In uncertain financial environment, go-go advocates press for DC arts funding equity

After months of intense advocacy efforts over equitable arts funding for go-go music, the DC Council has tentatively voted to allocate $3 million in the upcoming fiscal year for programs that will support the newly designated official music of the District.

“These funds are more important now than ever, as musicians and music venues suffer disproportionately from COVID-19 public health closures,” reads a budget summary prepared by the DC Council’s budget office.

Supporters of the uniquely polyrhythmic homegrown genre that Chuck Brown first put on the map in the 1970s have been pushing against an arts-funding structure that automatically gives a significant portion of the available money to 20 established arts organizations without any such set-aside for go-go. During last week’s budget deliberations, at-large DC Council member Robert White said he had hoped to redirect some of that funding stream to provide recurring support for go-go and jazz, but decided not to pursue the change this year due to opposition from groups already struggling to survive due to COVID-related revenue losses. White added, however, that he’ll revisit the issue next February if no agreement is reached.

In the meantime, the council’s 2021 budget, which won tentative approval last week, establishes three funding streams for the upcoming fiscal year. 

The Committee on Government Operations directed $1 million to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Office of Cable Television, Film, Music, and Entertainment to help establish a go-go creative economy and anchor. Meanwhile, the Committee on Education recommended funneling $1 million in one-time funds from the Committee on Business and Economic Development to the DC Public Library to support its go-go music archives. 

The council also approved $1 million for go-go-related programming, branding and marketing initiatives via new grant-making authorization for Events DC, the quasi-public entity that owns and manages the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, among other venues in the District.

If the proposals for go-go funding remain in the budget when it’s finalized later this month, it would be one step forward in a long fight for recognition and equity that go-go advocates have waged in the DC arts scene as well as the political sphere. But supporters aren’t resting easy yet.

In February, go-go reached a major milestone when the DC Council passed legislation making it the city’s official music. That law — signed by Bowser later that month during a celebratory event at Culture House — came with a directive that the mayor “create a plan to support, preserve and archive go-go music and its history.” Advocates thought this would ease funding constraints for go-go, but instead they and some city officials grew frustrated by the lack of a spending plan.

The Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which became independent from mayoral control in October, allocates much of the city’s arts funding. Two of its newly appointed commissioners, Cora Masters Barry and Natalie Hopkinson, have raised concerns over the legal requirement that annually 28% of commission’s grant money must go to the National Capital Arts Cohort (NCAC) — an issue also cited in a May letter signed by 11 go-go artists. The cohort consists of 20 established local theater, dance and museum organizations including Arena Stage, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Building Museum, the Phillips Collection and Step Afrika.

“The mayor and city council passed these two laws … and created this blatant separate-but-equal structure,” Hopkinson, a Howard University professor who co-founded the Don’t Mute DC go-go advocacy movement, said in an interview. “NCAC gets guaranteed money, and go-go gets nothing but ‘recognition.’ … With the NCAC set-aside, you already have every DC arts organization fighting for air to breathe, and to ask the go-go to get in line is not realistic or fair to anyone. The mayor and city council set up this whole Jim Crow legal structure for the arts, so ultimately they are the ones who will have to fix it.”

Lindsey Walton, director of communications for DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, whose office drafted the NCAC funding language, said that “the new funding structure was crafted by the arts community and broadly supported.” She said it makes sense to fund these community anchors, which also receive funding from the federal government’s National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs Grant Program. “The decision to allocate the 28% to NCAC was a policy decision that the arts community believes appropriately balances these large established organizations against half of the overall funding that is available to other smaller artists,” Walton said.

The District’s fiscal year 2020 budget provided between $291,657 and $605,755 to each of the 20 NCAC entities, which have budgets over $1 million each. As a group, the cohort received approximately $8 million of the nearly $25 million that the city allocated in 2020 to arts organizations and individual artists. 

The issue came up frequently at the DC Council’s May 29 budget hearing, which covered a variety of matters, including arts funding for 2021.

“Each of our organizations has been in existence for at least 10 years, has a budget of over $1 million, and is recognized as having a national reputation,” said Paul Tetreault, the director of Ford’s Theatre and chair of the NCAC. But “just because our organizations are well-established and reach large numbers of people does not mean that critical assistance is not needed, particularly during this crisis,” referring to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other cohort members in prepared testimony for the hearing noted that the NCAC contains Step Afrika and GALA Hispanic Theatre — the city’s largest Black and Latinx arts organizations, respectively. Washington Performing Arts said it held three go-go book club sessions in 2019 as well as go-go-related live-music events. The Folger and Dance Place said in nearly identical language that they support go-go funding “through a coordinated intra-agency effort across all of the city’s agencies and departments. With increased funding and support, all groups will continue to benefit from the structure of the arts funding law.”

Ward 5 Council member Kenyan McDuffie, who drafted the law that made go-go DC’s official music, called for the arts commission’s 2021 budget to include a specific amount for go-go. While he supports the NCAC, “we don’t have to pit the programs against one another — we can support both and help the smaller ones.” 

Ward 7 Council member Vincent Gray urged “equity” and said that wards 7 and 8 should receive their fair share of arts funding. 

Chairman Mendelson noted that the mayor is required by law to propose a financial plan for go-go that would involve the commission as well as agencies within the Executive Office of the Mayor, including the Creative Affairs Office and the Office of Cable Television, Film, Music, and Entertainment.

At the hearing, the commission’s acting director, Heran Sereke-Brhan, told Mendelson that she had not heard from any of the mayor’s offices regarding funding for go-go. 

The council has directed the mayor’s office to complete the plan by December, and an administration spokesperson told The DC Line that work is underway. “We are in the process of providing Council with OCTFME’s recommendations to support the heritage and culture of go-go music,” Michael Mitchell of the Office of Cable Television, Film, Music, and Entertainment wrote in an email.

Some members of the arts commission were pointed in their criticism of the funding processes and the NCAC formula.

“What you have is tokenism — minorities serving as tools to maintain the larger cohort’s privileged and elite status,” wrote Masters Barry, wife of former Mayor Marion Barry, in a June 6 letter to her commission colleagues in response to council testimony. “The creation of this consortium is the quintessential example of systemic inequity. It feeds off privilege and power. The forces who lobbied for the establishment of this cohort had the money, political power, lobbyists, and connections to demand the complicity of our legislative body, the Council of the District of Columbia.”

Masters Barry recommended that the commission propose legislation that “eliminates any inherent bias and preferential treatment of privileged entities,” and that it form an equity committee to “review issues of systemic biases and inequities.”

The commission acted quickly in response to the latter: On June 8, chair Kay Kendall announced the formation of a new task force on equity, inclusion and belonging to be helmed by Reggie Lee, chief transformation officer of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group.

Go-go artists such as Anwan “Big G” Glover from Backyard Band, Jas Funk of Rare Essence and Michelle Blackwell of the What? Band have shared their own funding recommendations for elected officials and the commission.

Although they weren’t able to testify at the budget hearing, 11 go-go artists submitted for the record a May 6 open letter to the mayor and council. Demanding funding equity for go-go, they wrote that the 28% set-aside “means that NCAC arts organizations don’t have to compete for public grants as we go-go artists and every other DC arts organizations must.” 

They requested the city instead adopt two recommendations outlined in an April 10 report by Don’t Mute DC: Establish a go-go cohort that would receive a 15% set-aside from the commission’s grant funds; and create a $40 million endowment for grants to go-go performing artists to ensure ongoing funding via the interest earned on the initial investment. Funding, the artists said, could help brand DC’s go-go scene as a tourist destination for music lovers, as Nashville, Austin and New Orleans have done, thereby generating revenue for the city.

“Being the ‘official music of DC’ means supporting policies that ensure that music is heard both in DC and around the world,” the letter states. “Shakespeare was a genius, but he wasn’t from here. Chuck Brown was both, and the new law making go-go the official music honors his legacy. But without making the same financial investments the city has made to other art forms, this honor is an empty symbolic exercise.”

The go-go bands’ financial requests come amid an economic environment in which many businesses, including hospitality-based power brokers, have sought help from the city. A new group called DC2021 — led by The Wharf’s developer, Monty Hoffman, and composed of some of the city’s largest businesses as well as smaller iconic entities like Ben’s Chili Bowl — asked that the mayor and council implement a variety of measures including tax law changes and new borrowing by the city to address the financial concerns of hospitality businesses. While the specific requests were not acted upon, the council last week approved legislation introduced by McDuffie and Ward 6 member Charles Allen to authorize up to $100 million from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to provide eligible businesses with financial assistance to help them recover from the public health emergency.

While debate continues over next year’s budget and calls for equity, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities is wrestling with myriad issues, from its management to how best to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Acting director Sereke-Brhan is the commission’s fourth director in four years. Kendall, its chair, was a longtime board member for the Washington Ballet, one of the NCAC entities that now automatically receives annual funding. The commission’s spokesperson, Jeffrey Scott, says that Kendall’s involvement with the Washington Ballet hasn’t influenced which entities receive direct funding, adding that the commission was not involved in the creation of the NCAC. When full, the commission consists of 18 members appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the council.

Meanwhile, go-go artists are waiting to hear about two rounds of individual grants from the arts commission.

Because of advocacy efforts, go-go was recognized as a specific category in the fiscal year 2021 grant applications, which were due July 10. As with organizational grants, there’s no formula specifying the proportion of the overall funding that go-go artists will receive.

Typically, individual artists can receive grants between $2,500 and $10,000 through the Arts and Humanities Fellowship Program. At the budget hearing, Sereke-Brhan said these grants account for 6.2% of the commission’s budget, totaling $1.5 million. In fiscal year 2020, the commission had 15 categories of grants that went to nonprofit arts organizations or individuals, with the majority of awards being much smaller than those received by NCAC entities.

Some artists are still waiting for grant funds awarded months ago. At an April 30 public commission meeting, a musician testified that she had not received her individual fiscal year 2020 Arts and Humanities Fellowship Program grant, which is usually provided in January. 

Scott told The DC Line that by mid-April the commission had distributed over $14.5 million of the $24.7 million in fiscal year 2020 grants awarded to at least 125 organizations and 272 individuals. He explained that the Office of the Chief Financial Officer disperses payments and that, given its governmentwide responsibilities, “the volume of payment requests into the system can therefore potentially impact the payment processing rate.” He added that any issues in receiving required documents from award recipients can “delay the payment process.”

Artists including singer/guitarist Elena Lacayo of the Latin folk band Elena & Los Fulanos, guitarist Mark Cisneros of garage rockers Des Demonas, and concert pipe organist and adjunct Howard University professor Mickey Thomas Terry told The DC Line that their grant award payments had been delayed despite submitting documentation on time. 

Lacayo said at the April 30 commission meeting that she had received grants in two prior years by January. A commissioner promised to look into her situation, and she had received the money by late May.

Terry told The DC Line that he “was informed that circumstances have changed from former years in terms of the method for processing the funds.” As of July 1, neither Terry nor Cisneros had received their money. “This stuff is totally not accessible for your average person,” Cisneros said of the process.

Also under the microscope is the commission’s ongoing dispersal of $421,000 in National Endowment for the Arts relief funding for local arts organizations and individuals, authorized via the CARES Act. 

Applications were only accepted for one week, which proved controversial. 

“When emergency COVID-19 funding was made available through the NEA Relief Fund, CAH promoted its availability on a first come, first serve basis. CAH did not take into consideration the inherent biases of this approach,” Masters Barry wrote in her June 6 letter to the commission. “Those entities with direct communications pipelines to CAH, with pre-existing capacity, and established infrastructures to do rapid-response were the first in line and received funds. By the time those who needed the funds the most were able to navigate the process, they were at the end of the line and no funds were left.” 

The commission has now posted a list of the organizations and individuals who were approved for emergency funding, but its spokesperson has not responded to inquiries on which were rejected. 

Hopkinson said that her $500,000 request for go-go COVID-19 relief, submitted prior to the March commission meeting, was rejected due to concerns about a possible financial shortfall for the commission. Her attempt during the April meeting to include a provision specifically for go-go artists in the NEA CARES fund was also rejected.

“The DC arts commission is way behind in investing in go-go, and the stakes have only intensified since COVID-19,” said Hopkinson, who was appointed by Kendall in February to chair the commission’s new Go-Go Ad Hoc Committee. “It is less paperwork to funnel money to artists and organizations the agency has always supported, but that is not the equitable thing to do.

“This newly ‘independent’ agency is facing its first crisis, both in terms of budget and in terms of equity. Do you slam the door on everyone who wasn’t already inside?” she continued. “Legally, the agency has wide latitude and the resources to adapt to the historic moment and find a way to rescue DC’s only indigenous art form. The will just needs to be there.”

This post has been updated to correct the name of Mickey Thomas Terry.