San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Creative Corps to pay year’s salary for artists
State agency will help larger nonprofits equip projects with funds to empower and revitalize communities through cultural currency
California artists can now get a yearlong state-funded salary to create municipal and neighborhood projects benefiting health, climate change, civic engagement or social justice.
That’s the idea behind the California Creative Corps, the result of a one-time $60 million allocation to the California Arts Council.
At a state arts agency whose annual budget has hovered around $26 million in recent years, such a huge add-on means artists and arts companies across the state are scrambling to get a share of the boon. It’s also invited scrutiny over how the program has been designed.
Unveiled last year, with applications online this year, the program distributes funding to large nonprofits, who in turn recirculate much of that money to smaller nonprofits. Those smaller groups then go on to design grant applications and select artists based on what they want in their towns and neighborhoods.
“Black artists are fighting hard to remain in San Francisco,” said Ashley Smiley, program director at Bayview Opera House, one of the smaller companies in the project. For her, the Creative Corps is government validation that says, “I see you as an integral part of San Francisco art and culture.”
Artists can apply for grants of $70,000 to $72,000. Anywhere between $10,000 to
$12,000 must go to materials for the project, with the rest as salary for the artist. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, one of 14 larger nonprofits in the project, had an application deadline of Friday, July 14, but smaller organizations’ deadlines, such as the opera house’s, last through the summer.
Projects must benefit communities that score in the lowest quarter of the California Healthy Places Index, which measures factors including park access, the percentage of adults with health insurance, drinking-water quality, voter participation and the percentage of workers who commute via transit, walking or cycling. In the Bay Area, that includes portions of Antioch, Bay Point,
Berkeley, Concord, Fairfield, Hayward, Oakland, Pittsburg, Richmond, San Francisco, San Jose, San Rafael and Vallejo.
Julie Baker, CEO of advocacy
organization Californians for the Arts, attributes the state Legislature’s decision to fund the project to multiple factors. One was having Deborah Cullinan, now vice president for the arts at Stanford University, on the governor’s task force for pandemic recovery, as the arts don’t always get a seat at the table when officials are trying to solve major problems. Another is that advocates made the case that artists were an “underutilized workforce” — hit especially hard by the pandemic, yet also uniquely positioned to help mitigate some of its problems as a kind of 21st century New Deal program.
“It doesn’t matter where you stand on the political spectrum; there are a lot of people who don’t fundamentally trust what’s coming out of government,” Baker said. But artists can build or rebuild community trust, she added. An artist finding a creative way to promote mask wearing — or any other desirable behavior — “is a very different message than Gov. Newsom coming on every week and telling people to do it,” she said.
The California Creative Corps evolved from an early pandemic pilot project. In San Francisco, it paid street performers and muralists to encourage passersby to wear masks and maintain social distance. Sacramento’s version, known as the Latino Center of Arts & Culture, distributed coloring books depicting hand washing and mask wearing to community centers, among other initiatives.
Jonathan Moscone, who now leads the CAC, was chief producer at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts when it developed San Francisco’s pilot. The company had “four minutes” to come up with a plan, he joked. “We were given literally a couple of weeks to get (artists) on the street.”
This new version, he told The Chronicle, “has a commitment to the whole of the individual rather than just the project.” It seeks to address some criticisms the pilot received, such as the fact that intermittent shift work wasn’t a sustainable source of income for artists that often prevented them from taking on full-time work elsewhere. The artists also didn’t get time or materials to make work that made full use of their abilities or effected meaningful or measurable change.
For YBCA, the Creative Corps is providing an opportunity for the organization to learn from alleged missteps in
“How could a cultural strategist help infuse and inform, educate and raise awareness
around the communities that (nonprofits) work
with?”
Esailama G. Artry-Diouf, who is running San Francisco Foundation’s
portion of the project
its 2021 guaranteed income program, funded by the City of San Francisco. Critics said that a predominantly white institution like YBCA shouldn’t be running or getting a piece of the largesse of a program aimed at benefiting artists of color, particularly when smaller organizations had more knowledge about racial equity and closer ties to the targeted artists.
YBCA CEO Sara Fenske Bahat said the company’s goal with the Creative Corps initiative “is to get out of the way and to allow communities to decide for themselves which projects feel like the highest priority.” Thus she was hesitant to speculate about what kinds of projects grants might fund, saying she hopes the initiative might expand “what counts as an artist” to include writers, architects, “culture bearers,” culinary artists, textile artists and craftspeople, among others. Funded projects could be anything from plays to sidewalk art to community meals to gardens.
Esailama G. Artry-Diouf, who’s running San Francisco Foundation’s portion of the project, described her goals similarly. In the Bay Area, she said, 85% of arts companies have budgets under $250,000. “How can we lift up these organizations?” she asked. And for other nonprofits that have never worked with artists before, “How could a cultural strategist help infuse and inform, educate and raise awareness around the communities that you work with?”
Some critics, including T. Kebo Drew, the managing director of Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, still question why large organizations are involved.
“It’s seeing a large organization as a proxy for competence when there are some forms of expertise that organization just doesn’t have,” she said, adding that YBCA is “steps removed” from the communities the project is supposed to
target. She believes that governments should fund small arts organizations like hers with more general operating support instead of creating specialized programs that give big institutions a cut.
But at Bayview Opera House, Smiley feels grateful YBCA has sent staffers to teach her about, for instance, the state’s extensive requirements for grant reporting. Now her community can take this knowledge and apply it elsewhere.
“It feels like a teachingfolks-to-fish moment,” she said, then making an analogy to homeownership: “It’s a bad idea to give someone a house without teaching them about
taxes, maintenance and HOA fees. You’re setting them up for failure.”
But, she added, “it then becomes the utmost responsibility to hold these organizations accountable for being that liaison, like, ‘Look, you historically have gotten this money and been a gatekeeper.’ ”
In return, large organizations owe transparency about how projects come to be, why, and who’s involved, she said. That way, “I can understand what to do on my own from this and figure out what my true piece in it is.”