Stirring Culture, a series of keynote lectures about the arts and their role in building culture and community, is generating big hype in the arts community. For two years, the series has shaped much of the public dialogue on this hot topic, but many voices from the arts community itself still aren’t being heard. Artists and cultural workers suggest that behind the veneer of cultural boosterism, arts and cultural communities in Calgary are reaching a state of emergency.
The most recent of these events, hosted by the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD), was a public panel discussion titled Calgary Responds. Attended by a few hundred people, the “very select group of community leaders from different sectors” discussed wide-ranging issues, from funding and corporate support for the arts, to how the arts can affect social change, but didn’t include artists or cultural practitioners, save Bob McPhee, director and CEO of Calgary Opera. Was the implication that community leaders from the visual and media arts sector itself were not a valued part of this response? When asked why there were no artists included, panelist Cynthia Moore, vice-president of community at the Kahanoff Foundation, levelled the stinging accusation that artists are not very involved with their community. “Few people in the artistic community move beyond [it]: they stay within their peer group, and they don’t get out in the broader community,” she said.
In response, Fast Forward asked more than 70 artists, cultural workers, arts administrators and gallery dealers to highlight five key issues in the arts. They delivered an outpouring of passionate opinions. Loud and clear, they stated that the arts contribute to defining Calgary on a day-to-day basis, but also that their concerns are reaching a crisis point. Many believe partnering with other sectors is the most important aspect of their work. Further to this, Fast Forward asked several city artists about the struggles of working in the arts and how they’re taking action to change their communities.
Many cultural advocacy efforts in the last decade have politicized the lack of arts spaces and cultural infrastructure in Calgary, and levels of arts funding continue to be a concern for artists across all disciplines. After years of lobbying and policy consultations, these issues have gained currency at City Hall and at Calgary Arts Development Authority (CADA), where new municipal funding programs for facilities and individual project grants are taking the edge off what was a desperate situation. However, rapid economic growth has led to substandard studio spaces for artists, rental increases and a wave of evictions.
ACAD faculty member and Stride Gallery board member Laura Vickerson was recently forced out of her studio space by rising rents. Still, she says no matter what the challenge, “artists figure out how to survive, but we don’t stop being involved. That’s the most important thing.” Still, artists seem unanimously focused on creating positive solutions and taking direct actions that can mediate the problems they face. Artistic leaders and their initiatives are changing the state of the arts and strengthening the role of culture in Calgary.
A HEALTH CRISIS IN THE ARTS COMMUNITY?
Elephant Artist Relief (EAR) is a multidisciplinary group of artists whose aim is to create a bridge between the arts community and the health sector. For its board members, waiting for someone else to address the health and wellness of the arts community was just not an option. Leslie Sweder recounts the health woes that spurred her into action. “I used to work in restoration with a lot of toxins, and I became so ill that I wasn’t able to do my job. I was spiraling into debt, trying to make ends meet, and then Janet [Turner, another EAR board member] came ill with multiple sclerosis. I just didn’t know what the hell to do.” A multidisciplinary fundraising event to assist Turner with medical costs netted $13,000, and the group felt that EAR could become a platform for ongoing action.
Artist and board member Mark Dicey points to a history of artist-run organizing at the grassroots level as one of the basic principles of EAR. “When someone has lost their house or become sick, the community comes up with phenomenal support. We’ve all thought that (bigger organizations) could be doing this, but they have no plans for it. EAR is about taking care of our own community,” he says.
In Toronto, the Artists’ Health Centre grew from “unanimous frustration with the cost and lack of appropriate health care for artists,” to a full-fledged organization of artists and professionals in the health, legal and business sectors. It now operates out of Toronto Western Hospital and serves over 20,000 professional artists in Toronto. “The centre presents talks, health workshops and has doctors and psychologists who are committed to working with visual and performing artists,” Dicey says of the cross-discipline approach.
EAR was also inspired by the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund. The organization was founded by American country-folk performer Victoria Williams in 1993, after she was diagnosed with MS. Her efforts quickly gained the support of musicians such as R.E.M., Madonna and Vic Chesnutt. Its fundraising work supports musicians who are suffering from injury or illness, unable to work because of medical reasons or simply retiring. EAR is convinced that artists in Calgary could use a similar fund.
According to a survey conducted by EAR in September 2007, more than half of the Calgary artists polled don’t have health benefits, nor have they had a dentist visit in the last several years. Almost 70 per cent of respondents had no retirement planning, and 59 per cent worked two or more jobs to make ends meet.
Johanna Schwartz points out that the problem extends to cultural workers, too. “As an arts administrator, I haven’t had a single job with benefits, even at a job that I work 40 hours a week with a salary.” Artists such as Schwartz suggest that even non-profit arts organizations are unable to support the health of their employees.
CREATING HEALTH AND WELLNESS STRATEGIES IN ARTIST-RUN CULTURE
Emmedia Gallery and Production Centre serves artists working in new media, video and sound, journalists, emerging musicians and members of the general community with an interest in video production. Its staff members are concerned that health of the artistic community has reached a critical breaking point. Emmedia operations co-ordinator Peter Curtis-Morgan believes arts organizations need to take the lead and provide holistic health care for artists and cultural workers. By speaking with many of the centre’s 300 members, he understands how difficult it is to make a living as an artist. He laments that they’re often forced to choose between “paying rent, buying art supplies, having a basic dental visit or affording to buy a new pair of glasses. Making art is not a cheap endeavour and most artists sacrifice their health,” he says.
Artist Kari McQueen’s health issues went untreated for many years until she became employed as Emmedia’s production co-ordinator and could take advantage of its new health strategy. “Even with a spinal cord injury, my option before working at Emmedia was simply not to get treated. If you need physiotherapy, medicine or an MRI, for example, you just find a way to live without. This is something that every person who is on a fixed income has to deal with, including people who work in the arts.”
Both agree that Alberta Health Care (AHC) premiums burden artists’ budgets. “Even AHC does not cover an ambulance trip, and one week a few years ago I had to go to the hospital twice,” McQueen says. “That’s $400 a trip. People don’t (always realize) that until they get the bill in the mail.” The Alberta Government plans to eliminate all health care premiums, effective January 1, 2009, but it doesn’t completely reverse the precarious state of health that artists have learned to accept.
Curtis-Morgan’s research into health insurance plans for artists and small non-profit arts groups led to Emmedia’s investment in Blue Cross coverage and an individual health spending fund that can be accessed in times of emergency or when medical costs are not covered by insurance. “It was like offering a security blanket for each employee,” he says. He hopes other cultural organizations will follow suit.
ARTISTS AS AGENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
Some organizations are creating cultural healing through art. Calgary Animated Objects Society has collaborated with aboriginal communities in theatre, music and inmates from a federal penitentiary. Quickdraw Animation Society recently launched its Aboriginal Youth Animation Project (Ab YAP) in response to community feedback about its ongoing Youth Animation Project. The new program is in the developing stages, and collaborations with educational institutions, the Urban Society for Aboriginal Youth and Treaty 7 Health (an organization that advocates for and represents the Blackfoot and Stoney nations) are shaping its activities. Artists and activists Patti Conteh, Keegan Starlight and Maria One Spot, who are all working on animation projects and are organizers of Ab YAP, have seen its effects first-hand.
They’ve just returned from a one-week animation intensive at the Tsuu T’ina Junior and Senior High School, where they are using animation to teach traditional language in the school’s culture class. One Spot says, “With animation, I get praised for telling my story. Being able to speak is a very powerful tool, and with animation it is even more so. I know you cannot fly or breathe under water in real life, but if you have the mindset that anything is possible in the creative world of animation, you can apply that to yourself, and animate or empower yourself, so to speak.”
Starlight says the program instills the message of empowerment through art by offering the chance for “kids to be successful at something that they love to do,” and One Spot emphasizes that “social change needs to evolve from youth.” Their work in using animation as a tool for creating this dialogue has attracted some big attention. Their latest project is a professional commission from Treaty 7 Health that aims to promote careers in the health sector to aboriginal youth using a five-minute animated film.
EMERGING ARTISTS AND THE COMMODITIZATION OF ARTS AND CULTURE
When artists pursue advanced post-secondary education and then leave Alberta because of rising rents or lack of employment in their field, “it can be a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money,” says emerging artist Ian Ward, who’s wrapping up a term as a member of ACAD’s board of governors. After attending ACAD to complete his second post-secondary degree, he’s committed to working in the arts despite the challenges ahead. “If the Government of Alberta has designated culture as a new priority, without contributing to rent control and arts development strategies, it still forces the artist to think about moving out of province.” Indeed, artists are also aligning their needs with low-income and student populations through initiatives like Calgary Housing Action Initiative, an advocacy group for affordable housing and work spaces.
“How do we value art?” asks Ward rhetorically. “Because of corporate structures, we’ve been conditioned to value things through purchasing them. Commoditization of culture really hurts the arts because people forget the values of art as a reflective tool, on society and on ourselves. There is a risk that people view art as a backdrop.”
By failing to include an artist on the Calgary Responds panel discussion, was the role of the arts being used as a backdrop for a corporate agenda? “The positive thing about Stirring Culture is that the audience is intended to be the whole city, but it also needs to include Calgary’s own cultural heroes in the dialogue,” Ward says. Hopefully, he concludes, “Calgarians will start looking towards and venerating our own cultural figures that are working in here in the trenches.”
STUDIO EVICTIONS AND RISING RENTS FORCE ARTISTS OUT
Emerging artists are not the only ones who have reason to be critical of corporatization and its effects on the artistic community. Two of Stride Gallery’s longtime board members, painter John Will and textile and installation artist Laura Vickerson, have also been ousted from their studios in the past year. These senior artists have substantial international exhibition records, and have worked in Calgary for decades. Will is a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary and Vickerson was just hired as permanent faculty in ACAD’s Fibre department. Unfortunately, their stories have become routine, as artists search for smaller, more expensive and marginal studio rental properties.
Will’s former studio wasn’t much bigger than a shoebox anyway, but he worked out of the tiny space for over 20 years until being unceremoniously evicted last February. He was given a month’s notice to vacate in the middle of winter. “I reminded the landlord that I was a longtime tenant, and that I had always paid my rent on time, never asked for any renovation, dutifully suffered the ever more frequent rent increases due to ‘rising utility costs’ (I had three light bulbs, no electronic items and a dripping radiator). I considered myself an exemplary client. He could only reply that it was a ‘difficult decision.’”
He sarcastically adds, “I will miss the lead paint, the mould and the mice, but not [the landlord],” suggesting that the working conditions were tolerable, but not pleasant.
Vickerson also worked in a sub-par space for over 10 years. “It was a beautiful building in Inglewood, but barely survivable – it was not heated in the winter, and until they replaced the roof, it was leaking. It was a bit of a shock when the building was sold and the rent more than doubled overnight. It [would have cost] over $1,500 a month for my space alone.” She’s found a new space in an industrial area and helped other artists to move into the same building. They doubt that the area will gentrify anytime soon.
Will sent a letter about his eviction to the landlord with copies also sent to several city councillors, journalists and to CADA. It poses questions about whether the city is truly committed to the role of “the arts in the viability of the city,” and suggests that the treatment of artists is out of synch with “self-congratulatory articles on how Calgary is becoming a leader in cultural affairs.” The lack of affordable studio space is consistently raised as the number 1 issue for the arts community, and despite the city’s inaction on the topic, Will emphasizes that it remains a pressing concern.
Several artists contacted by Fast Forward suggested that they have plans to move to Saskatchewan, New Brunswick or other communities where rent doesn’t pose such an obstacle. This mass exodus endangers the health of the community, too, as we lose a critical mass of people that contribute to artistic and cultural change.
If access to health care, living wages, studio space and the integration of arts into daily civic life are matters of survival, artists ought to be raising a bigger ruckus in their communities about these issues. The level of feedback indicates that artists have no shortage of good solutions and energy to make them a reality — they’re just looking for support and partners who are ready and willing to step up and take action.
Anthea Black is a Calgary artist and cultural worker. Her writing on visual art and politics is published by Bordercrossings, FUSE Magazine, Shotgun-Review.ca and through artist-run initiatives in Calgary and beyond. She has served on the board of directors for M:ST Performative Art Festival, Fairy Tales Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Calgary Professional Arts Alliance, The Calgary Foundation Arts and Culture Committee and as the director of Stride Gallery.
