Fresh Loaf

A painting from Andrew Cayce's exhibit "Recent Paintings" currently on view at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Last week’s cover story, “Atlanta’s arts organizations brace for crisis,” offered a fairly bleak and depressing look at the struggle for survival in which local arts organizations – both non-profit groups and private galleries – now find themselves as a result of a shrinking economy. The article looked at the dwindling audiences, reduced grants and a fall-off in individual donations that many arts groups are experiencing.

For the most part, it’s a bummer of a read, perhaps summed up best by this quote from Susan Weiner, executive director of the Georgia Council for the Arts: “We’re looking at a growing crisis.”

But the story did attempt to offset all that bad news with an example of a group that’s coping with this crisis fairly well. I used Dad’s Garage, which has managed to hang on to its audience, as that example, but I could have chosen others. Since the story ran, I’ve heard from other groups that are hanging in there, such as the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, which began the year by winning a $120,000 Warhol grant, and The Shakespeare Tavern, which sold out the recent opening weekend for “The Canterbury Tales.”

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Last fall, when Congress was grappling with the first of several bank bailouts, Buckhead art dealer Alan Avery came to appreciate that the current recession is different from others he’s faced in his 27 years in business.

“There have been weeks when I didn’t have a single person come into the gallery,” says Avery, who represents such well-known artists as Chuck Close and David Hockney. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that happen.”

Sydney Ellis, director of marketing for 7 Stages theater in Little Five Points, is also familiar with that sinking feeling.

“We opened our first show last fall on the same day there was no gas in Atlanta,” she recalls. “That seemed to set the tone for the entire season.”
Kim Patrick Bitz, founding executive director of the Atlanta Coalition of Performing Arts, recently decided to launch a 25th anniversary e-mail fundraising campaign for his organization, which operates the AtlanTIX half-price ticket booth.

In its first three weeks, the campaign collected just $380.

“We’d expected a few thousand,” says a stunned Bitz.

Nearly every member of the Atlanta arts community has a similar anecdote illustrating when the impact of a slumping economy made itself felt.

Continue reading “Atlanta’s arts organizations brace for funding crisis”

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