Arts Everywhere: The SAA Podcast
Arts Everywhere: The SAA Podcast
Episode 15 - Arts Everywhere - Decoding the Complexities of Arts Funding with Jeremy Morgan
With a wealth of experience under his belt, this episodes guest, Jeremy Morgan gives us an insider's perspective on the growth and development of major arts and heritage organizations.He shares interesting anecdotes about the struggles and victories of securing funding, and reflects on the transformation he has witnessed in the Saskatchewan arts sector over the years.
With host Em Ironstar, the two examine the impact of political shifts in the arts and the pressing need for arts education, shining a spotlight on the urgent requirement for extensive research on the state of the arts in the public sphere.
Links discussed in this episode:
https://www.saskculture.ca/content/generic_atoms/titlefilecaption-files/Sask_Arts_Strategy_Task_Force.pdf
https://sk-arts.ca
Thank you to SaskCulture, SKArts, and Sask Lotteries for your generous support.
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STARTING SEASON 2, THEME MUSIC PROVIDED BY:
Patrick Moon Bird: https://linktr.ee/PatrickMoonBird
https://www.facebook.com/PatrickMoonBirdMusic/
Kevin Power: http://www.kevinpower.net/ The Saskscapes Podcast: https://saskscapes.buzzsprout.com/
Your collective voice for the arts across Saskatchewan. This is Arts Everywhere. The Saskatchewan Arts Alliance podcast.
Kevin Power:Advocating for the arts sometimes feels like, well, to quote this episode's guest "banging our heads against whichever wall is nearby. But perhaps we can do a little less headbanging and save a few walls if we learn from the past, from where we were where we are now, and realize that, yes, we have made strides. It's a game of matching policy and practice. I suppose Jeremy Morgan is this episode's guest, a fantastic resource in helping us understand where arts, organizations and policies and politics once were. Jeremy is a great resource because he has been there For over 30 years.
Kevin Power:Jeremy has served as a member of various volunteer boards and committees and as founding CEO, managing director, executive director of major arts and heritage organizations. He's been recognized with some very prestigious awards, including the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal and the Centennial Medal, and those are very impressive accolades for someone who has definitely been through the trenches. That kind of journey is bound to teach you a few things. So I'd like you to consider this episode a lesson from a consummate teacher and hopefully it'll save you a little less headbanging and a few walls in the process. Enjoy the episode.
Em Ironstar:Hi Jeremy, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, I guess maybe we could start off if you just want to give a little introduction about yourself for people who are out there listening.
Jeremy Morgan:Yeah, Well, thanks, I am, and a long longstanding relationship to Sketch on Arts Alliance. My wife, nia, elar Nia and our sons one willingly, one hesitantly came to Saskatchewan in 1989. I say hesitantly because our older son was not interested in coming from Nova Scotia, but we bribed him with six weeks or so at the writer's workshop at Fort Sand, of which maybe more to be said and I came here to work at the what is then SCCO, the Saskatchewan Council of Cultural Organizations, which is now, of course, morphed into South culture. I had been working in an analogous organization in Halifax Cultural Federations of Nova Scotia which had nine members, all of which received about one-tenth of the funding of some of the lottery-supported organizations here give or take. And actually I had been working at that job as executive director, and there was a guy called Jim Lotz, I think, and he had worked here. He was an arts journalist, wrote particularly about craft, and he left me a note one day with the ad for the job here saying you deserve this, and I thought, oh, yeah, right, sure, put it away. And then it came back again, and so I applied last minute and ended up coming here and worked for three years at SCCO through a number of these kind of potentially transformational maybe not efforts.
Jeremy Morgan:The arts strategy task force, for example, the closure of Fort San Multicultural strategy had just been being finalized as I came, and the establishment of the Heritage Foundation, which I thought then and still think now, was not well thought through. And Heritage Saskatchewan, meanwhile, was great and gone on great things Nevertheless. So I was working there and one of the things I was approached by a group of indigenous artists and arts activists to secure a lot of refunding for what was thought first to be a festival, an Ironbow Arts Festival, and as the discussion went on it became clear, I think, to everybody the proponents of the festival what was really needed was a more organizationally oriented approach rather than festivals, something more basic, more transformational, if you will, which gave rise to circle vision, which gave rise to Sagaewewak and tribe. And that was an interesting effort for me because when I came I was struck. Scco used to meet two big meetings every year. It was a lot of community activity and I think that's one of the things I think we have lost to some extent over the years. But what struck me was not having any understanding at all of indigenous presence in the prairies or even the rest of the country at all, was how few, if any ie none indigenous people were involved in the provincial cultural organizations and in the meetings associated. The response was well, they're there, they can join if they want In the group of artists. Deb Piepot some people will know she's been in Alberta for quite a while.
Jeremy Morgan:The challenge was for the organization to be formed and to have access to lottery money, and the conditions of lottery funding is most funders. You have to be around for two years. You know you've got to go through all that, and so our board and staff, we decided if we could be an umbrella initially while the organization got going and then ultimately it would be around long enough to apply directly to the trust and for eligibility and so on, which is sort of what happened ultimately. Eventually, I think probably a lot of those resources went over to the arts board, but some of the story Anyway. So I was around for that and then, and when a scaven came and said we need support because the government of the time province was not prepared to provide any operating support for the park at all, it was still a year away, maybe eight months away from opening.
Jeremy Morgan:And you know for me anyway, and I think for most people, once you go out, see the park even if it was still just a shell of building you realize there is no going back. You know things are changing, even if we don't recognize that change. And so I worked with the board and our board and our committees and so on to ensure that there was some strong operational funding. And shortly after that I got a call and said would you be interested in coming to work for us? So I did and I felt, you know, want to fish out of water for sure, but also I was there to learn and easily I thought it was just a wonderful experience. I'm like I talk about not going back, you know anyway. And then after seven years or more, I ended up being approached by the arts board and went there for quite a while and retired from the arts board and done other stuff since.
Em Ironstar:Yeah, anyway, yeah.
Jeremy Morgan:I'm a university. I know some people will go to an institution for 20, 25 years and that's wonderful if their vision is strong and long term and so on. But I also think there's always a need to refresh oneself. That's just me. I don't bring that to anyone else who's been there for 25 years. So it was, you know, 11 and a half years or so at the arts board was quite a long haul and I thought they needed the government to change. There would be a new agenda perhaps and I thought I've done reasonably what I can in to try to help the community in the arts board and the arts alliance kind of move forward somewhat.
Em Ironstar:Yeah, anyway, yes, yeah, one thing I'm kind of interested in hearing more about you know, almost even for my own, my own knowledge and to share with everybody else too, which is a little bit more about the arts strategy task force and kind of what that was. Yeah, yeah.
Jeremy Morgan:I had meant to try and dig out a copy. So at the time and this was done and I also think it's interesting to know where political parties come from we tend to we have tended sometimes, maybe for good cause, to demonize the one group and to sacralize the other. But there was a movement in the late 80s, I guess, in Saskatchewan, to understand where maybe it was simply to placate people in government, but to understand where these areas were going Like. What about multiculturalism? What are the implications for public support, which largely was lottery support? Same for the arts, same to some extent. And then it got pushed aside for heritage. So the art strategy task force was conceived in the department somewhere but spearheaded by the minister of the day who was this is in the last days of the divine government the guy called Colin Maxwell, who was an interesting character, very much. I wouldn't say he was inside that government, I think it was an outside voice. But he helped. No, he didn't help. He said I want a task force that's going to tell us where to go. I think he was getting pressure from the community, the professional community.
Jeremy Morgan:The arts board was very poorly funded at the time compared to, I think, what people expected and he had a lot of lottery money at his disposal In those days. There was an instrument called the minister's directed fund and what that meant was, after all, the payoffs to the old. There was a federal agreement, there was money going to the exhibitions centers and stuff. There was a lot of money available outside of Treasury Board, outside of the provincial budget, available to the minister. It was called the minister's directed fund and he used that when he was minister to advance the sectors sport, culture and recreation and so he allocated money through us as the cultural umbrella for the lotteries to support this art strategy task force. And I was trying to remember I'm sure people were asked to submit their names Would you be interested in serving in the task force? They were compensated.
Jeremy Morgan:Someone called Donnie Parker, who I don't know if she's still active, but she was very active in the arts community. She was a Regina-based person. She was the executive director, administrator for the task force and our office ran the money and supported them as needed, administered the task force along with Donnie and they went and met with people, they held meetings, they did all the usual things and came out with a report and what the report recommended was a single arts agency, that is to say, bringing in particularly the arts boards world and the arts world of the lotteries. In a way the strategic error perhaps in this and I'm going back a long time now trying to remember was that what I think the final report didn't understand that the lottery community generally to some extent it was of a piece. So if you poke the stick in SCCO you're also poking a stick in Southsport and SPRA. You would appreciate this from your own work experience. And so when they recommended that money be transferred from lotteries into the arts agency let's call it not the arts board single arts agency to be then used as the agency board and management saw fit, I think it was seen as a very difficult challenge for government who did not want to alienate, at a very sensitive time with an election coming up, the rest of the lottery community, including, I'm sure, people from multi-side, people from the heritage side, who often saw the arts as scooping up a lot of the money anyway.
Jeremy Morgan:And a lot of the groups Writers Guild, then Craft Council and so on were, compared to peers across the country, very well supported. As Eric Klein said to me, there is never enough money for the arts and there isn't in two or three different ways. But certainly it was a challenge to some very strong vested interest that it had a big role in developing the lottery in the first place. The lottery wasn't simply there for government to easily at least anyway to play with. It was seen as a community-based effort, as it had been created in the community. Stories of people taking out second mortgages in order to finance the development of the lotteries in the first place, because government wasn't terribly interested. It was just they had to do something with the lotteries since the federal government were getting out of the business. So anyway, that task force reported. I think it would be instructive for people to look now and see, 30 years later, pretty much what that was about. There were some very strong people on that task force. Again, I think if there had been a fuller understanding of the Not the landmines so much as the the ecosystem, if you will around lotteries, I think it might have been more possible.
Jeremy Morgan:This all happened when the government was falling, when government was changing. I'm inclined to think, without having talked directly to anyone involved, but knowing the atmosphere, knowing some of the people involved, this was not a time when a new government was going to spend a lot of time fighting over money for almost anything except what do you do about hospitals? What do you do about pursuing the corrupt or allegedly corrupt sort of outgoing government? So there was an awful lot of other stuff that took up people's time and attention, and I have a feeling by the time that all was through three or four years later into the mid-90s. The next piece of this was the some changes to the Arts Board Act, which enabled, for example, enabled the Arts Board itself to appoint its executive director. Up to that time it had been an ordering council, it was a government appointment and this caused some real problems because the executive director would say who do I report to? To report to this board appointed by the government or to report to the minister? And in fact that became part of the sequence of events that led an opening that I feel ultimately in 1999, and so there was a.
Jeremy Morgan:The single arts agency kind of got lost in the mix, I think anyway, and then by the time things had cleared, by the time there was some better structure to the world of government and particularly culture, arts and cultural implementation and policy, or non-policy as it was, I think it was kind of late in the day. So the the Arts Alliance had a role in that, in that those amendments to the Act, I think was 97, I think ultimately there were some good changes letting the board or permitting the board to elect its own members or its own executive director, mandating the inclusion of one-third of the board from the community of interest, which which, when I got there, we were just kind of insisting that the arts a lot, that was the Arts Alliance's job. Primarily. Those were positive things, but not this was not about reform and and I think that the opportunity for reform was there.
Jeremy Morgan:Briefly and as often you know, it gets lost in and and I think the perception in government was that the arts community was not interested in anything other than itself, which you could apply that presumably to the agricultural, you know, whatever but and much more aggressive and there had been an attempt by the Arts Board management and staff to highlight the relative lack and this is in probably I don't know mid 90s to the relative lack of funding just exacerbated the problems that that kind of kept running through the 90s as well.
Jeremy Morgan:I think the ARCHARGY task force is worth a look. Yeah, one of the areas that I recall, because it was something that was fairly fresh in people's minds anyway was was work that had been done by a group of volunteers from the arts community on arts education, and somewhat successfully, I think at the time, but that was a big piece of, as I recall, of the art. The task force was to emphasize the importance of arts education, public arts education, yeah, which I think is an area that I think I touched on it in my little piece and I I think it's an area that we've just lost or don't know enough. Yeah, and I think these are areas for investigation, I think research yeah, well, it's, it's.
Em Ironstar:It's good you mentioned that, because I think that's one of the things that you know, that that arts education is a huge priority of the arts alliance, and one of the things that we're going to be doing this spring actually, with that I'm really excited about is getting some of the EDs from some of the music organizations, like the band association and choral and people who probably have a lot more connection with the education system and teachers yeah to find out.
Jeremy Morgan:You know, okay, what's the situation and where do we go and what do you need yeah yeah, and I, and I think I think so to just jump ahead a tiny bit, this particular. I keep having to remind myself the name of this paper art and the world after this. Okay, by David Maggs. He was a Metcalf innovation, fellow Metcalf Foundation, but but but he, he has him, he has lots to say about and he and it leads you into a discussion of ecosystems and and clearly, what we don't know I don't think we know is is what's going on, first of all, what's going on in arts education, whether it's in the public sphere or in the quasi public sphere, like the galleries or in the university, and and and we have, we have no, we have had no way really of putting that together.
Jeremy Morgan:Linda Oliver, whom you may know from from the world in Regina, she was one of the few people down Warren, another who had a really good understanding of that picture, the. But you know, one of the questions I have is is there any connection, does it need to be made, between what goes on, let's say, the Remy modern or or the McKenzie, and what goes on in the schools, and and what goes on in the development of artists, like where is carfack in this mix? Somewhere? These are the. I think this is, to me, the discussion about the ecosystem that that I believe we need to have. We need to talk about systems. One of the things that mags points out is that we're much of our public support and private support is based upon a winners and losers, and instead of spending so much time on that, maybe we should be thinking about what are the broad areas that need to be supported. So you have a, you have a kind of there's there's many questions.
Em Ironstar:I think there's a couple of PhDs in here, if anyone is interested yeah, well, I think I mean one of the things because, yeah, I guess we kind of alluded to it, but you recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Arts Alliance and we were kind of talking about it a little bit and we'll link to it in the show notes and everything of course but you know, one of the things that I was kind of struck by in there, and you, I think you outlined some of the challenges that were faced by the arts in our province.
Em Ironstar:You know, I like, let's say, 30 years ago and and honestly it's a little bit like it's it's definitely a little bit hard to read for me, I think, because I think we're still facing a lot of those same challenges and and and banging our heads against different kind, different walls, whichever wall is near about it.
Jeremy Morgan:And I I think you're right and I I think it is part of a scarcity mentality. Yeah, and that's justifiable because because of the, I think the aspirations of artists and arts activists and and arts workers is is always going to push beyond what's available and and that's like I think that's something we live with and it's it's easier for me to live with it, particularly now that I'm retired sort of, or when I was working in an administrative management capacity. Then it is for an individual artist, yeah, who is struggling just to stay as an artist, yeah, but but it is. These are things that I think the responsibility often of the of arts managers, whether it's addressing issues of governance, whether it's addressing issues of where, where the support comes from, entitlement issues, around around public funding I I think the public there, there, there is an obligation for the public to fund the arts. I think we struggle to make a effective argument. We go all the way from we contribute to the economy, but when you talk to hard case, hard-bitten economists, they're not so sure. In fact, some of them are some of my best friends, are. One of my best friends is a hard-bitten economist and he would reject that at this point. All the way to we operate in some ineffable kind of higher sphere and higher plane. All that being said, one of the things I like about this paper that I keep trying to get back to is, as a sense of art, being artists in the arts community, being much more assertive about the value of arts but much more analytical, much more thoughtful about where the arts have a transformational role in our society, whether it's in social issues, whether it's in economic issues, whatever those things are. This is not something I fully understand yet where this paper takes us, but those old challenges I think.
Jeremy Morgan:I mentioned coming here in 1988, 89, having several years membership in Cain-Sahara Fundraising Executives, and it just seemed to me at the time there was nothing in nobody and nobody wanted to talk about private support. It was old school thinking which now, when we see what's happened at the RME, we see what's happened at the McKenzie and other institutions, but there is still, I think, a lack of understanding of some of our leadership. How, in fact, to talk to the other, because they aren't the other in the end anyway. I think there's some false dichotomies that are thrown up and it speaks to the community or rural. Saskatchewan doesn't like us.
Jeremy Morgan:There's a really interesting article on the CBC website about how local music had changed someone's life and I thought, okay, fine, that's good. But when I started to read it, what I realized for me more importantly, was the presence of music in small communities for many years and the creativity that that would generate and the excitement that would generate. And I remember the first time when I went to the Arts Board, music was large musical grants for individuals. There was a bit of money for the jazz festival, a bit of money for the jazz society the two symphonies consumed most of it, as I recall. No money for, if any, for, choral groups. That's hobbyist, amateur stuff, right. And most of the individual grants were going to people with classical practices, some who were academics, some who were with the symphonies and some both. And we had an opening performing arts consumed and Cheryl Arandelle was hired and I don't remember all the details, but I do remember that all of a sudden we started to see people applying who were not of that sort of classical disposition and one of the first grants I remember went to Brad Joner, and I mean.
Jeremy Morgan:I'm sure this horrified all right thinking at people everywhere. It was a jury decision. They looked and saw that this artist and his band had something to offer. It was new work that they were developing. The idea, though, of a country-western singer getting a grant from the sketch and arts board was encouraging and also horrifying to some people. I understand that. I think it's like creeping something or other taking over, but it was the idea. It was taking over ours. This was our money, our institution, and I think that's, I think, a continuing problem, not just about the arts, I don't mean just the arts board. I think the sense of ownership, which sometimes is what strengthens an organization, makes it effective If continued too long, can kill it as well or reduce its value to its own community and the public.
Em Ironstar:Well, that's definitely something that I've talked with a lot of people about is, in an environment of scarcity, there is not going to be room necessarily for new voices or different voices or growth, I guess, and I think that that's a really concerning thing.
Jeremy Morgan:It is. I think it's morally concerning, I think it's also pragmatically politically concerning and its opportunities lost. I mean, if one wanted to be really just sort of pragmatic and let's alienate newcomers to Saskatchewan by telling them that their art doesn't quite fit, it's as I said to one of my friends as an artist, it's decorative, it's pretty, you know could find that at Walmart or something or whatever you know. I mean back in Bed, bath, beja, I don't know these places, but it is troublesome because it's anti-democratic. And I think if we preach democracy as a society as a whole and sometimes use it as a stick to beat our political sort of appointees and so on, we have to sort of live that. And I think, whether it's forms of art or whether it's people who have different outlooks on what art is or what community is, I think it's easy to. It is very easy and I'll go back to your environment of scarcity. This is a very prosperous society. There's no reason for there to be scarcity and we can be upset at the treatment we get, particularly from governments, from time to time, but at the same time there's a lot of clever, energetic, very smart people in the arts community. And I don't mean about education. I just mean people whose problems solve, people who often see things creatively. For example, there's an idea and we don't often apply that, I think, very well to the needs of the sector and how the sector relates to the rest of the communities that we live in. We tend to tack on things like let's have some art and health, and I've done that. I understand I've been part of this kind of problem, I think, for a long time. Let's have arts and this arts, and that this strikes me as it's a quick fix. Sometimes it helped, you could argue it helped get money from lotteries into the arts board for some of these programs that are still going, but in the end it's not.
Jeremy Morgan:There has to be a better base, I think, for our relationship to society and that's why any of these pieces there's a quoted frequently in this paper by David Maggs is the work that Elwood, jimmy and Vanessa Andriotti, whom I don't know. I know Elwood, of course, he's from Saskatchewan. The opportunities are there, it's just that we tend to be I think we're stuck, and as soon as some friends of mine and not friends of mine hear me saying this, I'm sure that their temperature will rise. But we are stuck. I think we're stuck in older paradigms of both public support and without really thinking through our relationships. There are people who do this all the time, but it doesn't get into a kind of a bigger conversation. I think the shuttling back and forth between being that ineffable good and being tools of the economy, that seems to be the polarities that we live in.
Jeremy Morgan:We have to be smarter than this, I think, and I guess what I'm hoping. I'm hopeful that that's what the arts alliance with a bit of a new face, if you will, but a new kind of thinking can help bring us through. The arts alliance should have 250 members, it should have every creative sask beneficiary it should have etc. And I don't accept that we're too busy. We're too busy. Yes, what's our priority? And maybe I don't expect everyone to jump up and say our priorities get more money for the arts or more engagement or whatever it is, but I do hope that there are enough people who will come out of the woodwork at some point and engage as members of the arts alliance. I think the arts alliance is, I think you are the focal point, you may be the keystone species, you know really, and I think when the arts alliance started to get money from the arts board on a relationship basis rather than a competitive basis. Because the competitive basis, I think the first grant when the arts alliance supply was like $3,000 or something.
Jeremy Morgan:But that, I think, was the hope not well expressed at all, was that the arts alliance was not a watchdog of the arts board, which is where a number of leading proponents of the arts alliance were at the time, but rather an agent for change, and change particularly government and its relationship to public funding. It's not a you can't bulldoze your way into that. So part of what I wanted to get to in this second op-ed piece is what are the connections that we as a community can reasonably make with government's agenda without becoming just adjuncts of a department? Because if you otherwise, when you just exist on this kind of basis, you do become an adjunct of the department. And that's my worry right now Is that creative Saskatchewan is on a great role for at least film. I don't know what the implications have been for craft and sound and for music and so on, but let's say there's certainly some progress made there in terms of support for certain aspects of it. I want to ask so, if you want to have a successful film industry, how does that work in the ecosystem? Where are the designers? Where are the sound people? Where are the techs? Where are the people who make the props? Where are all those people. They come. If they're from Saskatchewan, they come out of the rest of the community. I'm saying what's obvious and how do we make those links? And how do we, speaking of art, folk art and so on, how do we understand that someone who can make things is important in? I mean, presumably art making is about making and we seem to kind of these things seem in not on the daily basis, but I think when we get into these kind of big policy discussions, that seems to get lost.
Jeremy Morgan:The cultural policy of 2010 came about partly because I think the government of the day, the new government, wanted to make some sense of things. Maybe they just wanted to shut the arts community up. I don't know, but the Arts Alliance and, I'm pretty sure, the Arts Board we supported while they know we did and the government brought in a guy called John Holden, who was a prominent writer for be most the English think tank of the democracy, and Holden came and talked about art and community and culture and so on, and I think it was one of the things that inspired the minister of the day I think it was Christine Tell to set the policy work in motion. Does anyone know anything about that policy anymore. Does anyone look at it and say, okay, this is what we're going to do next? I don't think so. Actually, it was Dustin Duncan. He was the minister when it was authorized and finalized, and I think it may have been.
Jeremy Morgan:We go back to this notion in my mind anyway. We're great at saying we can do this or this or this, but we just don't connect the dots. We don't have a bigger picture. We, let's say we look at winners and losers, not at all the things that are needed to make a healthy ecosystem. That's a long-term project. It's about changing 75 years of arts board. Right, yeah, is it? Yeah, 75 years. Wonderful, and it is. But that was then.
Jeremy Morgan:And do we need, like I last the question do we need the arts board now? Do we need one? Do we need a single arts agency which would encompass creative Saskatchewan and some aspects of the lottery community and so on, or do we need a network that could be very much about engagement across all these pieces? So when creative Saskatchewan decides to allocate money to sound recording, do they talk to everybody engaged in, even peripherally, in the music industry? How do they do this? I honestly don't know. So I'm kind of hoping generally, that we can start to think more organically, holistically, systemically, without it becoming a monolith where M Iron Star sits at the top and orders the world as she sees fit. But you know what I'm saying there's no reason in this small community where we cannot come to some better understanding of what it's going to take to move forward.
Jeremy Morgan:The idea is, what's the future like? It's interesting to mither on about what happened in 1990 or what wasn't done when it could have been done, but the idea is where are we going? And we don't know, of course. Therefore, we've got to try to construct processes and thinking that is open to possibilities, knowing that some of those possibilities will be destroyed before our very eyes because we cannot predict. We just don't know. And of course, covid is maybe the most vivid illustration reminder that we don't know. And there are a lot of arts organizations and artists that suffered because of it. Actually, the biggest ones survived the best. And that's an interesting and disturbing thought, in a way that it's like those apex species that have no predator except themselves. And I think that's. The other thing is that large institutions are often their own worst enemy. They don't refer to anyone in this particular landscape, but that's part of what we've got to think about.
Em Ironstar:I think that's one thing that I've been thinking about a lot recently that we touched on is when we were talking about these people and we talked about variants if they really. There is a lot, and it's not just limited to the arts, it's throughout everything. I think that people probably, in general, just tend to cling to doing something the same way because that's the way it's always been done. I don't think that this is obviously not news to anybody, but I do think that we see it in the arts and I think that's an interesting thing to reflect on, especially because we are in this anniversary year of Sask Arts and also even, I think, coming in as someone who came into an organization that has existed for a long time and thinking about what are we doing and what can we do differently, and sometimes you don't even know if you're caught in that paradigm.
Jeremy Morgan:Yes, absolutely. There can be no other condition. I don't want to sound sort of glib about what it would take for the arts board to rethink itself. The last thing that they need is some former director holding forth. But having said that, what's missing is the absence of debate and discussion in the province and I think that used to be sometimes not very productive, but it used to be there and the sense of people getting together and engaging, and I don't think COVID is the reason that isn't happening very much anymore. I think it stopped happening long before COVID.
Jeremy Morgan:We have a chance and I don't want to put the burden on the Arts Alliance so much, but the occasion of the Arts Board's 75th anniversary. These were always good times, but if what we're doing is simply a little bit more of the same, only more, I don't think that's going to hold, and I know that there's apprehension about the direction the government wants to go. What's the relationship to creative Saskatchewan? When do we start that discussion? What I would really like to see done, I think, is for seven or eight people to sit around a table with this paper and talk about it. It could be under the auspices of the Arts Alliance, it could be under the auspices of one of the universities, but I think that might tend to be a longer process. But just to talk about what this means amongst people who really have a care and a compassion for the sector.
Jeremy Morgan:That may seem odd to talk about people having compassion for the sector, but I think that's in a sense that that's what we need to do. It needs to be infused in society, not segregated, and I don't pretend for a moment that's an easy task for anyone to do, including the Alliance. But I think you have an opportunity because of the circumstances now and perhaps because of certain changes you're already making in the structure of the organization. I may have said this clumsily this morning to your board member, but don't mistake that one change to be the change. It's only part and parcel of the change. I think one of the areas that needs conversation with and it might be very difficult is other universities, I think. So that's why I think an organization that is alert and aware and questing, that is focused on the arts, I think, is where I think this conversation is best housed, and so I put it to you.
Em Ironstar:Well, it's interesting to say that because that's also something that Jessica and I have talked quite a bit about Is just that is, facilitating these conversations to happen and making space for that, and I think, almost in a way too, that's a little bit about what I'm interested in doing with these conversations in the podcast as well. I wouldn't necessarily say it's selfish. In a way, it's more just about like learning through talking with other people about what's going on, and I think it's interesting to say maybe, when you said that, you know, maybe we haven't talked about some of these things as much as we could have or should have or can be, yeah, or we haven't talked about them at all in cases, and I think it's like family secrets.
Jeremy Morgan:You know they get passed around. You know the notion of this community, this arts community, which is still, I think, tightly knit and connected. It's changing, but there's still some of the old suspects around as well and participating in some way or another. I think these are the people that are also available but have kind of sunk below the surface. They're in their basements. It's not the kids that are in the basement doing that, but things like gaming, for example. I don't have a clue about how gaming electronic digital gaming is connected to visual art.
Em Ironstar:Well, and I think that loops completely back to some of what we were talking about earlier, because I even just saw this morning on Facebook there is a workshop happening through. Oh my gosh, the name of the organization is going to be out of my head, of course, when I want to talk about it, but it's game development.
Jeremy Morgan:You can edit that in. I'll edit myself.
Em Ironstar:It's essentially like a digital media game development organization that's through Creative Saskatchewan, that's going to be offering a clinic on how to set up your own studio, and so I think definitely, I think one of the interesting discussions and I think challenges that even thinking about systems that we've set ourselves up in right now, is that we kind of seem to have this commercial side over here and we have the art and I'm doing air quotes, art side over here, and I don't think that that's the way that these people and groups and creators really work.
Em Ironstar:I think that there's a lot more that can and should and do go beyond the borders of those.
Jeremy Morgan:Well, even if you look around here, most of the artists here some of them are no longer around. They sell through commercial galleries. They're not hostage or creatures only of public museums, art museums. And the Graham McConnell I don't know if you run across Grant, he was Mr National Carfack. I mean he's a very, very important person, I think, in this province and he's another person I want to sort of. He does some very interesting lecturing at the university as a sectional when he's not creating your art.
Jeremy Morgan:And then Adrian and others and the two women from Eickewood, but these are people who have to live in that world. And I think we've Mike Hosselach's work that bowl and then the table. This is someone who has he's kind of broken that barrier around art and craft and I'm very emphatically in this province and was the winner of the Hobday Award and the National Award for Fine Craft. But I mean he's in business and I think the notion of the artist has changed a lot and I think the commercial, the digitalization of art and the we can say commodification of art and some people will be very unhappy with that and that's how artists in this environment and in this society live and that's how arts organizations live.
Jeremy Morgan:The Remi Modern is highly dependent upon the generosity of Well and Remi for its level of service that it can provide and the level of engagement that its staff can get involved in too, and so the same for, presumably, the support that Mackenzie is getting through an anonymous endowment which may come from an industrial source, and so I think we've and this is old, I mean this is a very old paradigm.
Jeremy Morgan:One of the things that is interesting in terms of not just visual art but is the kind of the modernist application. Right, you know this better now because of your own knowledge and skills. Eli Bornstein, who just turned 100 and is still as far as I don't know if he's still playing tennis, probably but he has an article in one of the books I have in the pile over there I wrote some years ago. It's kind of taking a run at the modernist, at the Clement Greenberg sort of approach to visual art, and then there are the Joe Fafard's and the Vick Sikanskis, and I wouldn't want to quote David Thalberger or interpret his words, but I mean he's had a huge influence on recognition of what we would still call for better for us folk art. So do you know where Levine Flex Hogs work?
Em Ironstar:Yes, yes, kind of intimately, because my grandparents are from Weyburn and they had kind of unbeknownst to me for a long time. They had lots of his paintings in their house. So then when that exhibition came around to the Mackenzie I was like what?
Jeremy Morgan:Yes, and I think we worked on that before I left and when they was installed and I came to see it it was so I was just actually reading an article about it the other day. But one of the people that introduced Flex Hog to Nancy Towsley and Peter Smith, who did the exhibition out of Alberta originally, was David and he bought the painting that he gave at a value village. That's where he found it and I think it's being open and I think we've got to go from being an increasingly closed society to being much more open. But there's some tremendous resources in this province for change.
Em Ironstar:Yeah, I think that might be a nice place to pause the conversation. Yeah, okay, that's right.
Jeremy Morgan:I should be suspicious.
Em Ironstar:No, no, but yeah, no, I think. Thanks for your time in chatting, oh well.
Jeremy Morgan:I want to get this out somehow and helps me think, which is a bit of a gargantuan task now. Yeah.
Em Ironstar:And I think that's definitely wanting to talk to a variety of different people with different experiences. And especially, I think, right when I started at the Arts Alliance and I was reading through some of the documentation about how the Arts Alliance was formed and what was going on and what was, the climate of the arts community at this point and I think it's really interesting and valuable to have some of that context, to know where we, how did we get here? Yes, well, thanks Jeremy.
Jeremy Morgan:You're welcome, thank you. Thanks for talking with you. Thanks for coming here.
Kevin Power:I have a couple of notes for links to Patrick's music. This escatchment Arts Alliance would like to thank our funders, sas Culture and SAS Arts, both of whom benefit from lottery ticket sales through SAS Glotteries. Proceeds from SAS Glotteries fund cultural organizations all across the province and we wouldn't be able to do the work we do without your support. See you next time.
