ARTISTS SURPRISED
Less-than-expected grant funding leaves many struggling.
Early in March, Lisa E. Harris had reason to celebrate.
She had finally completed “Cry of the Third Eye,” an “opera for the people” 10 years in the making. Harris, an experimental musician and singer who also tours with Jason Moran, was performing live with her trilogy of elegiac, 30-minute films about gentrification, loss and the passage of time in Third Ward. She was performing a duet with the films as she narrated, sang and played the theramin and other instruments in front of a large outdoor screen at the Smith Neighborhood Library. She got the audience to participate, and this audience was special, including friends and family who star in the film.
“Cry” cost about $90,000 to make, with a cast of 10, equipment rentals, a film editor, film animator, sound engineer and costumes. So, between her teaching, lecturing and touring gigs, Harris spends much of her “free” time applying for grants to support the project. In fact, the March event, co-produced by Houston Public Library and the nonprofit Aurora Picture Show, received a 2020 grant from the city of Houston that she expected would cover some of her expenses.
“Expected” is a key word. Houston’s arts grants are funded by hotel-occupancy-tax revenues, with contracts based on projections made each November for the following year. Last November, Houston First Corp., which collects the tax, estimated it would have $11.3 million for arts grants in 2020 — a record amount. Though the bulk always goes to large organizations such as museums and performing arts companies that drive significant tourism, individual artist contracts this year were projected to top $1 million, supporting 72 community-based projects with grants of $15,000 each. Harris’ project was one of them.
But with the pandemic, hotel business nosedived. In March, Houston First slashed its projections in half.
Harris felt especially shortchanged because she’d finished her project. She met her contract’s obligations. “Now I am in the hole for my budget, and there are no clear answers for where the money will come from,” she says. With the pandemic, her busy slate of out-of-town appearances also went dark. “It’s so unreal. I’ve never been in a position like this,” she says. “I know we’re in a global crisis … but there’s accountability that’s not happening. It’s left to the artists to be creative.”
‘I did not see that coming’
Harris and others say they were unaware of the shortfall until they received their first quarterly checks, smaller and later than expected, and started asking questions.
The grants are administered by the Houston Arts Alliance, which distributes the funds within a few days of receiving them from the city, which funnels them from Houston First. The whole money transfer takes about two weeks.
Some of the artists were shocked to learn that the funding was nearly a real-time process — that their contracts were based on money that wasn’t yet collected. “It’s like somebody from the hotels is running money over to the Alliance,” says Gabriel Martinez, the founder of Alabama Song. He has led workshops for the Alliance for years but never had a grant application accepted until this year.
Martinez knew the pandemic would affect his project because it has an “object element” — a monumental quilt inspired by Houston’s water issues, made with fabric found on city streets — that’s a catalyst for public programs. He thought it odd that the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs and the Alliance never announced this year’s winners, as they customarily do, although that didn’t set off alarms. Then he got an email saying his funds would be reduced. “I did not see that coming,” he says.
After complaints piled up, the Alliance amped up its webpage about HOT (hotel occupancy tax) funding, explaining processes better and adding a HOT distribution tracker that provides up-to-date information on its finances. A message on that page puts the current situation bluntly: “With the revised projection, the first quarter payment is very likely more than half of the funding you will receive this year.”
A clause in the contracts warns that grants can be terminated or reduced if the Alliance doesn’t receive sufficient city funds.
“You see it, but you never anticipate that you need to pay attention to it,” says multidisciplinary artist Candice D’Meza.
Then there’s the issue of delivery during a pandemic. The grants are not open-ended fellowships. They’re service contracts, and they require that 2020 projects be finished in 2020.
That’s now problematic since most of the grants are for community-based work that was based on interaction with the public, and many public venues remain closed or have limited capacity rules. Pivoting to virtual presentations changes the nature of the projects, and artists are concerned about being taken to task for not completely fulfilling their obligations — or being asked to create more work for half the fee.
D’Meza won a grant this year to support “Fatherhood,” a onewoman show that evokes a ritual to reconnect people “across time and space” with physical or emotional homelands. Like Harris, she has expenses to pay, and now they include additional tech people who can help her convert “Fatherland” into a virtual project. “It will be this weird mishmash of live and digital, not my favorite medium,” she says.
Officials say they are trying to be flexible, but it’s not like they can just wave a wand and require less than contracts stipulate. These are legal documents concerning the use of public funds.
Fighting back
Grantees also are irked that while their monies were being reduced, the city and the Alliance were touting access to millions of dollars in emergency relief from other sources, including the federal government.
Debbie McNulty, director of the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, and Alliance CEO John Abodeely say they are using every available resource to help as many artists as possible.
Their budgets and staff were reduced, too. Houston is the only government in the region that secured CARES Act funds for artists, McNulty points out. Abodeely mentions the Greater Houston Area Arts Relief Fund, launched by the Alliance and other organizations, which has awarded emergency grants to 431 people. The Alliance also partnered with other organizations to thoroughly assess the needs of artists and arts workers during the pandemic, launched a website with COVID-19 resources and continues to host weekly town halls.
Several grantees, convinced more can be done, have formed the coalition Arts Accountability Houston to press their case. They declined to speak in person, instead referring me to their prepared statements and an online petition that has gathered more than 120 signatures from the arts community.
Their first statement accuses the city and the Alliance of mishandling public funds. It also demands that this year’s individual artist grantees be paid in full “through whatever means necessary,” seeks a more stable source for future funds and calls for a new grant-funding plan to be created with input from “elected artists and community members” who are paid for their time.
A second statement issued Sept. 21 objects to some of the first solutions Abodeely has floated for helping the 2020 grantees. “We were asked to choose between two untenable options for funding, both of which would cripple the local arts community in Houston by freezing or severely limiting grant cycles for the next 2 to 3 years,” the statement says.
“It’s kind of hard to get a handle on what the ask is,” McNulty says. “Some want current grant amounts increased to be in line with the pre-pandemic world.
I’m grateful for every penny we have to allocate. There were times earlier this year when it was projected to be less.”
She agrees the situation is terrible. “There’s so much uncertainty — I hate that word. But mishandling public funds? I see no evidence of that.”
The grant amounts are lower than anyone wanted, but HOT funds have been delivered according to the contract terms. McNulty doesn’t see other city funding sources that would have functioned better. “For more than 30 years, HOT funds have been stable and reliable,” she says. “All the things that generate revenue for the city are down right now — including sales tax, property tax, fees and parking.”
McNulty also disputes a coalition charge that the city doesn’t value artists. Houston is one of the few cities in the nation that makes individual artist grants, which have increased during the past four years, and Mayor Sylvester Turner is a strong advocate. McNulty says she continually beats a drum for artists with elected officials, and not just to be nice. Artists’ projects encourage cultural tourism that’s now even more important to the city’s economy. “This is one of the biggest assets of our city,” she says. “Experts expect leisure travel will return before business travel.”
Abodeely is listening to the coalition, responding and looking for solutions.
“The pandemic dealt hard realities and a ton of unknowns,” he says. “COVID’s impact exposed vulnerability in systems. For us, it was this: A grant fund driven by tourism was drastically reduced due to a pandemic, raising a discussion and questions about how we fund the arts in Houston.”
An alternative to HOT?
“For artists, it’s never a question of, ‘Can I do this?’ ” Martinez says. He would have pursued his project with or without a grant.
But he’s never had one fall through before. “It affects how artists live, not just their projects. I live on grants.”
He thinks the city needs an alternative to the HOT-funded system. “No one could have predicted this,” he says, “but next time it could be a storm. It’s only a matter of time, and it will happen again. There’s a lot of different ways the city could raise money for artists.”
Abodeely agrees, to a point. He hopes to find a way to stabilize grant amounts “should we endure another yearlong catastrophe that freezes society,” he says. “While we are moving with urgency, it will take time to determine whether we change the existing system or create a new one for a long-term fix.”
Other cities and states fund arts in other ways, driven by their unique dynamics and priorities. Abodeely may look at some of their best practices. “We also have to understand what drove us to pursue our current structure,” he says. “Are there risks to abandoning the way we do things, and what are the benefits? We need to weigh it all.”
Anthony Almendárez, whose grant was for a lecture performance about history, memory and marginalized people, says he can barely make ends meet even though he also has a full-time job. “It’s frustrating to see the slow response to the plights of artists who … have done everything to uphold their end of the deal. These grants are crucial to the successful completion of our work, and to experience their loss after we worked hard and labored tirelessly has been tremendously disheartening and stressful.”
For some grantees, just figuring out their own next steps is a big enough load.
Allison Hunter, for one. She won a grant to help support “Luxuriant Forest,” an immersive, multisensory video installation inspired by similarities between Houston’s wetlands and tropical rainforests in Madagascar. Collaborating with colleagues at Rice University, Hunter planned to take students to Madagascar to film lemurs. She wanted to hire a composer to create a sound score and a graphic designer to create a website. It all went to heck with restrictions on international travel, and the planned show for the Silos at Sawyer Yards was postponed until sometime in
2021.
“We’ll see what happens,” Hunter says. “I have had to stop thinking about it.”
She’s won three previous individual artist grants. “It’s always been a good experience, even though you have to front-load the expenses because you don’t get paid until the end,” she says. “But what really hurts is that they went into this major campaign of giving money away through other grants, and we never had any acknowledgment. They didn’t even announce the winners. When do we get to celebrate?”
McNulty normally announces grant winners early in the year but held off this spring because she planned to host the first City Hall celebration of grantees in March. That plan evaporated, too, she says. “I maybe held onto that dream too long; the logistics never worked out.”