The Big Picture Revisited Part Three: Engaging City Hall

My third and final post in this week’s series reporting on ‘The Big Picture Revisited’ addresses the discussion around Engaging City Hall. As this whole event was hosted by the City of Hamilton’s Arts Advisory Commission with the intention of forming an action plan within the means of municipal government, this was a topic that ingrained itself firmly within all parts of the forum - see Part One and Part Two for the early threads of the idea.

For the morning’s introduction to the discussion topic, Juan Bohorquez had come in from Kitchener to paint what seems a civic cultural utopia compared to Hamilton. Home of the CAFKA biennial of innovative art projects, Kitchener’s City Hall boasts an enviable degree of support for visual artists, from its Rotunda Gallery and Artist-in-Residence Program to the development of a nightly digital video projection program for its Berlin Tower.

Kitchener City Hall. I’d show you Hamilton’s too, but it’s quite literally under construction.

Combined with an increasingly common one-percent for public art policy in all its civic construction projects, Kitchener’s arts policy recognizes the city’s blue-collar legacy and therefore focuses on initiatives that bring art directly into public life, valuing presentation opportunities over establishing more studios. There’s a lot that a city can do for artists that doesn’t involve creating more opportunities to collect rent from their shallow pockets.

Another crucial yet simple formula to emerge from the forum came during Bohorquez’s presention, and was easy to copy verbatim from the soul-destroying medium of PowerPoint: Arts and Cultural sectors will provide quality of life amenities for attraction and retention of workers and beautification. As much as the ‘and beautification’ feels tacked on, the core point remains that in today’s economy of the self-employed telecommuter, workers are empowered to choose where they base their businesses and lives; the city that can build a prosperous population will therefore be the one that can offer something better than a big-box annex with a SilverCity showing that wretched Twilight shit on multiple screens.

Once one recognizes that City Hall has a vested interest in supporting local culture, the action plan begins to fall just as heavily upon their shoulders as it does the artist-collaborators aiming to build a stronger profile for their efforts. The suggestions that follow would essentially demand the participation of both parties, and are therefore those most likely to succeed:

1. Clearly communicate the stories of artists and their organizations the better to educate councillors on creative works in their community - the phrase ‘Take Your Councillor to Work Day’ was bandied about surprisingly often, though I cannot for the life of me imagine inviting Tom Jackson to hang in my home studio watching me draw along to David Bowie and Star Trek reruns.

2. Research best practices in other cities - Kitchener is one example, but there are others across Canada with equally strong support for their artists.

3. Increase artist visibility in civic spaces by providing more exhibition opportunities. Anyone suppose that newly-renovated City Hall is going to include a public gallery space?

4. Create an arms-length organization funded by City Hall but staffed by respected members of the arts community - note that all three discussion groups insist of this need.

5. Take a proactive approach to the upcoming 2015 PanAm Games as an opportunity to grow Hamilton’s profile while assuring that arts and culture funding is preserved against the demands of sports funding (see Vancouver 2010).

Unlike the last time I witnessed artists and city councillors gathered in the same room, the mood at ‘The Big Picture Revisited’ was refreshingly productive, offering both a clear-sighted look at Hamilton’s cultural issues and tangible solutions to those problems. Really, it was about bloody time, too.

The Arts Advisory Commission will be producing an action plan based on the day’s discussions to be made available in January 2010, presumably at their scintillating webpage. I will be sure to report back when that document exists; in the meantime, let’s get back to some proper art for next week, yes?

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