Fiery Arts Town Hall: Finally a Call to Action?

The SFJAZZ High School All-Stars had the audience percolating at the top of an August 20 San Francisco Arts Town Hall at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Then spoken-word artist and local hero Marc Bamuthi Joseph came on and lit the flame.

“You say you want a resurrection?” he asked, with a spiky rhetorical tilt. His bravura answer worked in many of the names of the 70-some groups who sponsored this conversation about arts policy and funding with 14 candidates for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Journalist Belva Davis moderated.

After the spirited opening, it wasn’t until the evening’s third panel of five that the audience of about 500 came to life again. It happened when District 5 supervisorial candidate Julian Davis asserted the need for reasonably priced housing. “Artists cannot afford to live here anymore,” he said, winning the first nonperfunctory round of applause, along with a few shouted affirmations.

A few minutes later Thea Selby, one of Davis’ District 5 rivals, seconded the call for affordable housing and promptly upped the ante. Her avowed goals include “making sure” that artists get paid for their work and can acquire health insurance.

Never mind that neither Davis nor Selby, nor for that matter anyone else on the Arts Town Hall docket, offered a concrete plan for how these and various other ideas might actually come to pass. Candidate forums such as this one are mostly about showing up, saying the right crowd-pleasing things to the constituency of the moment, and giving voters a rough sense of who they might be electing to represent them at City Hall. Substance and hard looks at the issues are in short supply.

At Monday’s third annual candidates’ event (formerly known as the San Francisco Arts Forum), the self-evident and partly self-serving bromides came thick and fast.

Christina Olague (District 5): “The arts are essential to who we are.”

David Campos (District 9): “The talent here is as good as any you can find in the world.”

John Rizzo (District 5): “The arts are an economic engine.”

Eric Mar said he wanted to tap the “vibrant and creative” spirit and “youthful energy” of the “diverse and community-based” Richmond District to make it “a more livable place” and ensure a “better future.”

No matter how well artistic administrators make the case, and how closely aspiring city officials seem to be listening, action is what counts.

David Chiu (District 3) asked, in an especially lame bid for a response, “Do we have any friends of the arts in the house?” It’s fairly safe to say, in an audience stacked with local arts administrators, that almost no one but committed arts partisans were on hand.

Insider Nuggets

There were a few little insider nuggets to tuck away. Joel Engardio (District 7) was once a documentary filmmaker. John Rizzo used to play the trumpet, “from dive bars to Davies Hall,” as he said, but lost his embouchure. F.X. Crowley (District 7) made a pitch for more groups to use the recently restored Gerald Simon Theatre at the Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. (How many even knew it was there?)

Crowley, the former business manager/secretary of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), Local 16, is one of two supervisor candidates with significant arts resumes. The other is London Breed (District 5), executive director of the African American Art & Culture Complex for the past decade. An arts populist who believes in “collaborating with institutions that have a lot of money,” Breed put her own experience front and center on Monday. If you want someone in City Hall who is of the arts community, she declared, “London Breed is your candidate.”

Yet for all the platitudes and posturing onstage, some potentially important messages came through loud and clear. When one candidate after another endorsed the idea that the city’s Hotel Tax–based Grants for the Arts funding needs to be increased, from its current 6% to the legally mandated 8%, the audience was listening.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard that so explicitly,” said Brent Assink, executive director of the San Francisco Symphony. “I think that’s significant.”

Marina McDougall, director of the Center for Art and Inquiry at the Exploratorium, agreed. “I was struck by how unified the candidates were tonight,” she said. “That wasn’t so true in the forum with the mayoral candidates.”

Thomas Simpson, artistic director of the AfroSolo Theatre Company, was impressed by how “up” on the issues the candidates were. “There were no losers up there.”

Too many “what-ifs?” loom over any discussion of local arts funding to permit a clear picture of what lies ahead.

One reason for that may be a more organized effort by arts organizations to have their own message heard. “I noticed how much more cohesive the arts community felt tonight,” said San Francisco Ballet Executive Director Glenn McCoy. “We haven’t always been that good at telling our own story. I think we’re getting better at that.”

Calls for Action May Eventually Be Heard

No matter how well artistic administrators make the case, and how closely aspiring city officials seem to be listening, action is what counts. Here, too, some reasons for optimism emerged. While none of the candidate spelled out any specifics, several fronted some promising ideas worth real discussion.

Julian Davis made the pertinent observation that until the city’s general fund is strengthened, arts funding would continue to be vulnerable. He called for restructuring real estate, commercial, and transportation taxes to raise those needed revenues. Olague wants to provide incentives for the reuse of industrial buildings for live-work lofts and other arts-related purposes. Selby engaged in a little Twitter, Apple, and Google bashing when she questioned the tax-break incentives that tech companies receive.

“It’s OK to ask them to contribute back,” she said, unable to resist a touch of sarcasm. “Your employees,” she said of those tech giants, “think they’re artists.”

Campos said he was open to the formation of a single city department, presumably merging Grants for the Arts with the San Francisco Arts Commission and some functions currently spread out elsewhere.

Too many “what-ifs?” loom over any discussion of local arts funding to permit a clear picture of what lies ahead. What happens if Governor Jerry Brown’s state Proposition 30 budget proposals are rejected by voters, putting even greater pressure on the city’s coffers? How much more damage will be done if Proposition H, the city measure that supplies a small but essential stream of arts funding to San Francisco public schools, is not recertified a year or so from now?

Maybe the dark clouds led moderator Belva Davis to ask such a starry-eyed final question to the last panel of candidates. Did anyone, she wanted to know, think that the arts were already adequately funded?

The candidates’ campaign managers would have fainted on the spot if they’d answered any differently. Oh yes, of course, they all assured the Arts Town Hall crowd. They all thought the arts needed more and better funding.