Walking through history at the High Desert Museum is a rite of passage for kids in Oregon – starting in the early morning, passing a Northern Paiute shelter and then a fur trader’s camp as the sun comes up, bird calls bubbling as visitors are immersed in the past.

“Spirit of the West,” a permanent exhibit at the Bend museum, is just one of the cultural experiences that define Oregon. Whether it’s the Oregon Symphony playing Handel’s “Messiah” over the holidays, Literary Arts filling the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for an in-person experience with a bestselling author, or the Oregon Shakespeare Festival delighting busloads of teenagers in the spring, Oregon is rich in cultural institutions.

And yet, right now, the future of many of those institutions hangs in the balance.

Most arts groups shut down completely during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. No kids explored Oregon’s history first-hand or experienced theater outdoors in an Elizabethan Theatre. No one saw their favorite author in person. Everyone was home, and museums, concert halls and theaters were quiet.

But, to make sure it was a temporary loss, local, state and federal officials provided funding for Oregon’s dormant arts organizations. With that funding, many of those organizations stayed open, virtually at least, providing programming online and keeping staff employed. When it was safe, they reopened buildings to smaller, more tentative audiences, with safety precautions in place that often limited audience size.

Now, many nonprofit arts organizations in Oregon – and throughout the country – are reporting that audience numbers still are not back to where they were in 2019. At the same time, emergency state and federal funding has nearly evaporated, and much of the annual arts funding that organizations expected from the state wasn’t approved by the Oregon Legislature this year.

According to a report from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Oregon already ranks 41st in state arts funding per capita, just $0.51 per person, but that budget snub still shocked many people involved in the arts.

All this has forced arts groups to put capital improvement projects on hold, scale back their seasons, or reduce the number of performances to cut costs. In some cases, organizations have been forced to suspend shows or entire seasons, which means lower, or no, ticket sales.

According to a study from Americans for the Arts, Oregonians say they support the arts, and the arts fuel parts of the state’s economy, drawing people to downtown Portland, Ashland, Bend and more. But without help, some arts organizations worry they might not survive the next couple of years.

Ginger Savage is the executive director of Crossroads Carnegie Arts Center in Baker City and a board member for the Cultural Advocacy Coalition of Oregon, a non-partisan nonprofit arts advocacy group that lobbies policymakers in Salem.

Savage has a broad understanding of arts in Oregon, from rural centers like the one she runs to the state’s “anchor arts organizations,” which include the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the High Desert Museum, the Portland Art Museum, Portland Opera, Portland Center Stage, Oregon Ballet Theatre and the Oregon Symphony.

“Those big bedrock cultural attractions,” Savage said, “they really are the center of that arts ecology. And if they begin to weaken or crumble, the rippling effect is just ridiculous.”

Take the Shakespeare Festival, she said. The festival employs many people who do lights, sound, costumes and makeup. They work for the Shakespeare Festival, but they also end up working for other, smaller arts organizations in the area, too.

If the Shakespeare Festival fails and those people leave town, the shock wave would reverberate through all of Southern Oregon. And that’s just one example of many.

A CHANGE IN AUDIENCES

A national study on the economic and social impact of nonprofit arts and culture organizations from Americans for the Arts reported that the arts in Oregon generated $829 million in “economic impact” in 2022.

The same report found that 89.3% of respondents to surveys collected from attendees at nonprofit arts and culture events between May 2022 and June 2023 agreed with the statement, “This activity or venue is inspiring a sense of pride in this neighborhood or community.”

But, while sentiment remains positive, most arts organizations are struggling to get audiences back to pre-pandemic levels.

And in Portland, there’s a specific challenge to organizations hoping to get people to shows downtown: safety.

Downtown Portland has gained a reputation in recent years as an unsafe place. On some blocks, the sale and use of fentanyl happens in broad daylight on sidewalks once full of office workers, many of whom haven’t returned to downtown buildings.

According to Portland city commissioner and arts liaison Dan Ryan, arts patrons are having bad experiences when they come downtown.

“If you come back to your car having broken windows, you don’t want to come back,” Ryan said. “The poisonous drugs on our streets, causing a humanitarian crisis that we’ve never seen before at this level, is having an impact on everything in our city. And it’s definitely damaging to our arts organizations.”

But even in places where safety isn’t a concern, many in the arts report that audience behavior has changed, making people more likely to see a show they find comforting instead of a more challenging or esoteric work. Some of the change in attitude predates the pandemic but may have been exacerbated by it, and it is apparent in the shift away from subscriptions.

Arts subscriptions have been trending downward for many Oregon groups.

“We are finding, along with our peers, that more people are leaning towards single-ticket purchases over the full-season subscription they were choosing in the past,” said Hilary Butler, Portland Baroque Orchestra’s executive director.

“People are being much more selective about when and if they go out to patronize the arts,” Butler said. “They are more risk-averse and it’s having a notable ripple effect in the industry.”

While Taylor Swift sells out arenas and stadiums globally and New York’s Broadway has nearly come back to full force, across the country regional theater companies have struggled to regain audiences post-pandemic, frequently citing the same issues that Oregon arts groups have identified: inflation, high labor costs, safety concerns and audiences’ desire to be entertained instead of educated.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a prime example. During several difficult years marred by wildfires and a global pandemic, the festival also came under fire for choices made by artistic director Nataki Garrett.

Garrett took over the festival in 2019 and was the festival’s first Black female artistic director. Beyond the wildfires, pandemic, and reported racist harassment that she endured during her time in that role, she was also criticized for her didactic choice of plays and diverse casting.

Going into the 2023 season, the festival had already shortened the season and reduced the number of plays. In 2019, the season featured 11 plays and in 2023, only five.

Garrett left the festival at the beginning of the 2023 season, but before the season began it appeared to be in danger of not happening at all. In April, the festival announced a campaign to raise $2.5 million to “save” the season and simultaneously suspended planning for 2024 as it sought to stabilize its finances.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival was able to go on, however, and finished out a successful season with crowd-pleasing shows like “Romeo and Juliet” and “Rent.”

“Prior to the pandemic, it was common for OSF to draw 380,000 to 400,000 tickets per season,” interim executive director Tyler Hokama said. “In 2023, we recovered just under 40% of these numbers, though we saw double-digit growth compared to 2022.”

Hokama believes things are trending in the right direction and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival already has another crowd-pleasing season on the horizon, featuring “Macbeth,” “Jane Eyre,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Lizard Boy,” a musical featuring dragons and the gay dating app Grindr.

“OSF has a robust 10-production lineup prepared for next year,” Hokama said, “and we are hopeful about seeing audiences return again to our destination theater.”

But while many arts organizations are optimistic that audiences will return, it hasn’t happened yet in a big way. Only a few report that audiences have returned to 2019 numbers.

“We are seeing audiences for Broadway and most commercial shows at or above pre-COVID levels,” said Robyn Williams, executive director for Portland’5.

Portland’5 is an organization operated by the tri-county Metro government that runs venues owned by the City of Portland. They operate some of the biggest venues in the city, including the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the Oregon Symphony practices and performs, and Keller Auditorium, home to touring musicals. The Keller could be remodeled or completely rebuilt in the coming years.

“Attendance for local nonprofit organizations has been slower to recover,” Williams said. “Especially if they have an aging audience and were starting to see some audience decline pre-COVID.”

Even theaters that can sometimes sell out shows haven’t been able to build their audience numbers to pre-pandemic levels. Broadway Rose Theatre Company in Tigard, which stages popular musicals, still isn’t selling as many tickets as it did in 2019.

According to marketing director Alan Anderson and development manager Chelsea Curto, in 2019 the theater sold 41,375 tickets. They have slowly built back after a complete shutdown in 2020, and anticipate selling more than 35,000 tickets by the end of this year.

The Oregonian/OregonLive reached out to many arts organizations across the state and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about business in the wake of the pandemic. Of the 16 organizations that replied, only three reported that they are back to or above pre-pandemic audience levels.

Two of the organizations – Friends of Noise and Ten Fifteen Productions – report that they are back to pre-pandemic audiences, but, they noted, they were just starting out when COVID hit.

Only one older organization, the Eugene Ballet, has substantially grown its audience since 2019. According to executive director Josh Neckels, the company has had to increase productions to bring back audiences in enough numbers to make that happen.

“The increase in productions has also opened the opportunity for world premiere collaborations,” Neckels said.

In 2024, the ballet will put on Artistic Director Toni Pimble’s full-length “Peter Pan” featuring a world premiere commissioned score by Oregon composer Kenji Bunch, Neckels said.

At the same time ticket sales are down, some organizations report that support from major donors is also slipping away, which could be part of a national trend. In 2022, charitable giving in the U.S. decreased according to a Giving USA report released earlier this year.

“Several large foundations have moved out of the arts sector altogether over the past five to 10 years,” said Nick Fenster, managing director and monthly giving circle donor for Northwest Children’s Theater and School. “I can count the remaining funders that make sizable grants to arts organizations on one hand without using all my fingers.”

ANCHORS IN TROUBLE

The Oregon Symphony is a case study of how one of the state’s anchor arts organizations is struggling to maintain stability in the wake of COVID-19.

Before the pandemic, Scott Showalter, the former CEO and now an executive adviser of the Oregon Symphony, said that the symphony had a budget that was roughly 55% supplied by ticket revenue and 45% by donations.

During the pandemic, that shifted to 100% donations and the symphony went dark for 18 months.

“That first year back, the ‘21/’22 season, it was still rocky,” Showalter said.

“Today, we’re probably 60% donations and 40% ticket revenue,” he added. “We want to get back to a kind of equilibrium, a little closer to where we were before, where a majority was coming from earned revenue because our community really likes and supports what it is that we do.”

But, as the symphony tries to get back to that equilibrium, which Showalter expects to take at least three more years, the ground has shifted.

“Inflation has gone through the roof,” he said.

At the same time, the costs of the venue the symphony uses, the government-owned Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall have ballooned, and a local arts tax that was meant to buoy arts organizations in Portland hasn’t helped.

“Today we receive 75% less than we did before the arts tax was implemented,” Showalter said.

That tax, a fee paid by most Portland residents, was first collected in 2013. Most of that money goes to arts education in schools. What’s left over is distributed through the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

According to Commissioner Ryan, the Regional Arts and Culture Council sets percentages for each organization.

“They did lower the percentage to the larger arts organizations, like the symphony,” Ryan said.

According to Ryan, the Regional Arts and Culture Council made that decision before he was part of the city council. While he wasn’t there when that decision was made, he believes it was made to increase the amount of money going to emerging arts organizations in the city.

The Regional Arts and Culture Council has recently come under fire from many, including Ryan, for a lack of transparency.

“Unfortunately, we have not found RACC to be a collaborative partner, despite the city’s funding almost 80% of RACC’s annual budget,” wrote Ryan in an editorial for The Oregonian in August.

“Specifically,” Ryan wrote, “RACC has not provided requested financial data about overhead expenses or complete demographic information about staff, board and other decision makers. RACC has declined to raise money to support the city’s arts priorities, and routinely cancels meetings designed to resolve contract agreements. It has not demonstrated how it is using public funds or the impact of such funding.”

Over the summer, in his role as arts liaison, Ryan said, “I made a decision, with the support of the entire city council, to not renew them as our sole source contractor.”

In October, the council quietly let its executive director go following an opaque investigation.

As the amount the symphony receives from the city has diminished, fees charged to the symphony for using the city-owned Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall have gone up.

Those fees include rent, which Showalter called “relatively modest,” but also everything else, from paying to use the HVAC system, to “user fees” for the hall, to custodial services, to security to even access the symphony’s own library.

According to the symphony, in 2016 the organization received about $704,000 from the city and paid about $896,000 for use of the Schnitzer. Those numbers steadily diverged. In 2022, they received $175,000 from the city and were charged $1.49 million in rent and fees.

For the symphony, rebuilding its audience to pre-pandemic levels and the ticket sales that come along with that, have been slow.

“Post-pandemic, starting in the ‘21/’22 season, attendance for Oregon Symphony’s classical concerts have declined by close to 20%,” said Russell Kelban, vice president for marketing and strategic engagement for the symphony.

Showalter said while some visitors were still worried about catching COVID, that wasn’t the main deterrent.

“Downtown safety is the number one concern still for our patrons,” he said.

But, said Showalter, nonprofits and even city leaders can’t directly control COVID outbreaks or violence and drug use downtown.

“This,” he said, pointing at a graph that showed the widening delta between city funding and city fees, “we can directly control. This is what I’m pointing out to everyone who will listen, that this is crippling.”

MISSING STATE FUNDING

Bend’s High Desert Museum has been lucky. Unlike many other organizations across the state, the museum has almost returned to pre-pandemic visitor levels. But it was also one of the organizations left in the lurch when the Oregon Legislature failed to fully fund proposed arts capital projects during the 2023 session.

The High Desert Museum was hoping to receive $2 million to construct a new wing as a part of a group of 16 arts and culture projects submitted by the Cultural Advocacy Coalition of Oregon to the Legislature.

The year 2023 was the first time since the Cultural Advocacy Coalition of Oregon began putting forward annual lists of projects in 2013, including the years during the COVID pandemic, that Oregon didn’t fully fund the list.

According to Amanda Beitel, the state’s legislative fiscal officer, the total amount the state budgeted for arts in the 2023-25 budget was not substantially different than in previous years.

“Outside of one-time funding related to the pandemic in the 2019-21 and 2021-23 biennial,” Beitel said, “the Legislature didn’t reduce funding for the Oregon Arts Commission or Oregon Cultural Trust in the 2023-25 biennium, including funding that supports grants to arts and cultural organizations.”

Beitel noted that while the amount approved for capital projects, about $4 million, was less than in previous budgets, the state added an additional $5.6 million for grants to small arts and cultural venues.

But for big organizations expecting continued pandemic relief and a major investment in their capital projects, the fact that the Legislature didn’t fund all of the Cultural Advocacy Coalition’s projects was a shock.

“It felt extreme,” said Dana Whitelaw, executive director of the High Desert Museum.

Savage, the Cultural Advocacy Coalition of Oregon board member, said the coalition was confident about what they were asking from this legislative session.

Along with the slate of major initiatives that they believed the state should fund, she said, “We also were asking for some pandemic relief because arts and culture has been slower than every other part of the sector to return.”

The Cultural Advocacy Coalition of Oregon has an exhaustive process, Savage said, to vet capital projects for arts organizations throughout the state to decide which to include in the Cultural Resource Economic Fund. A committee from the coalition looks through “multiple layers of applications,” she said.

After reviewing these applications and budgets and making sure they are well distributed geographically and by discipline, Savage said, “We put forth a slate. And every time we’ve done that, with the exception of this year, that slate has been accepted.”

Only two of the 16 capital projects were funded, the Native Arts and Culture Foundation and Literary Arts, both in Portland.

The list of capital projects that weren’t funded by the state includes cultural organizations across Oregon hoping to build arts infrastructure in their communities – the Clatsop County Historical Society with the Oregon Film Museum in Astoria, Black United Fund in Portland, The Friends of the Oregon Chateau and Caves in Cave Junction and more.

But that wasn’t all that wasn’t funded. There was no additional pandemic relief money for arts and culture nonprofits either.

For organizations still struggling to get back to full strength, the effect was devastating. Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre cited the failure of the recovery funding bill as the main reason it had to suspend its 2023-24 season.

Artists Repertory Theatre is one of the many organizations that responded to The Oregonian/OregonLive’s questionnaire and said its mix of revenue sources had dramatically shifted since the pandemic.

According to Leslie Crandell Dawes, communications and marketing director, ticket sales accounted for about 50% of revenue during the 2018-19 season. During the 2022-23 season, that amount was down to about 10%.

Today, Crandell Dawes said, around 90% of revenue comes from donations.

Artists Repertory Theatre has another issue to contend with. Before the pandemic began, the theater started the process of renovating its building in Southwest Portland. That project has now moved into the construction phase, even as the theater suspended its next season, cut its artistic director and laid off employees.

“Sustaining financial stability and growth while simultaneously producing work after a season of not doing so, and advancing a capital campaign to its final stage for a building renovation” are major concerns for the theater going forward, Crandell Dawes said.

But, she said, the theater is hopeful that the renovated building, when done, will be an asset to the company and to those in the wider community “in need of a performance venue.”

Rep. Rob Nosse, a champion of the arts in the Legislature who represents parts of Northeast and Southeast Portland, thinks some of the problem is a lack of understanding about the economic and cultural impact of the arts.

“The bottom line,” Nosse said, “is that at some point in the legislative process, legislators who are more powerful than me have to make decisions about what gets paid for.”

“Candidly,” Nosse said, “I think some of them, looking at this are like, ‘Hey, given all the things that are challenging in this state, this feels a little extra, and not as important.’”

Multiple people cited the lack of understanding about the value of arts, economically and socially, for the state as a key issue to getting the necessary funding to keep organizations running through this bumpy post-pandemic landscape.

“Arts and culture are a significant part of the Oregon economy, representing a sector that is 3.4% of the state’s GDP,” said Hokama, interim executive director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. “Our sector not only provides over 60,000 jobs in the state, but are also often a cornerstone for other industries like tourism.”

But arts, said Nosse, “don’t have the sort of moral and political cachet that school funding, university funding, roads, bridges and forestry has.”

For Portland-area Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, co-chair of the state’s Ways and Means Committee, the answer to why the state did not fund all of the capital art projects put forth in 2023 is clear. It had a different and urgent priority, she said: housing.

“There is general strong support for the arts in the Legislature,” Steiner said. “We understand the importance of the arts to Oregonians’ well-being and to our economy.”

At the same time, she said, Oregon is in the midst of a housing crisis and the Legislature decided to invest in projects that would maintain existing infrastructure to keep homes habitable or create infrastructure that would support future development.

“We made a decision as a Legislature to primarily prioritize funding for housing-related things, for infrastructure and for economic development other than arts,” Steiner said. “We just did not fund a lot of arts or sports.”

The reason the Legislature had to focus so heavily on housing, she said, is also one of the reasons arts organizations are struggling: inflation has caused the costs of everything to go up, including building, whether it’s a new home or a new museum wing.

But, many people hope that the state can come up with a way to both fund urgent needs and support the arts.

Meanwhile, several Portland-area theaters have joined together for the “Go See a Play” campaign. Commissioner Ryan is hoping to evangelize for the arts by explaining how important it is for the economy and how many people it can bring into downtown.

“I think arts is going to lead the way,” Ryan said.

And Gov. Tina Kotek has formed a “Central City Task Force,” to revitalize downtown. That task force issued recommendations on Monday. While the focus of those recommendations was predominantly drugs and crime, they also included supporting public art, holding more events downtown and a long-term goal of realizing the potential of downtown as a tourist destination.

“We want to have reasons that people choose to come downtown,” said Nolan Lienhart, principal and director of planning and urban design at ZGF Architects, who is the chair of the value proposition committee on the task force and also a member of the Oregon Ballet Theatre Board of Trustees.

When people come for a show, Lienhart said, “at least some of them go out to dinner, pay for parking. It’s an undisputedly good thing for downtown.”

Nosse plans to bring the arts funding question back to his peers in Salem early next year. He will once again ask them to fund the full slate of capital improvement projects in towns like Grants Pass, John Day, Bend, Rainier and Cave Junction. He will ask for over $5 million to support the seven anchor organizations – Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the High Desert Museum, the Portland Art Museum, Portland Opera, Portland Center Stage, Oregon Ballet Theatre and the Oregon Symphony.

And, he will ask for $13 million in continuing COVID relief funding.

“Part of life is being able to experience the arts,” Nosse said. “It’s part of what’s wonderful about humanity.”

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— Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052; [email protected]; @lizzzyacker

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