Planning underway to bring hubs for music and arts to three cultural centers

The city’s three ethnic cultural centers are being considered to house hubs for music and other artistic endeavors that would provide members of the local Black, Latino and Asian American communities with more opportunities to explore and advance their creative careers.

The process is in its formative stages, with a $50,000 request for proposals open through the end of this week to contractors interested in conducting the public feedback and input sessions necessary to determine the types of services and resources that would be required in the facilities. The feedback would help create a budget and plan for the hubs – to be located at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, and the Asian American Resource Center.

Once the plan and proposed budgets are identified, City Council would decide whether to fund the hubs through a bond issue or by shifting money to the Parks and Recreation Department from elsewhere.

The creative and music hubs have been under discussion for nearly a decade and were included as part of the 2016 Music and Creative Ecosystem Omnibus resolution that has gone largely unfulfilled.

Gavin Garcia, founder and executive director of EQ Austin, said the hubs would establish an “open door” to the city’s non-white communities that have historically lacked access to opportunities to create and receive expert career advancement education concerning music and other creative pursuits. Possible features of the facilities could include a sound stage, recording studio, rehearsal space, podcasting studio and boardrooms for planning and meetings.

“The idea from the beginning, from 2014 even before that, was these three communities really didn’t have a front door and there was not a location right in the city to engage in music, short of knocking on the door of C3 Presents or South by Southwest,” he said. “The idea was, what if we just bring satellite facilities of engagement with the commercial music industry to the community centers that already exist?”

The hubs “would not be commercial music facilities owned by private interests,” Garcia said.

“If this comes to fruition, it’s going to create a sustainable location because it is city property and cultural centers that will exist for quite some time,” he said.

Garcia said his nonprofit group plans to apply to conduct the feedback sessions and related services for the Asian American Resource Center and the MACC, which already has creative hub space planned in its forthcoming expansion.

The city has taken other steps to create and preserve space for the arts and musicians in recent years, with the passage in 2018 of $12 million in bond funding for that purpose. That money has only recently started to be deployed into real estate deals, with the Austin Economic Development Corporation taking the lead on the negotiations.

Nagavalli Medicharla, a board member for EQ Austin and member of the Music Commission, said the centers would have the potential to nurture new artists and genres in the local music scene while also building new audiences for those artists.

“This is part of the conversation around the gap that exists and the need to make the music industry more accessible for communities of color,” she said. “These centers will be available to people of all ages, backgrounds and circumstances, and we hope they will be well connected between each other and other cultural entities to make an environment where creatives can connect and use these spaces as incubators of entrepreneurial opportunities.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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