Transcript
Narrator 0:04
Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith identified neighborhood revitalization, anti violence and overall quality of life as key priorities of his administration. While Mayor Goldsmith’s efforts to reach these goals emphasized privatization of city services and fiscal responsibility, he also continued to play the role of arts advocate initiated by his predecessors Richard Lugar and William Hudnut as a way to build communities and improve the city. Yet maintaining an active arts strategy as part of city policy can prove challenging for civic leaders when social problems such as poverty, crime rates or government budgets loom larger in the public mind than seemingly superfluous activities like public school arts or music programs. At the Richard M Fairbanks Symposium held at the University of Indianapolis on February 5, 2016, arts professionals and city leaders discussed how the arts, if prioritized over the long term, can actually provide unique and creative solutions to significant social problems. Vice President of Civic Investment for the Health and Hospital Corporation, Michael Kaufman, begins the conversation by Angel Ysaguirre, Executive Director of the Illinois Humanities Council, how support for the arts can be garnered in the face of pressing community problems.
Michael Kaufman 1:16
I want to reference the mayoral address that our incoming Mayor Joe hogsett gave earlier this year, at the very start of the year, and where he cited crime, poverty and a significant city deficit in the budget as our primary issues that we’re facing going into this new year and into his administration. We have a $50 million structural deficit. We have one in three children in Marion County born into poverty. We have one in four children who are food insecure. So while I and I’m sure many others here believe in the moral imperative arts and the amazing ability for arts and culture to transform and impact change, how do we defend, or how do we argue or support or get behind the support for arts and culture as a city?
Angel Ysaguirre 2:07
So, you know, in a way, the arts is a long game, and the issues that you’re raising, I think we think of addressing those issues through like a shorter term fix. So with crime, right? We think about more police on the streets, right? That’s a very short term strategy, but there’s a lot of research, and I think a lot of really smart reasons to play the long game, which is what the arts are more about, in terms of community impact. I think about 15 or 16 years ago, researcher, a woman named Shirley Bryce Heath at Stanford University, finished up a 10-year longitudinal research of what kinds of interventions had the biggest impact on the academic performance of low income students of color. And about five years into this study, she realized that after school sports programs and after school arts programs by and far had the largest positive impact on young kids of color and their academic performance. So, you know, there are lots of things that we can talk about in terms of the economic impact of the arts, the ways in which it makes us more creative, smarter, better thinkers. But again, this is sort of the long game, right? We can’t say that it’s the same thing as buying a hungry person a meal or putting more police on the street, but in the long run, it’s probably a more effective, or certainly as equally effective, strategy for dealing with those issues 20 years from now. So they’re not as large of an issue as they are now.
Speaker 1 3:59
Joanna Taft believes that art education is a vital step in creating world class citizens through exposure to and patronage of the arts. She reiterates the positive long term effects the arts can have with illustrative examples from her work as the director of the Harrison Center for the Arts, through which she has seen how arts in Indianapolis can provide cultural solutions to community challenges.
Joanna Taft 4:20
The Harrison Center started here in high school because my artists started coming to me and saying, I need to move to New York, LA and Chicago. And by the way, I didn’t know that. Would the speaker say today that jobs are hard to get in Chicago. It’s hard to keep artists in Chicago. My artists didn’t know that they wanted to go to Chicago, and so I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I needed them there at the Harrison said I needed them in Indianapolis and and so, you know, I was thinking about, what do I do? And at the same time, Mayor Peterson was talking about needing world class citizens, and Brian Payne was talking about needing a creative class. And at that point, IPS’s graduation rate for African American males is 19%. This is long before you came. Yeah, and, and so, you know, I needed art patrons. So what could we do to to solve that problem? And so that was when Harris School of Art and Design had announced that it was moving to the IUPUI campus. And so we proposed, what would happen if we started a school designed to grow art patrons, a high school designed to grow art patrons, and that would grow those world class resident, world class citizens that every city needs. And so that was kind of how we started here in high school. And what’s happened today that schools crafted to grow art patrons, and now we have we’re in the top 1% of public schools nationwide, and these kids are not only graduating and coming to buy art from me, but they’re actually buying art before they graduate, which I never imagined would happen.
Narrator 4:20
Taft continues by describing the Harrison Center’s cultural entrepreneur initiative, which demonstrates how the arts can provide leadership and creative problem solving experiences for youth and young adults while simultaneously meeting a community’s needs.
Joanna Taft 4:50
And a cultural entrepreneur is someone who sees a need, takes a risk, leverages resources, invests energy and networks to build culture in the city. And so, we we’ve had over 125 students go through this program, either high school or college kids. I’ll give one other example. One intern came to me and asked for $372 to build giant puppets as a cultural entrepreneur. And I said, Okay, a cultural entrepreneur sees a need, takes a risk, leverages resources, invests energy, networks, build culture in the city. What need are you addressing? Why are you building these giant puppets? And he said, Indianapolis needs a spectacle of wonder. And that got me, that really got me. And so he built these puppets, and they took them down to the circle, and I need to tell Jim Walker this, so I can borrow them for Spark this summer. But an he, and he set these puppets up and people just streamed out of their office buildings. And, you know, the media came and we got it was so much fun to get the free media coverage. But the best thing that happened was it made people really happy that they lived in Indianapolis. And so these cultural entrepreneur interns are looking for different ways that they can help our city grow. And so when they they graduate from our program, they stay in our city, and they’re looking for ways to see a need, take a risk, leverage resources, invest energy and network to build culture in our city, and they become art patrons.
Ted Frantz 7:19
This podcast was produced by the Institute for Civic Leadership and Mayoral Archives and the Department of Communication at the University of Indianapolis. It is made possible by the support of the Richard M Fairbanks Foundation, Indiana Humanities, and the Lily Endowment. For more information, please see our website, uindy.edu/mayoral.