BRATTLEBORO — What's the difference between a cluster, a district, and a hub, and which of these structures would work for the Brattleboro area arts community?
Those questions were the start of a Brattleboro CoreArts Project meeting last Saturday morning at Equilibrium on Elm Street.
Brattleboro was one of 80 towns nationwide to get an “Our Town” grant. The town was awarded a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund the Brattleboro CoreArts Project - an initiative that focuses on arts and place, and how the two shape each other.
The Sept. 21 meeting was the first in a series of community discussions to explore the topics and questions around the creation of a cultural district in Brattleboro.
According to Zon Eastes, a member of the CoreArts leadership team, nearly 100 cities and towns across the United States have created cultural districts, and the nature and purpose of those districts are quite varied.
One definition of an arts district offered by one of the panelists - urban planner Anne Gadwa Nicodemus from Metris Arts Consulting of Easton, Pa. - was one given by Hillary Anne Frost-Kumpf of Americans for the Arts in 1998:
“A well recognized, labeled, mixed-use area of a city in which a high concentration of cultural facilities serves as the anchor of attraction.”
But the main questions that come with that definition, she said, is who gets to decide who's in and who's out? And does the process occur naturally, or is imposed from the top down?
Nicodemus said the Frost-Kumpf definition is most associated with the top-down approach, and is biased more toward cities than a smaller town like Brattleboro.
“You have some work to do to figure out what a district would look like,” she said. “Shared values should be the goal, but you have to reach a consensus about what those goals and values should be.”
And just putting up signs and banners, she said, doesn't mean you've created an arts district. And designating a part of your town as an arts district without setting objectives or finding out what people really want is an invitation for failure.
“Do some due diligence about the stakeholders in the process, and find out what success would look like for them,” Nicodemus said, adding that leadership, having diversified support from all community sectors, and keeping objectives clear and well-ordered were critical keys to success.
One place that has gone all-out for the arts is Providence, Rhode Island's capital. In 1998, Rhode Island was the first state to support the formal creation of artistic districts.
“The art districts were seen as an economic driver and an important part of Rhode Island's prosperity,” said Stephanie Fortunato, the deputy director of Providence's Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism.
She said that Providence came up with a cultural plan that capitalized on the city's rich history that stretches back to the 1600s.
Fortunato said the existing population and activity in different sections of the city helped shape its arts districts, creating something that was less arbitrary and more authentic.
But Providence did more than create arts districts: It convinced the state to create tax incentives, exempting sales of original art made in Rhode Island from the state's sales and income tax. Also, a combination of city, state, and private investments helped to create the arts scene in Providence.
But how does Rhode Island's experience translate into Brattleboro's efforts?
Eugene Uman, director of the Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro, said he's been part of the discussion that has taken place over the past decade over creating an arts economy. He said many of the topics that came up over the past year of the CoreArts Project were first talked about in 2007 and 2008 during the now-defunct Alliance for the Arts' (AFTA) first attempt to quantify the economic impact of the arts on the region.
Uman said AFTA, a loose alliance of local arts organizations, and the Arts Council of Windham County, held an Artist Town Meeting in 2007 and came up with ideas to deal with issues such as affordable living and work space for artists, art venues and public art, and funding for artists and organizations.
Many of those ideas ultimately were incorporated into the last update of the Brattleboro Town Plan.
“We had perfectly good solutions,” Uman said. “What we lacked was the resources and organizations to accomplish them.”
That lack still exists today, he said.
“If we're bringing in more than $11 million to the town's economy [according to a 2011 report on the arts economy in Brattleboro], we ought to be getting more support from the town,” he said.
To Uman, getting support for the arts to implement the many ideas generated five years ago was more important than the question of hub-versus-cluster-versus-district.
“Brattleboro has always been the hub,” he said. “People come here every day, and that's the way we ought to look at it. We can't just isolate West B, or the Cotton Mill. They're all part of the whole.”
The CoreArts project has five more meetings scheduled in the coming months. Eastes said they will have a similar format as the Sept. 21 meeting - a nationally or internationally recognized thinker and specialist, a regional expert bringing practical community development experience, and a local arts leader.