Exploring Ways To Give Marginalized Artists A Fair Shake

The life of an artist can be a hand-to-mouth existence. Very few artists are able to support themselves through their art alone, and often have to have a job or two on the side to bring in some money. The challenge is compounded for artists of color, who can find it tough to get their fair share of arts funding. 

“Artists of color struggle to find a place to exhibit. They struggle to get paid for the work that they do,” said Courtenay Barton, Program Manager for Arts & Culture at the Cleveland Foundation. “They struggle to get funded through artist fellowships and grants. It’s a struggle across the country and it’s certainly a struggle in the local area.”

Courtenay Barton [Mary Fecteau / ideastream]

The causes and potential remedies for such struggles will be explored in a panel discussion Friday at 5:30 p.m. at the “ Taste of Cultura” Latino arts and culture festival at the Michael Zone Recreation Center on Cleveland’s West Side, which continues throughout this weekend. Barton will be one of the panelists at that event, and she said artists of color need to learn the rules of the funding game that many white artists already know. Role models need to be cultivated.

“When you see that a lot of people that work like you and look like you do not receive funding, you don’t know who to talk to about getting that access, you don’t know how to complete a grant application,” Barton said.

Artist Will Sanchez had to learn that the hard way. After years of rejection from more mainstream local galleries Sanchez started up his own,  La Cosecha Galleria, in the heart of Cleveland’s Latino community.  Sanchez is one of the chief planners for the Taste of Cultura event and noted that there are many members of his community who have never been to the Detroit-Shoreway arts neighborhood and have never heard of the prominent hive of area artists known as 78 ^th Street Studios.  He'll be part of the panel discussion with Barton, muralist and actor John Rivera-Resto and Cuyahoga Arts and Culture's communications manager Jacob Sinatra. 

“Art is a basic human need,” said Barton. “Studies have indicated that communities with strong arts assets are healthier, physically healthier. So that’s why it’s important to have community galleries like La Cosecha. And it’s important to funders, I think, to think outside the box of only the large institutions.” 

Barton added that there are ways that those large mainstream museums and galleries can connect with artists from underrepresented communities and make everybody happy.

“It’s about more than pictures hanging on a wall,” she said.