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October 2016
Feature What Happened to Tucson Fall 2016 Open Studios Tour(s)? by C.J. Shane |
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I. Why Are Open Studios Tours Important?
Artists have two key concerns: 1) space and time to create art; and 2) a place to exhibit and potentially sell artwork. Open Studios Tours are opportunities for artists to exhibit and potentially sell their work. It’s that simple. That’s why Open Studios Tours are so important to artists. As you read this commentary, remember this. Also, as they say, “follow the money.”
II. Summer 2015 – Changes Begin
In July of 2015, sculptor Pat Frederick contacted Roberto Bedoya who was at that time Executive Director of Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC), the organization which had run the Tucson Fall Open Studios Tour for many years. Bedoya told Frederick that cutbacks had forced the cancellation of the fall studio tour. Bedoya’s position changed the next month and within six months, he had left TPAC. In August 2015, Debi Chess Mabie was appointed the new Chief Executive Officer for TPAC.
After learning of the cancellation, Frederick, along with two other artists in her area, began calling artist friends. A new artist’s tour group emerged from those calls which came to be known as Art Trails (AT). The new tour was a city-sector tour for the west and northwest side of Tucson. Some of us in mid-town, including me, heard about this. We decided to form a mid-town tour which we called Heart of Tucson Art (HoTArt). Art Trails and HotArt scheduled consecutive weekends in October for their tours.
City-sector tours had been suggested earlier by artists on the TPAC board, but the idea was never adopted for various reasons, or “excuses,” as one artist put it. The TPAC tour remained a city-wide tour. Over the years, the tour grew to have more than 200 artists’ studios to visit on one weekend in the fall.
Meanwhile Tucson businessmen Jim Click and Fletcher McCusker gave a $21,000 donation to TPAC to keep the tour going. The fall TPAC studio tour was back on. As usual, the reinstituted TPAC tour was city wide and scheduled for one weekend in November. Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art were going strong and decided to continue with their October tours. As it says on the HoTArt website, “We had already started forming a sense of community and ownership among ourselves…. We continued to plan our tour because we felt that the 200+ artist city-wide tours were too large for art lovers to reach the majority of studios located all over town in just two days.” (source: http://tucson.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/open-studio-tour-is-a-go-after-donation/article_010f5a5b-94b9-510b-842c-9fc4587c29f9.html )
From the beginning Debi Chess Mabie saw the benefit of DIY artist self-managed open studio tours so she shared the Click/McCusker donation with Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art. Heart of Tucson Art received $3,000 and Art Trails slightly less. Both artists’ tour groups also required a registration fee from each artist, $50 for Art Trails and $35 for Heart of Tucson Art. The fees and the donation were used by HoTArt and Art Trails to pay for domain registrations, website hosting, advertising in several media, display banners, and other expenses. A small stipend ($200 to $600) went to those individuals working on the tours, at Debi Chess Mabie’s suggestion. (“You should get paid for your labor,” she said.) How much each person received depended upon what s/he did for the tour. The manager for the November TPAC tour, Alec Laughlin, received $6,000 for his work in 2014. He was reappointed to manage TPAC’s 2015 tour.
The three tours went off successfully. Both Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art artists received more visitors than they had ever had on a TPAC city-wide tour. One HoTArt artist received six times as many visitors than he typically had ever received on the city-wide TPAC tours. Feedback from visitors was uniformly positive. Visitors said they appreciated being able to visit several studios in one part of town and not being forced to drive so much.
One HoTArt artist reported after the spring tour: “Heart of Tucson Art brought more people than I have ever seen from TPAC for Open Studios tours…Splitting up the tour is a fantastic idea because Tucson is geographically spread out and allows Tucsonans to visit more artists around the city. It’s a win for both the artist and art enthusiast.”
In a meeting in February 2016, Debi Chess Mabie expressed a continued commitment to artists’ groups like Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art. She said she would look for private funding to help us conduct our tours.
III. Spring 2016 Tour
Heart of Tucson Art continued into the spring and had a successful city-sector studio tour located in mid-town Tucson. The spring tour was larger than the fall tour had been. The spring tour grew to 19 studios to visit with 39 participating artists. Here is a link showing the artists and artist groups who participated in the spring 2016 tour. HotArt Spring 2016 http://www.heartoftucsonart.org/2016-spring-artists.html. The fall 2016 tour is even larger. HotArt Fall 2016. http://www.heartoftucsonart.org/2016-fall-artists.html . A real community formed among HoTArt artists. We produce a newsletter, we have meetings, and we gathered for a potluck in June.
In the intervening months, TPAC experienced more budget cutbacks. In the fall of 2015, Heart of Tucson Art had received a grant of $3,000 from TPAC. In the spring of 2016, following more budget cuts at TPAC, the grant to HotArt was reduced to $100.
What about the rest of the city? Eleven years ago, TPAC gave up running a Spring Open Studios Tour. Dirk Arnold took up the challenge. He created a website under the domain name TucsonOpenStudios.com. This spring 2016 tour traditionally was very like TPAC’s fall tours, city-wide and one weekend. In the spring of 2016, Arnold again made the tour city-wide and added a second weekend. Registration was $55 for individuals. David Aguirre also made available exhibition spaces in the Steinfeld Warehouse for an additional $30 donation. TucsonOpenStudios-CalltoArtists (source: http://www.tucsonopenstudios.com/calltoartists.html)
IV. What’s the Deal about City-Wide versus City-Sector Tours?
Let’s take a break here and make note of the emergence of city-sector tours in Tucson after many years of only one city-wide tour. I did some research about how studio tours are handled in other cities in the American West. You can read the results on the Editor’s Page of Sonoran Arts Network. Editor’s Page (August 2015 post) http://www.sonoranartsnetwork.net/editors-page. As you can see, Tucson was the only large western city still adhering to the old city-wide model. All the other cities had divided into sectors and were having tours on different weekends in different sectors. These cities had created a tour “season.” The emergence of Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art is a direct result of the dysfunctionality of city-wide tours, and the first sign of a Tucson OST “season.”
With more than 200 artists in the Tucson city-wide tour, most visitors could only visit a few studios. Because of this, visitors tended to go where there were clusters of artists, which basically meant the downtown area and just north of downtown (6th and 6th, West University, Dunbar Spring). Those of us, some 75 or 80% of the participating artists, were paying the same fees as downtown artists but we were just not getting very many visitors.
There has been an in-built bias in favor of downtown artists all these years. The spontaneous emergence of grass-roots artists’ tour groups in different part of the city is a direct way of addressing this long-time imbalance.
V. Summer 2016
Word came to me that TPAC was considering cancelling the fall Open Studios Tour again in fall 2016, and again, due to budget cutbacks. I phoned the TPAC office in late June, and I spoke to Julie Lauterbach-Colby, TPAC Deputy Director. She confirmed that TPAC would no longer be organizing a fall studio tour, but instead would provide support for artists groups like Art Trails and HoTArt. She said, “We will support the tours through marketing, public relations and mini grants to those who are organizing their own Open Studios Tours.” There is a full report of this dated July 1, 2016, on the Editor’s Page of Sonoran Arts Network.
This essentially meant that TPAC had cancelled the fall Open Studios Tours again. The local media did not report this cancellation until TPAC (now Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona) itself announced the tour cancellation eight weeks later in the last week in August. We don’t know why TPAC/Arts Foundation waited so long to announce the cancellation, nor do we know why the local media failed to report it until then. The exception was Sonoran Arts Network which reported this news on July 1. At the time the cancellation was announced, Arts Foundation also announced that mini-grants of up to $1,000 would be made available to artists’ groups that organized their own fall studio tours.
Arts Foundation announced its name change and mission in a full-page ad in the Arizona Daily Star (August 25, 2016). I called The Star and was told that the cost of a full-page ad in the middle of the week costs $2,664.00. This ad told us that the Art Foundation’s mission is: to give mini-grants to artists in Tucson and Pima County; to support public art in Tucson and Pima County; and to throw a big party every year called the Lumies where awards are given to artists and art supporters. Last year, I found an Annual Report on the old TPAC website that indicated these Lumie events cost more than $50,000 each year. This information has since been removed from the web.
Artists have two key concerns: 1) space and time to create art; and 2) a place to exhibit and potentially sell artwork. Open Studios Tours are opportunities for artists to exhibit and potentially sell their work. It’s that simple. That’s why Open Studios Tours are so important to artists. As you read this commentary, remember this. Also, as they say, “follow the money.”
II. Summer 2015 – Changes Begin
In July of 2015, sculptor Pat Frederick contacted Roberto Bedoya who was at that time Executive Director of Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC), the organization which had run the Tucson Fall Open Studios Tour for many years. Bedoya told Frederick that cutbacks had forced the cancellation of the fall studio tour. Bedoya’s position changed the next month and within six months, he had left TPAC. In August 2015, Debi Chess Mabie was appointed the new Chief Executive Officer for TPAC.
After learning of the cancellation, Frederick, along with two other artists in her area, began calling artist friends. A new artist’s tour group emerged from those calls which came to be known as Art Trails (AT). The new tour was a city-sector tour for the west and northwest side of Tucson. Some of us in mid-town, including me, heard about this. We decided to form a mid-town tour which we called Heart of Tucson Art (HoTArt). Art Trails and HotArt scheduled consecutive weekends in October for their tours.
City-sector tours had been suggested earlier by artists on the TPAC board, but the idea was never adopted for various reasons, or “excuses,” as one artist put it. The TPAC tour remained a city-wide tour. Over the years, the tour grew to have more than 200 artists’ studios to visit on one weekend in the fall.
Meanwhile Tucson businessmen Jim Click and Fletcher McCusker gave a $21,000 donation to TPAC to keep the tour going. The fall TPAC studio tour was back on. As usual, the reinstituted TPAC tour was city wide and scheduled for one weekend in November. Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art were going strong and decided to continue with their October tours. As it says on the HoTArt website, “We had already started forming a sense of community and ownership among ourselves…. We continued to plan our tour because we felt that the 200+ artist city-wide tours were too large for art lovers to reach the majority of studios located all over town in just two days.” (source: http://tucson.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/open-studio-tour-is-a-go-after-donation/article_010f5a5b-94b9-510b-842c-9fc4587c29f9.html )
From the beginning Debi Chess Mabie saw the benefit of DIY artist self-managed open studio tours so she shared the Click/McCusker donation with Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art. Heart of Tucson Art received $3,000 and Art Trails slightly less. Both artists’ tour groups also required a registration fee from each artist, $50 for Art Trails and $35 for Heart of Tucson Art. The fees and the donation were used by HoTArt and Art Trails to pay for domain registrations, website hosting, advertising in several media, display banners, and other expenses. A small stipend ($200 to $600) went to those individuals working on the tours, at Debi Chess Mabie’s suggestion. (“You should get paid for your labor,” she said.) How much each person received depended upon what s/he did for the tour. The manager for the November TPAC tour, Alec Laughlin, received $6,000 for his work in 2014. He was reappointed to manage TPAC’s 2015 tour.
The three tours went off successfully. Both Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art artists received more visitors than they had ever had on a TPAC city-wide tour. One HoTArt artist received six times as many visitors than he typically had ever received on the city-wide TPAC tours. Feedback from visitors was uniformly positive. Visitors said they appreciated being able to visit several studios in one part of town and not being forced to drive so much.
One HoTArt artist reported after the spring tour: “Heart of Tucson Art brought more people than I have ever seen from TPAC for Open Studios tours…Splitting up the tour is a fantastic idea because Tucson is geographically spread out and allows Tucsonans to visit more artists around the city. It’s a win for both the artist and art enthusiast.”
In a meeting in February 2016, Debi Chess Mabie expressed a continued commitment to artists’ groups like Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art. She said she would look for private funding to help us conduct our tours.
III. Spring 2016 Tour
Heart of Tucson Art continued into the spring and had a successful city-sector studio tour located in mid-town Tucson. The spring tour was larger than the fall tour had been. The spring tour grew to 19 studios to visit with 39 participating artists. Here is a link showing the artists and artist groups who participated in the spring 2016 tour. HotArt Spring 2016 http://www.heartoftucsonart.org/2016-spring-artists.html. The fall 2016 tour is even larger. HotArt Fall 2016. http://www.heartoftucsonart.org/2016-fall-artists.html . A real community formed among HoTArt artists. We produce a newsletter, we have meetings, and we gathered for a potluck in June.
In the intervening months, TPAC experienced more budget cutbacks. In the fall of 2015, Heart of Tucson Art had received a grant of $3,000 from TPAC. In the spring of 2016, following more budget cuts at TPAC, the grant to HotArt was reduced to $100.
What about the rest of the city? Eleven years ago, TPAC gave up running a Spring Open Studios Tour. Dirk Arnold took up the challenge. He created a website under the domain name TucsonOpenStudios.com. This spring 2016 tour traditionally was very like TPAC’s fall tours, city-wide and one weekend. In the spring of 2016, Arnold again made the tour city-wide and added a second weekend. Registration was $55 for individuals. David Aguirre also made available exhibition spaces in the Steinfeld Warehouse for an additional $30 donation. TucsonOpenStudios-CalltoArtists (source: http://www.tucsonopenstudios.com/calltoartists.html)
IV. What’s the Deal about City-Wide versus City-Sector Tours?
Let’s take a break here and make note of the emergence of city-sector tours in Tucson after many years of only one city-wide tour. I did some research about how studio tours are handled in other cities in the American West. You can read the results on the Editor’s Page of Sonoran Arts Network. Editor’s Page (August 2015 post) http://www.sonoranartsnetwork.net/editors-page. As you can see, Tucson was the only large western city still adhering to the old city-wide model. All the other cities had divided into sectors and were having tours on different weekends in different sectors. These cities had created a tour “season.” The emergence of Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art is a direct result of the dysfunctionality of city-wide tours, and the first sign of a Tucson OST “season.”
With more than 200 artists in the Tucson city-wide tour, most visitors could only visit a few studios. Because of this, visitors tended to go where there were clusters of artists, which basically meant the downtown area and just north of downtown (6th and 6th, West University, Dunbar Spring). Those of us, some 75 or 80% of the participating artists, were paying the same fees as downtown artists but we were just not getting very many visitors.
There has been an in-built bias in favor of downtown artists all these years. The spontaneous emergence of grass-roots artists’ tour groups in different part of the city is a direct way of addressing this long-time imbalance.
V. Summer 2016
Word came to me that TPAC was considering cancelling the fall Open Studios Tour again in fall 2016, and again, due to budget cutbacks. I phoned the TPAC office in late June, and I spoke to Julie Lauterbach-Colby, TPAC Deputy Director. She confirmed that TPAC would no longer be organizing a fall studio tour, but instead would provide support for artists groups like Art Trails and HoTArt. She said, “We will support the tours through marketing, public relations and mini grants to those who are organizing their own Open Studios Tours.” There is a full report of this dated July 1, 2016, on the Editor’s Page of Sonoran Arts Network.
This essentially meant that TPAC had cancelled the fall Open Studios Tours again. The local media did not report this cancellation until TPAC (now Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona) itself announced the tour cancellation eight weeks later in the last week in August. We don’t know why TPAC/Arts Foundation waited so long to announce the cancellation, nor do we know why the local media failed to report it until then. The exception was Sonoran Arts Network which reported this news on July 1. At the time the cancellation was announced, Arts Foundation also announced that mini-grants of up to $1,000 would be made available to artists’ groups that organized their own fall studio tours.
Arts Foundation announced its name change and mission in a full-page ad in the Arizona Daily Star (August 25, 2016). I called The Star and was told that the cost of a full-page ad in the middle of the week costs $2,664.00. This ad told us that the Art Foundation’s mission is: to give mini-grants to artists in Tucson and Pima County; to support public art in Tucson and Pima County; and to throw a big party every year called the Lumies where awards are given to artists and art supporters. Last year, I found an Annual Report on the old TPAC website that indicated these Lumie events cost more than $50,000 each year. This information has since been removed from the web.
VI. SAACA Comes on the Scene – The August 31 Meeting at Tucson JCC
In the next days, Debi Chess Mabie of Arts Foundation and Kate Marquez of Southern Arizona Arts and Cultural Alliance (SAACA) put their heads together, and the next thing we knew, these two called a public meeting at the Tucson JCC for Wednesday, August 31 – exactly one week after the full-page ad for Arts Foundation appeared in the Arizona Daily Star.
At this meeting, Arts Foundation and SAACA announced that Fall Open Studios Tours would be held after all, and the tours would be organized by SAACA. Instead of going back to the old city-wide TPAC tour, SAACA planned four tours for the fall season, two in October and two in November.
Remember those $1,000 mini-grants that were supposed to go to artists’ groups like HoTArt and Art Trails? That offer disappeared. Instead Arts Foundation CEO Mabie announced that $10,000 would go from Arts Foundation to SAACA for the fall tours. SAACA would contribute “value” (the full market value of ads, not what SAACA actually pays for ads) plus some of its own money and staff time to organize and promote the fall tours, and to form “partnerships” with existing art groups like HoTArt and Art Trails.
On September 2, Arts Foundation sent out an email newsletter announcing this change. The newsletter states [my boldface], “The Arts Foundation will grant money to SAACA to facilitate and market a series of Open Studio Tours this fall….. This does NOT mean that SAACA is taking control of your studio tours; rather, SAACA will be the centralized registration hub for all individual artists, and artist groups who would like to participate in the marketing resources they are providing. To emphasize, if you are an individual artist, whether you are a part of an artist group or not, to be included in the marketing, and all of the centralized maps, you MUST register as an individual artist with SAACA. “
Here’s what’s good about the fall SAACA tours.
This last point explains why Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art decided to join SAACA despite some serious reservations. SAACA’s presentation at Tucson JCC led to our deciding to become a SAACA “partner.”
It was apparent from the beginning that to not join with SAACA would have meant competing with them. Cooperation could lead to increased visits to our studios. Competing with SAACA looked like a very bad idea for smaller, city-sector tours. We could be pushed aside very quickly.
On the other hand, it quickly became clear that SAACA intended to have a much larger role than “facilitating” and “marketing” or being just a “centralized registration hub.”
VII. More about the August 31 Meeting at Tucson JCC
At this public meeting at Tucson JCC, Debi Chess Mabie introduced Kate Marquez of SAACA. Marquez presented a long list of promotional activities that SAACA would engage in on behalf of Open Studios.
Also at this meeting, members of Heart of Tucson Art volunteered to organize a tour for those parts of the city that did not have a tour at that point: downtown and Foothills/Eastside. We were ignored.
Two people attending this meeting were Dirk Arnold, 11-year organizer of the spring city-wide open studio tours, and David Aguirre, a long-time downtown arts-scene activist with projects like Dinnerware Gallery, Steinfeld Warehouse, Citizens Warehouse, etc.
Marquez said that the SAACA tours would require artists to register on the SAACA tour website for no fee. Arnold asked if there would be fees in the future. Marquez side-stepped the question and did not answer directly. I asked the same question and got the same vague non-answer.
One of the Heart of Tucson Art people asked Aguirre if he would be interested in our helping to organize a tour for downtown artists. His response was, “You do your thing and I’ll do mine.” He added that downtown artists had a “different approach.” (More on downtown artists and their “approach” later.)
The next day, David Aguirre made clear in emails and on Facebook that he wasn’t having any part of SAACA’s plan. Instead Aguirre announced that he was organizing a city-wide fall Open Studio Tour for the second week in November, the same weekend SAACA had scheduled a downtown Open Studio Tour. Like SAACA, Aguirre would not charge a fee to register. He invited individuals who did not live in the downtown area to show at the Steinfeld Warehouse for a $30 “donation.” Dirk Arnold had provided the Steinfeld option in the spring of 2016, but Aguirre halved the amount of space available to artists for the fall tour, but kept the “donation” at $30.
I have made repeated attempts to reach David Aguirre to get information about his tour for the Open Studios page of Sonoran Arts Network. Aguirre has not responded to any of my queries. SAN-Open Studios http://www.sonoranartsnetwork.net/open-studios.html His website appeared on the web about one week ago. http://tucsonstudiotour.wixsite.com/arts
VIII: A Traffic Circle or a Parking Lot?
Representatives of Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art (I was one of them) met with Kate Marquez at SAACA headquarters two days after the Tucson JCC public meeting. We had requested the meeting earlier in hopes that we could get some support from SAACA for HoTArt and Art Trails. At her office, Marquez asked us a lot of questions about our tours. She again indicated that SAACA intended to heavily promote our tours as well as the two tours in November (downtown and Foothills/East) that had not yet been organized.
We came out of the meeting encouraged, thinking that we’d be getting a lot of support in terms of promotions for our respective tours. The notion of financial support from SAACA was vague. Those $1,000 mini-grants we had hoped for were no longer on the table.
We were encouraged until we started getting written materials from Kate Marquez in the following days. It became quite clear that SAACA had a very different idea about what “facilitating” our Art Trails and HoTArt tours meant. All the marketing materials would feature SAACA and Arts Foundation as “partners” and the two city-sector tours were given far less attention and promotion. There were other problems as well.
I engaged in a series of very long and intense emails with Kate Marquez about the model of “facilitation” to be used. I suggested the traffic circle model. In this model, SAACA would be the central website where artists registered. This follows SAACA’s claim that it would be a “centralized registration hub.” I further suggest that artists should then metaphorically be directed around the traffic circle to the correct exit where they would then rendezvous with their appropriate city-sector tour group. The model I suggested means that once registered with SAACA, an individual artist would be directed to Art Trails, to Heart of Tucson Art, or to another tour group in the artist’s location. To not do this, I said, would be forcing us artists to all be directed to same parking lot and to stay here.
Marquez responded and said that, following my metaphor, the parking lot was exactly what she in mind. She wanted everyone in the SAACA parking lot.
IX. Artist Registration, aka Confusion Reigns
Earlier I mentioned what was good about SAACA tours. Here’s what is not so good about the fall SAACA tours.
SAACA controls the map of all four fall tours that will be published in Zocalo. To get a place on these maps, all artists MUST register with SAACA. Artists who previously registered with Art Trails or HoTArt also must register with SAACA. For their free registration, artists get a place on the map published in Zocalo and on SAACA’s website. The artist gets his/her name, weblink and studio location listed. That’s it.
Contrast this with the Heart of Tucson Art website which Marquez calls a “value-added” website. http://www.heartoftucsonart.org/ Artists each have his/her own webpage on the HoTArt website which will be accessible on the web until the spring 2017 tour. There is also a page on this website listing all artists by name and by medium with a link to his/her individual page. That means visitors can search only for ceramics artists, or oil painters, or sculptors, if they wish. There are additional resources: a separate extensive listing of teaching artists in our mid-town area with bios and details about classes taught, links to artist resources including how to prepare for a successful Open Studio Tour, and there’s even a video in which artists talk about the value of OST to them. HoTArt also produces an email newsletter that provides news and promotes member artists. Art Trails also has a value-added website, and like HotArt, provides additional marketing materials, calendar listings, pre-tour exhibit, free signage etc. Both HotArt and Art Trails produce maps of their respective tours. By the way, the Aguirre tour has a map and a listing of artists. That’s all. It is not a "value-added" website as are HotArt and Art Trails websites.
Registration to be parked on SAACA’s parking lot is free. Registration with Heart of Tucson Art’s dynamic model with all its extras costs $45. That’s because HoTArt pays for advertising, banners, our website, art cards, press overruns of ads and tour maps, etc. HoTArt and Art Trails are not getting money from any organization. We’re both grassroots, DIY groups that formed spontaneously over a year ago.
But most artists don’t have a lot of money. Which will they choose?
Although Art Trails and HoTArt logos are displayed on SAACA’s website on the respective weekend tour pages (first and second of the four tours), these pages have been very confusing to artists. I have received numerous emails from artists who thought that registering on SAACA’s website meant that they automatically became members of HoTArt or Art Trails. They did not understand, and SAACA’s website did not make clear, that joining Art Trails or HoTArt required going to those respective websites, registering, and pay a fee to cover the costs of the extras these group provide.
In the next days, Debi Chess Mabie of Arts Foundation and Kate Marquez of Southern Arizona Arts and Cultural Alliance (SAACA) put their heads together, and the next thing we knew, these two called a public meeting at the Tucson JCC for Wednesday, August 31 – exactly one week after the full-page ad for Arts Foundation appeared in the Arizona Daily Star.
At this meeting, Arts Foundation and SAACA announced that Fall Open Studios Tours would be held after all, and the tours would be organized by SAACA. Instead of going back to the old city-wide TPAC tour, SAACA planned four tours for the fall season, two in October and two in November.
Remember those $1,000 mini-grants that were supposed to go to artists’ groups like HoTArt and Art Trails? That offer disappeared. Instead Arts Foundation CEO Mabie announced that $10,000 would go from Arts Foundation to SAACA for the fall tours. SAACA would contribute “value” (the full market value of ads, not what SAACA actually pays for ads) plus some of its own money and staff time to organize and promote the fall tours, and to form “partnerships” with existing art groups like HoTArt and Art Trails.
On September 2, Arts Foundation sent out an email newsletter announcing this change. The newsletter states [my boldface], “The Arts Foundation will grant money to SAACA to facilitate and market a series of Open Studio Tours this fall….. This does NOT mean that SAACA is taking control of your studio tours; rather, SAACA will be the centralized registration hub for all individual artists, and artist groups who would like to participate in the marketing resources they are providing. To emphasize, if you are an individual artist, whether you are a part of an artist group or not, to be included in the marketing, and all of the centralized maps, you MUST register as an individual artist with SAACA. “
Here’s what’s good about the fall SAACA tours.
- We have four tours on four weekends in the fall of 2016. That means the city-wide tour is history. We have progressed finally to city-sector tours, and for the first time ever, we have created a tour season.
- SAACA has far more resources than Arts Foundation and vastly more than Art Trails or Heart of Tucson Art. That means, theoretically anyway, that more potential visitors to Open Studios Tours will see the SAACA marketing and promotional materials, and will be encouraged to visit our studios.
This last point explains why Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art decided to join SAACA despite some serious reservations. SAACA’s presentation at Tucson JCC led to our deciding to become a SAACA “partner.”
It was apparent from the beginning that to not join with SAACA would have meant competing with them. Cooperation could lead to increased visits to our studios. Competing with SAACA looked like a very bad idea for smaller, city-sector tours. We could be pushed aside very quickly.
On the other hand, it quickly became clear that SAACA intended to have a much larger role than “facilitating” and “marketing” or being just a “centralized registration hub.”
VII. More about the August 31 Meeting at Tucson JCC
At this public meeting at Tucson JCC, Debi Chess Mabie introduced Kate Marquez of SAACA. Marquez presented a long list of promotional activities that SAACA would engage in on behalf of Open Studios.
Also at this meeting, members of Heart of Tucson Art volunteered to organize a tour for those parts of the city that did not have a tour at that point: downtown and Foothills/Eastside. We were ignored.
Two people attending this meeting were Dirk Arnold, 11-year organizer of the spring city-wide open studio tours, and David Aguirre, a long-time downtown arts-scene activist with projects like Dinnerware Gallery, Steinfeld Warehouse, Citizens Warehouse, etc.
Marquez said that the SAACA tours would require artists to register on the SAACA tour website for no fee. Arnold asked if there would be fees in the future. Marquez side-stepped the question and did not answer directly. I asked the same question and got the same vague non-answer.
One of the Heart of Tucson Art people asked Aguirre if he would be interested in our helping to organize a tour for downtown artists. His response was, “You do your thing and I’ll do mine.” He added that downtown artists had a “different approach.” (More on downtown artists and their “approach” later.)
The next day, David Aguirre made clear in emails and on Facebook that he wasn’t having any part of SAACA’s plan. Instead Aguirre announced that he was organizing a city-wide fall Open Studio Tour for the second week in November, the same weekend SAACA had scheduled a downtown Open Studio Tour. Like SAACA, Aguirre would not charge a fee to register. He invited individuals who did not live in the downtown area to show at the Steinfeld Warehouse for a $30 “donation.” Dirk Arnold had provided the Steinfeld option in the spring of 2016, but Aguirre halved the amount of space available to artists for the fall tour, but kept the “donation” at $30.
I have made repeated attempts to reach David Aguirre to get information about his tour for the Open Studios page of Sonoran Arts Network. Aguirre has not responded to any of my queries. SAN-Open Studios http://www.sonoranartsnetwork.net/open-studios.html His website appeared on the web about one week ago. http://tucsonstudiotour.wixsite.com/arts
VIII: A Traffic Circle or a Parking Lot?
Representatives of Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art (I was one of them) met with Kate Marquez at SAACA headquarters two days after the Tucson JCC public meeting. We had requested the meeting earlier in hopes that we could get some support from SAACA for HoTArt and Art Trails. At her office, Marquez asked us a lot of questions about our tours. She again indicated that SAACA intended to heavily promote our tours as well as the two tours in November (downtown and Foothills/East) that had not yet been organized.
We came out of the meeting encouraged, thinking that we’d be getting a lot of support in terms of promotions for our respective tours. The notion of financial support from SAACA was vague. Those $1,000 mini-grants we had hoped for were no longer on the table.
We were encouraged until we started getting written materials from Kate Marquez in the following days. It became quite clear that SAACA had a very different idea about what “facilitating” our Art Trails and HoTArt tours meant. All the marketing materials would feature SAACA and Arts Foundation as “partners” and the two city-sector tours were given far less attention and promotion. There were other problems as well.
I engaged in a series of very long and intense emails with Kate Marquez about the model of “facilitation” to be used. I suggested the traffic circle model. In this model, SAACA would be the central website where artists registered. This follows SAACA’s claim that it would be a “centralized registration hub.” I further suggest that artists should then metaphorically be directed around the traffic circle to the correct exit where they would then rendezvous with their appropriate city-sector tour group. The model I suggested means that once registered with SAACA, an individual artist would be directed to Art Trails, to Heart of Tucson Art, or to another tour group in the artist’s location. To not do this, I said, would be forcing us artists to all be directed to same parking lot and to stay here.
Marquez responded and said that, following my metaphor, the parking lot was exactly what she in mind. She wanted everyone in the SAACA parking lot.
IX. Artist Registration, aka Confusion Reigns
Earlier I mentioned what was good about SAACA tours. Here’s what is not so good about the fall SAACA tours.
SAACA controls the map of all four fall tours that will be published in Zocalo. To get a place on these maps, all artists MUST register with SAACA. Artists who previously registered with Art Trails or HoTArt also must register with SAACA. For their free registration, artists get a place on the map published in Zocalo and on SAACA’s website. The artist gets his/her name, weblink and studio location listed. That’s it.
Contrast this with the Heart of Tucson Art website which Marquez calls a “value-added” website. http://www.heartoftucsonart.org/ Artists each have his/her own webpage on the HoTArt website which will be accessible on the web until the spring 2017 tour. There is also a page on this website listing all artists by name and by medium with a link to his/her individual page. That means visitors can search only for ceramics artists, or oil painters, or sculptors, if they wish. There are additional resources: a separate extensive listing of teaching artists in our mid-town area with bios and details about classes taught, links to artist resources including how to prepare for a successful Open Studio Tour, and there’s even a video in which artists talk about the value of OST to them. HoTArt also produces an email newsletter that provides news and promotes member artists. Art Trails also has a value-added website, and like HotArt, provides additional marketing materials, calendar listings, pre-tour exhibit, free signage etc. Both HotArt and Art Trails produce maps of their respective tours. By the way, the Aguirre tour has a map and a listing of artists. That’s all. It is not a "value-added" website as are HotArt and Art Trails websites.
Registration to be parked on SAACA’s parking lot is free. Registration with Heart of Tucson Art’s dynamic model with all its extras costs $45. That’s because HoTArt pays for advertising, banners, our website, art cards, press overruns of ads and tour maps, etc. HoTArt and Art Trails are not getting money from any organization. We’re both grassroots, DIY groups that formed spontaneously over a year ago.
But most artists don’t have a lot of money. Which will they choose?
Although Art Trails and HoTArt logos are displayed on SAACA’s website on the respective weekend tour pages (first and second of the four tours), these pages have been very confusing to artists. I have received numerous emails from artists who thought that registering on SAACA’s website meant that they automatically became members of HoTArt or Art Trails. They did not understand, and SAACA’s website did not make clear, that joining Art Trails or HoTArt required going to those respective websites, registering, and pay a fee to cover the costs of the extras these group provide.
X. “Facilitation” or a Take-Over?
Despite a promise to “facilitate” and to not interfere with artists’ group tours, in fact, SAACA has interfered with Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art in two significant ways.
SAACA expanded the boundaries of existing tours by following zip codes rather than a logical understanding of Tucson’s city sectors. For example, the 6th and 6th/West University/Dunbar Spring studios are now included in SAACA's 4th weekend-in-October tour (HoTArt’s weekend). This area, traditionally viewed as part of the downtown arts scene, is NOT viewed by most Tucsonans as “mid-town” and is not a part of Heart of Tucson Art’s mid-town territory.
Curiously, SAACA included this same area in the 3rd weekend of Ocober tour (Art Trails’ weekend) although this area is definitely not the west/northwest area of Tucson that Art Trails represents. I’m wondering now if this 6th/6th area will also be on the SAACA downtown tour and the Foothills/Eastside tour in November!
Second, although all artists “must” park in the SAACA parking lot, artists are not required to join either Art Trails or Heart of Tucson Art. Separate registration with these grassroots artists’ groups is optional. As we’ve seen, the SAACA website has been confusing about this, and many artists often did not understand this. Also the two grassroots groups are now “optional.” This makes these two tour groups into a footnote.
More about the money: At the time I write this, Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art have received no funding from SAACA. The October Zocalo ad about the two October tours consists of six pages. HoTArt pays for one page and Art Trails pays for one page, and SAACA pays for four pages. The two SAACA pages will have SAACA’s map of the two tours (maps with SAACA’s boundaries, not AT or HoTArt’s tours) and these maps will show SAACA’s registrants.
Heart of Tucson Art and Art Trails charge their participants a fee because these groups have no outside funding. The two groups cooperated and paid for a September ad in Zocalo reminding readers of the upcoming fall tours. We also had listings on various calendars and in the Desert Leaf. The two groups have paid for, or will pay for, more ads, banners, websites, and more. The last time HoTArt received any money from an outside source was April 2016 when TPAC gave HoTArt $100.
Remember that Marquez refused to give a clear guarantee that SAACA would not begin charging a registration fee for the SAACA website sometime in the future. And there is no sign at all that SAACA will provide any funding at all for any artists’ group now or in the future. This means that HoTArt and AT will be forced to continue asking for a registration fee from artist participants in order to pay for our expenses. So what will artists do if SAACA starts charging a fee, too?
Here’s an interesting observation. At the end of the meeting between SAACA staff and Art Trails and HoTArt representatives, one of the SAACA people said this. “You represent the artists. We represent the visitors to Open Studios.”
This is most definitely a false dichotomy and an obvious misunderstanding of the relationship between artists and visitors to the artists’ studios. Actually artists and visitors are not adversaries or combatants. We have the same goals – to show and to see art, and maybe to sell or buy art. Artists and OST visitors are allies. In fact, many visitors to Open Studios tours are also artists! Artists very often become friends with their collectors. We are not rivals.
Again, SAACA gets credit for moving into the 21st century and creating a tour season for four separate tours. But SAACA has made the future of smaller, city-sector grassroots artists’ groups and their studio tours very uncertain.
XI. Downtown Tucson
I realize that what I’m about write here does not apply to every artist who has a downtown studio. But it applies to enough of the downtown crowd that we can derive some insight here.
As mentioned earlier, the city-wide tour run by TPAC and Dirk Arnold did not work well for most of the artists in Tucson. We paid the same registration fee as other artists, but received far fewer visitors than did the downtown artists. That’s because if you have only two days to visit studios, it’s just easier to go to a cluster of artists (downtown) than to drive from Silverbell Rd. to Wilmot Rd. to visit two different studios. But those of us in the rest of the city (not downtown) went along with TPAC/Arnold tours because we had no other choice….until Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art emerged.
Some of the downtown artists came to conclusion that it was not convenience that brought visitors to their studios. Some artists seem to have concluded that they are better artists because they get more visitors. They have come to believe that they live in the most desirable, coolest part of Tucson to visit. I actually had one downtown artist tell me that a few months ago. He said that of course visitors wanted to go downtown because that’s the “cool” part of Tucson, the place where art happens, and where the best artists are located. He added, too, that most downtown artists view the many artists in the rest of the city as “provincial.”
So it is ironic that David Aguirre would reject SAACA’s efforts to create a tour season. He has characterized SAACA as an outsider organization that has done little for artists. That’s not really fair. If you look at SAACA’s website, you’ll find a range of arts-related activities and events sponsored by SAACA. Aguirre, then, has unwittingly re-created the old, dysfunctional model of the city-wide tour that TPAC ran for years. Aguirre portrays his effort as “grassroots,” yet he has studiously ignored the real grassroots tours – Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art. Aguirre has been praised for “keeping the community together.” Not so. He’s actually propping up an old model of tour that worked against a huge section of the Tucson arts community….unless, of course, you think that “the community” refers only to downtown.
Also ironic is the obsession that many individuals have with downtown Tucson. Millions of dollars have been spent to redevelop downtown. Now we have expensive restaurants and bars and theaters and housing units and a streetcar to take us there. But we are beginning to see the same thing that has happened in other cities that underwent downtown development. The artists are forced out. Many galleries have left downtown Tucson although several still exist on the 6th Ave./6th Street area. More and more artists are leaving because studio rents are too high. The downtown-focused Warehouse Arts Management Organization (WAMO) recently received a $500,000 grant. WAMO will spend much of this on providing lower-cost artist studio space to a few artists, and a community center. Artists in the rest of Tucson will not benefit at all.
Despite a promise to “facilitate” and to not interfere with artists’ group tours, in fact, SAACA has interfered with Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art in two significant ways.
SAACA expanded the boundaries of existing tours by following zip codes rather than a logical understanding of Tucson’s city sectors. For example, the 6th and 6th/West University/Dunbar Spring studios are now included in SAACA's 4th weekend-in-October tour (HoTArt’s weekend). This area, traditionally viewed as part of the downtown arts scene, is NOT viewed by most Tucsonans as “mid-town” and is not a part of Heart of Tucson Art’s mid-town territory.
Curiously, SAACA included this same area in the 3rd weekend of Ocober tour (Art Trails’ weekend) although this area is definitely not the west/northwest area of Tucson that Art Trails represents. I’m wondering now if this 6th/6th area will also be on the SAACA downtown tour and the Foothills/Eastside tour in November!
Second, although all artists “must” park in the SAACA parking lot, artists are not required to join either Art Trails or Heart of Tucson Art. Separate registration with these grassroots artists’ groups is optional. As we’ve seen, the SAACA website has been confusing about this, and many artists often did not understand this. Also the two grassroots groups are now “optional.” This makes these two tour groups into a footnote.
More about the money: At the time I write this, Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art have received no funding from SAACA. The October Zocalo ad about the two October tours consists of six pages. HoTArt pays for one page and Art Trails pays for one page, and SAACA pays for four pages. The two SAACA pages will have SAACA’s map of the two tours (maps with SAACA’s boundaries, not AT or HoTArt’s tours) and these maps will show SAACA’s registrants.
Heart of Tucson Art and Art Trails charge their participants a fee because these groups have no outside funding. The two groups cooperated and paid for a September ad in Zocalo reminding readers of the upcoming fall tours. We also had listings on various calendars and in the Desert Leaf. The two groups have paid for, or will pay for, more ads, banners, websites, and more. The last time HoTArt received any money from an outside source was April 2016 when TPAC gave HoTArt $100.
Remember that Marquez refused to give a clear guarantee that SAACA would not begin charging a registration fee for the SAACA website sometime in the future. And there is no sign at all that SAACA will provide any funding at all for any artists’ group now or in the future. This means that HoTArt and AT will be forced to continue asking for a registration fee from artist participants in order to pay for our expenses. So what will artists do if SAACA starts charging a fee, too?
Here’s an interesting observation. At the end of the meeting between SAACA staff and Art Trails and HoTArt representatives, one of the SAACA people said this. “You represent the artists. We represent the visitors to Open Studios.”
This is most definitely a false dichotomy and an obvious misunderstanding of the relationship between artists and visitors to the artists’ studios. Actually artists and visitors are not adversaries or combatants. We have the same goals – to show and to see art, and maybe to sell or buy art. Artists and OST visitors are allies. In fact, many visitors to Open Studios tours are also artists! Artists very often become friends with their collectors. We are not rivals.
Again, SAACA gets credit for moving into the 21st century and creating a tour season for four separate tours. But SAACA has made the future of smaller, city-sector grassroots artists’ groups and their studio tours very uncertain.
XI. Downtown Tucson
I realize that what I’m about write here does not apply to every artist who has a downtown studio. But it applies to enough of the downtown crowd that we can derive some insight here.
As mentioned earlier, the city-wide tour run by TPAC and Dirk Arnold did not work well for most of the artists in Tucson. We paid the same registration fee as other artists, but received far fewer visitors than did the downtown artists. That’s because if you have only two days to visit studios, it’s just easier to go to a cluster of artists (downtown) than to drive from Silverbell Rd. to Wilmot Rd. to visit two different studios. But those of us in the rest of the city (not downtown) went along with TPAC/Arnold tours because we had no other choice….until Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art emerged.
Some of the downtown artists came to conclusion that it was not convenience that brought visitors to their studios. Some artists seem to have concluded that they are better artists because they get more visitors. They have come to believe that they live in the most desirable, coolest part of Tucson to visit. I actually had one downtown artist tell me that a few months ago. He said that of course visitors wanted to go downtown because that’s the “cool” part of Tucson, the place where art happens, and where the best artists are located. He added, too, that most downtown artists view the many artists in the rest of the city as “provincial.”
So it is ironic that David Aguirre would reject SAACA’s efforts to create a tour season. He has characterized SAACA as an outsider organization that has done little for artists. That’s not really fair. If you look at SAACA’s website, you’ll find a range of arts-related activities and events sponsored by SAACA. Aguirre, then, has unwittingly re-created the old, dysfunctional model of the city-wide tour that TPAC ran for years. Aguirre portrays his effort as “grassroots,” yet he has studiously ignored the real grassroots tours – Art Trails and Heart of Tucson Art. Aguirre has been praised for “keeping the community together.” Not so. He’s actually propping up an old model of tour that worked against a huge section of the Tucson arts community….unless, of course, you think that “the community” refers only to downtown.
Also ironic is the obsession that many individuals have with downtown Tucson. Millions of dollars have been spent to redevelop downtown. Now we have expensive restaurants and bars and theaters and housing units and a streetcar to take us there. But we are beginning to see the same thing that has happened in other cities that underwent downtown development. The artists are forced out. Many galleries have left downtown Tucson although several still exist on the 6th Ave./6th Street area. More and more artists are leaving because studio rents are too high. The downtown-focused Warehouse Arts Management Organization (WAMO) recently received a $500,000 grant. WAMO will spend much of this on providing lower-cost artist studio space to a few artists, and a community center. Artists in the rest of Tucson will not benefit at all.
XII. We Must Help Each Other
1. Tucson could be an “arts destination” on the same level as Santa Fe. We have the talent here to support visitors from all over the world coming to Tucson to see and buy art. This is an idea that Kate Marquez and I share. We could be an arts destination. But that means that arts organizations must do their best to support the artists. The current evolution of Open Studios Tours does not do that as well as it could. SAACA must be more supportive in every way to these grassroots city-sector groups like Heart of Tucson Art and Art Trails. As it is, SAACA and Arts Foundation mainly seem focused on promoting themselves first above all.
2. Keep this in mind. Tucson is the fifth poorest city in the U.S. Source (source: http://www.cbsnews.com/media/americas-11-poorest-cities/8/) That means that if we want to survive, much less thrive, we all have to cooperate. Aguirre and the downtownies are going to have to give up the notion that they exist in the center of the Tucson arts universe. SAACA and Arts Foundation are going to have to put the artists first, rather than promoting their own organizations above all and at the artists’ expense.
We should all help each other.
We must all help each other.
© C.J. Shane 2016
www.SonoranArtsNetwork.net
1. Tucson could be an “arts destination” on the same level as Santa Fe. We have the talent here to support visitors from all over the world coming to Tucson to see and buy art. This is an idea that Kate Marquez and I share. We could be an arts destination. But that means that arts organizations must do their best to support the artists. The current evolution of Open Studios Tours does not do that as well as it could. SAACA must be more supportive in every way to these grassroots city-sector groups like Heart of Tucson Art and Art Trails. As it is, SAACA and Arts Foundation mainly seem focused on promoting themselves first above all.
2. Keep this in mind. Tucson is the fifth poorest city in the U.S. Source (source: http://www.cbsnews.com/media/americas-11-poorest-cities/8/) That means that if we want to survive, much less thrive, we all have to cooperate. Aguirre and the downtownies are going to have to give up the notion that they exist in the center of the Tucson arts universe. SAACA and Arts Foundation are going to have to put the artists first, rather than promoting their own organizations above all and at the artists’ expense.
We should all help each other.
We must all help each other.
© C.J. Shane 2016
www.SonoranArtsNetwork.net