New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
New fund helps CT arts organizations survive
The pandemic forced arts organizations across the state to close the curtains during its earliest days. Now, several nonprofit performance organizations are receiving relief through a new fund supported by the state and federal governments.
“We know that this pandemic has made it extremely difficult for arts organizations and in our state,” Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said Tuesday. “It’s literally been a matter of keeping employees on the payroll and keeping the lights on for these organizations and for the many theaters that have received the grants.”
Bysiewicz gathered virtually with groups from across Fairfield Country — along with state and local officials — to celebrate $9 million in funding for the arts. She and state Director of Arts, Preservation and Museums Elizabeth Shapiro spoke alongside grant recipients, including representatives from the Stamford Symphony ($185,600 grant), the Westport Country Playhouse ($365,800), Greenwich-based BackCountry Jazz ($31,400), and Music Theatre of CT, based in Norwalk ($44,600).
“This is an investment,” said Russell Jones, Stamford Symphony executive director. “The arts are not a cost. The arts are an investment in everything we do for our communities.”
Those four groups represented only a fraction of the organizations that received COVID Relief Fund for the Arts grants — administered by the Department of Economic and Community Development. More than
150 organizations got a cash infusion from the program, which repurposed money from the first CARES Act and Connecticut’s Coronavirus Relief Fund.
Left without audiences for most of the year, arts venues have struggled to keep themselves afloat since March. Ticket sales tanked dramatically in 2020 and so did philanthropic giving; the analytics firm TRG Arts found that from November 2019 to November 2020, ticket revenues fell by 96.3 percent.
Among the biggest beneficiaries were New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater ($551,400), the Goodspeed Opera House Foundation in East Haddam ($532,100) and the Horace Bushnell Memorial Hall Corporation in Hartford ($480,900).
Statewide, arts and culture institutions make up about 5 percent of the state’s total economy, generating more than $9 billion annually and supporting 57,000 jobs, according to the lieutenant governor.
“Our arts organizations are critical to keeping our downtown and main streets thriving and bringing people to our state,” said Bysiewicz.
Shapiro emphasized that the spending doesn’t stop within the walls of performance spaces. Without theaters, concert halls and other performance spaces to attract customers to communities, restaurants, hotels and retail outlets suffer tangential losses, she said.
“Every time an arts organization is forced to be dark, there is residual damage in communities,” said Shapiro.
The DECD restricted grants to nonprofit arts organizations that demonstrated a 25 percent loss of between 2019 and 2020. Recipients also had to have at least one full-time or full-time equivalent employee, which disqualified some volunteer organizations.
With a difficult year behind them, and the promise of reopened theaters ahead, each of the arts professionals who stood virtually alongside Bysiewicz Tuesday expressed tempered optimism about the months to come.
“I hope it is the beginning of a new dialogue about the value of the arts,” said Michael Barker, executive director of the Westport Country Playhouse. Five other Westport organizations received funding, along with eight in Ridgefield, six each in Stamford, Greenwich and Norwalk and four in Bridgeport.
Hartford had 17 organizations receive money, New Haven had nine, including the Shubert Theater.
“Our stage crews and members of the union have been out of work since early March, and so for a lot of us, we all have the same challenges,” said Shubert Executive Director John Fisher. The theater received a grant of $118,000.
“The funding is to keep us going and hopefully help us reopen and get us back to normal,” Fisher said. “We’re looking at many, many months more of challenging times. It will get better, and people will return, but it’s going to be a fairly long, slow process.”
Barker, of the Westport Country Playhouse, underscored that the pandemic forced the storied playhouse to tighten its purse strings early on. The playhouse had to furlough its staff and cancel upcoming projects that would have employed more than 100 freelance artists from the region, he said.
“This grant is the shot in the arm that allowed us to not harden our finances further so that we can be ready when the world opens back up,” said Barker.
After thanking the lieu
tenant governor and the state representatives who joined the call to stress the importance of the arts in
Connecticut, Barker made one plea to the audience.
“Help these organizations with your dollars and
your attention now,” he said. “So that when we are ready to go, we can all go together.”