Artober all around us

The bulk of Chico’s arts organizations were all in one spot at the same time, facing each other along opposite sides of the promenade in front of the downtown municipal building. At around 10 a.m., the last banquet tables and canopies were snapped into place, and the mood was a bit jittery. In addition to the displays of Chico’s arts makers and shakers, last weekend’s Artoberfest kick-off featured live community theater performances, a children’s choir concert, the Mayor’s Arts Awards and the debut of the event that much of the arts community has been talking about: Chico Palio.

It was this Palio—the fake horse race based on the centuries-old real horse race that takes place every summer in Siena, Italy—that had been dogged by skeptical chatter from local artists and journalists (many of whom were in attendance) since it was first announced: Will they be able to pull it off? Is this the thing for Chico? Are these people crazy?

<Actually, it had probably been more like, “Is Debra Lucero crazy?”</p>

Lucero is the director of Friends of the Arts, the arts marketing group that was, along with design firm Learning Change, awarded $50,000 by the city (up from $10,000 last year) to market this month under the banner of Artoberfest. Lucero is the one who took the Palio idea, presented to the Arts Commission by local bicycling advocate Ed McLaughlin, and decided it was just the type of arts-related activity to anchor her marketing campaign’s kick-off event. She was even able to whip up a quick grant proposal to the California Arts Council and received $10,000 to produce the whole Palio shebang.

But now she had to sell two events. Artoberfest was just starting to catch on, and this new thing was coming in as well, and questions of whether all this campaigning was the right path to follow at this stage in the city’s arts life were at the center of discussions.

Of course, any conversation on the state of the arts in Chico starts with travel writer John Villani’s designation of our cozy hamlet as one of the Top 100 Arts Towns in America—the 10th Best Small Art Town, his book boasts. Lucero is the one who originally arranged for Villani to visit, and she served as his tour guide to art all around Butte County.

Not a lot has changed since Villani first visited five years ago. Chico’s strengths and weakness remain the same. There is still loads of great art from every discipline (see map, page 20). It’s still a relaxed and inspiring natural environment in which to create and make a life for oneself. And it’s still fairly impossible to make a living being an artist without selling your work outside of Chico.

The one dynamic that has been changing is that the city, the Arts Commission and the Chamber of Commerce, with a lot of energy provided by Lucero, have made a commitment to cultural tourism, or spending money to market Chico as an arts destination.

The hyper-focused Lucero is a woman of many trades. Friends of the Arts is her one-woman show, but she’s also working as the director of the Butte County Cultural Tourism Project. She’s a past member of the Arts Commission and currently sits on the boards of directors of both the Janet Turner Print Museum and the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Association.

Being groomed by a combination of her work experience and growing up in Corning and Chico in an arts-focused household has steadily sharpened an aggressive vision for what she sees as the best way to improve the state of Chico’s arts.

“My goal is to create a kickoff that is going to be the No. 1 arts festival in the country in 10 years,” Lucero said.

If Artoberfest—and within that, the wealth of Chico’s arts community (including Chico Palio)—is going to succeed to that degree, it’s probably not such bad thing to bring a little madness to the proceedings. It could be argued that being a little crazy, or at least trying to do something unique despite the chance of its not being so popular, is the perfect mindset for creating a buzz about Artoberfest.

We need it. That’s the basic argument for funding the arts, right? Art is a necessary part of a civilized society. A kid involved in arts learns better. Community identity is bolstered by public art. Art is good for us—it says so in the mission statement of the Chico Arts Commission: “Excellence in the arts is a reflection of the health and quality of life in a community.”

You wouldn’t know it was such an important asset by looking at California’s budget, however. This state has the largest arts industry in the country (with 89,719 arts-related businesses, according to a 2004 report by the California Arts Council), and it spent only about $2 million, or 6 cents per person, on the arts (the lowest in the nation for two years running).

The art world is changing its approach, though, and the trend now is toward taking the “cultural tourism” stance when seeking funds, where investments in marketing arts destinations can reap significant rewards.

In the city of San Diego, for example, efforts to pump up cultural tourism amounted to investing more than $7 million in 86 arts groups over a two-year period. A joint report by the city’s Commission for Arts and Culture and the San Diego Regional Arts and Culture Coalition showed that the return on the investment was nearly $800 million being pumped back into the local economy over the same time period by the funded groups collectively. About 1.6 million tickets to arts events were sold to out-of-town visitors in 2005 alone. San Diego is, of course, a much higher-profile and nonrural destination than Chico, but the effect of investing in arts is worth noting.

In Chico, cultural tourism is the major reason for the Artoberfest season.

“Arts and culture are no different than any other form of economic development,” said Lucero. “We went to the city and said, ‘If you’re going to invest TOT [Transit Occupancy Tax] dollars into these groups, why not help them market themselves? Your dollars are going to go that much further.’ “

Bringing up this topic of cultural tourism at Artoberfest headquarters—which on an early Tuesday morning is around the dining room table of Lucero’s suburban home—is a sure way to get an arts marketer’s blood pumping.

“Artists are not used to being seen in that light,” she explained, “[but] if rice farmers can get subsidies, why can’t art? If Chico’s going to spend money to keep people away at Halloween, how much more money should they spend to bring people here to enjoy arts and culture?”

To its credit, the city is spending a little more money on arts than it used to (now about $100 per person; see chart, page 18), with the focus of that additional money being on marketing. For the three years leading up to this year’s Artoberfest, the Chamber of Commerce led the charge, receiving approximately $300,000 from the city’s General Fund to market Chico as an arts destination. There was a campaign ("Art, It’s in Our Nature"), trade shows, state fairs and a Web site at www.chicoart.com, which started off looking good but is no longer updated and appears to have been abandoned.

According to Mary Gardner, the city’s longtime art projects coordinator, one benefit of the Chamber’s efforts was gaining a better understanding of what kind of money was needed to market an event like Artoberfest, which led to the increase to $50,000 for Friends of the Arts/Learning Change this year. According to Lucero, $35,000 went to Learning Change for all design matters: banners, posters, magnets, advertising (print, radio, television), 80,000 programs, T-shirts, temporary tattoos and development of the Artoberfest.org site. The remaining $15,000 went to Friends of the Arts (Farmers Market promos, the kick-off event, etc.).

“We know it should be respected as economic development,” Gardner said about the idea of marketing local arts.

And when asked whether the Artoberfest efforts might financially benefit local artists, Gardner offered, “I think it could be one of the answers. I think the City Council thinks it believes it’s one of the answers. Absolutely, the potential for local artists to reap benefits is there. … For artists to make a living, there needs to be an influx of checkbooks from other areas—you have to get out there in the world, or you bring the world to you.”

There’s been a drastic improvement from year one to year two of Artoberfest, if for no other reason than the artists and arts organizations are “on board” with the concept. The extra attention to artist outreach and community involvement has given the package a less confusing face.

“Last year it was the idea of trying to pull together all the different arts organizations and helping them to understand this,” explained Lucero, “because they looked at it like, ‘What are you really offering here? All you’re doing is slapping an overall marketing umbrella on it. Big deal.’ “

To which she responded with the analogy: “What’s Durham? It’s just a collection of houses out there. But once you put Durham as a name, then all of a sudden there’s something there. It’s the same with Artoberfest.

“I look at all that stuff, and I always think, ‘We do have unbelievable artists here. We have musicians. We have visual artists here. People come here because they like it here. We have successful ingredients here. It’s up to the local folks for the vision. We can go a million different ways. I mean, 5,000 people show up to watch airplanes [at the airshow].”

For those who’ve yet to read Villani’s book, his assessment of arts in Chico is pretty spot-on.

“Welcome to Chico, an unpretentious and increasingly popular release valve for Bay Area artists who are tired of being overcharged for their loft digs.”

His list of arts “essentials” is brief but representative: Open Studios Tour, Chico Performances, Blue Room, Chico Art Center, 1078 Gallery, Janet Turner Print Gallery. (He does miss the gritty stuff—the local freaks and musicians who dance under the moon at the Serenity Center or destroy the carpet at punk rock house shows.)

The most refreshing aspect of the Chico entry is Villani’s recognition of one of the bigger issues: “To live here as an artist is to accept the challenge of running one’s life as a business, creating art that’s largely sold in other places.” There’s even a quote about the local market from one of Chico’s art glass masters, Rick Satava: “Artists here can’t depend on the local economy to keep them going.”

For locals, this conclusion is nothing new. And most agree that out-of-control housing prices have made living cheap and making art all day in funky, chilled-out Chico a reality that belongs to a different generation.

“The artists that are ‘making it’ here are selling outside this area,” said local muralist and sign maker Gregg Payne. “Most of the others are subsidized by family, teaching or other jobs. I am only getting by because I do so many different kinds of art and my living overhead is so low.”

Payne is also one of the city’s arts commissioners, and though he’s one of a handful of Chico artists able to piece together a living doing public and privately contracted art and design, he still sees a lot of problems for local artists when it comes to the public art process. While mostly expressing frustrations with the way public art policies are carried out by the commission he sits on, he also says when it comes to Artoberfest, the festival alone isn’t going to save the day.

“We need more independent creative participation of the artists and less politics,” Payne offered. “To truly support the arts would be to demand better performance, better use of the small amount of available funds, and more opportunities for local artists.”

Payne also wishes that the arts marketing folks would let the top art town distinction just die—"I find it kind of embarrassing that they still keep crowing about it.”

“We made such a big deal about it locally,” Lucero admits, a little frustrated that due to publisher problems the volume with Chico in it took three years to arrive after being announced.

Lucero is still proud of the notice, and she’s smart enough to know a marketing hook isn’t something to take lightly. She also didn’t take Villani’s suggestion that “now Chico needs a festival” lightly, going straight to one of the biggest festival success stories for her blueprint.

“For Artoberfest, the vision that I have is one that I really took from the Garlic Festival. Gilroy is about as far off the beaten path and about as hot-as-hell a place as you can imagine, and they have a festival in August, and they draw 500,000 people to this thing now. … There are 60 nonprofit organizations that meet their annual budget with that event. In 28 years, that event has given $7 million back to the nonprofit groups.”

This is Chico, and sometimes new things are not too easily embraced. But Lucero might be onto something when she said that Chico has a real “pioneer spirit,” and sometimes in forging our own paths we forget to come back together.

Chico Palio actually exceeded all expectations. Once the real-life horses began prancing around the parking lot in preparation for the presentation of the flags, the mood lightened and the festivities really warmed up.

The centerpiece of the event, which included musical performances by the Alliance of Chico Theatres and the presence of the most respected arts organizations in town, was the assembled homemade horses. The race was over in a blink, but the inventive designs lingered: The multicolored Paliodrome (Palio + palimdrome) horse with two heads pointing in opposite directions won the design prize, and the full-sized Pokey horse with the Gumby brand also drew raves.

Local painter and director of Community Collaborative for Youth’s Open Arts program Cindy Schildhauer was there to root for CCY’s horse, and her succinct reaction summed up a common thought process for the day: “I thought it would be a dud. I was surprised.”

It’s probably too soon to predict to what extent Artoberfest and Chico Palio will take off. Chico isn’t short on creativity, so if the artists and arts organizations can keep increasing their involvement, both in their own endeavors and by adding their skills to the horse and flag designs, Chico just might be onto something.

Lucero said that next year she wants to really play off the neighborhood aspect that is so crucial to Siena’s Palio and have artists assigned to paint the flags for the different neighborhoods. “It’s a process,” she said.

As the booths, horses and fake horses were quickly torn down at 2 p.m. on the dot, "The Hands" measured the busy scene at one end of the plaza, and a frame began to settle around a picture of possibility. There were some intriguing colors—more than a few expressive strokes. It will be interesting to see how the work evolves.