Perspectives on Financing Your Own Future
learn how to diversify their majority white audiences, Dr. Cuyler is working off the Black arts’ cultural rich inclusiveness. In his book Arts Management, Cultural Policy, & the African Dias- pora , 4 Cuyler takes care to dispel the widely circu- lated myth that Black cul- tural leaders do not know how to preserve their cul- ture and puts forward a way to count and measure their contributions to the arts ecosystem. At UMich, his Leading & Managing US Global Majority Cul- tural Organizations class provides placement of the students in the course into internship programs with arts organizations of differ- 5
BARRIER FOUR: Success Doesn’t Equal Equity
Gentrification doesn’t work due to its industrious nature to produce income inequality. Over ten years later, the influx of affluent households alongside the monolithic tech worker culture placed metropolitan areas in a state of sur- est due to neoliberal trickle-down policies. Nonprofits are designed to support the arts and cultural heritage with the caveat to not express political ideology, proselytize religion, and among other rules. After the 2024 Election, Silicon Val- ley took its turn in Washington D.C. with the neoliberal pri- vatization of government and what was to be the rollback of DEI, Women’s Rights and Civil Rights. The clear back- stepping of racial reckoning and systems change is a pattern of reduction, which primarily affects Black creators. That is to say, we can measure equity in the arts as opposed to struggling to understand how economic policies affect vul- nerable populations. What if we could better understand the generational wealth gap the same way we track the ephemeralness of dance? What I propose in this article is without vanity but in a manner to shine a light on understanding of how Black choreographers may develop their work in California’s eco- nomic climate. While adapting to changing economic times is worthwhile for survival, I find that the coming problem of tokenization with the impossibility of assimilation leaves myself and other Black choreographers on the periphery of arts administration; without the throughline to human dignity or monetary gain. As an arts administrator, edu- cator, and Black choreographer, I tend to fall into the trap of trusting the nonprofit arts model as a plausible way to create my art. When intersectionality of Black entrepre- neurship and choreography intermingles with historical theorization I find there’s a type of daily racial economic embodiment. I think we are incorporating colorblind approaches to economics – intentional or not – and other bootstrap theories that place the onus on Black people to pull themselves out of their own subjugation. However, the paradox of race and economics is that financial measures are divided along racial lines. In order to set the stage for liberation, I believe that access to arts administration, over- coming racial bias, measuring adversity, and understanding token phases are debiasing techniques needed to go beyond the promises of diversity, equity and inclusion. RAISSA SIMPSON Is a post-disciplinary artist, choreographer, scholar, and storyteller whose dances are at the intersection of complex racial and cultural identities. She values choreography as a form of academic scholarship and research as demonstrated in her book chapter Writings On Dance: Artistic Reframing for Celestial Black Bodies (Palgrave MacMil- lan 2021), which offers considerations on how Afrofuturism can be staged in contemporary theater. Celebrating its 20th Anniversary, PUSH Dance Company places the continuation of its social impact with the creation of Sanctuary, a dance studio centering global majority artists.
As a global majority arts leader who guides a professional dance group with a twenty year track history of making dances in San Francisco — one of the most economically inequitable cities – I’m uniquely positioned to provide per- spective on the economics of dance. In its two decade old existence, PUSH has survived the Great Recession, a global pandemic, post-George Floyd Uprising. We’re currently sur- viving hyper-gentrification and whatever we can call this post-pandemic recovery. After the George Floyd Uprising, our formalization of a postdisciplinary dialogic process was developed to examine barter economies, municipal policies and a multitude of collective leadership business models. During a good work period, we have 6 weeks to develop a new piece of choreography, otherwise the pro- cess of making dances is carried over a two year period, as more resources are gathered. Through T echnoculture and Performable Posthumanism , a radical sense of choreograph- ing of citizenship emerges as disruption to how black bod- ies are perceived on stage. Proverbial wisdom from Black dance scholars and authors offered stepping stones to navi- gating San Francisco’s constant and ergo instrumental anti- Black aggression. Over the past five years, we’ve raised over $850,000 in funding with $250,000 of those dollars going to emerging artists to produce their own art. With a mantra “Art to the People,” a tagline yielding free dance classes for children, affordable open classes, small grant programs and artist residencies. HOW TO IDENTIFY PATTERNS: During an arts town hall meeting in 2010, the then mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee made a major revelation to the arts community about a plan to invite big tech giants like Twitter and Google to the financially congealed city by waiving many of their taxes. Lee’s reasoning at that time acknowledged how tech work- ers wanted to live in San Francisco due to its vibrant and diverse arts community. The address came with many prom- ises to hire those who already lived in the city and how tech workers would patronize local businesses, additionally how the artist’s economy would benefit from those afflu- ent donors. The declaration had all the dubious makings of an eminent plan already in motion – if you have the finan- cial means to participate in society or Pay-to-Play strategy – with backroom deals siloed behind closed doors. Lee didn’t invent gentrification but the decision on tax breaks to pri- vate companies set the stage for solidifying its infrastruc- ture. At a time when San Francisco was in a type of post-re- cession era, it was clear how the appeal didn’t sit well with many in the audience. As one attendee questioned, “If they want to be here so badly, why don’t they pay their taxes?”
PUSH Dance Company's dance studio and BIPOC Sanctuary
ent disciplines. By bridging theorization of Black dance, an especially strong relationship to practical arts management skills are formed in the program. WHAT CAN BE DONE: Antonio Cuyler’s research harkens to a similar method deployed by Harvard Review’s usage of BlackQuantCrit, a qualitative critical theory frame- work for measuring student outcomes in academia. Hang in there with me for a moment, I know this is dense, but it’s essential to revealing how to tangible measure the impact of Blackness on cultural institutions! Whereas critical race theory or QuantCrit is used to measure general outcomes, it therefore doesn’t fully provide the nuanced scope of how anti-Blackness impacts the gather- ing of data in the way we find in BlackQuantCrit. What BlackQuantCrit compels us to consider is that while there will be factors other than race for why Black arts organizations struggle, it doesn’t mean anti-Black motive and impacts are absent. The harm done by economics to not account for the social harm done by anti-Blackness results in a suppression of the patterns from coloniza- tion and slavery. Along with the perpetual control and divergent resources away from Black communities, the upward mobility of Black enterprise is constantly under harm from racial bias. Modern day researchers and fund- ing institutions are now just recently capturing demo- graphic information which has produced unexpected results such revealing a great deal of numerical evidence of inequitable patterns of racial disparities in the philan- thropic system.
BARRIER THREE: Counting Black Dance’s Impact There’s plenty of informative case studies and recent evaluations such as how only 5.9% of individual dona- tions and 11% of California private foundations awards are distributed to BIPOC-centered organizations Wolf Brown 3 . Why is this amount so low? The obvious answer is because merely 18% of nonprofit organizations in California are BIPOC-led. Why is this number so low? While these numbers may not be completely accurate, it is indefensible that BIPOC-led arts organizations face dis- parities in funding and representation in the arts manage- ment field. Researchers and arts management educators like Antonio Cuyler of the University of Michigan hope to answer questions such as how do Black arts organiza- tions operate. During our move into our BIPOC Sanctu- ary and new dance home at 447 Minna Street (see image above) in San Francisco, Cuyler gathered a national group of Black arts leaders including myself to study our creative business practice. In his study of the cultural sec- tor, Cuyler posits there’s a better way to understand how funding flows in-and-out of Black arts organizations by focusing on diversity in arts management. Cuyler measures adversity through quantitative and qualitative research as a means for exploratory study of demographics of the arts workforce. While current fund- ing trends offer white-led arts organizations the ability to 4
4 John Carnwath, Alan Brown, Salvador Acevedo, Anh Thang Dao-Shah, Shalini Agrawal, Wolf Brown Report, California Arts Council: Grantmaking Evaluation, 2023
5 Antonio Cuyler, Arts Management, Cultural Policy, & The African Diaspora, Palgrave MacMillan, 2022
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