Artist Adjacent

I often say, in these final stages of my artist-adjacent career, that all I’m interested in is failure. Though it has taken me a long time to get here, I now understand that failure rewires your brain; it changes your thinking.

1992. I co-found Danceworks with my friend Mary Newton. We have seven children between us and want them to share the experience of dancing that had been so important to each of us growing up, Mary in Madison, me in New York. We also want to design an organization that makes it possible for dancers to put together what choreographer and scholar Sarah Wilbur has called “a danceable living,” with interlocking opportunities to teach, perform, and engage in community outreach (as it was called in those days). Danceworks starts as a presenting organization, with the specific goal of bringing in choreographers from afar for longer residencies to make work with local dancers. At that time, presenting and commissioning dance performance from artists outside Milwaukee is largely restricted to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Dance Department and Alverno Presents. Neither of us have run an arts organization before—Mary is a lawyer and I am a historian—but we can write, and with the positivist assurance of the kind of intellectual training we had received, we think we know a solution when we see one.

1996: I take a leave to earn a living wage. We had lost our beautiful downtown studio/performing space, another nail in the coffin of our presenting plans. We had learned that Milwaukee’s funders favored producing organizations over presenters, and facing this reality, Danceworks forms its own company, which continues to this day. Over the years, Alverno Presents closes down; universities lose funding; dancers and choreographers leave to return to school, to dance elsewhere, because their lives require it. Ultimately, the danceable living, as originally defined—and in the absence of full-time employment and benefits—proves a failure. What remains: artist-adjacent administrative work. Over the years, the old hands take on many of the administrative functions at Danceworks—though not the directorship. When a triumvirate of dancers recently suggested that they take over as co-directors, the board opted instead to go the traditional route, hiring an administrator from outside the organization.

2002. I spot an article in the local paper announcing the death of Mary Nohl. I am struck by the fact that it was an artist who had just left the largest bequest in the history of what was then the Milwaukee Foundation. I am interested in money because I have now been professionally artist-adjacent for a decade, and I go to see the foundation’s arts program officer to ask what she plans to do with it. (It is assumed, because Nohl was an artist, that the money will go to visual artists; what is not widely known is that there are very few restrictions on her gift.) When she asks me what I would do with it, I don’t think she is asking me what artists need, but that is what is on my mind.

It felt like Milwaukee was hemorrhaging talent in the early aughts, and if we were going to keep things interesting in the 532 zip codes, we would need to find a way to put money into the hands of individual artists. If Milwaukee’s philanthropies were not friendly to presenting organizations, they were even less accommodating to individuals. Choreographers who did not set up their own nonprofits were effectively shut out from funding, as were individual visual artists and many filmmakers. The IRS places a lot of obstacles in the way of private foundations—that would be the majority of Milwaukee’s foundations—that want to give money directly to individuals. Imagine a long vista of individual IRS rulings, expenditure responsibility processes, fiscal sponsorships, and regranting programs. It takes vision and a will to overcome these disincentives. Public-facing charities are free to make grants to individuals, but local foundations shy away, uneasy about what artists might do and lacking the staff to tend to the needs of individuals.

Traditionally, it fell to government agencies to fund individual artists. That blew up during the culture wars of the late ‘80s and ‘90s, when the National Endowment for the Arts dropped their individual artist fellowships after the NEA 4 controversy.¹ Even the Wisconsin Arts Board, which proudly launched its individual artist fellowship program in its second year of existence (1975–1976) with a clear statement about the importance of this kind of funding—under board chair Ruth DeYoung Kohler—dropped individual funding in 2009–2010 when their budget was slashed. By that time, they were the last government funder awarding fellowships in Milwaukee.

Although Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the neoliberal notions of value and accountability that defined that administration would prove remarkably resilient with arts funders. (Arts education, yes; community outreach, fine; creation: yikes.) There was no quantifiable way to measure what individual artists were up to. Plus it might involve looking at art.

2003. The Milwaukee Foundation agrees to appropriate some of Nohl’s bequest to a fellowship program for individual artists, and I become the foundation’s security perimeter. It seems fairly clear how to design a fellowship program that addresses some of Milwaukee’s particular needs: a significant, unrestricted, monetary award; an exhibition opportunity; a catalogue that circulates widely; a selection process that brings new curators to Milwaukee each year to lay eyeballs on the work of around 150 applicants. And there is the Suitcase Fund to provide small grants to local artists—with a minimum of fuss–to take their work outside the Milwaukee area. Thus begins two decades adjacent to more than 100 Nohl Fellows and another nearly 400 Suitcase recipients, organizing juries, writing checks, facilitating exhibitions and public programs, producing catalogues, building connections between here and there, and listening.

Cracks appeared regularly in this elegant edifice, and the history of the Nohl Fellowship has been a history of constant adjustment. It was difficult, with a fixed allocation, to keep the grant awards “transformational” (i.e., enough to convince an artist to buy themselves the most precious commodity of all, time); cooperating institutions found the number of awardees cumbersome; artists wanted more “professional development.” As life became more expensive, I secured more money to ensure that the awards remained meaningful. Yet when it became clear that 40% of the artists in a recent cycle were on Food Share–one an established artist in their 80s with a career that had been intermittently international–I sensed that I was sticking my finger in the wrong dike. This level of artist poverty was partly a reflection of the havoc that the real estate bubble, the pandemic, and inflation have wreaked on the marginal. But until fairly recently you could survive in Milwaukee, and even have a studio, on remarkably little, and the Affordable Care Act had put health insurance within reach for some artists. As the tidal wave of Nohl money rolled in and unintentionally ravaged their carefully constructed social safety nets, we worked to preserve as many of each artist’s benefits as possible. At this point, it took very little to convince me that the fellowship program, conceived as a one-time infusion of money and resources that could catapult an artist to the elusive “next level”—a level that might include some financial security—was a failure.

2023/2024. A new opportunity arises to think about what artists need. I sit down with four emerging artists of the early Nohl years who are now mid-career. We are trying to figure out what they need to survive, even thrive. These artists have come to terms with the ambiguity of convenient distinctions like “established” and “emerging”: in Milwaukee, they know, opportunities and visibility can be stiflingly limited and years of recognition can be followed by decades of invisibility. They talk, I listen. We experiment. We create structures to support the practice of asking each other for specific assistance: technical advice, connections, encouragement. Month after month, they demonstrate that there is a wealth of knowledge even within this tiny artist community of four. They help each other rethink the narrative of their artist lives, and then begin to consider how to share these insights with their fellow Nohl alums. We haven’t been engaged in this experiment long enough for the salient flaws to reveal themselves, but we are joyfully planning my obsolescence.

And yet, this act of joy unfolds against a dispiriting background. I learn that the supplementary funding for the Nohl Fellowship is expiring after three years. A former Nohl Fellow alerts me to the fact that the main funder of local filmmakers is terminating their artist support programs. I face a new fellowship cycle with far less funding, far more need.

Maybe it’s time to disassemble the artist-adjacent bureaucracy that stands between individual artists and resources, and to stop treating artists like live bombs, acceptable entertainment for 5-to-18-year-olds, or the expendable icing on someone else’s cake or public plaza. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that an awful lot of artist needs are human needs and to replace the philanthropic band-aids—as assorted in size and duration as the variety pack at the Dollar Store—with policy change. Perhaps there has already been enough generative error around universal basic income to implement it here, in Milwaukee, for artists. Maybe our brains are ready to kiss the Reagan administration goodbye.

In anticipation of the opening of ​our new space in September 2024, we ​invited active participants and longtime contributors to the artistic communities in Wisconsin to write about the cultural context of this region​. While we recognize​d the impossibility of capturing ​this state in its entirety through this one endeavour, ​the goal was to gather a range of perspectives to provide a fuller and more complex understanding of the artistic production of this ​region. ​We welcomed thoughtful, critical pieces that allow readers to see the artistic milieu, or t​his place, in a new light, reflections on ​Wisconsin's histories that have defined its present, or future-facing pieces that guide us towards new directions.​