from the public at large.

To get the ball rolling, I’m putting forward the idea that we start with Ken Seiling as he steps down from his 30-plus years of service as regional chair.

From a heritage perspective, Seiling’s contributions are too extensive to list here. The time won’t come soon again when we have someone who taught history and worked as a museum and archive professional fill this position.

From an arts and culture point of view, the first that will come to mind for most of us is the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.

Unparalleled anywhere in Canada, the Arts Fund has made an immeasurable difference “making art happen” for more than 15 years now. This began as Ken Seiling’s initiative, and he has always played an active role in its workings.

The time won’t come soon again when we have someone who is an organist and a choirmaster filling the office of regional chair.

I have a second nominee in mind, and some thoughts about how such an award might be shaped that I’ll save for another day.