See why some local stakeholders are worried about cuts Congress might make to arts funding
“Cultural opportunities affect economic development, dollars and expansion. Somebody’s going to go someplace else if there isn’t a good school system, if there’s not a good medical system, and if you don’t have opportunities in that community for cultural events ... The arts or the cultural opportunities drive economic development now across the United States.” —Brian Goesl, Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council executive director
In mid-March, national news reports indicated President Donald Trump’s proposed budget would eliminate several agencies that support the arts throughout the nation, agencies whose work touches many corners of our cultural lives.
Specifically, the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Institute of Museum and Library Services could all face the guillotine in the president’s attempt to tighten the federal budget.
Of course, a president’s initial budget proposal and the one that actually moves through Congress are typically different animals, but the push is there and local organizations are ready to push back and tell their story.
To varying degrees, local nonprofit arts and culture organizations would feel the sting if NEA, NEH, IMLS and CPB funds were stripped from the federal budget. In many cases, federal funds provide necessary seed money for operations and programming, without which survival is precarious at best.
Performing and visual arts
Perhaps chief among those groups to feel the burn would be the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council, which runs the Regional Arts Center and manages the Perot Theatre, in addition to offering arts classes at Arts on Main and putting artists in the schools through its successful ArtsSmart program.
A series of NEA grants to TRAHC indicates the type of programming that could be lost if the agency is axed. The MOMIX “Opus Cactus” appearance in Texarkana on April 15 is one example with a $10,000 grant that helps make it possible. Included
is a master class for local dance students, in addition to a performance that conjures the beauty of the American Southwest on the Perot Theatre stage.
“We could not bring MOMIX into our community if we did not have the National Endowment for the Arts,” said Brian Goesl, TRAHC’s executive director. They simply don’t have the resources to pay for the performance fee, hotel rooms, advertising and other expenses incurred. The grant helps offset such fees, but it’s not complete underwriting.
“Those are incredibly important for us, and it is for any performing organization and any visual arts organization,” Goesl said. “This idea that we are going to be able to support ourselves financially with no help is just not the case.” Since 2008, he says, arts organizations have already “creeped back” with membership, donations and outside sponsor support.
“Some of us have gotten back to that 2008 figure, some of us haven’t,” Goesl said. Many performing arts centers shut down, or they scaled back like TRAHC did with its Perot Theatre Series.
“We had to, and we’ve not ramped back up,” Goesl said. Limited budgets are the reality they’ve dealt with for several years.
Other $10,000 NEA grants of this type given to TRAHC since 1998 helped fund a Latino Cultural Arts Mini Festival, instruction and performances by taiko drummers from California, the Dance Theater of Harlem’s Perot performance and master class, a Ten Tenors concert and the Jump, Jive and JamFest arts festival that used to be held downtown.
“We used to use it quite regularly in support of performances at the Perot Theatre,” said Goesl. This year was the first in several that they received this sort of NEA grant.
Since 1984, NEA grants totaling $257,7000 have helped TRAHC achieve its mission, according to figures supplied by the arts agency.
“The other thing that this can affect is the National Endowment for the Humanities. That directly affects not our performances, but the visual arts,” Goesl said. For instance the civil rights exhibit “For All the World to See” at the RAC early this year was made possible by this type of financial backing.
“That exhibit would cost us, probably just in shipping alone, about $2,200. And then the exhibit itself would be another $15,000 to $18,000,” Goesl said. “That’s how good that exhibit was.” A Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit a couple years ago is another example.
But these exhibits, the Perot Theatre shows and what performing arts centers, non-profit galleries and cultural organizations provide are vital for the community, Goesl and others point out.
“We believe that we make life better for
“We believe that we make life better for our communities ... Cultural opportunities affect economic development, dollars and expansion.” —Brian Goesl
our communities,” Goesl said. And when people move to a community, they look for cultural opportunities. That’s not just individually, but also true for companies looking to locate somewhere.
Part of the story arts agencies strive to tell concerns the arts’ impact on the larger world. It’s important to the overall health of the community, Goesl said, including economic development.
“Cultural opportunities affect economic development, dollars and expansion. Somebody’s going to go someplace else if there isn’t a good school system, if there’s not a good medical system, and if you don’t have opportunities in that community for cultural events, they’re going to go someplace else where it is,” Goesl said, adding, “The arts or the cultural opportunities drive economic development now across the United States.”
Years ago, controversial art exhibits got people fired up about federal arts funding. But Goesl points out that funding is more restricted now. And about comparing the military budget with an arts budget, he says, “There is no comparison.” He also can’t see private revenue sources keeping up with what could be lost in federal funds.
“I hope enough people say, ‘No, we’re not going to do this.’ Very similar to what we just went through with Obamacare,” Goesl said about the public standing up to support the arts.
Museums
For the Texarkana Museums System, programming is where federal funds help the most. Curator Jamie Simmons points to a good example this month with an upcoming living history performance April 22. The state agency that provides the TMS with this opportunity is funded by the NEH.
“We got a grant to do that from the Arkansas Humanities Council,” Simmons said. The NEH funds state humanities councils and then grants are used to reach local programs like the TMS.
That living history event, titled “The Great War: American Soldiers, Tactics, and Technology,” provides insight into World War I as it was experienced by our soldiers. It’s not free. A travel fee is there, for one thing. It’s typical of the type of programming you’ll find at the Ahern Home.
“Those programs are funded in part by NEH funding that goes to the state organization,” Simmons said. It’s not unique to Arkansas, either. It’s across the country. Traveling exhibits are another area where such funds are used. And the IMLS has also helped the TMS. After all, part of the TMS mission is to preserve history as a museum.
“That’s a direct community connection there, too,” Simmons said, noting they’ve also applied for NEA funding.
The curator suspects people don’t quite realize the type of programming federal funds support. In this case of living history, it enables the TMS to teach history in an engaging way.
“Living history is always a very interactive way to experience history,” Simmons said.
Symphonies
For the Texarkana Symphony Orchestra, stripping federal arts funding wouldn’t be quite as dire, but the impacts would be felt.
Andrew Clark, the TSO’s executive director, first points to moves by the Texas legislature to cut arts funding. “They have been working on their budget that will fund the TCA, the Texas Commission on the Arts, for the next two years, since the legislature only meets every two years,” Clark said.
Several cuts are in that budget, said Clark. “Which would result in the largest cut of any state that the TCA is aware of right now to their arts funding budget,” he explained. That would be a $5 million cut seen in both the Senate and House bills. There’s also an additional $1.4 million cut proposed by the Senate Finance Committee for the TCA’s arts education program, he says. “Which is a 34 percent cut overall to the TCA’s budget.”
It could significantly affect Arts Respond education grants the TSO receives, for one thing. “It could certainly impact those grants,” Clark said. Also, he foresees a potential impact to Texarkana with a reduction in Texas Cultural District funding.
“We thought we were going to have a large pot of money to deal with but they’ve cut that back now,” Clark said about cultural districts. It’s a program Texarkana just recently entered to much local fanfare.
Clark says the way the funding cycles work in Arkansas and Texas, such impacts would be felt more in 2018 and 2019. The TSO gets financial support from the both TCA and the Arkansas Arts Council.
“For TSO, that represents only 3 to 4 percent of our budget on an annual basis, so around about $23,000,” Clark said. That’s between both states. If an NEA dissolution goes through, he explained, it would significantly affect both the AAC and TCA.
Clark says 40 percent of the NEA’s funding actually gets distributed to state arts agencies such as the ones that support local programs through different types of grants, whether it’s operating funds or arts-in-education or other areas. Clark says a loss of such funding could affect the educational outreach TSO has in the schools.
“We this year got two Arts Respond grants from the TCA of about $1,000 apiece and these help to fund our student concerts in the Perot Theatre. They helped to fund the events like going out to the Texas-side Boys and Girls Club, bringing guest artists for those kinds of things,” Clark said.
But he said as best they could, the TSO would not allow their programs to go away. Private donations and foundations are the dominant source of funding for student concerts.
“And we would find other ways to cover the monies for the other educational outreach things that we do,” Clark said. A more significant impact could be felt if they lost funding that goes to support guest artists, his salary and other staff.
“It would have an impact, not a severe impact,” Clark said, noting, “Arts agencies have known for quite some time that we needed to depend less and less on government grant funding, and so we’ve really worked, at least in TSO’s regard, to not anticipate or not expect those government grants, particularly the state arts grants, to be a huge and significant portion of our funding.”
Public Radio
For Texarkana’s National Public Radio affiliate, KTXK, CPB funds are the lifeblood without which they couldn’t operate as they do now. For example, in the year ending in September of 2015, CPB grants to KTXK totaled roughly $96,000 out of a total operating expenses budget of a little more than $387,000.
Longtime station general manager Steve Mitchell built KTXK into the station it has become, now operating at its new media center on the campus of Texarkana College. He says public radio stations across the country have about a similar percentage of funding from CPB.
“We all use that money to purchase programs. In my case, NPR, PRI (Public Radio International)—for instance ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ is purchased with that, ‘Morning Edition,’ ‘All Things Considered’—national programming,” Mitchell said. “The key thing here is that the network NPR doesn’t receive federal funding. The funding comes from the affiliates like myself, of which there are …. 1,300 locally- and independently-owned public stations in the country.”
Of those, a bit more than 900 of those are NPR affiliates, meaning if local stations go away, national NPR goes away, Mitchell said.
Mitchell is quick to point out how respected NPR is as a news source. According to a 2016 survey of nearly 2,000 adults that he references, NPR is ranked tops by the American public in such areas as integrity, trustworthiness and respect, above media institutions like The New York Times, CNN and Fox News.
“That’s significant. That’s why it is so important for public radio and public broadcasting to survive,” Mitchell said, adding that about half of the public radio stations serve rural areas. The Texarkana market is considered rural.
“In our case and in many cases, if public radio goes away, that’s the only contact this market will have with news and information,” Mitchell said, calling KTXK the only full-time news and information station in this market.
This is about the fourth or fifth time Mitchell’s gone through one of these threats to axe the arts from the federal budget, and he says nobody really understands why this happens. He points out that CPB money amounts to only $1.35 per person per year.
“Now how do you break that down? It’s one-one-hundredth of one percent of the total federal budget. That’s how little money we’re talking about,” Mitchell said. “We’re talking about a cockpit cover on a fighter jet. That’s about what they cost. So that’s how little bit of money.”
But with that small amount of money, he says, look at the impact on the American public. “You take 30 percent of my budget away, I can’t operate. It’s that simple,” Mitchell said. There is no excess. It’s him, one other full-time staff person and a couple of part-timers. Money goes to programming.
The impact would wreak havoc on a few levels. It’s a domino effect. If KTXK can’t afford the popular programming they supply now, such as “Morning Edition,” underwriters wouldn’t support the station. “Our listeners are not going to pledge with us,” he said. Another pledge week just started on Thursday.
“They’re critical now,” Mitchell said. If CPB was lost, KTXK couldn’t make up the loss through those listeners and business sponsors.
“I think the arts in general have become scapegoats because there are certain people who think that it’s a good target because they may not like a piece of art that has been funded,” Mitchell said.
Or they don’t like public radio or public TV because they tend to tell the truth. “And they don’t like that,” Mitchell said.
He puts the essential issue this way: “Look at the good that ‘Sesame Street’ has done in this country for public television. Look at the good that NPR has done to bringing news and information and the stories that we’re doing now and the election coverage.”
He doesn’t understand how the arts is turned into the easy scapegoat. Or how the target is public radio.
“What is wrong with funding good public broadcasting or good art in this country today?” Mitchell said. “That’s part of the problem we have right now in this country is we don’t concentrate enough on the fine arts.”