Two days after Governor Rod Blagojevich delivered his budget address back in February, a rare e-mail alert was issued by the Illinois Arts Council, the government agency that doles out grants to arts organizations statewide. Signed by IAC chair Shirley Madigan—the wife of house speaker and Blago foe Mike Madigan—it warned that the governor’s plan for fiscal 2009 won’t undo the previous year’s $4.5 million cut in arts funding. That message was followed a few days later by one from IAC executive director Terry Scrogum, confirming the bad news: the council’s budget would remain more or less flat, at $15.2 million—23 percent less than the 2007 figure of $19.8 million.
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Nevertheless, the next week a battle flag was raised. Another mass e-mail went out, this one from Ra Joy, head of the Illinois Arts Alliance, the nonprofit advocacy group. Under the headline “Take Action Now!” Joy called for a fight against the nearly 30 percent cut in arts grants that had been the end result of the arts-funding slash of 2008. He noted that Illinois now ranks behind hardscrabble states like Alabama and Louisiana in per capita funding for the arts; that we’re one of only three states that cut arts spending in 2008; and that 73.4 percent of the 435 respondents to an online alliance survey “plan to reduce or eliminate their education, outreach, or free public programs” because of reduced IAC funding. He urged recipients to click through and send a letter to their lawmakers demanding that the IAC budget be increased to $24 million, or about $2 for each state resident. (Alliance communications coordinator Scarlett Swerdlow says the campaign generated 3,772 such messages.)
In most cases, IAC awards are capped at between 10 and 15 percent of an organization’s budget. But they offer a couple of outsize benefits. First, as noted by both Olga Stefan of the Chicago Artists’ Coalition (which got only half the IAC infusion it expected) and Lyle Allen of the League of Chicago Theatres (down 15 percent), the grants provide the hardest kind of money to come by: general operating funds. Unlike private donors, who usually want to spend their money on specific, high-profile programs, the IAC gives unrestricted money that can be put to work where it’s needed most, even if that’s somewhere as unglamorous as the boiler room. More important, the grants validate their recipients in the eyes of other potential donors. As a survey response from Theatre Building Chicago puts it, “Our IAC grant… positions us to find other, private funders. A continued reduction would lower our leverage.”
Ergo, another e-mail campaign. A recent message from Americans for the Arts (the IAA’s national counterpart) calls on artists to send a prewritten letter urging their reps to vote for the Artist-Museum Partnership Act. As things stand now, anyone who owns a piece of art can donate it to a charity and take a nice fat tax deduction equivalent to its current market value. But if the artist who created the work donates it, only the cost of materials can be deducted. We’re talking canvas and paint. This is a patently screwy arrangement, and local artists, who are often hit up to donate their work for charity auctions, have frequently lamented it.
