2-minute read
Five artists, arts administrators and arts funders gathered in a sweltering early evening Thursday for a checkup about the state of the arts in Lakeland.
Gillian Fazio, the muralist, Ashley Gibson Barnett, the philanthropist and entrepreneur, Ashley Miller, the executive director of the Lakeland Symphony Orchestra and Tiffany Van Wieren, the coordinator of arts in medicine at the Watson Clinic Foundation, assembled for a discussion at the AGB, Barnett’s namesake museum.
The discussion was moderated by Daryl Ward, the executive director of the Polk Arts & Cultural Alliance and also an artist (Ward won a Merit Award for his fine art photography at Mayfaire-by-the-Lake last weekend).
They gathered before an audience of about 100 people in the museum’s Lynne and Richard England Gallery, surrounded by its American Art Since The 1960s exhibition, with stunning Highwaymen paintings next door.
The forum was sponsored by Lakeland Vision and LkldNow.
Ward asked the group what was going well with the arts in Lakeland and heard a range of answers from local government support to collaboration among arts organizations and philanthropy.
He asked them what barriers artists and arts groups were facing and heard they were lack of funding, lack of gallery spaces and, from Van Wieren, the thinking that art is “extra,” when it’s essential.
When Ward asked the group whether government has any responsibility to fund the arts, he heard that it should.
Barnett, who serves on the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, a state grant-making organization, was a strong supporter of government support but stressed that matching funding as a grant condition was equally important.
Van Wieren warmed to the subject.
“Absolutely,” she said. “Because the arts are infrastructure. They are intricately involved in the ways that we work, live, play and create healthy communities.”
Fazio spoke feelingly about whether government support should come with a say in the art itself.
She’s been supporting herself as a professional artist since she left the University of Florida with a Fine Arts degree in 2017, which makes her unusually successful in her field.
The artists who have most to lose from the government refusing to fund them are likely the ones who do the most provocative work, and that is many of them. But they’re not Fazio, whose murals, with their animals and flowers, are, as she says, uplifting.
That’s no guarantee of professional success, such as Fazio enjoys. She depends on commissions, and getting them can be time-consuming, she explained.
To succeed as an artist, at least in her case, she said, tenacity and resilience are as important as talent.
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You can watch the entire forum here:
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