With the industry in a nationwide, existential crisis, leaders may have to choose one or the other. If so, the choice is easy.
It’s 2025 and the nonprofit arts world is crumbling around us. In Seattle, ACT (A Contemporary Theatre) and Seattle Shakespeare are now part of the same company, a company that celebrates the 461-year-old Englishman performing the most contemporary hits of today.
In Pittsburgh, because of money troubles, Pittsburgh Public Theater, City Theatre, and the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera are figuring out a way to cut costs by working together. Shaunda McDill, who is a terrific arts leader, wrote about the now-familiar challenges in an email to Pittsburgh Public Theater supporters.
“…shrinking federal arts funding, tightening demands on philanthropic priorities, and the erosion of traditional subscriber models amid ever-widening entertainment choices.”
I wish, on some level, that she had written that email with leaders from the other two organizations, but no matter. If they decide to combine back-office duties into one larger department, it’s not a bad way to start. But cutting back on people — as was done in both cities — is not a good response to the problem.
What mystifies me is the continued genuflection to buildings over people. The funding and competition problems of 2025 are not new, but the solutions are. No longer will the solution come from a rising base of attendance and support from mid-1990s highs. It’s just not going to happen — in Pittsburgh, in Seattle, in what’s left of America.
I know this may surprise you, but unless you’re in a rural location with no arts organizations for miles around…
- There are enough performing arts centers.
- There are enough museums.
- There are enough stages.
- There are enough church basements.
There are enough theater/musical theater/opera companies, ballet/dance companies, symphonic/jazz music companies, and galleries/visual arts facilities. There just are. America doesn’t need another boondoggle. We’ve got plenty.
We can’t fill the arts centers we already have. During the Seattle arts building boom, the case was made for the Kreielsheimer Foundation to fund the erection of legacies (or was it the legacy of erections?). Thousands of additional seats’ worth of spaces. The biggest players in the arts-mosphere were the worst (and most successful) culprits at gaining access to the millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of money, come hell or high water (closing those smaller, pesty little companies that got nothing).
Companies broke promises, acted badly, and committed illegal, corrupt acts up the ying-yang, allegedly. I will write the word “allegedly,” but after doing the research and reading the entire contents of the archives of the Kreielsheimer foundation (located at the University of Washington), I’ve seen plenty of evidence of terrible actions that are now bearing the rotting fruit of empty, underused, buildings created mostly for the White folks (Seattle Rep, the Symphony, the Opera, Pacific Northwest Ballet, ACT, Intiman, 5th Avenue, and the Seattle Art Museum). Feel free to read it yourself at the UW archives — it’s free of charge. Like me, you’ll throw up in your mouth a little bit.
All it took was for the country to turn against the funding of the arts — a predictable outcome if you haven’t been hiding under a rock for the last 30 years — for that effort to be revealed as the waste it turned out to be.
ACT’s first artistic director, Gregory Falls, said in the early 1970s (that would be 50 years ago), “Theaters are like grapes, they grow best in bunches.” From the way some of the older Seattle folk revere those words, you might gather that this is the greatest thing anyone ever said about theaters in the history of people saying stuff about theaters.
It’s flapdoodle, of course. It’s not a crock because it was not intentionally bombastic. Falls meant well. He wanted a city full of theaters, everywhere you looked, all doing promising work. He didn’t get that, however.
Theaters, as it turns out, are only like grapes in that it’s really easy to crush the little ones. Falls’s innocent-sounding axiom ended up becoming more of a warning than anything else.
Those same, on-the-surface-collegial-but-not-really, planet-eating, oxygen-sucking nonprofit arts organizations received anywhere between 70-90% of millions in funding by the Kreielsheimer Foundation, as related briefly in an earlier article. They were, as it turned out, ruthless.
While they jammed their character shoes, ballet slippers, or bare feet on the necks of the smaller organizations — many (if not most) of which have closed down in the aftermath — they could be heard saying things like, “They had just as much a chance to raise those dollars as we did.”
Now that’s a crock.
But worse than messes in Seattle, Pittsburgh, and hell, the rest of the country are those soldiers out there with orders to, yes, build another performing arts center. Undeserved legacy building (a.k.a. “The Edifice Complex”) makes cities all the more rotten under the guise of making them healthier.
Exactly how does another empty arts facility do anything but devalue the arts? Emptiness promotes obsolescence and superfluity, so, on behalf of the arts organizations in your community, thanks a hell of a lot.
Do you subscribe to the ridiculous, fictional, incorrectly-attributed notion that “If you build it, they will come?”
If you think of your company’s venue as your company’s home, you’re already lost. In most cases, in urban and suburban regions across the States (United or Divided), there are ample places to perform your craft for the good of the people you serve, right where they are (instead of making them come to where you are). No additional building is necessary.
Think about all the community-based systems that exist already in your region. They might not be acoustically perfect, but if the people can hear you and join with you, that’s irrelevant. They might be “uncomfortable/unsafe/in bad neighborhoods” as far as your board may go, but people still live in those places. Those people might be exactly those who need the kind of help your art might provide.
You’re running a charity here. Not a country club.
The truth is dark here. Foundations — who continually seem to have no actual idea what it is that arts organizations are supposed to do, who save the big funding only for their friends and those companies they’ve heard of, who care more about the paperwork and reporting apparatus than about the impact of the program so they can lay claim to success to their shareholders — fund new buildings because they don’t know how or why to fund art.
Capital funding for the arts, whether it’s governmental or through private foundations, has got to stop being about the next new building. Fix the buildings that already exist, for example. I have six years of horror stories about ArtsWest’s (Seattle) struggle to keep afloat (in the literal sense, with 15 floods in the first six months) but very few people out there are willing to help a porous community asset, especially when that’s a literal description. Build a new facility? Sure. Fix the one you have? No way.
Stupid.
After having experienced what good organizations do, how they’re funded (even in emergencies), and why they deserve to succeed — the subject of my new, shamelessly-plugged book (pre-orders now accepted), Scene Change 3: The Ones Who Get It — it’s galling to see the Edifice Complex still dominate the funding machines.
And, for the senseless “If you build it, they will come” crowd, referenced above: W.P. Kinsella wrote, “If you build it, he will come,” and that was about the lead character’s dad. Therefore, I can almost guarantee that if you build some legacy building because some foundation only funds new buildings and not old ones, one person will show up. Someone’s dad. Bank on it. No guarantees beyond that.
Wanna have a catch?
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