None of those warnings ever seemed to light a fire under the board. It's easy to say the board had its collective heads in the sand. But Vic Linoff, a past president of the organization, says the board simply had too many other pressing matters.
"Having one more crisis is nothing new," says Linoff. "I was on the board for six years and I think every year there was some crisis or another. And not usually the center's doing." Linoff says you could point a lot of fingers, "but basically the organization was doing everything it could just to survive day to day."
According to Craig Dreeszen, an arts consultant and director of the Arts Extension Service of the University of Massachusetts, this profile fits a lot of small nonprofit arts organizations.
"Nationally, many of them are fairly vulnerable to changes in their environment or leadership. They're basically subsidized by volunteer staff and boards, by private contributions, by public contributions and grants, and by staff working at below market rates."
As a result, TAC has become a revolving door of arts administrators. With few exceptions, they don't stay long enough to develop the kind of institutional vision that distinguishes Barbara Meyerson's work at the Arizona Museum for Youth, David Saar's at Childsplay, the Tempe-based children's theater group, or Marilyn Zeitlin's current and Rudy Turk's past efforts at the ASU museum of art.
Without that vision, say several Valley culture watchers, the arts center will remain powerless to convince people to come. Yet they also stress that vision is wasted on a board that can't make things happen. Many say that most of the center's past boards were made up of friends of the arts who don't know much about running a business or a board.
"They called themselves a working board," says a former member of the organization. "And I never knew what the hell that meant."
And no one else seems to know, either. The leader of one Valley cultural institution says s/he'd prefer a trip to the dentist than to be saddled with a working board. "If they're not going to build the organization, then what's the point?"
Many people who care about the organization say that TAC's board essentially needs to decide whether it is going to raise money or guide. And if it's going to guide, then it needs to assemble another board to raise the money.
"I don't think any of the boards were ever really put together in a way that suited the needs of the community or the center," says Joe Segura, an early board member. "They were people who were really interested in helping, or people who were politically next to someone. But we weren't able to help the organization grow."
"Part of that might be due to the way it started," says Canby. "It's always been viewed as a community entity. And therefore the community was going to support it. But in realistic terms, there aren't very many arts organizations that can exist just on the good will of the community. It takes public funding. And I don't think that was as clear a message in 1980 as it is today."
The oddity is that after 16 years, the arts center is still faced with having to convince the city and public that it deserves the help.
Contact Edward Lebow at his online address: elebow@newtimes.com
