Today in Living & Arts, the AJC's contributing critics share their picks for the best of Atlanta's cultural scene in 2014. And it's good to be reminded that there were arts performances and exhibitions in Atlanta in 2014.
Because, thinking back, it seems that this year was all about the money — or the lack thereof — that supported that work, at times obscuring the art itself.
The recession was officially over, but like the scene of a four-alarm fire many months later, you could still smell its singed embers. Figuratively speaking, many arts groups have been making adjustments before rebuilding.
Exhibit A was the bruising nine-week Atlanta Symphony Orchestra musician lockout, which pitted players fighting to maintain the ensemble at a major-league level against cost-cutting management dead-set on balancing the orchestra's budget after a dozen years of deficits.
Amid the seeming daily written and verbal Molotov cocktails of that skirmish, Georgia Shakespeare, one of the metro area's longest-running theater troupes, quietly dropped its final curtain.
Many Atlantans had assumed the esteemed company’s future was secure after its high-profile Save Georgia Shakespeare emergency campaign that exceeded its $500,000 goal in 2011. Few knew then that more than $300,000 in debt remained and, despite its leaders’ determined efforts to pay it down and adopt a new business model, the red ink gradually became as constricting as a boa.
After the bad news spread, co-founder and producing artistic director Richard Garner was repeatedly asked if he had any advice for leaders of other arts non-profits.
“Never, ever, ever get in debt, because it’s impossible to get out,” Garner answered. “No one wants to fund that.”
Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund Director Lisa Cremin said everyone she has met with since the company’s closing is still stunned.
“Almost every meeting I go to, it is top of mind for people. There’s a huge sense of loss,” Cremin said.
Perhaps in some cases the news hit a little too close to home.
The Arts Fund has invested more than $11 million in mid-sized metro arts organizations over 21 years. But a recent survey of 40 of the top groups it has funded revealed that 78 percent possessed less than three months of operating liquidity. Worse, 53 percent had negative liquidity.
It doesn’t help, of course, that local and state arts funding continues its 21st century free-fall.
“We knew that there were some issues,” Cremin said. “We did not realize that they were as severe as they are.”
To help get them off this Wallenda-like tight wire, the Arts Fund announced a pilot Arts Capitalization program this year. It tutored leaders of select arts groups, established funders, business executives and other metro arts stakeholders on building a strong balance sheet that provides the resources for groups to meet their artistic missions.
The bottom line of this bottom-line-oriented program, Cremin said, is to help groups “own their future.”
As an extension of that outreach, the Arts Fund created a pilot capitalization grant competition in which the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center received $200,000, the largest Arts Fund gift ever to a single organization.
Julie Delliquanti, the Contemporary’s new executive director, said the support will back an initiative aimed at diversifying the Westside art showcase’s audience and increasing and diversifying its revenue. Though the institution is debt free, “that could be financially risky without the financial support,” she said.
In the meantime, the Arts Fund will continue its grants to mid-sized groups that are considered the most vulnerable in a city whose funding landscape is dominated by the Woodruff Arts Center.
The Woodruff is the parent nonprofit over the city’s largest orchestra (ASO), stage troupe (Alliance Theatre), visual arts institution (High Museum of Art) and arts education provider (Arts for Learning). With it and its divisions operating on a combined $90 million budget, it is the fund-raising Goliath in a city boasting only three independent arts organizations with budgets topping $2 million (Atlanta Ballet, the Atlanta Opera and Center for Puppetry Arts).
But even the Goliath appeared vulnerable this year.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of its financial statements published in November, just after Atlanta Symphony musicians and management finally hammered out a four-year collective bargaining agreement, revealed the arts center to be grappling with a heavy debt load ($173 million), stagnant revenue and rising expenses.
Throughout the thorny ASO negotiations, in which Woodruff administrative and board leaders were accused by musicians and their supporters of being poor stewards and far worse on social media, arts center president and CEO Virginia Hepner said there were inarguable reasons why hard cuts had to be made. The one she cited most often was that foundation leaders had told her future funding of the ASO, and the Woodruff in general, would decline or grow based on leadership’s ability to reach balanced budgets for all four divisions.
Then almost on cue, not even a month after the ASO deal was reached, the arts center announced it had received a $38 million grant from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. The largest gift in the arts center's 46-year history includes $25 million in endowment matching funds (to be split among the ASO, High and Alliance) and $13 million for capital improvements. Most of the latter will become the lead gift in a $30 million renovation of the Alliance Theatre.
Its share of the matching endowment fund will help ASO administrative and board leaders meet the terms of the collective bargaining agreement. Reduced from 88 full-time musicians in its 2012 labor agreement to 77 this season, the orchestra is contracted to grow back to at least 88 by the end of the 2017-18 season. (Top-rank orchestras tend to boast 95 full-time players and up.)
In the afterglow of the agreement and monumental gift, Hepner said she could see a silver lining in the strife: a more informed public.
“Everyone’s disappointed to have to go through a chapter like that,” she said. “But frankly sometimes giving people knowledge and making sure they don’t take what we have that’s great for granted at the High, the Alliance, the symphony — and all the other arts organizations in Atlanta — is important. And I have learned that we need to tell our story better about how much it costs.”
Though the Woodruff casts a giant shadow across the city’s arts landscape, the end of the recession brought signs of new growth in those shadows this year.
Among the most promising: WonderRoot, the decade-old Atlanta grass-roots group with a strong social change mission, plotted a 2015 move into a 54,000-square-foot former schoolhouse across Memorial Drive from its long-time headquarters in a timeworn converted house.
Executive director Chris Appleton said it is on target in the seed funding stage of a $3.5 million campaign to renovate the 1922 red-brick edifice and to construct an additional 7,000 square feet of space, including a 2,000-square-foot gallery.
“Despite a handful of challenges that some of the larger organizations have seen, the city has responded well to our requests for support to help us take a next big step,” Appleton said.
“Atlanta is in a moment of flux,” he continued. “Perhaps part of the reason that more agile and entrepreneurial organizations are thriving is due to the reality that the public is looking for change.”
