The nonprofit Fine Arts Fund was founded in 1949 to raise money for Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Taft Museum. In 1978, it added Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati Ballet, Playhouse in the Park and the May Festival. It has been increasing its reach, even as it fights to raise money during the recession, and last year collected just under $11.1 million on behalf of 100 groups. That includes the traditional arts giants, but also groups like the Lebanon Symphony Orchestra and Oxford Community Arts Center.
ArtsWave officials are proud of their outreach.
“We’re at the head of the curve — we were the only locally based organization invited to participate in a meeting the National Endowment for the Arts held in Washington last June,” says Mary McCullough-Hudson, longtime head of the Fine Arts Fund and now ArtsWave CEO/president. The meeting considered means of measuring the impact of arts and culture on communities.
“National bloggers are paying attention to what we’re doing,” she adds, an indication of new media’s role in the new ArtsWave. “We are on the leading edge nationally in showing how the arts make a community more livable, more exciting,” says Margy Waller, who left her Washington, D.C., job two years ago to return to her hometown as Fine Arts Fund’s vice president for strategic communications and research. Work already was underway in revamping the Fund’s approach; the name change was announced last September.
Some people still ask why.
McCullough-Hudson says the impetus came five years ago when the Greater Cincinnati Foundation convened a group of leaders from various sectors to consider a two-pronged question. It was this, she says: “Who is really paying attention to sustainability for the extraordinary array of arts in this community? And are we doing enough to leverage it in attracting visitors, in aligning with corporations to attract and retain the 21st-century worker?”
The Fine Arts Fund eventually decided to take the lead in exploring these issues.
“We had been very focused and successful (as a fund-raiser),” McCullough-Hudson says. “We could have continued doing that and let somebody else take on the broader role. But the leaders (at the meeting) felt the stature of the Fine Arts Fund made it the choice. In the fall of 2007 the board agreed we should explore what the community wants from arts and culture.”