by Bruce Checefsky

     (Plain Press February 2024) Jeremy Johnson was hired as president and chief executive officer of Assembly for the Arts in 2021. Formerly executive director of Newark Arts, he grew up in the Hough and Glenville neighborhoods and attended University School on a scholarship before heading to college. His hiring was considered a homecoming for the career arts administrator. Johnson was paid $100,325 plus benefits at the time of his appointment.

     Johnson has used a variety of stump speeches to promote his message, repeating the need for equity by invoking the three-legged stool metaphor or using “expanding the pie” terminology to describe what many claim is a lackluster vision for the agency, created for the purpose of providing grants to individual artists.

     Assembly for the Arts is funded, in part, by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture (CAC), and works closely with the agency to administer funding to individual artists. Assembly for Action, the sister organization of Assembly for the Arts, is responsible for raising the $1.5 million, or more, needed to launch a ballot campaign and organize grassroots support for renewing the cigarette tax before the current tax expires on January 1, 2027.

     Fred Bidwell, board chair of the Assembly for Action, said in an op-ed last November in the Plain Dealer that he doesn’t see a path for successfully launching this campaign “given the current atmosphere of confusion and mistrust in Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. Bidwell suggested a pause in the campaign and has not spoken publicly about whether the Assembly for Action will move forward, or when.

     A report from ISO Arts Consulting, funded in part by the Gund Foundation, revealed an artist community expressing anger, exhaustion, frustration, hopelessness, and sadness related to the disrespect shown by CAC.

     Jennifer Coleman, program director of Creative Culture and Arts for the George Gund Foundation, said in an op-ed published in the Plain Dealer in December that Cuyahoga County must find a sustainable public arts funding tax strategy that might “evolve into multiple streams of funding, from taxation, government, corporate, and new philanthropic players over time,” while adding that local philanthropy is ready to assist in supporting this work.

     The CAC board voted in December to approve $400,000 to the Assembly for the Arts to manage the Support for Artists program for 2024, adding another $100,000 after board president Nancy Mendez acknowledged that CAC had deliberately not paid out grants to individual artists in 2018 and 2019 and again in 2021. The additional money gives Johnson $500,000 for individual artists and artist support programs.

     Most of the available funds are restricted grants for programs designed by four pass-through or regranting institutions that include SPACES, Cleveland Public Theater, Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center, and Karamu House, with administrative costs totaling $120,000, incurred by both Assembly for the Arts and the regranting organizations, will be deducted from the total, leaving the artists with even less money. Johnson did say the additional $100,000, which was unexpected, will have no administrative overhead, and artists could expect unrestricted grants ranging from $8,000 to $10,000.

     He plans to create a paid artist advisory committee to help determine how to distribute grant money. Information will be available on the Assembly for the Arts website by the end of January at assemblycle.org.

     Rather than give Assembly for the Arts the entire $500,000 to distribute directly to artists without adding layers of administration — the reason for the nonprofit in the first place — CAC voted, behind closed doors and without public input, to structure the artist support program by adding the regranting institutions. Johnson agreed with their decision.

     Three of the four organizations are located less than a few miles from each other in a county of more than 450 square miles with a population of 1.25 million. SPACES and Cleveland Public Theater are on Detroit Ave., and Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center is on Archwood Avenue in the Brooklyn Centre neighborhood. Karamu House, in the Fairfax neighborhood on the East Side of Cleveland, received $575,000 in artist project support over five years. Artists without a relationship with these small groups of organizations usually miss out on the opportunity for funding.

     Johnson said that he made the decision to fund the same four organizations in 2024 as based on a review of their performance from previous years. Assembly for the Arts never released a call for applications from the many countywide 501(c)3 nonprofits that might have been interested in the program, nor did he solicit proposals.

     “The more pass-through organizations [other than SPACES, Cleveland Public Theater, Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center, and Karamu House] means more layers. We have not issued a call for applications,” he said. “We do not want to create layers of middlemen between the dollars and individual artists. We are not trying to create more pass-through organizations.”

     But he did exactly that by inviting SPACES, Cleveland Public Theater, Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center, and Karamu House, as middlemen, adding another layer of administration that drains money away from the artists.

     Assembly for the Arts will control issuing the checks going out to artists, whether in partnership with other organizations or unrestricted, suggesting that centralizing the process could reduce costs. Not so, according to Johnson, administrative fees will remain the same.

     Artists have been critical of the artist support program managed by the pass-through or regranting organizations, saying the creative process is limited to thematic, pay-to-play programming that does not support their work but is instead used to promote the CAC’s and Assembly for the Arts’ social and political agendas and the programmatic agendas of the participating organizations. Artists pay for their own art supplies and production costs. Money for basic living costs like housing, health care, and transportation is minimized.

     Karamu House recently announced that seventeen local artists will receive awards in 2024 through the Room in the House Fellowship (RITH). The awards are meant to “empower artists’ creative practice through a $5,000 financial award, digital exhibition presence, and space at Karamu for creation, exhibition, and performance. Applications for the fellowship were open to Cuyahoga County-based artists with a demonstrated commitment to their visual arts or performance-based work and alignment to Karamu’s vision of socially and culturally responsive art that celebrates the Black experience,” according to their website.

     SPACES will offer $4,000 in awards to 12 artists and collectives for project-based support through the Urgent Art Fund, which supports production expenses and artist commissions that are socially, politically, or culturally responsive. Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center plans to give ten $5,000 artist grants with preference to projects that support and celebrate the Latino/a/x and Hispanic communities of Cuyahoga County.

     CAC invited Cleveland Public Theater (CPT) to apply for artist support funding in 2019, which they received in 2020. But a year later, they were told the program had ended. CPT did not get invited back until recently.

     Johnson said he is in contact with Bidwell over the levy campaign and is closing in on the field of contributors. An announcement could be made following the April Assembly for Action quarterly meeting.

                  “We continue to work on raising money. We are paying consultants. I think you could look forward to something after our meeting,” he said. “We do need to heal, but we also need to raise money. The wheels are turning. We are still meeting with people.”

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in coolcleveland.com.