Chicago creative hub to help shape plans for three Austin cultural facilities

By the end of the year, the city will have rough estimates for the capital expenses and operational costs for opening three music and art hubs at three cultural centers, with a Chicago group likely playing a large role in shaping the offerings and programs included in those facilities.

The Music Commission received an update last week on the plans for upcoming community feedback sessions at the three cultural centers – Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center and the Asian American Resource Center – and the reports and cost estimates for the hubs. The community feedback process is being handled jointly by EQ Austin, Sound Music Cities and 2112 Chicago, which operates a 160,000-square-foot creative hub and is working to open a similar facility in Milwaukee.

Commission Chair Nagavalli Medicharla, who’s also chair for EQ Austin, said the upcoming community feedback sessions and other mechanisms to gather input will help to determine the greatest needs of local artists and how the proposed hubs could best assist them.

“We will be also talking to other entities public, private and nonprofit on where sustainable models have been successful, how they’ve been implemented, what have been the best practices and trying to understand how this has been approached,” Medicharla said. “Creating these hubs at these essential cultural centers that are really sister facilities provides a way to build something that is sustainable and not dependent on an individual person or company. There will be some partnership with nonprofits to run programming … and dedicated support to artists of color and professionals of color.”

The 2112 Chicago hub opened in 2015 and has grown into a cornerstone of that city’s creative industry, with more than 70 member companies involved within a year of its opening.

The facility includes a creative business incubator, band rehearsal space, production studios, a film production facility and other public spaces.

The three cultural centers are in varying stages of use and expansion, with the Mexican American Cultural Center currently the farthest ahead in terms of being able to accommodate a creative hub. The city broke ground on a $27 million expansion late last year that will include new classrooms and arts space, in addition to other site improvements. Leaders of the facility had pushed hard for more money to cover the costs for a much larger expansion, requesting $40 million to be included in the 2018 bond package that was approved by voters.

The Asian American Resource Center currently is in talks with city leaders regarding its phase two expansion, which was approved as a concept in 2019. That expansion, as well as improvements and enhancements to the Carver museum, will be funded using money from the 2018 bond package.

Commissioners Oren Rosenthal and Anne-Charlotte Patterson expressed support for the hubs concept. They asked if there was potential to look into public-private partnerships that could provide affordable housing for artists somewhere close to the three cultural centers. Medicharla said housing isn’t in the scope of the contract but lauded the idea, while noting that the city can’t use employment classifications as criteria to provide affordable housing.

“It is very problematic to discriminate for affordable housing based on someone’s profession. However, that is only applicable when you’re dealing with government funds,” Rosenthal said. “If there were to be some type of philanthropic funding that these dorms could be used to keep them functioning, that would make for a really strong partnership.”

No machine-readable author provided. Billy Hathorn assumed (based on copyright claims), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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