The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

to say “no” and learn to say “yes” to your
time. Also, I am a motivational speaker for a
lot of organizations. I come by and talk about
keeping your word. The only time that you
are going to do something is by keeping your
word because if you don’t, after a while, you
are just going to talk—you are not going to
walk the walk. People are going to know that,
and people aren’t going to take you seriously.
You are at this young age where you have the
whole future in front of you. Look at yourself,
Tatiana. You are going to Austin. You can
definitely do a lot more than what you are doing
by saying “no” and saying “yes” to yourself.
You talked about the nonprofit and the independent-artist
thing—artists selling their own
work. I know many people in Sacramento and
in the Bay Area. There are so many networks
that we have that we don’t use the Internet or
Web sites as much as we should. A few years
ago, I started putting my photography and
poetry on a Web site and boom—I blew up. I
stopped doing stuff for free, and I was getting
paid to do stuff. Also, I was getting other
contacts. You get yourself in a situation where
you know that saying “yes” to yourself and
following through is going to be a key recipe
to your success. And I want to applaud you.
Tony Garcia: I also wanted to thank you,
Tatiana. I thought her presentation brought up
many really interesting points and was nicely
structured, too. Tatiana has a tremendous
eye, and I love the curatorial work she did.
One of the things that resonates with me in
terms of what she brought up was the issue
of infrastructure. We started to talk about it in
terms of succession, and for me, as an artist who
built an organization around him to support the
work that he wanted to do and then to support
other artists, the core of what we did, what
we learned in those early days, was to build
infrastructure. Succession affects stability, and
it affects support for individual artists. Without
building those organizations in our communities—and
this has been going on for some time—
and having an infrastructure that can continue
to regenerate, then what we have is a bunch of
individual artists struggling. For us, the tragedy in
my community as well is that there are a number
of individual artists who are reaching the end of
their careers, and they don’t have health insurance;
they don’t have burial insurance. Lalo
Delgado, a well-known poet: We had to raise
money in the community to get him buried.
But there is a connection. If our organizations
were strong enough that they could then come
to us, I think that when you are talking about the
culture wars, Danielle, part of it was that, during
that time of cut backs, what happened is that it
became much cheaper for organizations and
presenters to book individual artists rather than
groups. Consequently, there was not a financial
need to be part of a group. You could make
your money on your own, and one outcome
was there was a big rise in individual artists. I
am not saying there is anything bad about
individual artists, but once you are established
as an individual, there is little need to come
together and find ways of relying on each other
to survive. The outcome was that we all split up
and lived our little lives, and we did not feed
those organizations and feed that whole cycle
in order to create a working infrastructure.
When we first opened our organization, we
didn’t pay our actors. They got 35 bucks for
the entire run, and the money we received
from grants went into paying salary for my staff.
Some people might think that’s unfair, but you
know what my staff did? They went out and
got more money in order to pay the rent, in
order to pay the heat, in order to build marketing
strategies, in order to build opportunities in
the schools. Now my artists receive significant
money for being part of it, but if we didn’t do
that, we would not have lasted. Last February,
we paid off the mortgage on our facility, and
there are probably a number of artists who
could have been paid a lot more, but we
had to make a choice. It is a real strategic
choice, and it is a real commitment to your
organization. I can’t say infrastructure enough.
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