The state’s top public promoter of art and culture, the quasi-governmental Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC), has a new executive director: Anita Walker. Walker, a native of Southern California, will take the reins of MCC next week, and will thus be the Bay State’s highest-ranking public official in the arts, humanities, and sciences.
Walker, who held the top cultural-development job for the state of Iowa from 2000 until Democratic governor Tom Vilsack left office earlier this year, brings with her a strong belief in the value of state investment in art — but she’ll find that most of the commonwealth’s leaders are already sold on that message. The battles that she’ll have to wage center on how much money will be available, and under whose control.
The MCC board, newly governed by Patrick appointees, is betting on Walker’s success navigating similar political waters in Iowa, and her talent as a public booster for the arts.
The MCC currently receives a little more than $12 million from the state — slated for a $150,000 boost under the new House budget proposal — to run its programs and to dole out grants. The state also spends money on the arts in others ways, some of which the MCC has a hand in, some of which it doesn’t. A new cultural-facilities grants program, started last year with $13 million, is administered jointly by the MCC and Mass Development. More millions are spent through state tourism funds and other departments, some of which collaborate with the MCC, but many of which don’t. Walker and the MCC board would like to increase the council’s influence on those plans; they are likely to run into territorial resistance.
Then there’s the money the state spends on arts and culture through direct earmarks — such as, say, the much-mocked Braintree bandstand last year. The legislature often chooses recipients of those funds on the basis of political pragmatism, rather than on artistic or even economic benefit.
Deval Patrick would love to kill the earmark culture, an idea that Walker supports. “To me, a competitive process that you go through is the way to ensure the best use of the taxpayers’ money,” she told the Phoenix from her Iowa home this week.
But when Patrick proposed erasing those earmarks, he did not steer any of that money to the MCC for competitive grants. Patrick’s budget also failed to fund a second year of the cultural-facilities grants, despite the pent-up demand shown in $80 million in requests that came in during the initial application process. The House put $10 million into the program.
Those state grants are critical to renovating old cultural and arts facilities, and to plan new ones — something that Iowa did even under tough budget conditions, Walker says.
