Boston Launches City Cultural Plan

The City of Boston is bringing public and private resources together in a ten-year plan meant to cultivate the city's arts and cultural vitality.

The ten-year Boston Creates initiative launched Friday, and started by identifying five strategic goals, broadly explained as:

• leveraging current and future municipal investments
• creating new partnerships
• breaking down barriers that hinder participation in the arts
• creating infrastructure that supports artists
• aligning resources towards the goal of making Boston a municipal arts leader

Making that not only happen but stick for the long-term takes money and leadership, the mayor's office said in a press release. That means commitment from the city in addition to private and philanthropic sectors.

"We are already making substantial investments and policy changes that will have significant impacts across the city," Mayor Marty Walsh said in the release. "To fully achieve the goals of this plan will take time, ingenuity and collaboration, with City government, philanthropy, business and civic leaders, and the arts and culture community all working together to make the case for sustainable investment in the arts in Boston."

It should come as little surprise that Boston housing prices do not favor the "starving artist" type. As such, Boston Creates' plan includes the Boston Housing Authority setting aside low-income housing for artists in redevelopments. Specifically, ten units of the under-development Bunker Hill public housing development in Charlestown will be set aside for income-eligible artists.
The BHA and developer Corcoran-SunCal also plan to dedicate funding for public art in the project, with the details TBA.

Among those corridors to arts funding is what the city's calling the "Percent for Art" program, which invests roughly one percent of the city's anticipated annual general borrowing for its Five Year Capital Plan. That capital plan targets major construction and infrastructure projects. In addition, the Department of Public Works is committing $100,000 for permanent public art - part of a Hyde Square road improvement project.

The Imagine Boston 2030 planning process will also align itself toward catalyzing the arts in neighborhood "Arts Innovation Districts": Upham's Corner, the Strand Theatre and two more locations TBD through Imagine Boston's public engagement process.

The Boston Foundation is also assisting with the program's long-term financing piece. Its "Catalyze Creativity" Pooled Fund for Dance and Theater, announced Friday, will provide $500,000 per year for three years to pilot and establish the new fund. The Barr Foundation will contribute $250,000 in the first year of the Fund.

The Boston Foundation will also launch a cultural equity study, exploring how cultural equity and access to the arts can be enhanced across the city. They will also devote funding to an artist housing strategy, which will identify how the region can create sufficient supplies of affordable residential, live/work and work studios to address the needs of artists.

Also Friday, the city announced a partnership between Emerson College and the Mayor's Office of Workforce Development; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and with the Massachusetts Eye & Ear, AT&T's Boylston Street store and the Plumbers Local 12 Union Hall, the three of which hope to serve as rehearsal space under an Alternatives Spaces Pilot Project.

That's perhaps the best example of this program's aspirations: filling the creative community's need for rehearsal space, while weaving in connections to businesses and the community at large.

Finally, the city is pursuing two new grant programs -- the Boston Opportunity Fund for Artists and a highly competitive artist fellowship program. The City of Boston will also continue its second round of the Boston AIR, in which artists are in-residence in City agencies.

"Keeping artists in Boston and creating a fertile environment where they can work is a key goal of the cultural plan," said Julie Burros, Chief of Arts and Culture for the City of Boston, in the release. "From the establishment of an Artist Resource Desk to a significant increase in grant funding and creating ways to help artists take advantage of these grants, we are working to find ways to help Boston artists - veteran and new - showcase their work and thrive here."

>> Photo by Alison Bauter, Patch staff