15 metro arts groups divide $700,000 in ‘recovery’ grants

At a Buckhead hotel luncheon Thursday, where the program will carry the sunny title “Bright Lights: Identifying and supporting what’s working in the arts,” the fund will award grants totaling $700,000 to 15 midsize metro arts organizations. The largest awards, $75,000 each, will go to Horizon Theatre Company, Theatrical Outfit and Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company.

In the four years since its launch in 2009, when the recession was threatening to wipe out several metro nonprofit arts groups, the Atlanta Arts Recovery initiative has provided $3.7 million in general operating grants to 40 organizations. Before the recovery initiative, the arts fund typically made once-a-year awards totaling $500,000.

Extending the recovery initiative, originally targeted for two years, into a fourth year “acknowledges that the recession didn’t end two years ago,” arts fund director Lisa Cremin said in an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It certainly did not feel like that economically this year.”

Still, Cremin sounded more optimistic about the future for metro arts groups than she has before award announcements in recent years.

“This is a period of recovery, innovation and acclimation (for the groups) to a new way of managing and producing their arts programming,” she said. “It will not ever look like the way it looked pre-recession.”

Cremin was referring not just to changes of approach in arts fundraising since the economy slumped but also to changes wrought by the rocketing popularity of digital media, providing entertainment in an instant to consumers in their homes or via mobile devices. They present a growing challenge to arts organizations that produce in a physical place that audiences have to make an effort to visit.

But there are many examples among the recipients being announced Thursday of groups innovating in the face of funding and audience-building challenges.

Horizon Theatre, for instance, has launched the Atlanta Intown Theatre Partnership, a yet-to-be-officially-announced collective fundraising effort with four other troupes. Along with Theatrical Outfit, the New American Shakespeare Tavern, Actor’s Express and 7 Stages, Horizon will seek to identify new donors of $1,000 or more, especially individual ones.

The collective’s initial program, the Atlanta Intown Theatre Giving Circle, will attempt to raise $1 million in operating support in three to five years.

A $75,000 partnership grant from the Atlanta Arts Fund’s parent group, the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, seeded the effort, and the foundation recently awarded $110,000 for the next phase, which includes hiring an executive director.

“It is really exciting. It’s also really scary,” Horizon co-artistic/producing director Lisa Adler said. “Collaboration is so hard. Everyone in this partnership is having to put in a lot of extra hours to make this happen, but I think everyone in the room believes that we can be stronger collectively than individually.”

While Horizon scores its third recovery initiative grant Thursday, the one going to the Jacqueline Casey Hudgens Center for the Arts is its first. The $50,000 grant will constitute nearly a tenth of the Duluth visual arts center's fiscal 2013 budget. It follows some mission-focusing work with consultants connected to the arts fund's Toolbox Project to make the Hudgens a more vital Gwinnett County asset.

“A gift of this size allows us to take bold steps that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to take in the critical areas of technology and investing in staff, which will lead to sustainability and growth,” executive director Teresa Osborn said.

The grant funds are drawn from the arts fund’s endowment, worth $7.7 million and built through private donations.

The positive arts funding news comes amid a backdrop of weakening public funding in Atlanta and Georgia. In August, Fulton County, perennially the metro area’s leading public supporter of the arts, approved $1.4 million in arts grants. A decade prior, the county funded $3.4 million. Meanwhile, the state ranks 49th in the nation in legislative arts appropriations for fiscal 2013, designating 6 cents per capita, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

Anticipating sharper Fulton County cuts for fiscal 2013, arts groups including Horizon and Roswell’s Georgia Ensemble Theatre, a $40,000 arts fund grant winner, recently sent emails to supporters asking their help in lobbying commissioners.

“The Giving Circle is intended to augment funding that keeps disappearing,” Adler said of the soon-to-be-launched collaborative campaign. “Every time we turn around, another source of funding disappears. So you end up where all you’ve got left is single ticket sales and your loyal donors. There needs to be more than that to sustain.”