Zilker Theatre Productions’ performance of The Little Mermaid (courtesy of Zilker Theatre Productions)
Two years ago, the city of Austin’s Economic Development Department enacted a huge overhaul of its arts grants program to create more opportunities for historically marginalized groups.
However, they seem to have destroyed important players in the community in order to save it.
The big red flag went up last weekend at the ATX Theatre Halloween Costume & Thrift Sale. Shoppers browsing for party attire may have been surprised to find a huge part of the wardrobe of Zilker Theatre Productions on the racks. That’s because ZTP basically held a fire sale. After decades of invaluable contributions to Austin’s artistic life through free, Broadway-level shows, they’d been cut out of the arts grants. As a result, they’d been forced to cancel their warehouse lease and sell a large portion of their costume library. They’ll have to follow up with a second sale, getting rid of props and scenery.
And it’s not just things. ZTP has already let go of its executive director because it could not afford their salary, and has launched a massive fundraising campaign.
And it’s not just ZTP. It’s dozens of established and proven artistic groups, nonprofits, and individual artists who have just had the financial floor ripped from under them by EDD. The city awarded $21 million in Hotel Occupancy Tax-funded grants, and there’s broad applause for entities like the ConnectHER film festival and the newly founded _OFCOLOR arts alliance getting major investments, but the broader picture is much more bleak. For some companies, grants were the difference between running shows and not. For others, they’re the essential seed money to keep the lights on. Last year, under the new paradigm, companies like TILT Performance Group, a company of people with disabilities, and the avant-garde Capital T Theatre went to the wall after losing their funding. As the city enters a second year of its new arts programs, more established companies fear they will either have to massively scale back or go dark.
At a hearing of the Austin Arts Commission last Monday, Commissioner Monica Maldonado said her response to the latest round of funding was “a real ‘wow’ and concern.” She pondered, “What is the ecosystem that we’re creating from these grants?”
As the saying goes, if you want to work out priorities, follow the money. The largest sums are in the city’s Thrive grants: applicants receive between $85,000 and $150,000 per annum for two years to encourage the growth of new and smaller companies in historically underserved communities. Then there’s the annual Elevate grants ($30,000-80,000) assisting with operational costs over the year. Finally, the Nexus grants: $5,000, issued twice a year, on a project-by-project basis.
The system has its roots in a 2017 Arts Commission decision to launch a review of what members saw as 50 years of funding disparities. In 2019, the city hired Atlanta-based consultants MJR Partners to help oversee a Cultural Funding Review delivered in 2021, and the new funding strategy launched a year later. Initially, organizations were relieved to have some post-pandemic clarity. But the reality set in that the largest portions of the grants were going to small or unproven organizations, while many proven organizations were cut out altogether. At the same time, the Arts Commission was relegated to an advisory role, and administration was taken on by EDD staff.
The core issue seems to be one repeated phrase: groups at risk of displacement and/or cultural erasure. When it came to increasing equity and diversity, Kate Meehan, managing director of La Fenice commedia dell’arte company and president of the B. Iden Payne Awards Council, said, “Everybody could get behind a course correction … What it doesn’t say is people of color [and] it was not explicit that that’s what they were looking for.”
“As a Hispanic woman, [it] feels like, once again, I’m being told I don’t count, and neither do our board members, and I take that personally because we have a diverse board.” – Zilker Theatre Productions Board President Lisa Muir
Arts groups, most of whom could not afford professional grant writers, were fighting with an unclear rubric and no guidance on the scoring matrix, especially when it came to diversity. Groups with a majority of members from historically underserved ethnic or racial groups got full marks; those focusing on LGBTQ or disability issues, half marks; and groups that lacked sufficient diversity got a zero. However, that was never made clear to the applicants.
And who decides what defines diversity? At Monday’s hearing, Austin Cultural Investment Program Manager Laura Odegaard told commissioners that the program was achieving its goal of funding “majority-diverse-led organizations, individuals, and creative businesses.” It’s the “led” bit that’s become the land mine in the process.
It all comes down the three A’s: audiences, artists, administrators. The greatest concern among the arts community is that the process was laser-focused on administrators – both staff and the board – at the expense of audiences and artists.
As a panel member and co-artistic director of Ground Floor Theatre, Patti Neff Tiven was one of the few people to sit on both sides of the process and said that many institutions struggled to adapt to the new system after decades in which “the city gave 98% of people money. You didn’t have to work hard, it was non-competitive, but now it’s competitive and they have a specific focus.” While she said she supported the city’s new direction, “it’s tough because there’s a lot of companies in town that that’s not their focus. … The first year [Ground Floor] did this grant, we didn’t flat-out write ‘Patti is a disabled white woman,’ but you absolutely have to.”
However, many people who went through the application process were concerned that, even after navigating the rubric, the assessment process could seem arbitrary, and hearings and decisions were littered with factual errors – and, worst of all, that the narrow “who’s in the boardroom” approach gives a limited view of diversity in the arts. Neff Tiven noted that she was shocked over the exclusion of some groups and artists, such as critically lauded Black poet and performer Zell Miller III, that she thought should easily reach the new metrics. That’s a feeling echoed by other applicants. Zilker Theatre Productions Board President Lisa Muir said, “As a Hispanic woman, [it] feels like, once again, I’m being told I don’t count, and neither do our board members, and I take that personally because we have a diverse board.”
Moreover, all this change came at the worst time possible for arts funding. Most organizations were financially devastated by the pandemic, and audiences have been slow to return. The underlying fear is that having so many organizations losing key funding will cause a collapse of the Austin artistic ecosystem. At Monday’s Arts Commission hearing, Bonnie Cullum, producing artistic director for the Vortex, warned commissioners that the current funding situation could spell doom for venues like hers that depend on small arts organizations that can’t make rent. Ken Webster, Hyde Park Theatre’s artistic director, echoed that concern, noting that HPT and the associated Frontera Fest help marginalized groups “produce their work very inexpensively [but] that doesn’t seem to have been taken into account. … It’s hard to wrap my head around that we got the minimum funding for two years in a row.”
His hope was that some groups that rent HPT may be able to apply for the project-based Nexus grants, but B. Iden Payne Awards Council President Meehan warned that they are awarded under the same terms as the Thrive and Elevate grants, “so if you are from an organization that is not from a traditionally marginalized group, it is currently not possible with the matrix provided to the evaluators to be funded as an arts group in Austin.”
And even if an organization gets a Nexus grant, that’s not a game changer. Neff Tiven warned, “You get to put on a show. That’s great. But what about all those people who work here, 24/7?”
For Muir, the fear is that the damage to established free productions like those hosted by ZTP, or for companies who run free, low-cost, or pay-what-you-can ticketing will permanently reduce audiences. Muir said, “Our whole mission is to expose people to the arts, so that then they go, ‘Wow, this is really cool. I’m going to go to Ground Floor Theatre, I’m going to go to Summer Stock and see what they do.’”
So now ZTP is trying to work out how to bridge the costs of their next project, of covering stage rental and complimentary parking, of paying living wages to cast and crew, many of whom are from exactly the kind of historically marginalized communities the funding reforms sought to help. Those same tough choices are facing dozens of artists and entities around town as they stare down a financial existential crisis.
