Few leaders expect their first months on the job to coincide with a fight for the future of the arts in America. For Erin Harkey, that became the reality when she stepped in as CEO of Americans for the Arts earlier this year—just as the federal government proposed eliminating national arts funding.
In an episode of CI to Eye with Monica Holt earlier this year, Erin reflected on her career journey, offering practical advice for arts administrators, artists, and advocates alike.
Note: Some quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
ON AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS
Monica Holt: In case folks aren’t as aware of Americans for the Arts, how do you describe the organization today?
Erin Harkey: Well, it’s evolving, but I think historically it has been a big part of the ecosystem in this country and is in some ways maybe the largest advocacy organization in the nation. And it’s not discipline specific, it’s in every geography. It really works to serve the entire country and it does that in a couple of different ways.
Number one: federal advocacy, particularly around the cultural agencies. Also an incredibly robust research department that does economic impact and opinion surveys and also has a lot of convening power. We do AFTACON, which is a big convening of arts and culture folks, and have a commitment to building local arts agency infrastructure in the country.
So it has a couple of different historical mandates, but in this time, it’s sort of interesting to think about the evolution of the organization, and how it both grows as an entity that is important and relevant and meaningful to people and also meets some pretty crucial needs in this moment.
Monica Holt: I can’t imagine walking into an organization on this kind of scale [at this moment in history and policy]. This isn’t, “the infrastructure of the organization needs to be revisited,” or another normal organizational crisis that a new leader might walk into. This is much bigger, much broader, but what I love is that everything I’ve been seeing has been really action-focused and future-focused. I know one thing that you’ve talked about just throughout your career is the importance of federal grants, state grants, local government grants, in the way that they support particularly small community organizations that might not be getting the attention of corporate giving at a certain scale or even individual donors of a certain scale. So how would you convey to folks why those small community organizations are so important for us to be investing in?
Erin Harkey: Yeah, let me just say a little bit more about why public resources are important. There are a lot of models that we can think about in terms of broad national support for the arts, and certainly private philanthropy and individuals and corporations have a significant role to play in that, but public funding is very unique in the way that it moves and operates in the system compared to those other resources. And the NEA actually did a great study where they mapped the giving of the top, I think it was a thousand private foundations, and where those dollars were going adjacent to where the NEA’s funding was going, and they’re in 700 more counties.
It is much more substantially distributed.
Public funding is more equitable. So that’s important to remember and it’s important to still advocate for these dollars for that reason.
ON PARTICIPATION
Erin Harkey: I’m hopeful in terms of what we’re going to be able to achieve [in the advocacy space]. Never let a good crisis go to waste. We need to make some things happen.
In some ways [for individuals], it’s just a very sort of local action—like supporting your local organizations, going to the theater, hanging out in museums, investing in your local artists. The most important thing is community and the thing that we all do, which is to make art, right? And staying engaged and educated about things that are happening in Washington, and participating in the democratic process, is also something to be encouraged.
Monica Holt: Thank you. Yes, I couldn’t agree more with that. The act of going to a local show or being at a museum or finding ways to support these spaces and places where artists are in their safe community, that’s also an act of finding joy. And I think this notion of joy as resistance feels very important right now, and particularly as you said in community.
Erin Harkey: I mean, you get something out of it too. It’s a mutually beneficial thing. So have at it!
ON THE NUMBERS
Monica Holt: Americans for the Arts is doing such a great job of talking about some of the key economic impacts of arts and culture on society. Could you just share some of those great figures?
Erin Harkey: Well, okay. I always give economic impact numbers with a little bit of a caveat because they’re hard for some people. So total economic impact is about $1.2 trillion, 5.6 million jobs, contributes 4% to the GDP, which is larger than transportation and larger than construction. It’s major.
I use economic impact numbers as a sense of scale because not a lot of us are getting up and going to arts jobs because we’re trying to contribute to the GDP. But the fact is, there’s power in these numbers, and the scale of how we operate within the economic system is important to recognize–and also to recognize, obviously, that in something that is this important, when it’s not healthy, there are consequences to that. There are human, social, and economic consequences.
So I think those sorts of statistics are really important in painting the picture of how significant arts and culture actually are in this country.
Monica Holt: Sometimes I worry that when I see organizations talk a little too much about arts as a means of economic impact, we are then consciously missing the much broader story, and how that affects healthy communities, how that affects actual health and wellbeing, and also the joy factor. So I love your framing: you need it for a sense of scale, as a table-setting measure, and sometimes there are going to be more relevant economic impact numbers to call out. But it’s a hard thing to think about the arts as a whole, and not just trying to boil it down to the language of capitalism.
Erin Harkey: Totally. And sometimes when we put out economic impact numbers, there’s the argument on the other side that this isn’t the argument we should be making. [But] it’s just a fact. There are lots of facts about why the arts are important. You can pick ’em. We’ve got something for every question in terms of how it helps promote education, how it helps promote health, economic development, how it’s beneficial to people that are aging, to brain development. I mean, every statistic that you could possibly think of. There’s no downside, right? So it takes a lot of different arguments, but I think economic impact is just one of those things that we can point to.