Just last month former NEA director Bill Ivey was in town to warn leaders of nonprofit arts organizations about rampant overgrowth in their field. For the last couple years he’s been saying that the sector is out of step with the rest of the economy and probably can’t be sustained. Citing national figures from Americans for the Arts, he noted that their number has mushroomed in the last 40 years, from about 7,700 to more than 40,000. Meanwhile, since the early 90s, the arts’ share of the philanthropic pie has shrunk by nearly a third. He offered some hard-nosed advice on how to deal with it: Abort start-ups and put down the weak sisters, pronto. We are too many. Then (whew) he flew back home to Nashville.
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The guy behind this neat little exercise is Donnelley program director Paul Botts. The last time I spoke with Botts, he was managing director of Noble Fool Theatre Company, which was on the brink of bankruptcy just two years after moving into a unique Loop home built in part with $1 million in city funds. Three years ago Noble Fool abandoned both the venue and the city and then went bust anyway. Botts, who’d previously worked at the Nature Conservancy, surfaced in late 2005 at Donnelley.
Some of the results were less than startling, Botts says. “No one was surprised that nearly a third of the groups are theater companies, or that the biggest concentration is a sort of loop going up the north-side lakefront.” They did find some city and suburban clusters they hadn’t been aware of and noticed that the geographic spread to the burbs has recently slowed: contrary to what Botts had assumed, new groups are now much more likely to locate in the city. Also, the Art Institute (including its school) turned out to be an even bigger 800-pound gorilla than expected, generating more than a quarter of nonprofit revenues in the entire region (based on 2004 tax forms) all by itself. But the biggest surprise was the boom in the number of arts organizations: a more than 100 percent surge in start-ups during the last decade. “Absolutely no one I talked with expected that,” he says.
“Two weeks after I came on board,” Palmquist says, “I got a call from the union announcing that the dancers had chosen AGMA as their representative for collective bargaining. We proceeded to go through 15 months of negotiating a first contract–not an easy process. There were issues the company felt were matters of artistic control that were not appropriate in a collective bargaining agreement–for example, the size of the company in the future. We came to a final agreement in March 2006 and have been rebuilding since. Nutcracker this year was the most successful in the company’s history, in terms of ticket sales, and we just came off a sold-out engagement at the Kennedy Center.” Palmquist says Webre was the victim of “strategic negative publicity” during the union’s campaign but has done “incredible things” with the company, expanding its size and repertoire and growing its annual budget from $3 million to $7.5 million. “There’s been some churn at the administrative top,” he says, and “lots of institutional growing pains. It was a really difficult time.”
