Karen Mittelman is executive director of the nonprofit Vermont Arts Council, the state’s primary arts funding organization. The council awards grants, using public money and private donations, to Vermont communities in the areas of theater and community arts, individual artist grants, and teaching artists in schools.
Mittelman was hired to lead the Vermont Arts Council in 2017 after almost 20 years working in Washington, D.C., for the National Endowment for the Humanities, where she was director of its division for public programs. Previously, she had been a university professor and the exhibitions curator at the National Museum of American Jewish History.
When Vermont started to shut down businesses and performance venues as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the arts council mobilized rapidly to get money to individual artists and arts organizations. The nonprofit arts council, which is also a state agency, first created a rapid-response artist relief program that provided grants of up to $500 for artists who had lost income as a result of a Covid-19-related cancellation. The arts council later joined forces with the Vermont Humanities Council, pooling the organizations’ federal Covid-19 emergency money to collaborate on guidelines for a new grants program.
The arts council also worked with the Vermont Community Foundation on an arts recovery fund that raised more than $30,000 for artists. The state allocated $5 million of Vermont’s share of federal CARES Act funding to the arts council specifically for grants to the nonprofit arts and cultural sector.
Mittelman said that from April to November 2020, the Vermont Arts Council awarded more than 650 grants, five times the number it typically processes in a year. In all, arts council grants to artists and cultural organizations were worth $1.1 million in the 2020 fiscal year. The year before, that number was $663,400.
Mittelman talked with VTDigger about how the pandemic has affected Vermont’s artists and arts organization. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How were artists initially affected by the pandemic shutdowns?
Artists were hurting. Gigs were canceled, teaching artists had their residencies canceled, performers saw their entire summer season wiped out.
When you have a live music performance, it’s not just the people who get up on stage. It’s also the sound technicians, all the people behind the stage, the person who collects the tickets, works the concession stands. A lot of them were out of work entirely.
We heard from cultural organizations that they were canceling their entire summer season, so somebody who had thought they had six months of income coming in all of a sudden had nothing to pay the rent.
Right now in Vermont, the earliest anyone is booking artists for anything indoors is next October and November 2021. And that’s optimistic.
Q. What form has artists’ work taken during the shutdown period?
Vermont’s arts landscape is amazingly creative and resilient. I was stunned every day, every week, by what artists and arts organizations were able to produce out of thin air with so few resources. There were examples in every town.
The Vermont Arts Exchange, a community arts organization in North Bennington, sent their wonderful painted arts bus on the road and staged live performances on the roof of the bus. A parade of cars followed them through the town so people could listen from the safety of their front porches and vehicles.
Yellow Barn broadcast music on speakers and drove into the parking lots of senior centers and nursing homes where people were shuttered inside and couldn’t leave. Seniors came to their windows and listened. It was everything from Beethoven to The Beatles.
Catamount Arts did a vertical concert at Burke Mountain resort. It was snowing; they had 150 people on the outdoor patio, and then ticket-holders booked hotel rooms so they could come out on their balconies in little pods of friends and families and watch remotely.
Weston Playhouse canceled their entire summer season and commissioned playwrights to think about their work in a fundamentally different way. Their challenge to the playwrights was to script a play that could fit on a postcard. It had to be written with no visuals. No actor was going to perform it. They wrote these marvelous postcard-size plays in response to archival photographs, and they are remarkable.
Q. Have artists created works that interpret the pandemic?
We’re all still processing it. The Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro last summer asked a series of artists to create miniature works on the theme of sheltering in place. They were all reflections on shelter and the fear of strangers and fear of going outdoors, what it means to take shelter in your home, isolated from other people.
Also, a book came out early on, and one of my favorite poets, Stephanie Lahar, has a poem in it. It’s reflections on what their experiences have been.
There is work being created right now that is going to reflect back this story to us and help us process it and figure out how to kind of assimilate it into our psyches, individually and collectively. That’s what artists do for us. I’m a writer, and I’m writing about it all the time.
Q. Did artists get enough financial support?
That’s a hard question to answer. There is such a range of needs. When I looked at the applications from artists, there were people out a few hundred dollars and people out thousands and thousands of dollars. The person who lost one gig that was going to pay $6,500, did they get enough? Probably, yes. The artists who had entire seasons canceled? No, they didn’t.
In terms of the challenges ahead for cultural organizations, number one is we know it’s a long time before they’re going to get their audiences back.
That’s pretty scary when you operate a theater. If you’re a cultural organization, you need to figure out: How do I adapt my performance space for livestreaming in addition to live performance? It means different lighting, a different camera setup, different sound equipment. Maybe you don’t have the technical expertise on staff.
It’s also a marketing challenge because, all of a sudden, your potential audience — if you are marketing yourself digitally — isn’t just in Greensboro or even Vermont. It could be someone in Milan, or Moscow or Mexico. How do you market to a global audience?
You’d expect when a community goes digital, you’d attract more young people. But cultural leaders are finding more senior citizens are part of the audience because they have mobility issues and transportation challenges, and they can’t afford the ticket price. They’re not going to come back to the library in person for an evening lecture, but if they can sit in their living room and watch it livestreamed, all of a sudden, they are avid participants in lecture series, poetry readings and digital workshops.
So if I know I’m not going to get them to come in person, how do I continue to keep cultivating that audience digitally? The executive director has to figure out a way to continue on two tracks at once, maybe forever, and that’s not something many of us planned when we entered into this.
Q. Is that also a good thing?
It’s fantastic. It’s a huge opportunity. We’ve just discovered that there’s a potential audience out there that is global.
Another silver lining is with the Vermont Creative Network. We’ve been doing Zoom meetings like everyone else. Usually, when we do convenings, we might get 25 or 30 people. Our Zoom convenings have had hundreds, and there have been connections sparked between artists working in different parts of Vermont who have never met.
There was a filmmaker and media artist and musician who had never connected before, and now they are working on a film project.
We’re not going to want to keep connecting in regular Zoom meetings, so how do we, as the arts council, nurture the connections and keep them happening? How do we manage to keep the walls broken down?
Q. What’s next for artists?
Live performance venues are hoping they’ll be helped by Save Our Stages that’s about to open. It’s not clear exactly what the eligibility requirements are, and the money is going to disappear really quickly.
We’re still waiting to see what’s going to come the way in another stimulus package. There’s a lot of optimism and hope about outdoor events this summer; we’re all dying to be back together in person for a crafts festival or to hear live music, I know there will be a lot of outdoor arts events and public art that can flourish as soon as the weather is warmer.
Q. Has the pandemic changed the way you do your job?
We are trying to figure out how to support the long-term resilience of artists and organizations. Our artist development grants are small but meaningful because they support professional development. You can go to a workshop, learn how to do digital marketing and create an online sales platform. We’ve seen this is one of the best ways we can help artists survive the pandemic, and it also helps build skills that will make that person’s creative business more sustainable in the long term.
We’re looking at our grant programs and saying, “What are things we can do to put businesses on firm footing?”
We’re also trying to build an equity perspective into grant-making. We did this with cultural relief grants. We convened an external review panel and had them assign extra weight to proposals that were led by or serving marginalized communities in Vermont.
We also made sure we were reaching organizations that were served or led by marginalized populations, the ones who had less access to funding resources, and the smaller organizations that were most at risk.
If we can partner with an organization that has other artists in their network, that’s another way we build that equity lens into the grant-making.
