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State of the Arts
Steering Austin’s Arts Organizations Through the Best and the Worst of Times / John T. Davis / Photos by William Russell
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Whoops, scratch that. From certain perspectives, it’s looking more like the dead-solid worst of times where the Austin arts community is concerned. Consider these dire developments: The Austin Lyric Opera is performing triage to try to keep the company solvent, even to the point of putting its beautiful custom-built headquarters on the market. The Austin American-Statesman reported that operational budgets for 11 major local arts organizations rose 63 percent since 2000 as they struggle to grow and serve a growing population. At the same time, noted the paper, although the population rose by almost 134,000 between 2000 and 2009, median household income in the same period did not increase, leaving less disposable income to spend on the arts. And to really top off the day, we are most likely barreling down Rerun Highway toward another recession. This sucks.
On the other hand, the city has been gifted with two new, spectacular performance spaces in the past few years: the new ACL Live at Moody Theater and The Long Center for the Performing Arts venue. Ballet Austin, which opened its own new venue, the Butler Dance Education Center, reported record ticket sales of almost $2 million for the 2010-2011 season. And KLRU’s locally produced Arts In Context series continues to spotlight Austin’s diverse arts communities from the established to the esoteric.
Change is also in the air with the recent announcement of the merger of the Austin Museum of Art and Arthouse at the Jones Center forming a new entity with an operating budget of $3.2 million and zero debt—a move that will save the two organizations more than $1 million in operational costs in the first year alone. The new entity will also own outright two architecturally significant properties: AMOA’s historic Driskill Villa with its 12-acre lakeside Laguna Gloria site and the Arthouse space located at 700 Congress Ave., designed by renowned architectural firm Tsurumaki Lewis.
Of the merger, Stephen Jones, a member of the newly formed board of trustees, says, “It all adds up to a very bright future for the visual arts in Austin.”
So, are things trending up or down? If the city is faring relatively well in hard times, does that mean arts groups can be complacent? Does a new and more austere climate call for new tactics? What, in the end, do the arts mean for Austin?
“2011 hit, and the rules changed,” says Cliff Redd, who, before he became executive director of development for the University of Texas’ massive College of Natural Sciences, was the executive director and chief fundraiser for The Long Center. “The new rule is survival counts. The lesson for arts groups is to stay heads-up and very clear about what their programming needs to be.”
The new rules are a central preoccupation of three men who run three of the city’s most visible performance spaces: Jim Ritts, the new executive director of the Paramount and State Theatres; Dave Steakley, the 20-year veteran producing artistic director of Zachary Scott Theatre Center; and Jamie Grant, the newly arrived executive director and CEO of The Long Center. Grant is the new guy in town, having taken up his reins just two weeks before speaking with me for this story in late September.
“I preface everything I say by noting that I’ve been here five minutes,” he says, not exaggerating by much.
But his are fresh eyes, and it is interesting to get his take on his newly adopted city. A Canada native and veteran arts manager with almost three decades of experience, Grant was aware of Austin from afar.
“I came from Kichener, Ontario, a high-tech center in Canada. They were constantly trying to recruit and retain the best workers in the world. And they would run up against a number of American cities. And they would lose out to cities like Austin,” Grant says. “So, even as an outsider, long before I knew there was an opportunity here, I was very aware of some of the investments that have been made in Austin in the arts, culture and creativity.”
Grant loves the fact that his new venue not only hosts the ballet, symphony and opera, but also a barbecue festival (“Barbecue, particularly in this neck of the woods, is very artistic,” he notes) and a food-trailer exhibition. He loves to run his hands across the divots left by hailstone in the old Palmer Auditorium’s re-purposed roof panels that now make up The Long Center’s walls. And he loves that his five kids all have their own reasons to want to visit Mom and Dad in their new digs.
“There are so many different Austins,” he enthuses. “One of my sons is a track star at his university, and for him Austin is all about the Texas Relays at U.T. My youngest, her Austin is all about being able to swim in March. My stepdaughter has heard all about Saturday night on Sixth Street, so she can’t wait to experience that.”
Grant, who opened three performing arts venues prior to this assignment, believes a healthy local economy and a healthy arts scene go hand in hand.
“People understand that if you want a prosperous and vibrant community, that includes the arts. I can tell you that those communities that invested in the infrastructure of the arts are best positioned to recruit and retain the finest minds,” he says. “My vision for The Long Center is a place that’s busy in every corner and there’s something happening every day.”
Across the river, Jim Ritts sits in his office, which was once the projection room of the venerable State Theatre, open again after a disastrous flood a few years ago. He talks about his responsibility of guiding Austin’s cultural grande dame, the Paramount Theatre, and the newly restored State Theatre through a new century.
“I’ve been here 100 days at this point,” he said in late September. “If you look at my background”— including a globe-spanning tenure with ABC Sports— “my skill set is as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, as a marketing person. I’ve always been about deriving value out of content, and I have an incredible respect for content. I want to enable others who have those unique talents that I revere to have an environment to flourish.”
Ritts originally hails from Dallas, but he worked his way through U.T. bundling stats for Frank Gifford and Keith Jackson for ABC’s football broadcasts. He was away a long time, and when he and his wife returned to Austin in 2006, they plunged in to supporting the Paramount. When the chance came to succeed the inestimable Ken Stein as executive director, Ritts took a long, hard look at what he was inheriting.
“First thing, this is the most soulful center of art in the entire city,” Ritts says. “When you walk into the Paramount, you’re walking in with the cumulative souls of everyone who’s ever performed or seen a performance there. This is Austin’s original creative home. Second, it is acoustically the best space in town. Third, I give tremendous credit to Ken and his team. I’ve never found an arts organization that took better care of their patrons.”
Though he laments the alleged drug dealers who currently hang out at the bus stop downstairs, Ritts sees his two theaters as the anchors for one of the most culturally charged blocks in the city.
“We have 220 performance nights a year at the Paramount,” he says. “I want to have that many at the State too. Then you have Arthouse right across the street and the potential of a new Lake/Flato-designed boutique hotel on the corner. This block could become one of the core centers of arts and visual culture in the city.”
Ritts also avidly eyes the new population of young upwardly mobiles and empty-nesters beginning to fill up the condo towers downtown.
“You’ve just got to remind them that we’re only a five-block walk away,” he says. “The walking experience of living downtown and going out for an evening is one of the great benefits of urban life, and we’re very well-poised to take advantage of that.”
Beyond that, he says: “This is an arts community and a city that’s in a state of flux… We’ve got to figure out how to connect South Congress with downtown—you just have to. Otherwise, you have two disconnected urban pods, and you’re putting people back in cars.”
In the meantime, Ritts is rooting for his peers. It’s not a zero-sum game for him; they are all charged with the same obligation, he says.
“It is all of our responsibility that, when you come into the Paramount or The Long Center or ACL Live or Zach, you may not happen to love the show you saw that night, but it better be high-end professional,” Ritts says. “You should never walk out questioning the professionalism of what went on. And as long as we live up to that… Hey, none of us are impervious to what happens in this economy. What it means is, we can have fewer mistakes.”
Perhaps no one in the city’s arts community has made fewer mistakes than Zach’s Dave Steakley. He has seemingly perfected the art of combining house-filling, crowd-pleasing fare like Santaland Diaries and Beehive with edgier, forward-leaning productions that speak to issues before the community. (“I believe that Dave is quite brilliant at understanding his audience, brilliant at programming to them and brilliant at keeping his theater full,” Redd says. “That’s a rare gift.”)
Zach is entering a triumphant new period. A stone’s throw away from Steakley’s office behind the Whisenhunt Stage, the walls are going up on the Topfer Theatre, the third installment of Zach’s decades-long master plan. It represents the triumph of Steakley’s 20-year tenure.
“Every city has a great producing theater,” Steakley asserts. “Dallas has the Dallas Theater Center and Houston has the Alley Theatre. That’s the regional void that Zach is filling. … Austin gets a lot of hype nationally. What’s important to me is how do we meet the challenge of growing, maturing our city and our arts community? How do we hold on to our soul?”
To Steakley, the answer lay in programming to the community.
“The key for me has been to align the identity of the theater as closely as possible to Austin,” he says. “You can’t pluck us up and set us down in Provincetown or La Jolla. We have to have work that has Austin artists and is speaking to Austinites about things that are important to us.”
Steakley has been frequenting Zach’s corridors since he was a Plan Two undergrad at U.T. studying journalism and theater. One of his most memorable early experiences at the theater was watching a production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, featuring a young actress named Barbara Chisholm. Now, these decades later, Chisholm is back onstage under Steakley’s roof, so to speak, having starred in the recent Red-Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins. Steakley shakes his head at the passage of time.
Could he ever envision an Austin without Zach Scott Theatre, which was, after all, incorporated way back in 1932? No, he says, adding, “That comes with an added responsibility: to always be reflective and responsive to our city and to sometimes lead that conversation. … The idea of community has to be inclusive. It’s not just a certain kind of people. We always have to expand the compassionate parts of our hearts and minds when we talk about who is community. How expansive can we be in terms of everybody that we’ll include at the table of conversation?”
The job of the arts, contends Steakley, in good times and bad, is to build that great community.
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