Off With the Heads!
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The project includes a brief history of the last 30 years of local arts management by Michael Wakeford, a PhD student at the University of Chicago, who conducted interviews with ten established arts leaders. Among them is Nick Rabkin, executive director of the Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College, who notes that the city’s oldest institutions were founded by businessmen with deep pockets, while the “second wave,” those organizations founded since the 1960s, tended to be launched by artists with more passion than money. It’s hard to see who’ll step in and carry on at small and midsize organizations, and Rabkin wonders if anyone should, asking “What are we saving [when] the soul of an institution is withdrawn?” As for the booming new college arts-management programs, the old guard is skeptical. According to Wakeford, “veteran leaders doubt whether formal programs will ever supply a pool of leaders driven by the type of artistic commitment with which they entered the field.”
In the words of the IAA’s promo materials for the symposium, the “baby boomer generation of nonprofit arts executive directors is careening toward retirement.” It may be that the prospect of anemic retirement packages has them spinning as much as the question of their successors. Joan Mazzonelli, who became executive director at the Theatre Building after cofounder Ruth Higgins left, remembers when Higgins had to step in upon the sudden death of her husband, Byron Schaffer. Higgins moved on five years ago, in part with an eye to funding her retirement, says Mazzonelli. Now Mazzonelli is worrying about the same issue. “I’m not going anywhere; I’m hoping the board will address this,” she says. “But when I came it was easy for me to trade off the big bucks and not worry about my retirement–I could wear jeans and work with artists every day. That was 17, 18 years ago. [Since then] I’ve gotten kicked upstairs, my job’s become much more administrative, and the vision of writing grants into my 70s is not great. Folks in the corporate world are dying to have this kind of job, but the work is hard and long, salaries are low, and there isn’t that infrastructure to say OK, here’s what you can count on.” The IAA will consider salaries and benefits in a “second wave” of research to come.
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