Teaching Artists and the Pandemic Crisis
By Eric Booth, May 17, 2020
Teaching artistry in the time of pandemic. I write this at the beginning of the second chapter, mid-May 2020.
In chapter one, teaching artists were heroic in keeping work going in digital form when most of our in-person work was suddenly shut down. And in chapter one we got clobbered financially. Alan Brown at WolfBrown[1], one of the most respected analyst-researchers in the arts, described teaching artists as the most vulnerable sector in the arts. The latest survey data from Americans for the Arts about artists and creative workers (which includes teaching artists) shows the following about the impact of the crisis time:
- 62% have become fully unemployed
- the average financial loss per artist/creative worker is $21,000 as of early May
- 95% report some income loss
- 80% experienced a decrease in creative work that generated income—with 61% reporting “drastic decrease”[2].
Some TAs were laid off early and abruptly. Many TAs had the chance to temporarily continue work in some form over the internet to complete the arc of a project, contract or semester. Their response was vigorous and inventive. There was an explosion of experimentation which sought to fulfill various purposes—keep the learning going, complete work that was underway, keep a steady presence for young people during a crisis time, get new kinds of engagement started. TAs answered the challenges posed by the crisis with speed, cleverness, generosity of spirit, and fast learning to be proud of.
To my eye, most of the work I observed was driven by expedience and problem-solving demands. Understandable under the circumstances. Not much was original or artistic-in-teaching—it was a sudden adapting of what we usually do into a somewhat-constrained approximation in a less engaging medium. It was done with enough gusto and good intent that positive things happened.
Many artists were inspired to post creative work online—to offer something of comfort, interest, help to suddenly-home-schooling parents. There was a public campaign to #KeepMakingArt. Some of the larger projects became remarkable works of art themselves—those from Juilliard, The Paris Opera Ballet and National Orchestra of France stood out, and shone a light on the art of video editors as much as artists.
For the better part of a decade, teaching artists in general have avoided the exploration of how to deliver our distinctive strengths in the different environment of virtual connection. This March, April, and May, we played catch up.
We did it pretty well. But if this is the best we can do—if this is what the wider field comes to think of as what teaching artists can do in virtual space—we are going to be in serious trouble. Others who have been working in digital media, like the gaming and entertainment industries, are way ahead of us, offering extraordinarily appealing ways to grab and hold attention, and to make serious money doing it.
Chapter Two. Let’s recognize where we are. We’re in a liminal time of uncertainty because the current disruptions will bring lasting change. Our field is going to be different from now on, for the rest of your life and mine. Take that in. From the perspective of this mid-May writing, it seems likely that there will be a significantly less work for teaching artists overall. Even though I am an optimist by nature, I am concerned about a decimation of our field, as teaching artists will be forced to take their already fragile finances to other fields to survive.
Accept this fact too: TA work via the internet is here to stay. Henceforth, it will be a significant element in the work of the successful teaching artist, like it or not. Yes, you may be able to survive without developing skill in this medium, but TAs with a feel and a taste for high impact engagement through the internet are going to get more work.
Another truth to swallow. While there will be less money in general for teaching artist work, for a while, at least, there will be even less money for the more experimental, pioneering work that programs hire teaching artists to fulfill. We are not going to find significant funding to help the field of teaching artistry grow into its new capacities. We are going to have to do it ourselves, and with willing organizations who will support experimentation.
Private philanthropy in the arts has ducked its responsibilities to build the field of teaching artistry for a long time. The U.S. arts industry has relied on the workforce of teaching artists and community artists to accomplish its efforts at expanding audiences and serving communities in more meaningful ways, but it invested next to nothing to build that field. Personally, I think this has been worse than short-sighted, I think it has been unethical. But, over decades, I and we have failed to make an appreciable dent in this reality. Going forward, the already-modest number of funders who care about the arts, and even-more-modest number who care about evolving the ways the arts can serve communities, are not going to have much (or any) money to invest in new programs that hire artists to do new kinds of work.
We have some options. In the early stages of Chapter Two, I see several grand ideas emerging, and three closer-to-home strategies for us to pursue.
The first two big ideas come from Arlene Goldbard[3], whose work I always turn to, listen to. I have heard these ideas burbling up among others too.
- A new WPA-like, or CETA-like, Federal Arts Project. There are rumblings of such proposals in the arts community, and even a little in the political world. It would be historic and among the best investments an ailing, fragmented nation could make. Let’s stay poised for pouring our energy into opportunities as they arise.
- A 1% tax on advertising expenditures that goes to arts/culture programs. This could build on the highly successful Percent for the Arts programs for large construction projects, which require developers to dedicate a percentage of construction costs (ranging from .5% to 2%, but usually 1%) to public art. As I see it, Arlene’s idea allows 99% for advertisers to grab and occupy our attention, colonize our hearts and minds, and manipulate us as consumers, and provides 1% to nurture us as creators. If the billions of dollars that would accrue from such a 1% tax were invested in smart, equitable ways, teaching artists could change the world.
- Here is a big notion of my own. After giving the keynote at the world’s first conference about orchestras working with communities (Glasgow, 2006), I worked with a number of orchestras in the U.K.. I was struck by how much more community involved they were, and how much more imaginative the organizations and musicians were, in their education work—more than the average major U.S. When I asked about it, I was told that conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had threatened to eliminate national funding for orchestras—and U.K. orchestras were completely dependent on the government to stay alive. In the frantic response, orchestras recognized they had to serve their communities in more evident and committed ways. Many changed their mission statements to bolster the change. What I witnessed, several decades later, were the changed norms that evolved from the commitment by major arts organizations to actually serve their communities, instead of just saying they served their communities. I think U.S. arts organizations, large and small, are invited—I would even say required—by this current existential crisis to rethink the ways they serve their communities, if they want to survive. The term you may hear is “value proposition,” meaning how arts organizations, artists, and teaching artists change the way they provide value to their communities. If all we’ve got is discount tickets to sell, we’re going to flail, even if those tickets get people into great performances. If all we’ve got to justify subsidies is the current community relations work we offer, even when it’s good, it is not going to be enough. This is the question we need to be asking ourselves right now: What do we know, as arts organizations, as artists, and teaching artists, that can make a significant difference in the challenges our communities face? If we can’t come up with better answers than those we have offered in the past, we deserve the financial hit we are going to take.
Apart from those big ideas, here are three closer-to-home strategies for teaching artists to pursue at the individual, local and regional level….beginning as soon as now.
- Start experimenting. Bring your teaching artistry to the virtual space and experiment with ways to light it up with what you do best, rather than grudgingly use the Internet to deliver good-enough lesser versions of what you do best. Experiment and share. We have a lot of field learning to catch up on. We have such distinctive skills to bring to the virtual space, but the medium is new, and we have to learn how to be distinctively powerful in it. Your learning and your sharing aren’t just hoped for; they are needed. Starting now.
- Start conversations with the organizations you work with about piloting some small-scale experimentation in what the next generation of their work with teaching artists might be. Help them get started; think and plan with them. Yes, they have to pay you for the work, but maybe donate the brainstorming, giving them the gift of your expertise. Get started now, in this liminal time, to discover exciting seeds of answers to the challenges those organizations face.
- Start finding and sharing examples of innovative work by teaching artists online. Connect with other TAs and be a disseminator of good ideas to help this field learn faster. I don’t know the best way for you to do this; you do. Of course we must be careful to fully acknowledge the sources of the work, and make sure sharing is okay, but please contribute to our collective growth now, when we need it.
These ideas are entrepreneurial. I see entrepreneurialism as a natural extension of teaching artistry. Artists make stuff they care about. Teaching artists expand the reach of those artist skills to activate others to create things they care about, including deeper engagement with the worlds those artists have made. And entrepreneurial teaching artists bring those the processes of making things people care about (including connections to those worlds created by artists) into sustainable engagements with communities they draw together and serve.
There is a key piece of advice from Jim Collins, the business researcher who studied how for-profit and not-for-profit organizations succeed in turbulent times. This advice applies to all our arts and arts learning organizations, down to the single TA who is trying to figure out what the hell to do while in lockdown with two kids under age six. His advice: Pull back to your core values and experiment boldly from there.
Your core values are not the way you have worked effectively with participants and programs in the past. Those are your delivery systems, the ways you have become used to applying your core values. Your most basic artist values are your fire-in-the-gut determination and skill to make things that matter. Your most basic teaching artist values are your belief in the creative power of all people, and in your skills to draw forth that force to make the world better. Re-center yourself in that set of core values, and experiment from there—boldly, playfully, and with curiosity.
We can do this.
Footnotes:
[1] http://wolfbrown.com/news/7-news-and-announcements/731-a-sector-in-peril-philanthropy-s-role-in-responding-to-covid-19
[2]https://www.americansforthearts.org/node/103614?fbclid=IwAR0_mm6e94I7QkPHxypWrRpXUzjXEPGl7HgCejreiSaBNGexro61NGnfxQw
[3] https://arlenegoldbard.com/2020/05/08/arts-and-culture-part-2-so-what-should-arts-advocates-say-and-do-now/