Being a performing artist can be a tough way to make a living. Running a small performing arts company can be even tougher. To make that journey a little less choppy, the leaders of a dozen small, mostly performing arts organizations in the city have joined forces to help foster financial and professional support. Dubbed
Being a performing artist can be a tough way to make a living.
Running a small performing arts company can be even tougher.
To make that journey a little less choppy, the leaders of a dozen small, mostly performing arts organizations in the city have joined forces to help foster financial and professional support.
Dubbed the Small Arts & Culture Cohort (SMAC for short) the group is comprised of: choral ensemble Aperi Animam; theater company The Constructivists, DanceCircus; live storytelling nonprofit Ex Fabula; Ko-Thi Dance Company; Milwaukee Opera Theatre; Pink Umbrella Theater; Quasimondo Physical Theatre; WoLF Studios MKE; Walker's Point Center for the Arts; ArtWorks for Milwaukee and CAPITA (City at Peace in the Arts), which offers African dance and drumming classes and performances to local families and youth.
All but three of the entities – ArtWorks for Milwaukee, which develops arts internships for teens, WoLF Studios, a private business with a nonprofit offshoot working to develop young artists, and visual arts organization Walkers Point Center for the Arts – are nonprofit performing arts entities.
The thing all of the groups have in common is that they are small organizations, most have only one paid full-or-part-time employee, and all have an annual budget of less than $300,000.
First convened in April 2020 by Mac Antigua and David Lee, formerly of Imagine MKE, the cohort began as a way to determine how the arts advocacy group might be able to help the organizations weather pandemic shutdowns. But it soon grew into something more.
As time passed, the group members soon realized that what they needed most was each other, explains Katie Cummings, executive director of Pink Umbrella, a small theater that works with people with disabilities.
The group soon started talking about how they could support one another. Those conversations eventually grew into a plan to work together to raise $945,000 over the next three years – enough for each organization to collect $75,000 with about $45,000 set aside for marketing.
Once the last disbursement of funds goes out in July 2026, the plan is to pass the cohort model onto another 12 small arts organizations in the area.
A healthy start
The inaugural cohort only began accepting donations in May 2023, and so far, it has raised $198,030 via larger donations from patrons and foundations as well as smaller donations via an online fundraising page. This first of six bi-annual fund disbursements went out this past week – giving each organization $6,931 to put toward the project or support service of their choosing.
Members have been instructed to not use those funds to support their organizations’ existing operating budget – to pay existing staff or debt for example – but to provide what Cummings calls “wish money.”
For a lot of the groups that “wish money” will likely go toward funding a part-time support position that can handle administrative and development tasks, giving executive and artistic directors within the organizations more time to work on supporting or developing artistic projects. For others it will mean hiring more teachers, or providing better or more compensation to the artists they work with, hiring more artists and teachers or offering more programming.
[caption id="attachment_583969" align="alignleft" width="300"] Katie Cummings[/caption]
The hope is that the effort can help address – at least in the short term – one of the biggest challenges for small arts organizations: a lack of reliable funding that often leads to a lack of financial stability.
“This money is a dream. It’s a wish. It’s a hope. And it is, on the whole, funding that will be able to be used to expand programming, in whatever fashion that looks like for each company. It is not to fill the pocket of one executive director,” Cummings said. “For us, I can tell you that the focus is on how we can get our programming to more people. Maybe that means a part-time person, maybe that means hiring more teachers, maybe that means offering more programming for free to the community.”
[caption id="attachment_583968" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Performers with Pink Umbrella Theater Co. share a laugh (submitted photo)[/caption]
Another way
While the performing arts organizations in the cohort can qualify for grant funding through the United Performing Arts Fund’s affiliate program, there is no guarantee that they – like UPAF’s 14 member organizations – will receive funding from UPAF each year. The largest amount an affiliate program can receive from UPAF each year is $15,000.
UPAF raised roughly $10.6 million last year, according to its 2023 Annual Impact Report. Of that money, just over $6.36 million went to its 14 member organizations, with $185,000 being split among the 41 affiliates that did receive money that year. Another $413,500 went toward grants for educational and outreach programs offered by UPAF members and affiliates.
Two of SMAC’s 12 members did receive UPAF funding in 2023. Aperi Animam received a $1,500 grant through the affiliate program. Milwaukee Opera Theatre received a $5,500 grant.
Cummings acknowledges that funding, noting that Pink Umbrella too has received UPAF grants in the past.
The problem, she said, is that UPAF doesn’t provide to smaller groups the same kind of stabilizing annual funding that it does to larger organizations like The Milwaukee Rep and The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, which each received more than $1 million from UPAF in 2023.
“I think UPAF serves a tremendous purpose, but I am old enough to remember, that the original model for them was to ensure that Milwaukee always had an opera, a symphony, a ballet, a theater, and a youth theater. And they are doing the work to expand and open their support to other organizations, but I also know that most of the smaller groups don’t see a lot of increases in their funding from year to year. That is just the way UPAF works and that’s OK,” Cummings said. “But we’re just asking: Does Milwaukee only have one option for funding the arts?”
Additionally, UPAF typically only funds affiliate groups that pay most of their artists and teaching staff. For some smaller groups that work with a lot of volunteers, and children, and are operating on shoestring budgets, that’s not always possible, Cummings said.
“A lot of the smaller arts organizations don’t pay their artists but that doesn’t mean their work isn’t as valuable, or necessary or needed, especially if they are working with underserved youth,” she said. “CAPITA, for instance, who works with a lot of youth (and doesn’t require auditions), doesn’t pay anyone to perform.”
There’s also plenty of misunderstanding in the arts community, and among some donors, about which arts groups receive funding from UPAF each year, Cummings said.
“At nearly every presentation we’ve done, people have said, ‘well, why don’t you just get money from UPAF, and our response, is well… Some of us can get funding from UPAF, but they have rules for who they fund,’” she said.
Supporting each other
But SMAC isn’t just about providing sustainable funding to cohort members, it’s also about creating a collaborative, supportive environment that can help those groups to grow and thrive, said Brian Rott, a cohort member, and the executive director of Quasimondo Physical Theater in Milwaukee.
“It’s trying to create a culture of collaboration and equity and nurturing young companies to become the anchor arts organizations in Milwaukee,” Rott said.
Quasimondo plans to use its funds to eventually hire a part-time development staff person.
“At this point, I'm doing most of the fundraising, so it's huge to be able to pay someone part-time to do donor outreach and to write grants and to take care of a lot of the necessary measures that go into development,” Rott said.
[caption id="attachment_583970" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Quasimondo Physical Theatre's performance of Kamikaze Cutesauce. (submitted photo)[/caption]
Support is also critical, say group members, when it comes to supporting a diverse mix of voices in the arts community. Part of the reason that SMAC’s membership includes three groups that aren’t full-time performance arts organizations – ArtWorks for Milwaukee, WoLF Studios and Walkers Point Center for the Arts – is because the group wanted to make sure to mirror the racial makeup of the city. Walkers Point Center for the Arts, which is a Hispanic-led organization, was asked to join because SMAC initially didn’t have representation from the Hispanic community.
“Art is Art, the current model in Milwaukee focuses on performing arts, and we wanted to acknowledge other art forms,” Cummings said.
For Ferne Yangyeitie Caulker, founder and interim executive director at Ko-Thi Dance Company, a 55-year-old performance art group in the city rooted in dance and music of the African Diaspora, SMAC is needed to preserve and grow groups like Ko-Thi, which educate people about African American history and the African American experience.
“I think the very fact that there is a SMAC organization is a testament to the commitment of all of us as a general sector. But it's also a statement to Milwaukee about how we have been ignored,” Caulker said. “And there's movements in this country, as we all know, to remove, in particular, the African American aesthetic experience, and the history of how Africans even ended up here, et cetera. There's a movement to eradicate that because they might offend somebody.”
That sentiment is shared by Rhulene Artis, an active board member at CAPITA Production, which also strives to teach children and community members about African dance and drumming, as well as other African American performing arts traditions. Rhulene has been with the group since 2018. It was founded in 1990 by the late Arlene Skwierawski, a music teacher at North Division High School, and the late Capuchin friar Booker Ashe.
“It’s just been such a tremendous discovery, tremendous opportunity for CAPITA. I know for me, there's been a lot of learning and a lot of growth as a result of meeting with these other groups. It’s been helpful to hear that there's someone else struggling with some of the same challenges, and how they've handled them,” explained Artis, who said CAPITA plans to use its SMAC funds to create a part-time administrative support position.
[caption id="attachment_583971" align="alignnone" width="1024"] A CAPITA performance from 2022. (Submitted photo)[/caption]
“There needs to be a constant voice for the organization. And you can't just rely on volunteer service because that kind of comes and goes,” said Artis, adding that while CAPITA does have an executive director, it is a contracted position.
Building capacity
The hope is that through the support of the cohort, and the funds raised, each of the 12 member organizations will have received at least some small boost in building capacity, Rott said.
“It's no secret that Wisconsin is ranked 48th or 49th in the country when it comes to state funding for the arts,” Rott said. “And most of the funding opportunities that are out there in particular, they focus on programming, like one-and-done shows or educational programs, but you're not able to use the funds to build your capacity and pay for operations.”
For Rott, the cohort is an important step toward creating an arts community that fosters smaller arts organizations and helps them build that capacity, while also creating more opportunities for young professionals and would-be arts leaders in Milwaukee.
“Getting to know the other organizations, and having that pipeline of information and problem solving, I think that’s huge. I think it's really going to grow Milwaukee's arts and culture,” he said.
For Wanyah Leon, executive producer at WoLF Studios, a for-profit arts production company in Milwaukee that plans to use its SMAC dollars to create a fiscally sponsored artist promotion program, being able to learn from, and collaborate with long-standing arts organizations is invaluable.
“My company is probably the youngest company in the cohort. So, when I enter into the cohort, I'm entering it from a very different space than Ko-Thi who has been around for 55 years and has this huge legacy,” Leon said. “So, it's a very interesting space where you're engaging with people at entirely different levels and perspectives in the arts industry. So, the cohort, to me, is an experiment on how you get organizations – organizations who may be in similar spaces and may even be competing for similar grants outside of the cohort – to come into one space and communicate and have a certain level of comradery.”
[caption id="attachment_583972" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] A contemporary dance project that WoLF Studios filmed and produced as part of its ReVibe program. (Submitted photo)[/caption]
For Caulker, it is those different levels of experience and perspectives that have made SMAC so effective. At 77, it gives her hope for the future of the arts community in Milwaukee.
“This is not the first time Ko-Thi has been part of a cohort, but this is the first time that I’ve actually been part of a cohort that is comprised of young people who really know the arts, and know the business of the arts, and who appreciate the work that has to go in to becoming viable arts entities,” she said.
And what Caulker is looking for to keep Ko-Thi sustainable – is a younger person to lead the organization for the next 55 years. Caulker had to come back to lead the company because the executive director hired just after her retirement roughly two years ago, didn’t work out.
“I cannot continue at this stage in my life to be the executive director of the company. This is not how I envisioned my retirement,” she said. “What I know is needed right now is somebody to do what I'm currently doing – someone who sees the big picture.”
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