It seems every civic institution, initiative, or booster lists our “excellent arts & culture” as one of this region’s drawing cards. As they should. Each year, my Fine Arts Fund campaign brochure reminds me that we are blessed with a legacy of quality fine arts institutions that need our continued support.


We try to support the majors. My wife and I go to Paavo’s symphony every so often. We catch an opera or two each summer. We were wowed by “Othello” at our Tony Award-winning Playhouse in the Park. On the other hand, we mostly use our membership at the Art Museum to get a discount at the Terrace Café, and in spite of having memberships at the Freedom Center and the Taft Museum of Art, we’ve never taken the time to make it through all their exhibits.


For all the attention and resources that are devoted to maintaining our amazing anchor arts institutions, I believe that we also have an imperative to put a similar amount of energy behind efforts to support the smaller and mid-sized, edgier arts offerings that tend to be more attractive to that talent we as a region need to retain and attract.


While I don’t disagree with the value and distinction of having a rich historical tradition of traditional fine arts, I do wonder whether or not we are leveraging the right mix of arts and culture to compete in today’s inevitable national and international competition for knowledge worker talent. We had a taste of success when the CAC’s new building opened to international rave reviews in 2003. Since then, most would agree that momentum has waned.


Through involvement in a few of our region’s innovative smaller arts organizations, I’ve seen their tremendous impact firsthand. In the late 1990s, I helped Laura Hollis Hammonds launch “The Artery,” a neighborhood arts center in Newport. It didn’t last more than a few years, but it’s been encouraging to see creative people taking the initiative to create similar centers around the region (MarX Gallery in Covington or Manifest in Walnut Hills, for example). Similarly encouraging has been the emergence of a cadre of smaller edgy theatre companies. Every time we go to the Know Theatre’s new permanent home in Over-the-Rhine, I’m amazed at their diversity of audiences, of actors, and of programming. Evidently, I’m not alone in finding their product compelling, as shows repeatedly sell out. They are continuing to grow, as they also produce the annual Cincinnati Fringe Festival and offer their facility as a venue for other progressive arts events.


I’ve also gotten more involved with Enjoy-the-Arts, a membership organization whose official mission is to “build young audiences for the arts,” but as their board president prefers to state it more bluntly, “putting tight young asses in saggy old seats.” They do this by reaching out to thousands of students, YPs, and others, tempting them with a year’s worth of free or discounted tickets to arts and culture offerings from more than 35 organizations. Nowhere else in the country has an organization like it.


To be a region that retains and attracts talent, we need to build on our existing strengths in an authentic and compelling way. Why shouldn’t Cincinnati be known across the country for its robust and thriving arts community that values and supports both the large and the small, the traditional and the challenging, the venerable and the emerging? It’s going to take more than rhetoric.  It’s up to us to make it happen.


(Postscript: This is similarly true for supporting and growing the original music scene in Cincinnati. Think about MidPoint Music Festival or Rivertown Breakdown as examples. However, I’ll save that for another blog at another time.)