Marc Vogl
Soon after I started my job at Hewlett a couple years ago I was at a party in San Francisco talking to a woman who had just turned 30. Let’s call her Tina (she’s not called Tina but this is my first blog post and if I want to make up aliases, who’s gonna stop me?). Tina worked for a Bay Area arts organization. The mission of the organization was inspiring, she said, as were the artists she was employed to support. The people she shared an office with were more than co-workers, they were her friends. So, why wasn’t Tina happy with her job? Why was she disenchanted with her prospects in the field she’d chosen? Why, to be blunt, was Tina on her way to law school?
There are a million personal reasons that go into the major decisions we make in life, and the work we do in the arts doesn’t occur in a vacuum. So I get that no philanthropic initiative to increase the odds that smart, talented, driven people contribute their skills and passion to making great art possible, and are incentivized to stay in our sector for the long haul is not going to work for everyone. No matter how much professional development training, mentoring, or peer networking Tina received, no matter how much her boss acknowledged her contributions, asked for her input, empowered her to turn ideas into action – or even if she had been better paid and had health insurance (!) – she may still have decided this was not the career for her.
But through the research we at Hewlett and our colleagues at the Irvine Foundation have done with young arts professionals in California, and through the anecdotal conversations I have had, and have listened in on at meetings of emerging arts leaders around the country, I know that there are many Tinas out there who want to stay in our field.
Every time a Tina leaves our field is impoverished and all of our work gets harder.
If we understand that the quality and impact of the art that is presented ‘onstage’ is a function of the resourcefulness and imagination of everyone working ‘backstage,’ then why do we funders, arts organization managers and board members, arts advocates and artists accept Tina leaving so easily? And how well do we really understand why Tina or left, or what it would take to get the next Tina to stay?
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I really don’t mean to be a Negative Nancy, but there does not seem to be a shortage of young, eager talent wanting to get involved in the Arts. Personally, I had difficulty breaking into the arts world because I graduated college without any arts internship experience.
I eventually fought my way in, waiting tables and working part-time as an overqualified office gopher just to get my foot in the door. After my foot in the door turned into a full time position, I had to hire several part-time assistants and a group of seasoned workers every year, and I was always inundated with legions of young, eager applicants.
I suppose my point is that my own experience leads me to believe there’s more of a glut of young people wanting to get into Arts Administration than a shortage.
Am I completely off base?
Rachel – I don’t think you’re off base at all. In fact two recent studies on this issue conducted by the Irvine Foundation and the Hewlett Foundations indicate that the field does not have a problem attracting talent. What we learned, and I wonder, if this jives with your own observations, is that the field has a distinct problem holding on to talent much less nurturing it.
Marc, at a conference we recently hosted, one thing that came up is that emerging leaders feel stymied by a lack of movement at the top — current leaders can’t or won’t retire, being (as they are) in the arts, where having a retirement account, not to mention a set of hobbies to engage with after an artistic career are relatively rare. One thought that came up was that perhaps there might be a role for foundations in setting up some sort of “transition fund” to ease the way out of the organization for those leaders who are simply hanging on for lack of a financial safety net. I don’t know how that would work practically, and I doubt there are many foundations interested in essentially becoming a social security supplement, but I do wonder whether the arts ecosystem in total might benefit from a transition system for retirement-age arts professionals interested in moving to that next phase of life.
The other thing that came up in the conversation at our conference was that there is often a feeling of disrepect on the part of the current arts leaders — a perception that emerging leaders are impatient, not ready, and essentially rude in assuming that they deserve that leadership role. This is only exacerbated by the number of small arts organizations with a relatively flat structure, which essentially means that an emerging leader jumps into a role of some responsibility, grows into it, and then discovers that the next step is actually either up to the top or out.
In my job at Theatre Bay Area (and previously at Z Space, where I grew from an intern to marketing director), I’ve been blessed to have bosses who worked with me to expand my duties as my interests dictated (on top of a core group of responsibilities). This has allowed me, largely, to maintain a level of interest and engagement lacking for many junior arts administrators. At the same time, I’m not yet 30, I’ve been in the arts field for under 10 years — and I’m already sensing some impending ceilings based both on who’s ready to depart and on a perception that I’m not ready to take on certain challenges (which I may not be). It’s a hard question, how to keep people with talent and voracious appetite for responsibility engaged in a community that has a limited number of high-level positions (especially when the compensation isn’t there to make a holding pattern more palatable).
Greetings! I have a few thoughts. I’m thinking that if Tina has received mentoring, coaching, training, encouragement, and challenge to use her talents and she is still not interested in working in the field, then she’s probably not the right fit to stay in the field anyway. My guess is that there isn’t alignment between her personal values and goals to those of the arts organizations and the field.
What I think we need to be concerned about are people who’s personal values are strongly aligned, who have a lot of energy and talent to offer their organizations and the field, but who are demoralized and disempowered by working in the field. Our field doesn’t have a strong tradition of providing professional development and leadership development, but rather has a tradition of learn-on-your-own/trial-and-error culture. I think we’re at a point in time where emerging leaders aren’t as accepting of the tradition AND the field is starting to learn that intentionally developing our people is smart and necessary.
Many leaders have short tenures at individual organizations but stay in the field. Why? Because a lot of our organizations are so small that there isn’t much of a “ladder” to climb, so they go sideways to another arts organization that can provide the next set of learning experiences. What I’ve found in talking to arts leaders of all stripes is that they appreciate being an arts leader because it’s more stable than solely being a working artist. And, as Rachel says, there doesn’t appear to be a lack of folks who want to work in the arts.
The problem is: what happens when once they are in. Are they trained properly? Taken seriously? Are they prepared to take on new challenges with the right tools and the right information? Is there adequate support? Is power and influence being shared with them? Does their contribution meaningful?
Helping more people say “yes” to all those questions I posed is what excites me about being a capacity and leadership developer in this field!
Thanks for listening!