Courting creativity

A well-supported arts community is a defining characteristic of a successful city

Recently, I heard that Annie Ellicott, an outstanding, arguably singular Tulsa singer, performance artist, and entertainment phenom, was leaving T-Town for San Francisco.

Annie is an amazing conflation of talent, focused eccentricity, and sheer energy. Her leaving, which I understand is driven by a slew of considerations, is, no matter how you cut it, a real blow for Tulsa’s art, performance, and entertainment world.

News of her departure came not long after I had a brief discussion with Washington Rucker, a former Oklahoman and a world-class drummer and jazz musician. Washington spent over a week in Tulsa performing, teaching early-stage musicians and kids, and talking art, music, and movies with yours truly, and others. When asked what would make him stay longer when he visits, he said that sparking operations like the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame and its teaching and performance efforts would be a grand start. He also told me that the density of engagements and gigs was at least as important as anything else. He ended by suggesting that cool, inexpensive housing would also be a real plus, a thought echoed by one of his local hosts, Oklahoma Hall of Fame chair Jeff Kos.

Annie’s departure got me and some of my policy-obsessed buds thinking. Are there stout initiatives now in our city that would forestall the departure of outstanding talents like Ms. Ellicott?

My buddies and I are, of course, not the only souls to ruminate on this. Indeed, the Arts and Humanities Council and its statewide sister organization, operations like Theatre North, Living Arts, and the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, and a small army of community music, art, and performance organizations devote lots of thought and what resources they can to this matter. Relatively new pieces of T-Town social machinery, like Tulsa Music + Film, are, at least in part, here to retain and nurture Tulsa artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creative workers.

But unlike our efforts in conventional economic development, where we have expended millions and have proposed to spend many millions more (think about the failed $254-million Tulsa Aerospace/Vision 2 initiative, pushed almost 18 months ago by the Mayor, the Regional Chamber, and parts of the business community), we have spent comparatively few dollars and allocated little imagination or intellectual capital to retaining, or better still, dramatically ramping up the “human capital” so central to the arts in Tulsa.

A passel of evidence suggests that arts are not simply a nice thing, a gilded amenity that makes a city a little more vibrant, a bit more interesting. A 2010 sample study of U.S. adults in 26 cities conducted by the Gallop organization for the Knight Foundation found that “social offerings, openness and beauty are far more important than people’s perceptions of the [local] economy, jobs or basic services...”

We could argue that these findings are consistent with the synthesizing work of development theorist and urban geographer Richard Florida, planner and new urbanist Ann Markusen, Andrés Duany, and a growing cadre of others from development-planning, architecture, urban economics, and regional-planning circles. Practitioners call it “creative place making:” making communities dramatically more attractive, more livable, more vital. Using vibrant design, mixed-use projects in neighborhood planning, and strong transit availability are some of the most important parts of this array of ideas, notions that are all central to Tulsa’s new comprehensive plan and the citizen-led PlaniTulsa process.

While it may seem counterintuitive to argue that an aggressive art-and-culture policy is every bit as important as the number of cops on the street, the quality of public education, or the quality of our trash service, it’s becoming clear that communities that offer a superior, fully developed arts-and-culture ecology hold a competitive edge over burgs that fail to privilege the arts. The Knight/Gallup perception study and Florida’s work are just two drivers. 

And then there are the changes in employment. The impact, key observers say, of the revolutionary character of next-wave digital technology, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and advanced automation is on the quantity, quality, and shape of our work. The employment world as we have known it is about to be convulsed. Writers and MIT scholars Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, in their provocative new book, “The Second Machine Age,” argue that unless we start to think very consciously about what a job really looks like and radically expand our concept of what gainful employment actually is, we will suffer a job shortage of epic dimensions. The two asked, “the Industrial Revolution produced machines that required humans, but is the digital revolution rendering labor obsolete?”

Late 19th-century America was a nation populated and defined by farmers. Fully 70 percent of the U.S. population was engaged directly in farming in 1870. Now, the metric is well under 2.5 percent of the working population. A change just as dramatic may be afoot in the not-too-distant future. The number of people working in art and the creative professions may—no, must—multiply very rapidly, and towns that have the tools, the atmosphere, the creative policies to buttress this transition will be, as Carol Colletta of ArtPlace, a collaboration of national foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts argues, among the most successful metros in the land.

We need to create a Kickstarter-like project in which Tulsa-area people contribute, together with our philanthropic community, to an “Annie Fund;” that is, a variation on the important Raymond & Nancy Feldman artist prize here in Tulsa, too small for this purpose. Kickstarter and a tiny set of similar ventures online manage portals to secure small donations from interested folks to finance small art, film, music, and other creative efforts. Our new Annie Fund, if it succeeds, would be used to identify and support promising new and maturing artists and creators, with a strong preference for artists who are already here. It’d be helpful during this process to use a broad idea of what a creative professional is and does. Included could be industrial designers, architects, filmmakers, writers, fashion designers, video-game developers, chefs, craftspeople, and visually inclined software engineers, plus visual artists, performing artists, musicians, and other folks we already think of as artists.

We need to create and provide access to next-wave tools. Tulsa’s still-new Community Supercomputing operation should be readily available for the members of our creative community. Video-game developers, special-effects pros, and digital-animation wizards could make fantastic use of high-performance computing; they’re already doing so across the country. Providing Tulsa-area artists with this kind of juice would be a retention and attraction tool of the first order.

While we need more affordable rental units in Tulsa’s downtown, north Tulsa, and midtown, there may be a need to use public/private resources and Tulsa’s philanthropic community to craft new housing devoted to retaining and growing our creative community. Perhaps we should re-examine Tulsa’s sales-tax-fueled, Downtown Revolving Housing fund.

Members of Oklahoma’s art community can learn loads from other places and other arts communities across the country. Mid-career artists, like too many Tulsa professionals, rarely get an opportunity to take extended leave; in the case of creative professionals, it’s the roaring art enclaves that are calling, such as the ones in New York City, Austin, or San Francisco. Nationally renown painter P.S. Gordon, in a extended conversation I had with him and a colleague recently, reminded me that he left the state for NYC about a decade ago; he returned some months ago with the intention to remain here permanently. He said his long stay away from T-Town had helped him immensely. He told me that financing extended stays away for local artists might be an effective way to secure their return, and a grand way of exposing a large body of area artists to new techniques, styles, dealer and artist networks for the benefit of our artists and our status as an arts city.