Executive Director's Note: Art for Everyone
by Brad Erickson
Photo by Kat Wade.
A postcard greets me every day with the ringing phrase "Art for Everyone!" In the graphic, a Trotsky-like figure, pitched forward, face thrust upward, eyes bright with the optimism of early 20th-century utopianism, holds in his outstretched right arm an emblematic starburst--the icon of KQED-TV's Spark!, a weekly program covering arts in the Bay Area. The starburst, an asterisk, really, here stands as a symbol for the spark of creativity. The image is endearing to the Red Diaper Baby in all of us. I keep the promotional piece enshrined on my desk.
Art for everyone. The motto on the lefty-red postcard carries a certain kitsch appeal, not to mention a generous helping of counterculture nostalgia, as heady as a sunny Sunday afternoon at Haight and Ashbury. Art for all. At second glance one can glimpse, past the cleverness, a sincere if unfulfilled promise. Art for everyone. One could even make out a pledge--laced, perhaps, with a hint of menace. Art for everyone--or else.
Art in California is demonstrably not for everyone but, more and more, just for some. Decades of cuts to arts education--dating to the passage of Proposition 13 in the 1970s--have levied an appalling toll. A comprehensive report entitled An Unfinished Canvas, Arts Education in California: Taking Stock of Policies and Practices, just released by the Hewlett Foundation, reveals that almost no California public school children are receiving an education in the arts that the state itself has defined as core and essential. The Hewlett study reports that 89 percent of California's public schools fail to provide the standards-based, sequential training called for by the legislature in the four primary artistic disciplines: music, visual arts, theatre and dance. Some kids get some arts training; some get less. Many receive not even one hour of arts instruction. Art for everyone?
Four years of cuts to state support of the arts themselves has slammed shut the doors of access for many Californians. Programs that once brought theatre artists, dancers, writers and musicians into neglected urban neighborhoods, far-flung rural hamlets, schools, clinics, neighborhood centers and prisons have been eliminated. Funding that once supported more traditional programming in theatres, museums and concert halls--gone.
Despite the cuts and despite economic downturns and the vicissitudes of funding fashions, the arts in California have survived. Indeed, despite all expectations, many have grown: More artists enter the field each year, and new organizations continue to spring up. Theatre Bay Area's own theatre and dance company membership has grown from 325 in 2003 to nearly 420 in 2007.
The arts can be properly understood as the people's cultural resource. But market forces, unmitigated by an utter lack of state funding, have made the motto "Arts for everyone" a lie in California. The truth today is art for some. And an increasingly select some.
We can look to other sectors for a better way. Here in the Bay Area we have a uniquely successful example of federal, state and local government agencies working alongside nonprofit organizations and private stakeholders to create and sustain the largest urban wilderness in the nation, if not the world. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area and its neighboring open spaces span three counties and the straits of the Golden Gate to preserve and to provide the public the spectacular natural resources of coast, mountains and bayshore.
Just last weekend, I stumbled upon Theatre Bay Area's board president Patricia Mok trekking at 1,000 feet above a shining Pacific on the sun-washed flanks of Mt. Tamalpais. Patricia, her old college buddies, my companion and all the scattered hikers were drawn to a mountain made accessible for all Californians by public and private partners. Like Mt. Tam, the arts beckon all of us to find recreation, rejuvenation, challenge and inspiration. Unfortunately, unlike Mt. Tam and the wildlands of West Marin, the arts for many Californians have become increasingly inaccessible--a great mountain that is receding out of reach, even out of view.
Art for everyone. Clever copy? Impossible ideal? Or a determined pledge to every Californian that we will fling wide the gates of our rich cultural resources?
The week I write this column, Theatre Bay Area and Intersection for the Arts, with the support of the Hewlett Foundation and the expertise of the California Arts Advocates, are in Sacramento, trying again to push rhetoric toward reality.
Art for everyone.
