April 19, 2011
By Colin Dabkowski
Last December, as the leaders of art galleries and theaters gathered in the chambers of the Erie County Legislature to watch lawmakers spar over their worth to the community, some prominent faces were notably absent.
Those were the faces of the leaders of the county’s largest arts institutions, several of which received their full allotment of funding in County Executive Chris Collins’ 2011 budget. As the arguments raged, as the public spoke out in fierce support of the region’s theaters and galleries, and as Republican lawmakers sank deeper into their self-protective shells, those cultural leaders remained largely and painfully silent.
The failure of the big arts organizations to stand in unified, public solidarity with their cloutless colleagues resulted in hurt feelings, and a rift between the haves and have-nots began to appear.
Now, fortunately for everyone except Collins and company, that rift is closing. But it’s important to understand how and why it came to be in the first place –and that it was no mistake.
Depending on where you were standing at the time, the timidity of those “Big Ten” cultural leaders might have looked like pragmatism, or it might have looked like cowardice. But given Collins’ proven penchant for imposing his whims without so much as a nod to the public good or the rule of law, it probably contained more of the former than the latter.
Collins’ “divide and conquer” strategy –which he has applied to the arts as well as to larger matters of regional politics –frightened those large organizations into silence by the implied threat of de-funding. You could almost picture him pacing in his 16th-floor office in the Rath Building, clasping his hands and muttering under his breath in his best Emperor Palpatine: “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.”
But the rebel alliance –that is, the Greater Buffalo Cultural Alliance, with its range of big and small constituents –has grown stronger than Collins might have guessed.
Now that the county arts funding battle is over and lost (at least for this budget year), the cultural community is hard at work to salve those wounds and make itself whole once again. On Wednesday in Kleinhans Music Hall, in a most impressive demonstration of solidarity between small and large arts organizations, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra collaborated with MusicalFare Theatre to raise money for Artvoice’s Give for Greatness Campaign.
That concert, part of a two-month campaign to help make up for the budget shortfall for small and midsized arts groups that were de-funded (among others), signals a genuine desire from the large cultural organizations to stand together with the smaller groups that feed them with creative product and with audiences –and without which they wouldn’t exist as we know them.
“Even the large cultural institutions will tell you that there is a need for different tiers within the community,” said Robert Gioia, president of the Oishei Foundation and an outspoken advocate for public arts funding. “If we only had Major League Baseball, no one would see AAA here. And if there was only NHL hockey, we would never have had the AHL here to then mature into the NHL. It’s more about diversity within an industry that makes a community unique.”
That deafening silence from top leaders during the budget battle was perhaps nowhere more painful than in the case of the Albright- Knox Art Gallery, which was then in the midst of its participation in one of the largest and most ambitious collaborative art exhibitions in Western New York’s history. That exhibition, “Beyond/In Western New York,”would not have been remotely imaginable if not for the small and midsized galleries and art centers that coorganized and raised money for the event.
But now, the Albright-Knox –through the participation of its staff on the Greater Buffalo Cultural Alliance steering committee and its hosting of the Give for Greatness closing party on May 5 –is once again fully engaged in the work of cultural solidarity.
At the heart of all this is a widening understanding that a cultural ecology –and a regional economy –can only operate to its potential when all pistons are fully firing. And almost everyone seems to understand that –except for the people who steer the political fate of Erie County.