A single mom working as a part-time postal clerk at a small village post office in Shelby County moves briskly, dispensing stamps, weighing letters and shifting bulky packages. When not on duty at the post office, she works the late shift at the convenience store, sweeping the floors and locking up. She also manages to baby-sit and clean houses at other hours, all in an effort to make the proverbial ends meet in the slow drag of this recession. An unemployed computer technician in Champaign County struggles to find an odd job repairing laptops, trying to supplement his unemployment check and his wife’s meager salary as a teacher’s aide. The couple is raising two young sons.
A recent hire for a newspaper in Macoupin County loses her job, and then the bank forecloses on her newly purchased home. Some homes in central Illinois have been on the real estate market since 2008, unsold and unwanted. A talented research librarian in Sangamon County now works in two departments on two different floors, trying to approximate the work of several people at once. Everywhere the quality of life seems to be deteriorating. In dozens of little ways, frustrated Illinoisans are coping with the economy in this topsy-turvy world called the “new normal.” It is a place where the national unemployment rate hangs stubbornly at 9 percent. Fourteen million people are officially unemployed, a figure that does not include the underemployed or those hapless citizens who have simply given up. The real figure is probably closer to 25 million.
This massive unemployment certainly evokes memories of the Great Depression of the 1930s. During that national calamity the unemployment rate actually peaked above 25 percent, but President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came to the rescue with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA famously helped to support artists and writers during this troubled era, creating a legacy of post office murals and city guides. The WPA even supported writers and folk singers like Woody Guthrie, who wrote his patriotic “This Land is Your Land” with WPA assistance. In the 1930s John Steinbeck wrote the classic Grapes of Wrath, a novel which faithfully documented the tragic consequences of the Dust Bowl. Half a century later, in the 1980s, Willie Nelson launched his famous Farm Aid concerts, coming to the aid of thousands of Midwestern farmers, especially those in Iowa, who were in imminent danger of losing their farms — and their family traditions. So there are well-known precedents for government-sponsored arts programs — and individual initiatives — that link the arts to economically marginalized communities.
In several important ways, however, the arts scene of the 2000s is markedly different from that of the 1930s. First, there are simply more venues for the arts, including little theater groups, libraries, art galleries, symphony halls and, especially, museums, from the county and city museums all the way to venerable institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Second, the arts are now bound together by an invisible but nevertheless real network, a web of interconnections created by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Americans for the Arts, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2010, for example, the MacArthur Foundation awarded 200 grants in the city of Chicago alone.
So grant money is widely, if not sufficiently, available for the arts. In fact, the NEA benefited dramatically from President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, adding an additional $50 million to its coffers. Recently, at Christie’s auction house in New York City, the very high end of the art market, a minimalist photograph of the Rhine River was put on the auction block. Created by German artist Andreas Gursky, the photograph was titled Rhein II. It sold for the mind-boggling sum of $4.3 million dollars. A new website, www.daligallery.com, now offers original art work by famed surrealist Salvador Dali for well-heeled online shoppers. The prices begin at $20,000.
But at the state and local levels, the arts landscape is decidedly less hospitable. The Metropolitan Museum, the largest and richest in the nation, saw its endowments shrink from $2.9 to $2.1 billion, a fate suffered across the board by all the foundations and trusts. The Metropolitan Museum also cut its staff, as did museums in Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and San Diego. The Connecticut Opera Company closed down completely, as did the Baltimore Opera Company. The Kansas Arts Commission also closed its doors. The Art Institute of Chicago raised its basic ticket price from $12 to $18. And the Illinois Arts Council (IAC), which serves communities throughout the state, was forced to scale back some programs and eliminate others entirely because its budget shrank by 63 percent over the past six years. The underserved arts communities in rural areas, especially in southern Illinois, were especially hard hit. As the IAC explained, “Arts organizations that have been faltering may well close their doors or cease to exist.”
As painful as these setbacks are for the organizations and the artists they support, there are dire implications for related communities. According to a widely-circulated 27-page document created by the Americans for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Alliance, Arts and Economic Prosperity III (2007), the arts enhance the economic life of any community. The arts attract tourists and local audiences who then spend money on hotels, food and parking. This miniature economic cycle begins with the arts organizations and the artists themselves who must purchase materials like paint, plaster, canvas, lights, costumes, musical instruments, microphones, recording equipment, paper, printing supplies and even computers. And there is a cumulative effect to these purchases: a growing sense of well-being created by gallery openings, plays, poetry readings, dance performances and the like. People become more conscious and prouder of their communities, and real estate values actually rise.
The arts represent a potential win-win situation for everyone. To diminish the arts during a period of economic decline can transform the body blow of the recession into a solid knockout punch. During the London Blitz of 1942 and 1943, when London was a bombed-out shell of its former self, the city was bombed for 76 consecutive nights in a row. But attendance at art museums soared. This historical example demonstrates that art can save the very soul of a nation, even in the midst of a real war. But an economic war is also painfully real, as it slowly saps the will of the population and undercuts everyone, including the artists.
The Southern Illinois Metalsmiths Society in Carbondale reports a noticeable dip in sales of metal artwork and sculpture, especially in the last four years, a sales curve unlike that of the 1990s, when artwork in metal was riding a wave of popularity. In like manner, free-lance poets and writers are hard put to discover venues for their work. Most museums and libraries can no longer afford to offer fees or honoraria of any kind, even reimbursement for travel expenses. With gasoline hovering as high as $4 per gallon, travel expenses alone can make any performance an economic loss for the artist, even if he or she needs and craves the validation afforded by a live audience. To make matters worse, most audiences have become notoriously tight-fisted, making it almost impossible to sell a book or a CD, even if the live performance was enthusiastically received. So the artist simply cannot recoup the losses. This situation suggests that audiences for such performances will either no longer be served, or the audiences themselves will have to become more directly supportive of the artists, who are now visiting them but losing money in the process. Everyone will have to become more pro-active if the arts are to survive in a meaningful way, especially in smaller and poorer communities, the ones that are the most economically challenged. In any event, the status quo for free-lance artists is unsustainable.
Two Illinois artists who have experienced these problems firsthand are renowned storyteller Dan Kedding and popular folk singer Chris Vallillo, the latter a recipient of Illinois Arts Council (IAC) and Illinois Humanities Council (IHC) grants like Arts Tour and Roads Scholars. Many of Kedding’s and Vallillo’s programs occur in the schools, venues that are directly impacted by shrinking tax levies, nonexistent state funding and reduced programming from the IAC and other agencies. Chris Vallillo has served twice as an Illinois State Scholar for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibits, from 2006 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2011. He recently completed a tour at Grinnell College’s Prairie Center for the Arts, and he is now preparing for his performance in Springfield’s First Night celebration on New Year’s Eve. Passionate and outspoken in his defense of the arts, Vallillo believes that “Illinois is one of the most poorly funded states for the arts.” Vallillo puts a great deal of store in the educational value of the arts, and he laments the loss of funds that enriched the “schools, senior centers, the underserved audiences and educational audiences that needed them most.” For him, supporting an artist is an investment in the community. He can’t afford to do any more free or “pro bono” programs because he drives to his performances in a mini-van filled with $20,000 worth of musical instruments and amplifiers, the tools of his trade. Artists are always making an investment in the community. Yet, as Vallillo summarizes his profession, there are “fewer gigs at lower cost, and fewer places selling CD’s” of his music.
Yet artists will always be making art, in spite of the economy, because they are driven to do it. “I suspect that creating is like breathing,” says guitarist William Furry, who holds a day job as executive director of the Illinois State Historical Society. He goes on to add that if “artists don’t do it, they turn blue and fall from the vine.” Art still occurs all over the country, particularly in small venues, sometimes independently financed, sometimes agency-supported. The small town of Bristol, Va., recently staged a successful State of the Arts weekend festival, including a miniature ballet. Like William Furry, Michele Plescia, artistic director of the ballet, also picked up on the theme of art and breathing: “Forget about all your problems. Forget that you’re worried about money or that you lost your job. Breathe, even if it’s just for an hour.”
So art seemingly has a life and a momentum of its own. David Walker, a pianist and music teacher in Douglas County, composes music daily during this lengthy recession. Skip Mathieson, a former college football coach, makes — and sells — unique pieces of jewelry in Logan County. The Writers Center at Elgin College in Elgin and the Vachel Lindsay Home in Springfield regularly sponsor literary events that are free and open to the public. Jon Griffin, a graphic artist in Decatur, makes free posters for penurious musicians who need the publicity. James Schietinger, an art professor and potter in Macon County, recruits his best students to make “chili bowls,” which he sells to raise money for the Good Samaritan Inn, a charity that feeds more than 200 hungry people every day. “As long as I can play in clay and make art I’m happy,” observes Schietinger. The Cancer Care Center of Decatur offers free art classes every weekday in Macon County. And Quiddity, the weekly arts radio program on WUIS-FM in Springfield and its companion arts magazine published by Illinois Benedictine University-Springfield, appeared in 2009, in the very midst of this recession, and it has been flourishing ever since.
In Chicago, the edgy Inconvenience Theater on North Lincoln recently presented a group of seven short plays about the recession titled Strapped, and Jennifer Mills, a Chicago-based performance artist who gives away free art in a parody of the glitzy art scene, will perform her work at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., an avant-garde venue that recently presented a show titled “Irrational Exuberance: A Recession Art Show.” So in some places, the recession is being “tamed” by becoming the subject-matter of art, a rare instance of intrinsic human expression successfully overcoming a nearly overwhelming obstacle.
In the end, art conquers the economy. And if citizens want to keep art in their communities, they must empower themselves and become hosts to visiting artists. Church groups, Rotary and Lions clubs, parent-teacher groups, Friends of the Library, and neighborhood organizations can all become sponsors for memorable artistic events. Two websites offer some intriguing ideas about how to become an arts donor: Kickstarter and The Awesome Foundation. It is not just about money. Ultimately, art fills an aching hole in our hearts that, left unattended, would be the death of us all.
Dan Guillory is professor emeritus of English at Millikin University. He is the author of 10 books, including The Lincoln Poems (2008), which will shortly appear as a Kindle digital book. Guillory formerly served as a poet in the Schools for the Illinois Arts Council and as a member of the Literary Arts Panel of the Illinois Arts Council.
Illinois Issues, December 2011
