The art and culture industry in Nevada is unique. In addition to what tourists may find in casinos, the Silver State has a myriad of museums, orchestras, art centers and more. When it comes to economic contribution, workforce development and the overall growth of the human condition, arts and culture in Nevada has been surging in recent years.
Recently, a group of art and culture experts met at a roundtable sponsored by Nevada State Bank to discuss their industry, the challenges they face and the value they bring to the Silver Sate. Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
What Impact Do the Arts Have On Society?
Aaron Berger: As an industry we often use warm and fuzzy language and do not discuss economic dollars enough. We do not talk about community development. We do not talk about the fact that the Art’s District has changed as a result the initiative it had created. Rents have also increased as a result of it and from the city’s perspective, that is an investment. These are investment dollars, and we do not speak in those term often enough. The more that we speak as equals in the business arena, the more respect we will receive.
Alice Sauro: The arts also contribute to workforce development. If you look at the Strip, there is graphic art and music everywhere. Some of the people who come out of our programs contribute to that, but people do not always make that connection. There is art everywhere in this town.
Tony Manfredi: The arts are integrated into almost everything. There are definitely community needs and challenges that the arts can’t solve by themselves, but they can help support and supplement some of the solutions. Creativity certainly plays a role in how we find our way through difficult times and challenges. The arts are an amazing driver of creativity.
Melissa Kaiser: The arts prevent people from ending up in our prison systems or going hungry. We would rather invest in a child when they are young and give them workforce development skills than try to rehabilitate them.
Tony Manfredi: The arts are one of the best ways to improve anxiety and depression. They offer many health benefits. We are trying to bring forward a prescription arts program here in Nevada, where physicians can prescribe someone to have an experience as a prescription. That is happening. The arts are not just a nice thing to have. They are integrated into everything.
Kaiser: We believe workforce development begins at birth. And in STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, art and math) art is a very important part. We are teaching kids what they can do with those vocations and how they can create career paths with them.
Aaron Doty: The arts are about building and instilling community value. We have a role to play on the education side and what we do is critical for growing the next generation of people that participate.
Manfredi: The real gap is in our school system. Each district is a little different, but typically after third grade, the arts are no longer a priority. And once a student gets into middle school and high school, art is an elective. Just like English, math and science are required to graduate, I would love to see art classes become a requirement for students. We are losing generations connected to the arts because we do not have an immersion in our school system.
Corey Fagan: As a mom and as an art advocate, I know that art is necessary. It is important that if students are going to learn math, that they learn how to work with their hands, color and paint. It is important that they have art experiences too, especially field trips when they are little.
Doty: Our small philharmonic reaches over 200 young musicians and helps foster a love for art and creativity, not just so that they will become professional musicians, but so that they will appreciate the arts. We are growing our audiences for the future and working on the education side of things. That is where we provide value. It is not necessarily the tourism dollar that we are contributing to, but we provide community value and attract businesses to the area because of what we offer the human condition.
Berger: People are not necessarily coming to Las Vegas to see the Neon Museum, for example. But perhaps the Neon Museum can convince them to stay an extra day. That is going to put one more night on their hotel bill, and the Neon Museum is the reason for that.
Manfredi: For far too long the arts have been pushed to the side and thought of as nice, versus necessary. It can’t be thought of that way anymore. The arts are critical. When you first go to Rome, what do you go see? You go see the architecture, the art and the culture. You do not go to look at the economic activity or the business culture. There is a mindset here that the arts need to be an economic driver. We need to reframe the narrative so that when times are tough, instead of cutting the arts, we ask how we can utilize the arts.
Berger: The next hill we stand on is an arts and culture hill. We want to make them a reason for people to visit. If you listen to people discuss the sports arenas, they all say that 20 years ago, there was nothing here, and they never thought there would be anything here. It took a concerted effort to be able to bring sports to Nevada, and each one became a domino after the other. If we begin to make the argument for arts and culture now, 20 years from now, this is going to be a robust destination for people to come here.
How Does This Industry Gain Attention?
Laurie Thomas: One of our biggest challenges is living in the entertainment capital of the world. People are primarily focused on sports and the gaming industry.
Hollis Gillespie: We are competing and will continue to compete with lots of opportunities for people. As a result, we constantly need to think about how to reinvigorate what we are doing to make it accessible and entertaining.
Fagan: Letting people know that we are an arts district, that we are art-centric, and that this is a place where we have the Smith Center and wonderful museums and art spaces is difficult.
Shakeh Ghoukasian: Sharing with the community what each organization does and what they have to offer is a big challenge.
Thomas: We are very much a local museum. We cater to locals and our focus is usually on education. Our challenge is reaching the locals and letting them know that we are there. We hear people say all the time that they have lived in Las Vegas their whole life and never knew we had a Natural History Museum.
Fagan: We are also seeing a swell of people that are coming here for the art scene. We see a shift, but we have to keep working on it and riding the wave. We are going to get there.
Gillespie: All of us have at least a minimum number of people who need to either come across our threshold or buy a ticket. We need to capture as many people as possible. We are never going to be able to sit back and say, “I just did this incredible exhibit at the Mob Museum, and I do not need to do anything else because visitors will keep coming.”
Sauro: As much as we want to think that people will be coming here for our arts organizations, I know that my organization is a wonderful regional orchestra, but we are not the New York Philharmonic or the LA Philharmonic. I want to develop my orchestra to be the very best regional orchestra that it can be for the 2.5 million citizens that are growing here. People are moving here for jobs and want to live here. It is not this back road community that has been thought of previously. I want to be able to help them understand that we are all here for them.
Gillespie: We have characterized ourselves forever as transient, and maybe we do not give it our all because we know that people are not going to stay. In terms of promoting our sector, we need to give it our all. And even if people do not stay, they are going to take everything they get from here and enrich somewhere else, and then somebody else is going to come in.
Jonathan Ullman: The issue is not just that Las Vegas is young, but for some of us, our organizations are very young. If you compare our institutions to other cities, the Philly and the Franklin Institute are approximately 150 years old. There are a lot of individuals who have memories of those places and shared them with their children and grandchildren. We are only 13 years old and are just starting to see people that have come through in student groups that are now professionals and are signing up as donors.
Is Art Funding an Issue in Nevada?
Ullman: One of the challenges we have is that there are limitations to the philanthropic community and funding organizations in this town. Many of us are chasing after the same dollars from the same organizations. That is not unique to Nevada or southern Nevada, but it is in some ways more pronounced here.
Kaiser: Arts and culture are ranked low here. And with a limited pool of philanthropists, the arts are ranked even lower. Philanthropists consider social services, hunger and homelessness as important. And there is a lot of competition, philanthropically, with the national charities that exist here because they are brand names and national corporations usually give to national charities. That is a challenge for those of us who are homegrown.
Gillespie: I do not consider Las Vegas a giving town. I worked in Alaska for a while, and they were near the bottom as well. The question is, how do you teach people to take on that ethos?
Ghoukasian: We are such a transient community. And there is an attitude among people of not adopting this as their hometown. The challenge we face with donors is changing that culture so that they do see this as their hometown.
Kaiser: We have had a children’s museum for 35 years in this city. Las Vegas is a great place to raise a family. We are always trying to communicate the importance of investing in that to keep our community great. We tend to lack the civic pride that you see in Chicago, Atlanta or Philadelphia.
Fagan: The LVCVA, when they give money, has been programmed for so many years to think in terms of getting heads into beds because there has always been a tourism, gaming and hotel-centric mindset of where money is coming from. If we could collectively present something to them, they would start to find funding and donations or sponsorships for the arts district as a whole and understand that we represent places that people want to come and visit.
Ullman: We do not often think about how one sector impacts the other. But when we discuss driving philanthropy and the spectrum of saving and changing lives, there are limitations to the amount of philanthropic dollars that can go around. Especially when we have these other issues that are considered to be more dire such as homelessness, food insecurity. As a result, arts and culture, which is considered to be on the end of the changing lives spectrum, suffers.
Manfredi: This is not a zero-sum game. They are all important. We all believe in the work we do, and we know the transformational effects it has. Certainly, we need food for those who do not have it, but we also need experiences and opportunities for humanity in general. We face a challenge in addressing the mindset around the importance and value of the arts.
Gillespie: The arts and culture in Nevada are really disparate. In the last 20 years, the culture sector has done a good job of identifying the economic impact that we provide by being here. That resonates with both funders and legislators. But I do not know if there has been a collective written statement of need, especially in our current funding hole, that allows us to give a unified presentation to corporate donors so that they have an idea of what the cultural sector entails and what those financial needs are. Because it would probably firm up a stronger sensibility about what they could do and what is out there.
Thomas: Marketing funding is one of the hardest things for us to get outside of wages. People do not like to fund marketing. Sometimes we get a little bit of money for marketing, but not a lot.
Sauro: We need marketing dollars to be able to get the word out about what we are doing and who we are collectively.
Manfredi: We are here to ensure that all Nevadans can receive the benefits that come with the arts, including the economic, cultural, civic, health, and educational benefits. We do that through our support of nonprofit art organizations and artists, primarily in the form of grants, but also in professional development to help them do what they do better, work with them, and support them to make sure that those opportunities are available for our citizens, and then also for tourists. One of the biggest challenges we are up against is a public understanding of how the arts and creativity are integrated into everything.
Is This Industry Collaborative?
Fagan: While we have beautiful museums and a diverse table here of what represents Las Vegas, I truly believe that we do not collectively collaborate together effectively.
Ghoukasian: Nevada does not have an arts incubator that brings everyone together so that our collaborative work can be larger and more impactful. I will never forget when I was at a meeting with Michael Kaiser from the Kennedy Center in 2009 or 2010. It was during the downturn when everybody was shutting their doors and nothing was happening. And his big pitch was that we needed to learn to truly collaborate. And not just saying it, but actually sitting down at the table to collectively figure out how we can make an impact. And everybody agreed, but nothing happened. We are still discussing it almost 20 years later.
Gillespie: I do not know that our economic development staff, either state or local, have a sense of who we are. If we could make that connection, it would be helpful to us as a group.
Thomas: We need to be better advocates for ourselves, for the city and the state. I went to a conference last year for museums in Boston, and I would sit there and listen to all of them discuss their issues and then be directed to certain agencies. We do not have anything like that here. The city is very supportive of the museum, but we do not have agencies that we can go to and get help with the issues we have.
Gillespie: We have an advantage in the arts and culture community that is in this room. There are still a few others, that represent a full range of visitor experiences, learning experiences, enrichment, art and culture. That is not true everywhere. The more we can support each other, the more helpful it will be.
Fagan: I am a big advocate for collaboration. One of our biggest challenges may be learning how to truly collaborate.
Berger: One of the challenges we have is this concept of local organization versus tourist destination. We have an opportunity to collaborate on how to bring those audiences together. We are all working so diligently on whatever the next fire is in front of us that we do not necessarily do that. We have an opportunity to find what can help us strengthen the message and open new audiences. We need to find ways to capitalize on our collaboration.
