The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
State’s public art spending under siege
Just outside the Department of Allied Health and Nursing at Gateway Community College in New Haven, Cat Balco’s 24-foot, abstract painting raises questions.
All those pinkish, roundish, repeating forms — are they about health?
“That’s what I surmised,” said Alice Pandolfi, administrative coordinator for the department. “It fosters conversation. I think it’s beautiful.”
Balco, a Hamden artist and professor of art at the University of Hartford, sees a link between the rhythmic flow of the three-panel work and healing. Most important is that it makes people feel, think, react.
That’s the state’s “1 percent for art” program at its best.
In 1978, Connecticut became one of the first states to adopt a recommendation sweeping across the nation’s arts community: 1 percent of the cost of all new public buildings and major renovations is devoted to the purchase of art.
That would total $200,000 for a building that
costs $20 million.
Over the years the program has spent at least $18 million and the state has installed more than 400 sculptures, paintings and other art works at colleges and universities, agency buildings, homes for developmentally disabled residents, courthouses and more.
Now it’s under siege, suspended for 2018 and 2019 under a budget agreement that was hammered out last fall by six top legislative leaders with no hearings and zero public debate. It’s unlikely that even the majority of lawmakers knew it or paid attention to it in the 700-page document they approved.
Republican leaders wanted to kill the program altogether. The 2-year hold was a compromise.
The reason, on the surface, is cost at a time when we’re deep in the hole. But the battle over this state’s art spending is also part of a broader culture war between liberals and conservatives that goes back to the founding of the United States.
Who do we want to be as a state, as a society? Can art and culture ever compete for scarce spending at a time when we can’t meet the basic needs of health, shelter and safety?
“If we’re going to use common sense,” said J.R. Romano, the state Republican chairman, “the state being in a dire situation — Seymour had to lay teachers off because they were cut $8 million in their state funding for education — are we going to try to fund Seymour to make sure there are teachers, or do we want a statue in front of the courthouse in Bridgeport?”
Advocates say spending money for art is every bit as integral to the state economy as any other activity — and less expensive than most. The basic argument is this: Connecticut’s biggest economic problem is that it’s not attracting enough people who want to live here, causing the tax base to erode. High taxes are part of that, but many factors weigh in.
Public art can and does make the state more livable and, if it’s doing its job right, it can help spark inspiration.
That’s how Anthony Nowlin sees it. Nowlin, a student at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, was studying for a math quiz beside one of the square, concrete-and-brick pavilions installed in the courtyard there in 1998.
“It’s kind of weird but it gives me a lot of energy,” said Nowlin, of Stamford, who plans to attend Southern Connecticut State University after graduating.
No, that’s not weird at all. It’s art.
“We consistently talk about becoming a state that is attractive to all kinds of people,” said Kristina Newman-Scott, the state’s director of culture, who heads the state Office of the Arts in the Department of Economic and Community Development.
“We invest so little money in the arts in our state and the ripple effect of investing in art is so powerful and positive,” Newman-Scott said.
Upgrades underway
On a personal level, I’ve been familiar with the percent-for-art movement since the 1970s, when a mentor of mine wrote a book designed to help local governments jump into funding art as part of public construction. Philadelphia was the first jurisdiction to do it, back in 1959, with a 2 percent guideline.
I favor the spending because it brings great value for the amount allocated.
But the more important point is this: Let there be a
public debate and let the people of the state decide with their votes. If Republicans want to say let’s kill the percent-for-art program and Democrats want to save it, then bring it out into the open, out of the back rooms of the state Capitol where it’s been for decades.
This is not a moral issue, like gay marriage or the barbaric practice of separating children from parents in immigration enforcement. It should be a public debate and there are many ways to slice and dice it.
And if we do save the program, we need to improve it. Shockingly, the state doesn’t have a unified, complete record of the works that are tied to public buildings, saying who did it, where the artist is from and so forth. For example, the University of Connecticut purchase of a $480,000 installation in 2017 by the late Connecticut artist Sol LeWitt is not on a database the state provided for me.
The state’s website showing percent-for-art purchases is well designed and easy to read, but it’s incomplete. And most of the works I visited, in Stamford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Norwalk, lacked any kind of placards or plaques explaining what they were.
That would improve the sense of state and regional pride people feel, which is a big part of the art, and of the economy.
All these improvements are under way now, Newman-Scott and Tamara Dimitri, the program manager, told me.
More local needed
At its best, the program funds local artists, who are spending money in the state, such as Balco, the Hamden artist who is associate professor of art at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. That painting at Gateway, a $24,000 commission last year, enabled her to keep her studio going during a break from teaching.
After costs, including paying a commission to the New Haven gallery that represents her, Balco netted about $8,000 for the work, she said.
“I’m a small business and I’m paying the people who work for me, said Balco, whose abstract painting hangs outside the offices of the department of nursing and allied health — and is loosely related to health.
“It’s going right back into the economy,” Balco said.
At about $600,000 a year, the program packs more bang for the buck than the $60 million Small Business Express program, which gives loans and grants. One such art business is Versteeg Art Fabricators in Bethany, which builds, repairs and installs large, complicated works.
“It’s very important, it’s seed money and they get a lot of people working,” owner Peter Versteeg said of the percent for art porogram.
Unfortunately, not enough of the art is from Connecticut artists. It’s a balancing act, NewmanScott and Dimitri explained. The program is open nationally so that agencies — who pick art for their buildings with committees for each project — can find precisely the best works for them.
Besides, Connecticut wants its artists to have access to commissions in other states; no one needs a trade war between states like we’re seeing between nations these days.
But what is art?
Overall, Connecticut as a state spends about $5.5 million a year on various arts and culture programs, much of that directed as earmarks by the legislature, not by Newman-Scott’s office. New York City, by comparison, spends $155 million, she said, even as private groups spend billions.
Connecticut is — or was — one of 27 states with an active “percent for art” program, typically a mandatory 1 percent in new public building construction, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. Five states have canceled programs.
The art purchases have averaged about $600,000 a year over the last 10 years, which is just a tiny fraction of a $20 billion budget. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions are now in various stages of proposals.
That spending comes as the state eliminates thousands of jobs under costcutting by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to balance the budgets.
That’s the problem with the art, as one employee of the state Department of Developmental Services sees it. She was outside at a Norwalk residential facility when I stopped by Thursday to see a work titled “Family,” a cement sculpture installed in 1995 for $19,630.
“People are getting cut,” said the employee, who spoke anonymously because she doesn’t speak for the department. “If they downsize enough, what have we got?”
She said the sculpture needs repairs, which indeed it does.
Across the state, some works, such as a pair of glass walls at the Stamford court house, inspire great admiration and clearly stand out as public art. Others, not so much. Four heavy, handmade metal benches, installed in the Golden Hill Court House in Bridgeport at a cost of $14,000 in 1993, are beautiful on close inspection but few employees there realized they were works of art.
That’s the nature of art, and that’s fine. Romano, the Republican chairman, speaks for the party in insisting he’s all for culture, but not at the expense of basic state needs. He doesn’t even think the state needs a director of culture.
Malloy, in an interview, took a broader view in response to the Republicans’ effort. “I’m happy the Romans didn’t agree with that, or the Venetians or the Tuscans,” Malloy said. “The idea that we don’t support public art doesn’t make a lot of sense in the short term or the long term.”