Inside the Rhode Island Arts Sector’s Creative Comeback

Photo Illustration Emily Rietzel/Getty Images

Mid-morning sun washes the studio with light and heat. In ten days, Newport Contemporary Ballet will host five other companies from around the world for its annual dance festival, a series of performances on the grounds of the Great Friends Meeting House. With the opening nearly upon them, the dancers perfect their lifts and chasses, toweling off sweat at the barre, as two large fans purport to push around the heavy July air.  

The Ballet, founded in 1982 as the Island Moving Company, is headquartered on the second floor of the old Rhode Island Lodge 12 I.O.O.F. The brick Colonial Revival building off Washington Square is nearly a century old, with elegant Palladian windows but no modern HVAC system or performance space. In 2018, the group signed a sales agreement with the city of Newport to purchase the old George H. Triplett School property on Broadway. The site was to become the Center for Arts, Dance & Education, a three-level, 14,000-square foot facility with three studios for rehearsals and classes, administrative offices and a performance space open to other arts organizations. 

It was an ambitious plan that could not have come together without an en pointe-level of balance among the company, public officials and private philanthropy. Over eight years, the project moved forward — from conception, to the building’s purchase from the city, to the division of the property into a second parcel for residential development, to the fundraising campaign.

Then, COVID knocked it sideways.  

“We had to close down, and we were very resourceful about how to work outdoors and online when we could, but it certainly took a big toll on our school, and we lost the momentum of our capital campaign,” says Artistic Director Danielle Genest. 

The company now has a mortgage and only $2 million raised
toward a growing price tag of $8 million. “[The pandemic] brought things to a halt, so you’re not going to ask people for money,” she says.

Next month, the arts community will ask voters for $10 million. The Rhode Island Cultural Arts and Economy Grant Program bond referendum would provide $2 million each to the Newport Contemporary Ballet’s center, Trinity Repertory Company’s expansion and upgrade of its Lederer Theater Center, and the Tomaquag Museum’s new home on the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus. The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts would allocate the remaining $4 million to other organizations for capital improvements under guidelines “based on meetings and conversations with the arts and culture community,” says RISCA Executive Director Todd Trebour.

As welcome as the measure is, it is far less than the state’s arts organizations hoped for.    

“They shut us down out of necessity, they knew our revenues were grossly impacted, and they helped distribute a substantial amount of federal aid that came to us during the shutdown,” says David Beauchesne, executive director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra and Music School. “But for a variety of reasons, when it came time for the post-shutdown strategy for rebuilding, there was not a dialogue with the arts community or with RISCA.” 

The pandemic’s impact on the arts was immediate, devastating and enduring. In the first year, “few areas of the U.S. economy were harder hit than the performing arts” according to a National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis report. The inflation-adjusted value added by performing arts presenters fell by 73 percent; the value added from new construction of arts and cultural facilities declined by 24.3 percent; and the arts economy shed 604,000 workers, not counting self-employed artists and other cultural workers. As of December 2021, the percentage of job losses at nonprofit arts organizations — 12.5 percent — was more than three times worse than the 3.7 percent average among all nonprofits, Johns Hopkins University reports.

“We lost a lot of industry people who either retired or just left the business altogether, because COVID offered an opportunity to have better gainful employment,” says Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, co-founder of the twenty-four-year-old Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket. “We lost a lot of technicians and administrators, directors, actors, stage managers — the people who are necessary to support the business.”

Advocacy organization Americans for the Arts has been tracking the industry’s comeback struggle.

“We’re the first to close and the last to open. So it was just brutal — a hemorrhage,” says Randy Cohen, vice president of research. “The research predicted a more rapid return by attendees, and they are coming back, but at a slower rate. So, the performing arts have been bouncing back, but they are not fully recovered.”

At the Gamm Theatre, that looks like a cumulative deficit of $430,000 created by the loans it took out in 2018 to move and develop its current home in Warwick, and to stay afloat during the pandemic, coupled with a significant loss of revenue. 

“We had one full season [at the Warwick location] and we were riding this upward trend of new folks to the theater, climbing at a healthy pace, and then audience retention and acquisition crashed and burned,” says Gamm Executive Director Jason Cabral. “Now, we’re seeing the level of engagement that we saw the year prior to the pandemic, but the last four years we’ve been working to catch up, and accumulating debt in order to make up for the lost revenue.”

The Philharmonic entered the pandemic with books in the black and exited with a deficit. Earned revenues — ticket sales and school fees — from last season were 24 percent below pre-COVID levels, while expenses are up at least 16 to 20 percent.

“So, that’s the wrong relationship, right? The financial picture during the pandemic was awful and post-pandemic it’s still terrible,” Beauchesne says. “We are making progress, but we’re going to run a deficit of around $700,000 this year, and we ran a deficit of over $300,000 last year. For an organization that has roughly a $7 million annual budget, those aren’t sustainable numbers.”

Trinity Repertory Company lost half of its subscribers and many of its donors, resulting in fewer productions and a leaner, restructured organization. 

“We are rebuilding our subscription and donor base and ticket buyers to get back to a sustainable operating model, but we’re not quite there yet, and that’s why we were participating with our peer organizations to ask for this essential operating funding, because a burst of operational support would ramp up our recovery timeline and let us get back up to full operations much faster,” says Executive Director Katie Liberman.

In April, thirteen organizations formed the Rhode Island Coalition for the Arts to lobby the legislature to create an $18 million RI Creative Futures Fund using reallocated American Rescue Plan Act money. Modeled after similar programs in a dozen states, the fund would provide one-time grants to restore eligible members to their 2019 selves.  

“The coalition is a mix of large and small organizations, based on that one criteria of need. So we’re in the same bucket as Trinity, and it shows that there are some significant issues that are bigger than just the operating budget, but that also makes it harder to find ways to help us all,” says Kristen Williams, executive director of Riverzedge Arts, a Woonsocket-based nonprofit that combines workforce development and the arts to teach job skills to underserved youths. 

The coalition rallied a sizeable force of patrons to contact their legislators.

“We were pleasantly surprised by how our respective audiences and communities responded to our call for action to lobby their leaders,” says AS220’s David Dvorchak. “The support from Rhode Islanders was amazing.”

But it wasn’t enough to pry any dollars from the General Assembly. Senator Louis P. DiPalma (D-District 12, Little Compton, Middletown, Newport, Tiverton), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, says the request came too late.

“The vast, vast majority of the ARPA dollars had already been appropriated. That money doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. DiPalma sponsored the bill that created the arts capital improvements bond referendum because “those are things that ultimately are going to make a difference over the long term. As to the operating money they were looking for, the case wasn’t made.”

Arts administrators counter that if the state doesn’t address the short-term challenges, there may not be a long-term. 

Another venue, the Columbus Theatre, closed in June after twelve years. In July, Barnaby Evans, the creator of WaterFire Providence, mused in The Boston Globe whether the iconic summer happening could continue in the face of decreasing corporate support and a $750,000 hole — despite the millions it generates for surrounding businesses. A 2012 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study estimated WaterFire’s annual economic output at $114 million. 

More recent numbers from Americans for the Arts show that in Providence alone, the arts generated $207.5 million in economic activity during 2022, including $89.5 million in direct spending by arts and culture organizations and $118 million in event-related audience expenditures. The arts supported 2,774 jobs and provided $118.1 million in personal income to residents and $36.3 million in local, state and federal tax revenue, according to the report.

It’s hard to square those numbers with the notion that a case cannot be made for a robust state investment in the arts. So, the coalition is regrouping to determine how to engage with the legislature. The Rhode Island Foundation has embarked on a study of the economic impact of the arts. And Providence’s Office of Art, Culture and Tourism is writing its next ten-year plan to elevate the arts and spread them citywide. 

Back at the ballet studio, Genest scrutinizes the triads and dyads of dancers eddying around the notion of “Blind Witness,” jotting down notes. She choreographed the so-named piece around “the idea of being close to each other but not seen,” she explains.

For the arts community, the dance is not so much a composition of music and movement as it is a metaphor for where the industry is right now.  

“I think the thing that frustrates most creatives in this state is the fact that arts and culture are not just a feel-good thing, but a sustainable, viable industry,” says Joe Wilson Jr., ACT’s director. “Arts jobs are real jobs, and the industry should be included in the same way that you would support oil or development subsidies — all the things that we do to encourage economic growth. The cultural sector has to be a part of the conversation.” 

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Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than two decades.