A recent forum on the state of the arts in Ottawa has the artistic community buzzing, but they’re not sure whether discussing problems is the right way to solve them.
Approximately 150 local artists and arts administrators packed into the Churchill Seniors Recreation Centre on Nov. 7 for the Ottawa Arts Summit, hosted by Paul Dewar, MP for Ottawa Centre. They discussed the biggest problems facing the local arts community, and how those problems might be solved.
Peter Honeywell, executive director for the Council for the Arts in Ottawa, was a keynote speaker. He says he was blown away by the size and scope of the event.
“It’s an unusual occurrence to have a member of Parliament call a local arts summit,” he says. “I think it was actually quite exhilarating to see that many people attend and get involved.”
Forum participants worked in small groups to develop lists of the biggest problems facing area artists and how they might be solved, which were then presented to the larger group. Some of the biggest issues discussed at the meeting included tax breaks for self-employed artists, increasing studio and performance space, and something one presenter called “particip-art-tion” – educating the public about the art that Ottawa has to offer.
Amy Kishek, a spokesperson for Dewar who helped organize the event, told participants that “every scrap of paper” used in the discussions and presentations would be gathered and processed into a report. Despite this promise, some attendees aren’t sure if simply talking about the artistic community’s problems is the best way to solve them.
“To just spend a few hours talking around the table is a bit casual, in my view,” says Stefan St-Laurent, curator of SAW Gallery. “If you want to have a strong voice in the Ottawa community, we need to do more serious work in building a long-term vision for Ottawa.”
Although St-Laurent says he is hopeful that the information gathered at the event will prove useful, he doesn’t see a promising precedent. St-Laurent says that the summit reminded him of the Ottawa 20/20 campaign of 2003, which he says generated few results at a great cost.
“In my opinion, Ottawa 20/20 didn’t result in anything concrete from the City of Ottawa, who spent hundreds of thousands on the summit,” he says. He says that despite discussions and summits like Ottawa 20/20, little has changed. “If you ask an artist what their main concerns were 20 years ago and today, they’d probably be pretty similar,” he says.
Honeywell also says he sees potential problems in generating results from the information gathered at the summit. There were over a dozen group presentations, and the sheer volume of information could be seen as overwhelming.
“It’s going to be a challenge to take sheets and sheets of flip-chart paper and organize it in a way that demonstrates what are the priority issues, and what the more interesting solutions are,” he says. “It’s certainly going to be a lot to produce a report on.”
At the summit, Dewar said that his main goal was to figure out “how we support the arts at the local level and how we get governments engaged.”
St-Laurent says he is cynical that any government will engage with the summit’s results, but is still impressed with Dewar’s dedication to the arts.
“It means a lot to hear from our members of Parliament and to see that they have an interest in the arts,” he says. Even so, he says he doubts that Dewar’s interest in the local arts community will end up “trickling down” to the municipal level.
“I think we’ve been repeating the same thing to the city and they haven’t been willing to hear us,” he says.
“I’m hopeful, but I think the City of Ottawa has a lot of issues with the arts that they haven’t resolved yet.”