Towards a Generous System
Address delivered at ArtTable's Luncheon
By Ruby Lerner, April 26, 2001

I must have made a mistake – I thought this was the Decency Commission luncheon.

I was so pleased when ArtTable invited me to come speak about supporting individual artists, and especially to be part of this celebration honoring Paula Cooper, someone who has done so much for so many artists throughout her distinguished career. Paula was one of the first people I met with when I got to Creative Capital, and I was immediately struck by her tremendous generosity. I found out much later that we both went to Goucher College, which is a lovely coincidence.

Generosity, building generous systems, is what I want to speak about today. I think that this is a topic quite appropriate for an ArtTable gathering, since to me, ArtTable represents generosity in action.

But, believe it or not, it turns out that "decency" is actually a pretty good starting point for talking about generosity. These incursions–and I know we're having a hard time taking the decency commission seriously–all these incursions, no matter how small or ridiculous they may SEEM, are not only paternalistic assaults on artists and their audiences, but they are assaults on the very idea of democracy. Because whatever the individual skirmish APPEARS to be about, underneath the rhetoric of the particular incident lurks the intention to stifle critical thinking.

But why is controversy so fear-inducing? Doesn't it usually mean that deep conversation on the issue in question is called for? A healthy society should have enough experience to know that it is usually critical dialogue that propels us forward.

This principle is crucial in thinking about creating support structures for individual artists in this particular moment, because creating a hospitable climate in which creativity and a free marketplace of ideas can flourish is a prerequisite. I don't think anyone has calculated the psychic toll the culture wars take on artists, who had previously been led to believe their contributions were valued, only to then see themselves suddenly demonized and vilified.

So much so that now when people talk about support for "the arts," it often seems that they mean anything BUT support for actual living, breathing artists. James Baldwin said, "Everybody wants an artist on the wall or on the library shelf, but nobody wants one in the house."

I am completely baffled by people who believe work shouldn't be supported until the artist is long dead and the work has "stood the test of time." These kinds of comments get repeated so often that they become a kind of unexamined mantra and seem to have the weight of truth. But, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you don't support work being made in the present, there won't be anything TO HAVE STOOD the test of time. Think about applying this same principle to support for scientific research. Well, actually there wouldn't be any scientific research. You'd have scientists delivering papers about experiments done 100 years ago. Think of the advances we wouldn't have made.

Culture is inherently a do-it-yourself proposition, something the people of a nation must create for themselves.

Sure, supporting contemporary work is messy. Sure, not all the work will hit the mark. Sure, it may turn out that some of it, viewed with a little perspective, wasn't even art at all. So what? Think what we get to learn in the process. Think of the plethora of ideas, even in work that may not be wholly successful, and think how those ideas could then influence artists whose work might turn out to be extraordinary.

So, nothing could be more important than support for a country's contemporary creative voices, because not supporting living, breathing artists in all their messy glory is tantamount to a "cultural death wish."

I'm going to posit a radical proposition–that perhaps it's possible to judge the health of a community or a society by how generously it supports its contemporary creative voices–in all areas–science, business, and in the arts.

Creative Capital is one recent effort to create a generous support structure in the cultural arena. Founded in 1999, it grew out of conversations that began when the NEA was no longer able to support most individual artists projects. It does not see itself as a substitute for national government support of artists or for other private sector efforts. With the leadership of Arch Gillies and The Warhol Foundation, we launched in May of 1999 with 22 brave contributors, including Agnes Gund and other people in this room. I'm pleased to tell you that, after just 2 years, the Warhol Foundation board has allocated $10 million to help us launch an endowment campaign. It is a matching grant and it will be quite interesting to see if the community will respond to create a permanent, national source of funding and support for individual artists.

We were set up to support artists creating innovative work in the performing, visual and media arts and in a category we call emerging fields, which includes technology-based work and experimental literature and music. We're supporting an incredible range of projects.

The core idea that makes Creative Capital different from more traditional arts philanthropies is that we don't just make grants, but rather stay engaged with artists and their projects and try to help those projects make their way in the world by providing advice and technical assistance beyond the monetary award. Then, if any projects end up being financially successful, we would receive a small portion of the proceeds, which would be used to support future projects. Generosity is therefore built into the project's design. Creative Capital is a hybrid–a cross between a traditional grantmaker and an artists' service organization, glued together with an entrepreneurial energy.

I want to tell you a little about what we're doing and some of the specific ways we're trying to build a generous system.

Once a project is selected, we sit down with each artist individually and discuss project goals in practical terms and try to determine how the project we're funding fits into where the artist sees their work life heading over the next few years.

We allocated about $5,000 per project on top of the initial grant awarded by the panel to be used for strategic purposes. This creates the space for artists to think about very specific strategic needs.

We have a special opportunities fund which I think of as a Rapid Response Mechanism. We have made decisions to provide small amounts of support within a few hours. We also created a second round funding opportunity for already funded projects.

What we're learning is that all money is not the same and that even small amounts of money can be catalytic, if strategically utilized. But even more important is that we have a system of diverse funding opportunities available to funded artists over an extended period of time.

Those are the kinds of things we do to support the project.

But I had always hoped that we'd also be able to help artists think in depth about career issues, beyond their projects, because one of our most ambitious goals is for artists we work with to be better able to sustain themselves. Those of us who run organizations or businesses are always thinking about where we want to be in 3 or 5 years, but artists are rarely assisted to think about that. And nobody ever gets at artists' complex relationship to money.

We now have a Strategic Planning Program involving more than 20 of our artists who are working on personal and career planning issues. This process has been life changing for many of the artists who are participating, and we're hoping to create a workbook to make this approach more broadly available to the field.

So, beyond the project, we're interested in the person.

Creating a community with and among the artists is also important to us. There are so few opportunities for artists to come together, particularly across disciplines, and to become resources to each other. We held our first artists retreat at Skowhegan, which was truly inspiring. We brought in about 25 outside resource people, representative of all the disciplines we fund and also representative of both the nonprofit and the commercial sectors. One of the artists remarked, "This was the most amazing month I've ever spent in two days!"

Many concrete opportunities have come out of this event for the participants, and many friendships were forged. These kinds of events need to happen more frequently.

In year 5 of the cycle, which will be 2003 and probably extending into 2004, I think we won't make new grants but we will instead spend the year working with our artists on the public presentation phase of their projects. The wonderful Creative Capital staff refers to this as "The Year of Living Dangerously."

How many important events have you seen or presented yourself that you knew should have had a longer life, but didn't because either the financial resources or human energy and expertise just weren't there. If our fundraising is successful, we will be able to aggregate resources at a level beyond what is available to most artists individually, which means that we'll be able to see that the work is represented at important discipline specific events; and we'll be able to cluster projects thematically to help the work reach particular constituencies. And we'll be able to subsidize presentations in 10—15 cities around the country. We would use these opportunities to be a catalyst for increased support to artists in those regions.

This is very exciting and an appropriate culmination of our first 5 years of work. Then we'll begin the cycle again.

So, what we're evolving for the artists we fund is a system that includes support for the project, support for the person, engendering a sense of community among the artists, and engagement of the work with the public.

But when I think about building a truly generous system, I also think about the 98% of artists who apply to us that we can't fund. My hope is that we can consciously, and "consciously" is the operative word, evolve a system that has generosity built in all along the way. Can the application form be useful even if you don't get a grant? Can the evaluation process create opportunities for artists not funded by us? Can we create a system that makes it possible for artists to be in touch with each other, whether we've funded them or not?

These are the kinds of things we think about. At just a little more than 2 years of age, we are very much a work-in-progress, we are in an ongoing state of evaluation, but clearly, beginning to take an interesting shape.

I'm interested in systems, and on the days that I don't think of myself as the Director of Expectation Modification, I think of my job as system architect. I want to pose a challenge to us here today: How might we work with artists to create systems that strengthen the climate of support?

1. I mentioned earlier that perhaps we could judge the health of a community by how well it sustains its creative voices. Over the years I've thought a lot about what a comprehensive system of support for artists might look like. I believe that we could easily develop an inventory that articulates the component parts of a comprehensive system of support, the ingredients that need to be in place in order to engender creativity. We could then use this inventory to assess our communities and to deliver report cards to them. We could make this information public. VERY PUBLIC. Because sometimes shame can be a useful tool.

2. Perhaps we also need a Percent for Artists program–by this I mean restoring artists to the center of our conversations about the arts–in James Baldwin's term, bringing artists into the house. We need to evaluate how well our institutions and programs support artists. If endowment funds are being raised, what percentage will go to support artists' projects? If a cultural facility is being built, are artists involved in the planning process? What percentage of annual operating budgets support artists' projects and artists' fees directly? Boards need to monitor this; funders need to monitor this. It needs to be of concern.

As I've traveled around the country meeting artists and talking about Creative Capital, I think the most important symbolic statement Creative Capital makes and that our donors make collectively is nothing less than a revaluing of artists' contributions to the culture. It's been a lesson to me in the animating power of ideas and a reminder of how seemingly small actions can have extraordinary resonance.

As I conclude today, I'd ask each of us to think consciously about how in our own individual situations, we might make positive changes on behalf of artists–changes that might seem small but that could have a powerful impact. And I probably don't have to point out that if we were then to add up our individual actions, the results would not only be generous, they would be nothing short of astounding.

And what a fitting tribute to Paula and ArtTable that would be.

This speech was delivered on the occasion of ArtTable's Ninth Annual Luncheon in New York City honoring Paula Cooper. Ruby Lerner is President of Creative Capital Foundation.