Portland launches the Office of Arts & Culture

Last year, city officials decided to end Portland’s contract with the independent Regional Arts and Culture Council. The organization was previously responsible for doling out grants and providing art advocacy for the city. Now, Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture has taken shape and has found organizations, including RACC and MusicOregon, to help administer grants to artists and creators. The city itself will be working on arts advocacy and education. We hear more about how Portland plans to partner with creators from Chariti Montez, the director of the new office.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Last year, city officials decided to end Portland’s contract with the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC). That organization had been largely responsible for doling out grants and providing arts advocacy for the city. Now, Portland’s new Office of Arts & Culture has assumed a lot more control of grant making of arts advocacy and arts education.

Chariti Montez is the director of the new office. She joins us now with an update. It’s good to have you back on Think Out Loud.

Chariti Montez: Thank you, Dave. It’s great to be here.

Miller: Can you remind us of the short history here? Why did the city create, first of all, the Office of Arts & Culture?

Montez: I think the short history is maybe five years in the making. In 2018, there was an audit from our city auditors about the city’s contract with RACC. It identified that there was no cohesive vision for the arts, there wasn’t a strategic plan for the city’s arts investments and there wasn’t enough oversight. So since then, we’ve been slowly working towards that. It started in 2019 with the creation of the City Arts Program and that program manager to oversee the contract. And then you already mentioned bringing in arts education coordination into the city. Then last year, Commissioner Dan Ryan announced that he was going to create an Office of Arts & Culture and we kind of moved into that formation in April.

Miller: Just to be clear, you’re still giving RACC some money, right? A lot less than before, but not zero?

Montez: Yes. So one of the important things that we did … again, when we’re talking about what are the city’s arts investments, we’re looking at, what are the arts services that we provide? And instead of just saying, “that’s just art over there,” looking at what’s arts education coordination, what’s advocacy, what’s grant making – we have multiple kinds of grant making programs – and what’s public art. Which of those are best for the city to do in-house versus what would we want a contractor to do?

So in December, we launched a request for proposals. We went for a competitive bid process for contractors to manage our small grants programs. RACC was encouraged to apply, and they did. RACC won that bid, along with two new art service providers.

Miller: So let’s go through the other two. MusicOregon is one of them. They’re getting $60,000 to give out to musicians. Why did you choose MusicOregon as one of these three grant makers?

Montez: I will say it was a competitive bid process. And so they were selected through the committee process. They had a great proposal. Part of that is that MusicOregon has an existing grant making program that aligned, it’s called the Echo Fund. They make small grants – and they have been for a couple of years – to independent working musicians for things that are not always eligible for other kinds of arts funding, specifically non-performance-based stuff like recording an album, designing the artwork, working with a publicist or getting gear. That was one of the city’s goals. We want to make sure in our small grants program that we are reaching a diverse array of disciplines and reaching individual artists and arts organizations. But we also want to reach folks who have traditionally been underserved by this kind of grant making.

Miller: Another grant maker is a nonprofit called Friends of IFCC. Who are they and what are they telling you they’re going to do?

Montez: The Friends of IFCC is kind of a newer organization and they have morphed out of a community advisory committee that is place-based around the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. [It’s] a Parks [& Recreation]-owned building but has been a sort of home and cultural center for Black arts in Portland for decades. And they have been working with Parks [& Recreation] and previously with the City Arts Program to make artist residency grants available. Those are space-based, so space and cash. So this is an evolution of that grant making program. And what it does is allows them to still offer that space in partnership with Portland Parks and Recreation. But also reach out to artists who maybe don’t need the space, who just need the cash infusion to do their arts. And it’s really also open to folks who are aligning with that mission of celebrating and supporting Black arts and culture in Portland, but it’s open to any discipline.

Miller: In announcing the big reduction of money going to RACC, Commissioner Dan Ryan said that this new model is going to let you “establish stronger performance measures for grant makers or grantees.” What is that going to look like in practice? We’re talking here about the oversight, which the audit and you had said that city leaders recognized wasn’t always working as you wanted in the past. So what does oversight look like right now?

Montez: To start with, we have a dedicated contract grants program manager who is regularly working with each of these art service providers. There is a 20% cap. So when you said MusicOregon gets $60,000, that’s how much they’re granting out. They get 20% on top of that for their administration fees. And that is true for the Friends of IFCC and RACC as well. So there’s an administrative cap on this. We have regular monthly reportings. We are working, and the city as a whole is working, to really align what we do around data collection and making sure our standards are the same across all of our grantees and contractors.

Miller: How does that 20% cap on overhead compare to how much was going to that in the past?

Montez: It’s less. I do not know the exact number. And I think it’s hard to say because of the way that RACC’s previous sole source contract was structured.

Miller: So this is a question of overhead, which the city wants to lower so more public money goes to artists. Is the city also interested in changing grant making priorities themselves? Is part of your argument that that money should go to different kinds of artists, different sizes of organizations?

Montez: This is a great question, and the city just went through a two-year cultural planning process called Our Creative Future. In May, our regional cultural plan, in partnership with six other jurisdictions, was approved. And one of the things that came up in that after 18 to 24 months of community engagement is really that funding, and how and who is eligible to receive funding and those grants. So, yes, and we do want to make sure that we are reaching folks in community that have been traditionally underserved, that maybe have not been eligible for these kinds of grants. And we also feel that art service providers, these partners, are the best ones to do the small grants programs for us because they are in community.

Miller: Does that mean that large organizations like the Oregon Symphony, the Portland Art Museum, the [Portland] Opera, Portland Center Stage, that they should get proportionally less than they had gotten in the past? If the pie is not going to get bigger, should the slices be cut up differently?

Montez: Well, we do think the pie should get bigger.

Miller: OK. But there’s a limit to how much money is going to go. And I’m curious if the city … because if you’re emphasizing underserved or smaller organizations or individual artists, should that come at the cost of larger organizations?

Montez: It shouldn’t. And for the city, they’ve traditionally been two different programs. So we’re not putting any less money into the small grants program. It’s $500 to $5,000 for individual artists or arts organizations. So that’s still happening. And then, what you’re talking about with these larger arts organizations is what we call General Operating Support Grants. And that’s something that we did bring in house. So the city wanted to bring that in because we now have the opportunity to have direct relationships with 75 of the largest arts organizations in the city. And those are all of the big folks you just named on one end and on the other end, it’s smaller up and coming theaters or dance companies.

This is just our first year with this. We just took this on in the last month, really, so we’re still looking at how much. We made a promise that those arts organizations would receive the same amount of funds, the same percentage of funds, this year. And we’re going to spend this year to understand what their needs are and how we can work together with them. We brought them together for the first time in the city’s history in May. We had a convening of all of our General Operating Support grantees, and it was amazing. It was really simple, it seemed like a really simple thing. But not everybody even knew each other. These are arts leaders in Portland and not all of them had met each other before. So for me, that was kind of amazing. And to think about how we can support them to hear what they need. There are still small and midsize arts organizations in that cohort, and they have different needs. And so we’re trying to learn how we can support them going forward.

Miller: The last time we talked, it was because you were the houselessness strategies manager for Portland’s Safe Rest Villages program. Homeless services is such an obvious example of an area where Portlanders are hungry for more action. I’m wondering if you now, in your current role, hear people who point to something like homelessness and say, “why are you spending city money on arts and culture right now, when all that money could go to homelessness?”

Montez: It’s a really great question and no one has asked me that

Miller: Let’s say I’m asking you that question right now. How do you respond?

Montez: Why are we spending money on the arts?

Miller: When we can see people sleeping outside.

Montez: When I was here before, I think I shared that I have been unhoused and I will tell you now that arts are what saved me. They were the thing, that was all I could do, it was my guiding star. I’ve been a musician since I was a child and that was the throughpoint for me. I feel like also saying I worked in homeless services because that was my pandemic pivot. I did what needed to be done. Before that, I ran the city’s Summer Free For All program. And I’m a musician and an event producer in my outside life. And I see now that we’re at that place where what needs to happen is the support for our arts and our arts organizations. Because those are the things where we are creative, where we problem-solve, where we’re going to be able to find solutions to some of the biggest challenges we’re facing right now. I don’t think that it’s an “either/or;” it’s a “yes, and.” Some of our arts organizations are directly serving unhoused folks in really amazing ways.

Miller: What’s an example of something that you’re trying to put in place now in your current role that is directly tied to your experience as a musician, as somebody who has been a part of Portland’s art scene for a long time?

Montez: Most of what I’m doing right now is the unglamorous stuff, like building an office. There are four of us and we’re staffing up, we’re very small still. We have a recruitment open right now. We will have more before the end of the year. So we’re trying to build up the Office of Arts & Culture so that when our new council comes in, in January, we’re ready to go. And we’ve hit the ground running.

I think some of the things that I think about a lot, having been a musician and a performer in small and mid-size venues, is really access to space – cultural space, creative space and where to rehearse. If you’re a very large culturally specific drum and dance group, you’d be surprised. Not everybody wants a bunch of drumming in their space, or it’s a conflict. I have that experience of trying to look for rehearsal spaces, or booking venues, or where are we going to store all of our gear and all of our instruments, and where are we going to find classes to teach? And I think that informs a lot of the work we’re doing and that is something that we will be looking at as we build up the office. Really wanting to bring back the affordable arts space plan, and look at how we can fill some of our vacant spaces with artists and arts organizations.

Miller: Chariti Montez, thanks very much.

Montez: Thank you.

Miller: Chariti Montez is the director of Portland’s new Office of Arts & Culture.

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