In the East Bay, Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble received some grim news a week before Christmas.
With Oakland’s mayor recalled and the city facing a $129 million budget deficit, the Oakland City Council voted to eliminate funding for arts and culture organizations, including the revocation of a $30,000 grant to Kitka for its 2024–2025 season.
The plight of the world-famous 10-singer ensemble is but one example of the latest financial problems facing the arts in a world beset by wars, overwhelming natural disasters, the continued fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, and now even the failure of governments that had formerly been the source of some financial support.
Kitka’s loss may be familiar to arts organizations in numerous countries experiencing political turmoil, such as France, Canada, and South Korea.
San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, a scion of the Levi Strauss family, which has supported the arts here for nearly a century, is meeting the city’s projected $876 million two-year accumulated deficit with a hiring freeze, announced on Jan. 9, his first day in office.
The new year has opened with Bay Area arts organizations, from the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera to small ensembles like Kitka, facing serious fiscal challenges. Some of them have seen their meager government funding reduced or cut entirely.
As Lily Janiak reported in the San Francisco Chronicle at the beginning of the new year:
“In 2024, some decades-strong pillars of the community — California Shakespeare Theater, Cutting Ball Theater — splintered, joining pandemic casualties Bay Area Children’s Theatre, PianoFight, TheatreFirst, American Conservatory Theater’s master of fine arts program, foolsFury and Exit Theatre’s Eddy Street venue. There have also been the hibernation of Mugwumpin and Custom Made Theatre Co. and the withering — without an official closure announcement — of 42nd Street Moon.”
Kitka Executive/Artistic Director Shira Cion explains what loss of support means for her organization:
Over the past two seasons [after emerging from the pandemic], Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble has had to nimbly adapt to sudden funding cuts from the California Arts Council at the state level and, more recently, from the city of Oakland at the municipal level.
Prior to 2023, grants from the California Arts Council were a competitive but reliable funding source that, in previous years, provided up to $50,000 in annual support to Kitka.
While Kitka’s applications to these programs scored quite high in panel rankings in the last two seasons, available funds were not sufficient to fund beyond the top 15 percent of funding requests received. Countless organizations doing incredible artistic work received nothing.”
Another municipal program with a much larger funding pool, San Francisco Grants for the Arts (GFTA) — with $14 million annually against Oakland’s $1 million — has received similar complaints going back several years. During London Breed’s tenure as San Francisco mayor, Vallie Brown was eventually replaced as GFTA director by Kristen Jacobson. Future leadership is in the hands of the new mayor.
Cion continues:
In previous years, before government and many foundation funders shifted application scores to be more heavily weighted on to what extent the organization is led by and directly serving and impacting underserved communities of color, Kitka’s scope of programs and musical excellence ranked at the top of most competitive application pools.
The fact that Kitka is a women-led and all-woman organization, with a programmatic focus on Eastern European — Balkan, Slavic, Baltic, Caucasian — music traditions, traditions that are largely underrepresented in California’s musical landscape, did not pull enough weight in making the [diversity, equity, and inclusion] case for Kitka’s work.
This is in spite of Kitka’s long and impressive history of cross-cultural collaborative projects with artists representing underserved, underrepresented, and disenfranchised communities and our commitment to providing accessibly affordable or free admission to many of our Bay Area season events.
With regard to the city of Oakland’s recent cuts to its Cultural Funding Program grants, Kitka was one among dozens of Oakland-based arts organizations in the city’s highly competitive two-year Cultural Organizational Assistance category, which provided general operating support relating to performance, educational, and community engagement programs within Oakland’s city limits.”
Kitka’s funding was revoked mid-cycle, and midway through the current musical season, in order to address the city’s ongoing fiscal crisis. The cuts came after the ensemble had already fulfilled project commitments that had this funding factored into the budget, Cion says. “We see this as an incredibly shortsighted move,” she adds.
“Oakland has one of the largest and most diverse creative communities in the country,” Cion says, “and the work that Oakland-based artists do to revitalize Oakland’s neighborhoods, stimulate local businesses, attract visitors, and provide community-building cultural programs with important benefits that extend beyond just art-for-art’s-sake can only assist Oakland in addressing its perpetual problems.”
Similarly in San Francisco, hundreds of music and theater organizations (the latter in major decline recently) are struggling to survive despite the well-established fact that they have a beneficial economic impact on the city and the Bay Area.
Cion calls attention to one more current challenge to arts organizations, something SF Classical Voice has reported on extensively:
These state and local level cuts in cultural funding are coming at a time when small and midsize arts organizations must step up their financial commitments to comply with the AB5 labor law [which limits at-will and temporary employment contracts].
While Kitka is heartily behind paying our artists fair wages for their talents and time, becoming compliant with AB5 required a major shift of our artist payment model from being project-based to [being] based on hourly wages that comply with local minimum living-wage requirements.
This transition increased our labor expenses significantly. We are holding out hope that the state-sponsored SB-1116 Performing Arts Equitable Payment program will go into effect soon to help us maintain our very modest artist payment agreements.”
As other arts organizations have done — all with increasing difficulty — Kitka has turned to individual donors, says Cion.
“To address these challenges, we are turning to our base of supporters — ticket buyers, community choir and workshop participants, and individual donors — and asking them to give more generously to help us close the gap at this vulnerable time. We are also simplifying programs to whatever extent we can so that earned income can support a greater share of any given project’s costs.”
