Last night some eighty artists, cultural organizers, politicians and buskers converged upon the newly renovated City Hall for The Bigger Picture, a forum following up on last November’s The Big Picture Revisited at the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre. Hosted by the Arts Advisory Commission for the City of Hamilton, the purpose of the evening was to share some of the findings from that previous forum and present upcoming strategies for improving the state of Hamilton’s arts community.

In the interests of disclosure, I should point out that I was hired on contract by the AAC to prepare their rolling slide presentation of arts organizations, but I promise not to let that administrative headache darken my view of the proceedings too much.

Following a loud and lively mingle complete with aesthetically striking nibbles and table presentations by various arts organizations, everyone was duly herded into the Council Chambers for what proved to be a densely-packed array of speakers responding to the various concerns raised by artists and organizations during The Big Picture Revisited. AAC member Anne Cibola and a hand-out of the report’s Executive Summary gave the audience a refresher course on the key issues, which seemed to break down to the following five points:

1. Building Understanding and Appreciation of the Arts

2. Funding (direct financial support for artists and organizations)

3. Support Beyond Money (improved space and resources for the arts)

4. Arts Community Collaboration

5. Capitalizing on Opportunities (such as the PanAm Games, apparently)

Though as was pointed out by Bryce Kanbara in his remarks on the history of Hamilton’s arts community, our concerns always have (and likely always will) boiled down to two repeating needs: to make a living, and to be valued for our work as artists. For those looking for a more in-depth analysis, a PDF of the complete report is available online.

For those in the room, however, there was no escaping the staggering quantity of strategic planning happening at the government level, with the vast majority of the evening’s (too) many speakers representing various divisions and departments within City Hall; further, with the exception of Bryce, the non-governmental arts folks invited to speak - Barbara Milne and Patti Cannon for Arts Hamilton, and Jeremy Freiburger from the Imperial Cotton Centre for the Arts - are closely linked to the City’s cultural development plans. With so few speakers from outside of the municipal government fold, it was plain to see that this particular event was less a conversation than an attempt to answer all those questions posed some seven months ago.

Thankfully, the questions are unlikely to stop anytime soon - can always count on Gary Santucci for some lively feedback - and the City was encouragingly emphatic about wanting to keep an open dialogue with arts organizations and individual artists, the latter of which seemed poorly represented in this context. Evelyn Myrie of Stewart Memorial Church opened the lamentably short Q&A session with a truly apposite call to level the playing field of Hamilton’s culture so that engagement and opportunities are not being limited to the same mainstream players who benefit time and again for their ability to speak the City’s language. Outreach and collaboration need to happen through multiple channels - the few hints at new online forums are tantalizing, for a start, but I personally would like to see broader terms of engagement outside the much-quoted task forces and focus groups as well. Not that I can’t recognize the value of those methods, but in my own experience alone I find the administrative burden of uncompensated meeting and consultation time is already a bit too high for artists who could be spending more time making art instead of talking about the infrastructure to make it look sexier for the economic powers that be.

On the whole, the evening was a balance of obscure bureaucratic speak - I’m afraid I’m still not sure what “cultural planning” entails - and tangible promises that artists’ voice are slowly but surely being heeded. A concrete commitment from Jennifer Kaye for a better-funded return of the Hamilton Arts Awards in 2011 is very good news, as is a clearly delineated action plan towards establishing an arms-length funding body capable of awarding grants to Hamilton artists. There’s great potential for growth in all of this, but I think the real challenge will be to ensure that individual artists have the means to flourish as creative individuals without having the better part of their works appropriated into larger governmental strategies. A certain measure of freedom needs to be preserved in any plan for supporting the arts, and hopefully it’s a quality that will not be lost in the larger tidal wave Hamilton’s greater ambitions.

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