The Back Track to Art

Make no bones about it, the Northfield Arts Guild needs your support. Without the generous support of members, donors, business supporters, institutions, and other funders, we simply cannot continue offering all that we offer to Northfield in the way of arts activities, events, classes, and entertainment.

Before you decide once and for all how much you’re willing to support the arts in Northfield, please consider the following six key reasons that supporting the Northfield Arts Guild is a good thing:

1. History: The Northfield Arts Guild has long been an important part of Northfield’s culture. We’ve been here, in fact, for nearly fifty years–though not always in our current prominent location on Division Street downtown. The Guild was founded in 1959 and presented its first event that year, a successful stage production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah Wilderness.” In the early 1960s, the Guild was able to buy its first building, a church on West 3rd Street (where it still houses the Guild Theater), and in the early 1980s, the Guild was offered the opportunity to purchase its present building, which had formerly been used as a library, as City Hall, and as a YMCA. The Guild has been the place were thousands upon thousands of Northfielders, current and former, got their first taste of art. For instance, a list of Guild members from the mid-1960s included many prominent community members of the time, such as the Schjeldahl family, whose son, Peter Schjeldahl, grew up and moved to New York to become perhaps the most prominent art critic of our time. In 1967, the Minnesota State Arts Council (the precursor to the State Arts Board), in a survey of regional arts centers, held up the Northfield Arts Guild as a model for providing diverse activities to the community on a minimal budget (which, in my opinion, we still do). You can’t think of the culture of Northfield without also thinking of the role the Arts Guild has played and continues to play here. Supporting the Northfield Arts Guild helps us continue this history.

2. Artistry: The Northfield Arts Guild has always been all about providing a quality arts experience for the community. This dedication to excellence begins with early-childhood arts classes–in visual art, theater, dance, and so on–and continues into its many programs for artistic adolescents and adult artists. The Northfield Arts Guild theater offers the opportunity for local performers of all ages to get up on stage in high-quality productions of every sort–from comedy to drama, from musicals to kid’s theater. The dance program presents age-appropriate, non-competitive (but highly artistic) classes in dance for both kids and adults. The Cannon Valley Regional Orchestra presents four or five yearly concerts each year, giving regional musicians an opportunity to play together for their communities. And the gallery and shop at the Guild’s Center for the Arts on Division Street offers local and regional artists numerous opportunities each year to display and sell their work. Supporting the Northfield Arts Guild means you are supporting great arts and artists.

3. Stability and consistency: The Arts Guild has been a centerpiece of arts activity this town for an amazingly long stretch of time, and it will continue to be so for many years to come. This consistency is indeed our strength. While we may not offer the most novel or trendy types of arts activities, you can always know we’ll be here doing what we do year after year after year. We will present six or more regular theater productions each year, as well as a number of smaller, more lively, and more locally created theater events. We will teach hundreds of kids each year the joys of theater, dance, music, and art. We will exhibit more than twenty unique art shows each year in our gallery spaces. We will sell beautiful art objects in our shop and support working artists. We will support the work of a regional community symphony in producing 4-5 concerts each year, and we will have a hand in helping to organize local arts festivals and events that the entire community can enjoy. In our constantly changing, ever mutating world, isn’t it nice to know there’s someone you can always count on? Supporting the Northfield Arts Guild helps us continue providing consistently great arts programs in Northfield.

4. Community: The arts are important to communities—not only for the effect they have on life-quality, but also because they provide economic benefits. A 2006 report, The Arts: A Driving Force in Minnesota’s Economy, provides strong evidence that the nonprofit arts and culture industry are a significant economic incubator across the state. Further, due to the nonprofit and community focus of these organizations, the vast majority of this economic activity filters directly back into the communities—providing pay for working artists, purchasing ads in community publications, buying materials and supplies from community businesses, paying local workers for services, and so on. Supporting nonprofit art organizations epitomizes the economic idea that a “rising tide lifts all boats.” When we support the arts we not only enhance our community’s quality of life, we invest in our own and our neighbors’ overall economic well being. The Northfield Arts Guild is a downtown anchor, providing programs and services, and developing support and appreciation of the arts, and spreading arts-related economic activity throughout the community. For these reasons, the Northfield Arts Guild is a key contributor to the quality of life and economic vitality of the community of Northfield. For nearly fifty years, the Northfield Arts Guild has been a place where community members committed to and interested in the arts come together. Supporting the Northfield Arts Guild means supporting the community of Northfield.

5. Opportunity(s): With all of the Northfield Arts Guild’s history and its consistent production of quality arts programs, the organization has long had time and space to offer opportunities for artists to try new things, give a project or program a whirl, and get themselves involved in something creative. In recent years, the Guild has supported the production of new programs and projects like the Very Short Play Festival and the Under Construction workshops for playwrights. Guild artists are showing art work in a new venue, the local Allina clinic, and we are always bringing new artists and art into our shop. The Guild is your place to try out new things in the arts. Supporting the Northfield Arts Guild supports new arts projects in Northfield.

6. Fun and frivolity: While all of the above reasons make a lot of statistical sense, we can’t forget the idea that, even though there’s no way to quantify it, the arts are fun! In some respects, there’s no other reason to support the arts in Northfield. The arts make people happy, and who can’t use a little extra happiness in their lives? Plays are fun events to watch, symphony concerts are fun events to listen to. It’s fun to walk the town and stop by our gallery during an Art Crawl. It’s fun for children and adults of all ages to dance in our studio. Supporting the Northfield Arts Guild means you are a supporter of fun and happiness in your town!

Today is essentially the end of my eighth month as director of the Northfield Arts Guild. It’s been, at times, an enjoyable ride; it’s also been hectic and draining and all the things you’d expect in an organization that does so much for so many people on such a tight shoestring.

I wrote about some of this activity in this week’s Progress section of the Northfield News: “It is through the Arts Guild that this community often shines and creates great beauty,” I wrote. “Visual art on display and for sale, fabulous symphonic music, wonderful dance programs, arts festivals and so much more!”

But I also wrote about how important it is for everyone in the community not to take this activity for granted, and to support it in practical ways: “…though the Northfield Arts Guild is not in danger of being overrun by revolutionaries any time soon, it is still vulnerable to the ravages of time and neglect. The Guild suffers when the community overlooks the arts and underrates what the arts can do through us. The arts suffer when people, institutions, businesses, organizations, and the government forget to support it in practical and tangible ways: through membership, donations, volunteer service, and so on.”

To be more explicit about this last point, you should know that the Northfield Arts Guild is struggling to continue providing all that it does for this community. Much of the reason for this is because, in addition to the organization’s chronic budget shortages, the Guild has taken a double funding hit in the past eight months.

First, this summer the State Arts Board cut its biennial funding for the Guild in half–giving us an additional budget-hole to fill on top of the traditional deficit. Among the reasons cited by Arts Board panelists for the cuts: A concern over our chronic budget woes; a concern over the lack of local city/government support of the arts; and a concern over the very breadth of programs offered by the Guild (that they suspect scatter our attentions and reduce our viability).

In addition to this cut in governmental support, the Guild has also seen, after nearly four hard months of work by me and numerous volunteers, a 50% reduction this year in financial support of the Arts Guild. The most often cited reason for this is business-owner concern over current economic conditions. Businesses who have long been supporters of the Guild have unceremoniously let their sponsorships and other forms of support lapse.

They tell you in arts management text books that these sorts of hits to arts organizations–shocking as they may be to the organization and its membership, and damaging as they can be to programs (that may need to be cut)–are to be expected. Business and governmental funding (when it even exists) can be prone to cyclical ups and downs–causing disruption to organizations and hard decisions about what programs and offerings to cut.

The key to weathering such ups and downs, say the experts, is to foster a dedicated and stable pool of individual and family supporters–people who will make sure that cuts by institutional funders can be endured, and who will rise to the occasion when an organization has need.

Well, supporters of the arts in Northfield, I’m here to tell you, your Northfield Arts Guild has need. If you ever had a reason to step in and lend your energy to helping the arts survive here in Northfield, this is it.

We welcome support and involvement from any and all lovers of the arts.

Last week, I was visiting Tom Proehl, the director of the State Arts Board, on Guild-related business. (More on this visit will be discussed in future posts.)

On the round coffee table next to his desk, I noticed a copy of a study about rural arts involvement published by the Montana Arts Council. I glanced at it quickly while Tom went to get coffee, but I became intrigued enough by the publication to later contact the Council and request a copy. And they actually sent me three publications: Building Arts Participation in Rural America: Learning to Increase Participation and the Return on Investment, Fundraising Ideas That Work in Rural America, and Building Arts Participation in Rural America: Learning from Montana’s Arts Organizations.

Now, I realize that Montana and Minnesota are completely different states, with unique demographics, political situations, social makeups, and cultural traditions. But already, in just skimming the first book (the one I’d seen at the Arts Board), I’ve learning something important.

It is this, from page 48: “Buy-in and community involvement (in rural arts organizations) come in response to concerted efforts to serve a target market.”

In other words, give the people you serve what they want above all else and you will be more successful.

A beautifully simple idea, and one that matches some changes that I’ve thought necessary in the Guild’s institutional philosophy: that we need to be less of a top-down programmer of the arts, but more of a service to a community hungry to develop arts programming that matches their needs.

More to come on these changes at the Guild, as well as regarding these studies of rural arts participation.