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Tuesday April 13th, 2010 @ 9:24am

Arts

In a city with one-hundred-and-four cultural facilities, 511 cultural organizations and over two-hundred-and-fifty sites of cultural significance, Windsor is incredibly well-cultured, but not necessarily well-connected.

The Municipal Cultural Master Plan is a one-hundred-sixty-four page study produced by Toronto’s TCI Management Consultants on how to improve everything related to arts, culture, music, architecture, history and more.

TCI consulted hundreds of people involved in Windsor’s cultural scene, and has produced several recommendations on how to improve cultural connectivity in Windsor.

The plan calls for significant expansion of the City’s Cultural Affairs Office including necessary staffing, resources and funding, the commissioning of a study to build a new City of Windsor Museum, adequate maintenance of the Odette Sculpture Park, and perhaps most interesting, the implementation of a project that has been on the shelf since 2005 — the City of Windsor’s ‘public art policy’.

A public art policy would mandate a 1-2% per-municipal-building allocation of funding to permit local artists to display works of art, sculpture and multimedia on city properties.

Another section of the Cultural Master Plan recommends investigating the feesibility of providing artists with “affordable live-work spaces”.  (See windsoriteDOTca writer Brendan Houghton’s article describing Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation)

The remainder of the plan lays out a roadmap for Windsor to promote culture, develop a “cultural tourism” plan and increase the saturation of arts, music, theatre, film and a full gamut of cultural aspects within the City of Windsor.

The Municipal Cultural Master Plan goes to City Council for consideration on Monday April 19th, 2010.  You can read the entire plan, in full, here.

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  • Gavin

    A friend of mine had told me something about the proposal. The 1-2% didn't sound like much to me at first, but the concept grew on me quickly. Local artists of various types, media and genres, having places to display their work on city property is a fantastic idea to promote local art and artists! I had no idea that this had been proposed 5 years ago, however. My only question would be: Is the council meeting on the 19th open to the public? As this is probably something I should get behind. Thanks for writing about this too, btw.

  • pc

    I believe it is open to the public as it's on regular agenda and you can speak to the issue by being listed as a delegation. Call (519) 255-6432 before Thursday, April 15th.

  • carolinax

    I'll say it once, and I'll say it again:

    If artists don't produce their own capital none of this will matter. It'll be wasted taxpayer money.

    That's it. Not going to say anything more. I'm wonderfully curious about the Plan though.

  • Search for more

    I'm not sure this is something I'd need to be part of a delegation on, but it would be something worth learning a lot more about, and what have you. Myself and one friend would love to place some of our better photographs somewhere, and another friend is a more traditional artist, and I know he would love to get some exposure. But anything to do with local arts is something I'd like to get behind. There are a lot of people in various arts in this city, and the city itself doesn't have much of a reputation for the arts, and this sounds like a way to improve the place. :)

  • http://www.stevencochrane.org Steven

    I've skimmed through the full document (the thing is long. and repetitive, which I guess is just how these kinds of documents tend to be), and a few things came immediately to mind.

    1) While I see why the angle is attractive to Council, I think they might make too much of the tourism angle, at least at this stage. The latest figures they had for Michigan/Ohio tourists were from 2007, before the U.S. passport requirements went into effect. The report itself notes that only 25% of Americans have passports, and effectively nobody in-province considers Windsor a “destination.” Nevertheless, the thrust of their tourism angle is Michigan, which now just seems unwise. Better, in my mind, to frame vibrant cultural activity as a draw for the SW Ontario market, which as of right now is mostly going untapped (I mean, people visit //Kitchener// of all places. If we can't operate at least at that level we might as well give up).

    2) The structure of their proposed “Cultural Funding Commission” is… a bit weird. It effectively proposes a stable board of directors consisting of between 10 and 12 “city residents who are familiar with cultural disciplines and cultural organizations in the City, but have no real or perceived conflict of interest with any potential applicant.” Firstly, in a city this size you're never going to be able to pull together a group of people (for a sustained commitment, as outlined) with any knowledge of the fields in question that don't have some direct interest in the organizations being funded. Better to do it the way it's done in real cities, where the arms-length body has a board of directors, yes, but calls individual juries for each of the various granting programs (operating and project grants for institutions and—dare I even wish for it—individual artist grants for, uh, individual artists). That way you can keep a sustained level of expertise while maintaining enough flexibility to actually conduct the process in a somewhat-impartial manner.

    3) They make the important point that, as of right now, the vast majority of City arts funding (that doesn't go to City programs as such—libraries, etc.) is going to the AGW and the WSO, and rightly suggest that funding opportunities need to be made available for smaller organizations. My concern is that, given the wording, and, uh, given the Council we have to work with, the strategy will be to simply divert funds from the AGW and WSO to other (no less deserving) groups. Given that those major institutions seem to be barely above water, that could be disastrous. Which brings us to the real elephant in the room:

    4) The city just isn't allocating enough money for the arts. Full stop. Take Winnipeg for example (a similarly blue-collar but //actually culturally vibrant// city). Their municipal arts council (their arms-length funding body) receives a city allocation of some $4mil annually. Adjusted for population, a comparable amount for the City of Windsor to be allocating would be $1.3, or very nearly double what they're spending over currently. Winnipeg manages that in the face of a perfectly hostile mayor; what this place needs by way of brute force (or regime change) to get the same level of commitment, I don't know.

    And Carolina, you in particular would do well to actually read the report, as it's kind of geared towards people with a mindset like yours, but in short: the arts //do// generate capital. Mountains of it, in fact. It's just that they tend to generate those funds for //other people// in the form of secondary employment, tax revenue, and urban revitalization. //That// is why cities spend money on their cultural sectors: because the investment almost invariably pays off big time.

    The other stuff mentioned in the report, about live/work spaces for artists and turning Odette into something other a failed tax shelter are great ideas, but I'll eat my shoe if any of them ever go into effect.

  • http://windsorite.ca Owen Christopher Wolter

    Well said, Steven!

  • carolinax

    Steven, seeing as I don't know you and you don't know me, I'll give you a small taste of my background in Windsor's art scene. I feel this is necessary as I'm probably not only going to read the report, but actually be interested enough to attend the meeting. Full disclosure ahead:

    I'm wrapping up my degree in Visual Arts and Communications Studies at UWin. For the entire length of my university career I've been directly involved in student organizations (Visual Arts Society and UWSA as a Director on their Board of Directors, serious business!). During my year as President of VAS I learned a great deal about managing a very active (if super cash strapped) non-for-profit, specifically within the arts, but I also sat on Artcite's Board of Directors as well. This experience taught me even more. Within the 25+ years that Artcite, specifically and respectfully, has been operating they've poured slightly over 1 million dollars into Windsor's local economy and bringing in all kinds of international artists and seminars and other fascinating events. Breaking it down, that's $38,000+ a year. Although its a large amount for an organization that employs 2 people regularly, its literally amounts to one person working at just under $20.00 an hour and living in Windsor for 25 years – One person shopping and living in Windsor has made the same financial impact of one organization. Money is the lifeblood of EVERY organization.

    These studies are made so that people with my “mindset” aka a “business” mindset can see how their/public funds will be spent, and more importantly, if they will be spent responsibly. There would be a public outcry if 10% of the City's budget were to go directly to any corporation without oversight, and most importantly without a return. Now imagine 10% of the budget going to a poorly organized and unambitious non-for-profit. When you make an investment there must be a return for that investment to be a good investment. //That's// why cities like Toronto and Winnepeg (who's population is 600,000+) invest in the arts, because its a sustainable part of their economic structure. For Windsor? We're not quite there…yet. This is a good first step though.

    I'm trying to put things into perspective. However, once I read the report I'll have a better understanding of how their recommendations will fit in with their 5 year plan and etc etc.

    Also, I'm a capitalist who's applying to the MBA program @ UWin – Hope I get in y'all!

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