The Mellon Foundation almost got it right for nonprofit arts leadership in the 2020s.
Why aren’t nonprofit arts subscribers renewing their subscriptions?
Because you can’t get good seats in a coffin.
You may not have heard about this, mostly because the news has not been reported as much as it should have been, but the Mellon Foundation, the meat of whose mission is…
We believe that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and we believe that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there.
…just granted three $1 million grants to leaders of theaters that are instituting a radical change for the better for their respective institutions.
One hopes.
I’m sure that by now, if you follow the large nonprofit theater scene, you’ve read or heard that the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut has broken with its past almost entirely. And this is a monumental positive change for the company and for New Haven — a city with a bifurcated populations of Yale (and its offshoots) on the one side and middle-class laborers (and their offshoots) on the other. This is a massive success story as they have eschewed the glitz and toxicity of choosing to produce art for the donors who support it (“Donors donate so that donors may attend”) to bring their art to where the people who are underserved actually are.
On the one hand, it’s a no-brainer. On the other, there are a slew of me-first, I-paid-for-it would-be stakeholders in the area who see this move as a slap in the face. I have no stake in it except to say that if those people still exist, I’d be happy to slap them in the face and so would the entire underserved population of New Haven.
New Haven is a city of approximately 138,000 people, 32% of whom are White, 30% of whom are Black, and 22% are Latino/Hispanic. 25% of the population lives below the official poverty line, which means that there are 34,500 slaps in the face due to the detractors. Oh, right, 34,501.
So, Jacob Padrón, the Long Wharf’s artistic director, along with key members of the board and administration, had to fight off the shackles of a storied, if uncharitable tradition of producing Broadway-bound plays for the “largely White, affluent, older” (which is how Padrón described them) former attendees. The entirety of the previous decades of the company’s existence settled on producing art for the sake of acclaim. Its eyes were trained on New York, and its attitude toward New Haven was that of a slick huckster you probably work with. You know, the one who, while in conversation with you, is continually looking past you to see if someone wealthier, handsomer, or generally is more interesting is behind you.
Now, to use their produced art as a tool, not merely its unique (and measurable) power as a collaboration, convening, and reflective way of making lives better, but as a conduit to greater personal knowledge, dignity, and paths to greater understanding of the people whose stories are not always told. They take their art to the people, as guests in their world, as opposed to forcing them to go to a (possibly) intimidating place where they’ve never, ever felt welcome.
Good job, Mellon. This was a fantastic decision.
I recently got to spend a lot of time with Robert Barry Fleming of Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL). Fleming received one of Mellon’s million-dollar grants to benefit the company, a company that had really only been known outside of Louisville as the home of a new play festival. The sponsor of that festival, currently selling its downtown buildings in Louisville and reportedly sharpening their Damacles sword over their staff, pulled their funding. And the festival will no longer happen, which is a bit of a shame, but it did not help the communities of Louisville in any way (except for some hotel rooms and airlines – the plays were seen by scouts of commercial and for-profit theaters).
But Fleming’s goal is to lift ATL into a company that told the stories of the “global majority” (his words, and eloquent at that). In other words, the same people who have been quietly but studiously eliminated from the power structure of Louisville would now have their stories told back to them. It’s a case of a company that had never done that kind of peer-to-peer storytelling (instead, looking at an annual season of traditional Dracula productions at Halloween and A Christmas Carol at the holidays), and it is beginning to take hold. Like the misguided hecklers to Padrón at the Long Wharf, Fleming is fending off myriad old-timers who want to drag their companies back into some sort of Euroentric Eden, but don’t understand that Eden belongs to everyone, not just descendants of the Puritans and the privileged. I hope Fleming succeeds and continues to work with non-arts charities to spread that message of not just inclusion, but of the truths of the people (even funny ones).
Good job again, Mellon. This was a fantastic decision.
Then there’s Portland Center Stage (PCS), whose $1 million gift from Mellon to support their operations. The artistic director there, Marissa Wolf, talked about the gift in more traditional ways. Nonprofits often discuss major gifts in terms of leverage instead of award. Wolf talked not about celebrating transformational change, but of “inspiring long-term investment from our whole community.”
Leveraging other gifts for PCS from Portland power brokers is great. As I was told at a PCS board meeting several years ago, Portland’s elite is notorious for having “deep pockets and short arms.” But PCS clings to an outdated theory that maintaining a glorious venue is more effective than acting as guests in other of Oregon’s communities. It’s the polar opposite of the truly transformational work from the Long Wharf.
As Meat Loaf once sang, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”
Meat Loaf (1947-2022)
Good job, Mellon. A solid B-. But read next week’s column to get an A next time. Please.
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