Colleen Echohawk

Echohawk for Seattle
Democracy Voucher Program? Participating

The arts sector includes literature, theatre, music venues, museums, public displays of art, arts education in and out of the school building, design, and more. What role do you see the arts playing in the pandemic recovery? What is your experience with creatives, creative organizations, and the arts in Seattle?

I have seen our arts and cultural communities taking this year’s existential issues head-on. The degree to which arts and cultural organizations have invested in the economic survival of their staff and artists this year has been inspiring. As an Indigenous leader in Seattle, I feel deeply connected to arts and creatives. Artistic performance and celebration is a healing part of our culture. That healing is what we need right now. Arts will play a central part of pandemic recovery.

And let’s also be clear about how we talk about our return to gallery openings and theater premieres next year – don’t call it a comeback. Artists and cultural creatives have been here all year. They’ve been making new work and they’ve been exploring new ways of sharing that work. Artists have carried us through the darkest parts of this past year. We owe so much of our collective mental, spiritual, and cultural health to the artists and cultural organizations who have been here for us. Artists have shown up for us this year, bringing us hope, and joy, and reflection, and escape.

As we emerge from our COVID-driven isolation, I want to see Seattleites celebrating in the streets, and in the clubs, and celebrating in our stadiums, and in community centers and museums and places of worship and in our parks, and in our theaters.

Total personnel expenses budgeted for 2020/2021 are nearly 30% lower than in the pre-pandemic fiscal year 2018/2019. Artistic and production personnel budgets are those most dramatically affected, seeing 44% and 37% drops, respectively, since prior to the pandemic. Given this statistic from ArtsFund’s economic survey, how will you work to grow the creative workforce sector?

I will invest in the Office of Arts Culture. The City’s arts efforts are almost entirely funded through the Admissions Tax, a 5% tax we all pay every time we buy a ticket to any commercial entertainment. Typically, pre-pandemic, this tax generated roughly $10 million per year, which is the base budget for the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. Clearly, for the past year no one has bought a ticket to anything. If the City wants to see support for the arts remain robust and grow we must address a glaring omission in how we collect the admissions tax.

Also, I strive to eliminate the inequity baked into this system. For example, this tax is applied to Seattle Storm games but not for men’s professional sports. I will work with our partners at the Mariners, Seahawks, Sounders, and Kraken to rally around our civic priorities, and add significant support to our shared cultural celebration moving forward. This fund should be a robust resource for funding artistic institutions in the City.

But, this funding needs to be done equitably as well. We need to reverse the City’s overinvestment in its largest institutions. It’s also critical that we recover from a half-century of inequitable investment in the arts. The six largest arts organizations in Seattle generate enormous benefit to the City, they employ hundreds of artists and administrators, they are the portals through which the rest of the country sees Seattle’s art world. These six organizations also receive nearly half of the funding in the City’s flagship funding program. This has been true for more than a decade. Another 150 of the City’s small and midsize organizations are then left to compete against one another for the limited resources left after the “majors” have had their fill. Our largest institutions are important anchors to our cultural community. But we have to invest in the whole of our cultural ecosystem. The belief that outsized investments in the largest cultural institutions would trickle down deeper into the arts community has not been borne out. I will mandate a reversal of this practice and build more equitable funding structures that invest in Seattle’s cultural ecosystem from the grassroots up.

Growth in creative occupations has outpaced overall job growth (23% vs. 15%, 2012-2017). 2019 saw 4,373 more creative jobs than would be expected if Seattle had followed national trends. At $30.76, the Seattle metro has the second highest cost of living-adjusted, median hourly earnings for creative workers among large and medium metros. Creative industries contribute 18% of Seattle’s gross regional product, compared to 4% of the U.S. gross domestic product. Seattle is a world-class city for the arts and is a thriving hub for creatives with regional, national and international renown. How would you ensure that artists, and arts and cultural organizations, have the support and resources to maintain that status as a thriving hub? What are your plans to help grow the creative class that makes Seattle so vibrant?

People-first means centering individuals. I believe that if we invest in people we can build a more inclusive community. I envision a Seattle that works for everyone, including the artists whose labor is essential for our collective well-being and civic cohesion. I watched as the pandemic hit Seattle and our arts workers—musicians, actors, dancers, DJ’s, teaching artists, writers, arts administrators, and so many more—were hit hard. Artists whose livelihoods rely on the ability of people to gather were suddenly without a way to earn income.

I’m committed to exploring Basic Income programs for artists. I am inspired by examples of cities exploring new ways to directly support artists. In San Francisco, the Guaranteed Income Pilot project was launched earlier this year as a way to provide baseline support for artists and creatives in one of the (other) most expensive cities in the country. I’ll direct Seattle’s Office of Arts & Culture, in partnership with the Office for Civil Rights, to explore how this pilot program could be replicated in Seattle. To paraphrase San Francisco’s mayor London Breed, if we help artists recover, artists will help Seattle recover. Providing for the basic needs of artists in our community is the very foundation of that recovery.

I will also support the creation of affordable artists housing opportunities. When I speak of the need to provide housing to all essential workers in Seattle, I am explicitly including artists as essential to our collective civic health. In multiple conversations, I’ve heard artists speak about the creative and communal benefits derived just from the proximity to one another that artist housing provides. Artists are being priced out of the city at an alarming rate. If we don’t plug this creative drain, we risk becoming a city that lacks the ability to remember itself, to see itself, to gather itself, to define itself collectively, and to imagine itself into a better future—this is the work that artists do, and it is essential. The city also directly benefits from an investment in artist housing. The Tashiro-Kaplan building in Pioneer Square houses over 50 affordable artist housing units, and another 30 affordable commercial cultural spaces. It has become an essential anchor to the First Thursday art walk, and brings a creative energy and vitality to the entire neighborhood. The City of Seattle could partner with existing providers of affordable artist housing and arts live/work spaces, such as ArtSpace, to make Seattle a more inclusive place for artists and their families.

Washington state ranks 45th in funding for the arts, while having the second highest absenteeism rate in the USA. Knowing that the arts increase engagement for children in school, what are your plans for arts education, and what role do you see arts education playing in our school system?

When our schools were struggling to reach some of their teenaged students this winter, they reached out to arts organizations for assistance. They knew that, even if those students weren’t showing up for their Zoom classes, they were still coming together around art. It’s a powerful story that demonstrates how crucial Seattle’s network of youth-serving arts organizations is for the health of our community.

As children return to school, art can play an important part in the healing process. We owe it to our kids to make sure that these essential learning tools are there for them—all of them—when they need them the most.

The work of addressing inequities in access to arts education and arts experiences has already begun, of course. There are community organizations, city offices, schools, and individuals who have been doing this work for years and decades, and they would be the first to tell you: Seattle can do more. I am excited to work in partnership and community with those already doing this work to ensure that our city delivers on the promise of arts education for every student. Access to arts education, beginning in Pre-K, is strongly correlated with future success. But not every student in Seattle is getting what they need and deserve when it comes to arts education. As Mayor, I will work to ensure that every student in Seattle Public Schools has access to robust, comprehensive arts education beginning in Pre-K.

As Mayor, I will invest in these activities by reversing historic inequities by prioritizing funding for organizations that already have deep, longstanding ties to BIPOC, immigrant and refugee, and other historically under-resourced youth, even and especially those organizations that might not have professional fundraising or assessment capacity. I’ll also invest in organizations that serve court-involved and incarcerated/formerly incarcerated youth through art. Continuing to invest in the sustainability of organizations that democratize access to art for young people. I will also invest in Creative Advantage. I want I want the city to invest more resources in expanding and solidifying Creative Advantage programming in our schools, especially those schools that serve students who, because of race, economic status, and home language, experience the greatest access gaps when it comes to arts education.Prioritizing funding from the Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise Levy to explicitly support ongoing arts education through the Creative Advantage.

The arts sector was left out of early recovery dollars, and the impact was a 65% decrease in earned income projected for 2020/2021 as compared to 2018/2019. We know the arts have historically solved problems for our city, as each new job in a creative industry creates a total of three local jobs, according to 2019’s Creative Economy Report. What is your vision for the arts in community recovery, and how will you work with the sector to achieve your goals?

The Seattle Artists Relief Fund, created by Ijeoma Oluo, Ebony Arunga, and Gabriel Teodros, and managed by Langston, is an example of a successful campaign where the City’s arts office was able to move resources directly to artists through a partner with direct ties to community. I recommend expanding this strategy, and finding partners in Indigenous communities and in other communities of color, in disability communities, immigrant and refugee communities, with the young, the old, and in other disproportionately underfunded communities, to move money directly to the places where it can have the greatest and most immediate impact. The City of Seattle strives for direct and authentic connections to the artists and organizations driving our city’s cultural life, but it doesn’t always succeed. As mayor, I will make City resources available to the arts community, without requiring a direct connection to the City.

As we begin to reach a point in the COVID pandemic where we are able to gather together again and to celebrate our shared experiences, I would like to see the City of Seattle supporting an ongoing series of community celebrations driven by the arts community. Specifically, as mayor I would reimagine our mammoth annual Bumbershoot arts festival, redistributing it into 100 equitably resourced neighborhood festivals, reflecting, centering, and celebrating the artists and cultures of those neighborhoods. This would create arts jobs all around the City.

I also want to launch Hope Corps. The City of Seattle and community partners have devised a new approach to integrating artists into our shared recovery efforts. Modeled in part on the New Deal that helped pull this country out of the Great Depression, this new program, Hope Corps, centers artists in our city’s post-COVID revitalization. I will fully fund the Hope Corps model, connecting artists and our burgeoning local communities to build this city back bolder than ever.

Historically, the funds dedicated to the arts have gone to predominantly white institutions serving predominantly white audiences. How will you ensure that available funds are distributed in a more equitable manner and that we invest in diverse communities?

Part of healing and recovery as a society is acknowledging and repairing historic societal wrongs. We live in a city that has reaped the benefits generated by extreme exploitation, by land theft, by exclusionary policies and programs, and by intentional disinvestment. And we see these wrongs perpetuated today, through various mechanisms that, despite good intentions, are insidiously hard to root out of our institutions.

I propose a series of reparative investments, primarily in BIPOC artists and organizations but in all marginalized and exploited communities, to address these historic harms and to build a more inclusive future. I am inspired by the strides towards racial equity that I have seen the City, our community-based arts partners, and the philanthropic world take in the wake of this past year’s national racial reckoning. We must take action to make permanent the gains that have been won in this past year. I would work with our departments, and with our funded nonprofit partners, to ensure that public resources are distributed in a way that continues to meet our equity goals, and in a way that makes reparative investments in communities that have been historically undercapitalized. I will formalize a small but symbolically significant element of cultural reparations connected to the One Percent for Art public art ordinance. Ten percent of all “One Percent” dollars (the percentage of municipal capital projects dedicated to public art) will be mandated to go to Indigenous artists. These public art budgets are literally generated off of buildings that sit on the land from which Indigenous families were displaced during Seattle’s founding. It is time to begin to repair that damage.