Arts commissioners signal support for city funds for The Contemporary art museum

Members of the Arts Commission appear ready to advocate for The Contemporary Austin fine art museum and sculpture park to receive consistent city funding beyond Hotel Occupancy Tax dollars.

This week’s commission meeting featured a presentation from Sharon Maidenberg, executive director and CEO of The Contemporary, detailing the organization’s plans for the next five years – including addressing an expected $1 million deficit in its current budget. Maidenberg, who joined The Contemporary in mid-2020, said the downtown museum and its Laguna Gloria property perform well in terms of earned income compared to peer museums in other cities, but the city’s philanthropic community is much less giving than that of other cities.

While there are plans to address that disparity and increase revenue for the $10 million annual budget, Maidenberg said the organization has to find short-term funding to address its shortfall.

“One of the things we know is that we are very, very significantly underperforming in terms of contributed income,” she said. “There is a lot of work for us to do around advocacy dollars, philanthropy and, frankly, just optimizing the economic opportunities around the role that arts play for tourism, for visitation, for food and hospitality and all the reasons that people come to visit other places.”

Commissioners noted the change in the city’s allocation of hotel-tax-funded cultural arts grants in recent years to increase support for new and underserved artists has moved money away from long-standing entities such as The Contemporary that had consistently received city grant money.

Commissioner Acia Gray said she has long wondered why the city government doesn’t provide ongoing support for arts organizations outside of hotel tax money, which can fluctuate from year to year based on annual hotel revenue.

“Why isn’t there a line item for institutional art in general … not just HOT funds? The new cycle of funding has made a big difference in a lot of things. The Contemporary was being funded for many years and to see that change, I’ve seen that happen to other artists and long-standing institutional things, and it’s just these growing pains are very painful,” she said. “I’ve said so many times sitting in this chair how when the strategic plan of the city comes out, they brag on who we are as artists and why people come – and yet again, it’s not a (budget) line item.”

Commission Chair Celina Zisman invited Maidenberg to join her and a handful of other commissioners for meetings planned with individual City Council members in the coming weeks to advocate for more consistent funding for the city’s legacy arts organizations. Zisman said in the current funding framework for cultural arts contracts, major organizations can find themselves competing for the same pool of funds as individual artists or new nonprofits that have much less of a track record.

“The big guys need help too. … They are really supporting other entities in town that are providing us with the front edge of contemporary art and culture and bringing that education to Austin,” Zisman said. “There needs to be additional funding outside of HOT for many reasons, mainly that it is finite, but it is also ever-changing.”

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Posted In: Austin, District 9