EMPANELED

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday I went to Phoenix to serve on an Arizona Commission on the Arts panel evaluating grant applications from music organizations. The commission staff seemed pleased with how well we panelists worked together; most of us had done our homework, and we made our way through the 40 applications thoroughly but efficiently, dispatching them in about three and a half hours, not counting the lunch break.
    We were warned not to “rewrite” the grant applications, judging the organizations by what we thought they should be proposing rather than what they actually requested funding for. Not every panelist complied. One among us frequently suggested that the organization’s educational component should be more extensive, even if the funding request had nothing to do with educational programs. Education is a wonderful thing, but really, that’s not the core mission of many arts producers or presenters, and funding for a group’s main programming shouldn’t hinge on such extras. Fortunately, the panelist merely presented those pro-education comments as gentle encouragement, and didn’t penalize anyone for perceived lapses.
    In the beginning, I was concerned that another panelist’s praise for one applicant’s “audience diversity” signaled that a lack of diversity would count against other groups. Welcoming a broad spectrum of people into the arts is what most of us hope to do, but we can’t impose “diversity” on groups serving homogenous communities. So a music presenter in Sun City is patronized almost exclusively by elderly white people, and elderly white people constitute its board of directors; well, that’s who lives in Sun City. Before the group’s audience and board can be diversified, we’ll need somehow to move younger and browner people into Sun City, and it’s not up to an arts presenter to re-engineer community demographics.
    Again, that turned out not to be the idée fixe I’d feared. All in all, we were pretty kindly disposed to most of the applicants. That wasn’t true of panels judging certain other categories; one person told me that her panel had given very low marks to fully one-third of its applicants.