Glus resigns from Arts Alliance
Jonathon Glus has resigned as president and chief executive officer of the Houston Arts Alliance, the nonprofit agency that manages the city’s civic art commissions and oversees grant funding for the arts from hotel-motel tax dollars.
In a letter to the alliance’s board of directors and advisory council co-signed by HAA board chair Philamena Baird, Glus did not elaborate on his reasons for leaving.
“The time has come for me to pursue new challenges and therefore I will be resigning my position with HAA,” he wrote.
The announcement came just a day after the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs announced that Houston Arts Alliance would get a grant budget increase of 6 percent in 2017; part of an estimated $15.4 million that will be distributed this year to four agencies that support and promote the arts, including the Houston Museum District Association, Miller Theatre Advisory Board and The- ater District Improvement.
Under Glus’ leadership for nine years, the alliance has received numerous accolades and major federal grants that have helped make the city a national leader in the public art realm.
Baird said she had great admiration for Glus. “He took a fragile organization and built it into a substantial agency that has helped the city on so many levels,” she said. “He will be sorely missed.”
The alliance’s board and staff have a retreat starting Monday, and Baird said she was looking forward to “evaluating and rethinking who the alliance is and what we can do to embellish the arts community in Houston.”
The arts have a powerful and vocal advocate in Mayor Sylvester Turner, who is asking agencies to think outside the box, she added. “It’s just thrilling.”
Turner has created a more robust Office of Cultural Affairs to build on the work done in 2015, when the city adopted its first official Arts and Culture Plan (a project Baird co-chaired). Led by Debbbie McNulty, the office has spent months evaluating programs and working to improve their transparency.
That includes the civic art program administered by the alliance, which had not been evaluated during Glus’ entire tenure. The program came under intense scrutiny in late 2014, during a scandal involving the awarding of a major commission. (Ed Wilson’s “Soaring in the Clouds” now hangs above the grand foyer of the George R. Brown Convention Center.)
A Civic Art Program Evaluation completed last fall acknowledged successes but presented “opportunities for improvement at both the administrative and policy levels in three key areas: identity and promotion, distribution of projects, and productivity and performance.”
Glus was not available for comment.