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Ann Arbor 200

AADL Talks To: Deb Polich, President and CEO of Creative Washtenaw

When: September 19, 2024

deb polich
Deb Polich

Deb Polich has been involved in Ann Arbor and regional arts development and management for decades. She was the director of the pioneering and award-winning ArtTrain Inc. and is currently president and CEO of Creative Washtenaw where she’s been involved from its inception as Arts Alliance. She’s also served on the board of several arts and culture institutions and nonprofits. Deb talks with us about some career highlights, from memorable exhibitions with ArtTrain to initiatives such as Winterfest, PowerArt!, and creative:impact, her radio program at EMU. She also discusses changes in the local arts and culture landscape and the importance of funding for public art.

Transcript

  • [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy.
  • [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: This is Elizabeth. In this episode, AADL Talks To Deb Polich. Deb was director of Artrain Incorporated and led the Arts Alliance from its inception through its changed Creative Washtenaw. Prior to this, she worked as managing director for the Michigan Theater. She has also been on the board of many regional organizations and worked with numerous non-profits. She talks with us about her work with local and national arts communities, recalls some career highlights, and discusses continuing challenges to the Arts in Ann Arbor.
  • [00:00:44] AMY CANTU: Thank you so much for coming, Deb. It's great to have you here. We'd like to start with just a little background. Can you tell us where you were born and raised and what brought you to Ann Arbor?
  • [00:00:52] DEB POLICH: Sure. I'm a very proud Michigander. I was raised in Detroit. I've joked that I've slowly moved west because I went to school in Detroit until I was about 14, and then I went to high school in Westland. I went to college in Ypsilanti, and now I'm in Ann Arbor, so very slowly west.
  • [00:01:11] ELIZABETH SMITH: What did you study at Eastern Michigan University?
  • [00:01:14] DEB POLICH: I started in theater and then I switched over to Arts Management, which was just -- and that was prompted in part because while I was going to school, I put myself through school. I started managing a restaurant and I found an affinity for management and, of course, my love of the arts. The Arts Management program, which back then was brand new, it was a brand new field in regards to a degree. At the time I found it or discovered it, it was about five years in, and it just happened that Eastern Michigan University was one of the very first programs. In fact, I only learned about it because I found one of those magazines they drop at the Union that has 90% advertising and 10% content and there was an article about Arts Management. I walked into my advisor's office and said, I'd like to change my major, and I went into Arts Management.
  • [00:02:06] AMY CANTU: Was there something... When did you know that you were committed to the arts, that this was a passion?
  • [00:02:12] DEB POLICH: Oh, gosh. I didn't know I was committed to it. I know that it started to influence my life at a pretty young age. I mentioned I went to school in Detroit. Detroit had wonderful school programs at the time. From the get go, you start engaging in the arts. There were in elementary school, we had music, and we had art, and we had a program called Auditorium, a class called Auditorium, which was an introduction to the performing arts and of course, we had a library as well. I was raised in a situation that was rather... There wasn't a lot of experience in my family life. Those experiences in art and music and Auditorium just opened the world to me. I became connected to it early, but of course, when you're that age, you don't know that this is going to be your thing.
  • [00:03:07] AMY CANTU: That's true.
  • [00:03:07] ELIZABETH SMITH: So you graduated from EMU. What was next after that? What was your first job?
  • [00:03:14] DEB POLICH: The Eastern program requires you to do an on-campus internship and an off-campus internship. I was not a traditional student. It took me 11 years to get through school. I mentioned already that I put myself through. But in the meantime, I got married and had two kids and when I was pregnant with my first daughter, I had 30 credits left to go at Eastern. I decided I was going to wait until after the babies were born and then go back to school. I could do my internship and then hope that that would lead to connections and a job. As I was finishing up my degree and my internship, on-campus internship was in the dance department, but my off-campus internship was at the Michigan Theater. I interned there for a summer, helped them, that was 1986, helped them through their very first audit of all things. Then before the end of the summer, I was offered a position to run the box office and that's where that professional role started. Now, I had done costume design. That's really where my theater interest had been. Since I was in high school, I was a paid costume designer. Professional or professional.
  • [00:04:24] ELIZABETH SMITH: Sure. Did you design for any shows around town?
  • [00:04:29] DEB POLICH: Mostly the stuff I did was doing was in western Wayne county. I did a fair amount for community theaters and then high schools.
  • [00:04:36] ELIZABETH SMITH: You're working at the Michigan Theater. How long did you end up working there and did you first meet Russ Collins?
  • [00:04:43] DEB POLICH: I met Russ Collins as an intern and then I worked there for seven years. I literally did every job except the technical director job, including a stint as interim director while Russ was on a sabbatical at the National Endowment for the Arts as a fellow. I was the interim director for a year and then it was about a year after he came back that I left to take my position as executive director of Artrain.
  • [00:05:13] AMY CANTU: That's a great transition. Can you tell us about Artrain -- a little bit about its history and about your involvement?
  • [00:05:20] DEB POLICH: It's a remarkable program. It was started in Michigan as the flagship project for the Michigan Council for the Arts at the time. It's now Michigan Arts and Culture Council and it was intended to -- so what happened was in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts was started. When that legislation happened, there was a requirement that 40% of all the funds for the National Endowment for the Arts had to go to the states so the states could distribute them if a state started a state, arts organization. Michigan did that under the leadership of a guy named E. Ray Scott, and E. Ray had this knowledge of a project in Kentucky that was called Artrain. It was actually a for-profit project. He thought that putting art on a train and traveling around Michigan was going to be a great way to help stimulate the development of local arts agencies in the state of Michigan. He reached out and engaged Mrs. Helen Milliken, who was at the time the lieutenant governor's wife and he and Mrs. Milliken and a group of people who went down to Kentucky and saw this Artrain project and decided to take much of what it was doing in Kentucky and bringing it up here. That project actually closed pretty shortly thereafter -- the Kentucky one, but Michigan's was supposed to last a year or two. The community had to agree to start a local arts agency before the train would go there with this, you know, the art that was... Actually, the first curator was a guy named Emil Weddige, who was actually a local artist and worked at both U of M and Eastern. Emil put together that first exhibition. It was a huge success and there by the second year, the National Endowment for the Arts had taken great notice and asked our train to travel nationally. This project that was supposed to be only two years old, or last two years, I should say, was now going national. Then we toured with the train until 2009 when we retired the train. Hundreds and hundreds of communities across the United States can look back at our train as the catalyst for the beginning of their local arts agencies and our strengthening local arts agencies, in addition to all the people, many introduced to the arts for the very first time because we primarily went to small towns.
  • [00:07:54] AMY CANTU: What are some of the exhibits that stand out, that are special to you?
  • [00:07:58] DEB POLICH: Oh, gosh. So I was responsible... When I was touring, I think I did five shows. There were two that were particularly, they were all great. They were all a lot of fun, a lot of work, too. We did a project with NASA and the National and Space Museum called Artistry of Space, and little known to lots of people, but wisely the founders -- not founders of NASA, but the first management teams of NASA -- knew that artists could capture this exploration of this space frontier in ways that film and photography could not alone. They, from the very beginning, started inviting artists in and giving them access to pretty much everything so that they could capture, indeed what was happening. We worked with NASA and the National Air and Space Museum. At the time we did the show, there are about 3,000 works in the collection. I'm sure it's much bigger now, but we took about 120 pieces on the train and toured them to more than 100 communities. That was great fun. The other one that I was particularly proud of is that, lots of people would say, Artrain should do a Native American exhibition, Artrain should do a show about this and honestly, I did not know actually at the time, but I do actually do have a native heritage, but I didn't know that then. But we were not an organization with Indigenous people that were part of our board or organization. We decided that if we were going to do this, we needed to put together an advisory council of leaders, native leaders from across the country, and in some cases, Canada, to just define what this exhibition would be and frankly, as ignorant as I was about all of this, I was expecting more nostalgic work. But these advisers said, No, you have to make this a contemporary show because we are contemporary people, and too much of America thinks of us in that nostalgic, romanticized way. So we put this exhibition together with the help of our curator Joanna Bigfeather. "Native Views: Influences of Modern Culture" was the show. It was a tremendous learning experience for me to engage for what turned out to be about six years with the Indigenous population of the U.S. and Canada.
  • [00:10:36] DEB POLICH: One of those things that we had to work through was trust. The fact that the Caucasian population is not well trusted is evidenced by how Native communities have been treated over the years. It took a long time for them to actually believe we were going to do what we said we would do. When we opened the show in Tempe, Arizona, it was a huge success and we toured across the states to 100-plus communities, including going to Alaska, and that was a pretty exciting thing to barge a train on the Pacific Ocean up to Alaska.
  • [00:11:19] AMY CANTU: Did you stay connected with the groups that you met, the people you met, to continue some other projects?
  • [00:11:30] DEB POLICH: In every industry, there is a...you meet people, you become friends, you connect with folks, and you know that you can always count on them, they can always count on you, when something's necessary or important. Very many of us stay connected.
  • [00:11:48] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about the changes in the railway system over time and how that broadly impacted Artrain, and probably eventually to the.
  • [00:11:57] DEB POLICH: Demise?
  • [00:11:59] ELIZABETH SMITH: Demise of the train cars themselves.
  • [00:12:02] DEB POLICH: We worked... So, again, one of these things -- they don't teach this in Arts Management school, trust me -- how to get around the world and on trains. In America, we are aware of the Amtrak system. We know that there's freight, but most of us don't understand how that works. The truth of it is that 90 plus percent of the American railways are owned by individual companies. Freight companies. Amtrak, usually there's a couple of places where Amtrak owns their tracks, but in most cases, they're getting trackage rights from the companies that the national railways, not national corporate railways. The fact is that it's costly, very costly, to move private equipment on any railways. We were fortunate that for very many years, the nation's corporate private rail companies would actually tour us or move us as a donation. That added up to a significant amount of money every year. There would be no way that our train could have done that on its own without boosting the budget and making it extremely difficult to make it happen. After 9/11 in 2001, access to the rail shifted greatly, in large part because there was such demand for the use of the rails. We found ourselves in a situation that, more and more often we would have a fully subscribed tour, which is about 30 stops per year, and we'd get to the final approvals and we'd be knocked down to 17 or 18, and we just couldn't sustain on that. It was 2009 that we decided that -- or 2008 -- that we decided that we needed to shift, and initially had expected to move the cars or the project onto what we called mobile museums, which are semi-trailers, and we had designed a phenomenal program there. But 2008 happened in the recession and to try to mount a capital campaign at that point in time was folly. We didn't, and we took ourselves off the train and took -- we were never a train organization, we are always an arts organization. Our board said, So how do we take what we know, how do we take our skill sets and translate those into something else to keep the importance of helping to develop arts programs and helping local arts agencies and individuals move forward? We became a project management organization. We've been doing that now since then.
  • [00:14:54] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was also curious about the graffiti and how the rise of graffiti as an art form or a nuisance [LAUGHTER] impacted the cars. I read some articles about...they kept getting graffiti on them, and it was very expensive to repaint those. Did that have any impact?
  • [00:15:09] DEB POLICH: Actually, we have great affinity for graffiti artists. If they are in fact doing things with permission, which is counter to the counter community that is the graffiti artists. But in 1986 or before I was part of Artrain, one of our local artists and teachers from Community High, Tom Dodd, and a handful of people on the Artrain's team, thought it'd be great to have the exterior of the train cars painted by graffiti artists from New York. That in fact happened, and they were doing that work in Ypsilanti, and there was quite a controversy about that as to why an organization like Artrain would let graffiti artists, who have been known to vandalize private property, would be selected to do this train. The fact is many of these graffiti artists are extremely talented. To harness that and use it in a way that worked for Artrain was a huge success. Subsequent to that, there are always times when we have train cars in places -- not always a few times -- where graffiti did happen without permission, and our team was pretty well versed in how to handle that and to take care of it.
  • [00:16:37] AMY CANTU: When that fell apart, you were involved in many other arts initiatives in Ann Arbor at the time, and regionally. Artrain was located in the NEW center, and I know you've been... What was it like having headquarters there? Can you talk a little bit about how it was to be in proximity with so many other non-profits?
  • [00:16:59] DEB POLICH: I started at Artrain in 1993. NEW center opened in January. We were their first tenants, and they came in just around that time. I wasn't there until September that year, but that location, which was it's on North Main Street, as you headed out of town towards M14. That location was Lansky's Junkyard. The McKinley Foundation purchased that property and cleaned it. It was a brownfield location. Ron Weiser was the chair of Artrain at that time, and the train itself was in Mount Clemens is at the Southfield -- not Southfield, the Air Force Base up there Selfridge Air Force Base. And so staff was in Ann Arbor. We had moved to Ann Arbor after Ron became ambassador, Ron Weiser now became our chair, but they moved the team from Detroit to Ann Arbor, but the train was still up at Selfridge. When Ron and Eileen were putting this together for the NEW center space, which was meant to be a building for non-profits. We, Artrain, actually helped raise money for that and then had the railroad siting built specifically for Artrain to be there. The location and having the staff there all at the same time, I'm sure -- again, I wasn't there exactly when it happened, but very shortly thereafter -- all in one location was great. It was nice working. I was at that building for 25 years. My office was there for 25 years. It was nice getting to know other non-profit organizations. I think the idea that they had initially that there'd be a lot more interaction between organizations really didn't quite pan out. I think it's because many of us go to work every day to get what we need to get done, and then we still have families, and so the time that you have in your office and you're doing your work, it's precious. There's not as much water cooler talk, if you will, in the hallways, but it was very friendly. If you ever did need to seek some information or get some advice, you absolutely could do that. One of the people that I knew at that time or met at that time was Ron Brooks, who was with the Dispute Resolution agency. I knew him as an artist as a jazz musician, but I also knew him in this role. That's played out, and including to what we're doing now with Creative Washtenaw in honoring Ron and his role for being one of Ann Arbor's best jazz enthusiasts. So we're excited about doing that. But those relationships date back to those days.
  • [00:19:48] ELIZABETH SMITH: While we're talking about jazz here, I wanted to ask about your involvement with the Blues and Jazz Festival in the early 90's.
  • [00:19:57] DEB POLICH: It's an interesting history because again, I wasn't here then but I know it well enough, that Ann Arbor wasn't ready to have this explosively wonderful blues and jazz festival taking place in Ann Arbor that also did, at that time, reflect the counter-culture that was taking place then. You know, the Rainbow Peoples, and the fact that there was... I mean, a festival that brought people from all over the place to make it happen was a little unwieldy for maybe a more stayed community as Ann Arbor is or was at that time. It was exiled to Canada, and it never made its way...it didn't really didn't make it through that transition. In about 1991, '92, I was still at the Theater at the time, Lee Berry, Peter Andrews -- there's two other names that are not sticking in my mind -- thought that they wanted to resurrect the Blues and Jazz Festival. I was working at the Michigan Theater at that time. Lee Berry asked me if I would consider being their box office...if the theater would run the box office. I jumped into that with my team, and then we did that. Then eventually, I became a board member because I was gone from the Michigan Theater. I'd left the Theater in 1993. So I was the controller for the Blues and Jazz Festival -- treasurer eventually -- when they did actually become a nonprofit.
  • [00:21:31] ELIZABETH SMITH: How long were you involved with that?
  • [00:21:32] DEB POLICH: Gosh, I don't remember the years because I was on the board for a while. Then, of course, I just participated with it. But I thought that that was such a great -- even though I was working -- but walking around Gallup Park on a beautiful September afternoon, just seeing some of the best... I remember Al Green. Oh my gosh, what an opportunity. So many phenomenal artists and just to be there and, like, Wow, this is so great and it's happening in our town.
  • [00:22:03] AMY CANTU: You were also involved in Winterfest. Can you tell us about that?
  • [00:22:06] DEB POLICH: Oh my gosh, Winterfest. Wow. That was a project that my good friend Ron Miller helped start with... I want to say it might have been the Washington Council for the Arts, but I think it was more the Downtown Development Authority back in the day with Franz Modgis. God, where's that name come from? Mogdis. It was the idea of using nontraditional spaces for arts programming. So, a jazz quartet in a storefront or carolers on the street, or likewise. But it also had snow sculptures. That was a lot of fun. A lot of communities do ice sculptures, but the snow sculptures were great and then the snowflake artist...
  • [00:23:04] AMY CANTU: Oh, Dr. Thomas...
  • [00:23:07] DEB POLICH: Thomas. It's there. It'll come to me in a minute. We had buttons that he would do that were the snowflakes. They were so great, and he was quite a talent.
  • [00:23:23] AMY CANTU: That was amazing.
  • [00:23:24] DEB POLICH: Amazing workout of cutting something like that.
  • [00:23:27] AMY CANTU: I know, the positive and negative space, like he had unbelievable...
  • [00:23:31] DEB POLICH: No, really cool. In fact, now you're making me wish I still had that sweatshirt.
  • [00:23:34] AMY CANTU: I know.
  • [00:23:36] ELIZABETH SMITH: So in 2002, you became involved with the Arts Alliance.
  • [00:23:41] DEB POLICH: Actually, before that.
  • [00:23:42] ELIZABETH SMITH: Before that>
  • [00:23:43] DEB POLICH: Even though it wasn't an organization. So in 1999, a group of us prompted in large part because NEW center had gotten a grant from the Michigan Count for the Arts for supporting arts in Washtenaw county, I didn't really know what to do with that grant, and so they pulled a bunch of us in the room together and we thought that the right thing to do is to have a summit. We had the Washtenaw County Summit for Arts and Culture -- I don't remember exactly what we called it -- in1999 at Washtenaw Community College -- I'm pretty sure it was Washtenaw, now I'm not sure, it was so long ago -- about 150 people showed up, and we looked at the history of arts and culture in Washtenaw county. We looked at assets that we had with strengths, weaknesses, timelines, etc, and what was needed to go forward and strengthen the sector, and there were 10 things that at that time were suggested. Everything from an umbrella organization, which is exactly what the Arts Alliance eventually became. Also to having a centralized box office, and that was happening just before online ticketing became a thing. A centralized downtown box office didn't make sense after a year or two, but anyway, the idea for an umbrella organization came out of that. Why? Because by having that opportunity to meet up with and be with others that are working in the same field as you are and to learn from and to gain opportunity from that was important and to build strength and expose the community to the fact that we weren't all a bunch of one-off programs, that there really is an economy here that is based on the arts and creative world. A bunch of us met for a number of years and in 2002, then Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce offered to be the overall organizational -- what they actually offered to do was to start the Arts Alliance as a division of the chamber. The then director Woody Holman saw a great opportunity and understood very well that this was an important asset -- that arts and culture was an important asset to Ann Arbor and Washtenaw -- but he also knew it was business and that it deserved a place within the chamber. All the overhead was taken care of by the chamber, which was great. We put a board of directors together, and I was actually the founding chair, and was still in my role at Artrain as the president and CEO. Then Martha Johnson from the chamber was our first admin, and then eventually the late Tamara Real, a wonderful person, so much energy, really believed in arts and culture and what it can do for people and communities. She took over as the executive director and served in that role until...2011, I think, is when Tamara stepped down. But I was involved for a number of years as a board person, and then tangentially, because, like I said, with those relationships you never really walk quite away from those programs.
  • [00:27:24] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was reading an article from 2002 that said there was a survey that was trying to estimate the economic impact of the arts, and they estimated that it had brought in at least $165 million. So that's obviously a really big economic impact for the arts. Has that changed over the years? Has it grown?
  • [00:27:43] DEB POLICH: Yes. I think... Gosh, that one was done, I haven't looked at those stats, but we are now doing more and looking at that regularly. There are two components to our arts and cultural community. It's the for-profit actually, three, let's take three. There is the non-profit sector, there's the for-profit sector, and then there's the gig sector. Tracking real numbers in the non-profit sector is actually quite easy because you can pull down -- and we do -- all the 990s, which is the tax forms that non-profits have to file. We analyze that regularly about every year we pull that down. We know how big that industry is from the non-profit world. It's a little harder to get the numbers and the data from the for-profit entities and/or the gig... You know, the gig conomy here is artists and creatives that are working in the field as independent contractors, and it's a little harder to track that, but we do have more... So we can look at that, and I can tell you that there are 191 cultural nonprofits in Washtenaw County. That's everything from your small mom-and-pop family-oriented support for our organizations like the band boosters, that Pioneer, Skyline High or Ypsilanti, or whatever, to the larger organizations. In fact, we tracked the library's information, too.
  • [00:29:18] DEB POLICH: But the other side of that is that now today... Let me step back one time. That report that you're talking about back from the early 2000s, that ran through Eastern Michigan University, Chuck Lousma, I think, was the guy who did it and they do the ripple effect dollars. This is what the hard dollars are, and then this is what the economic impact on. We just finished one just on the nonprofit sector, and it was showing over $100 million just on the non-profit sector. But what we also know is that now the Bureau of Labor Statistics is tracking all of this on a national level. First of all, I want to step back a second and say that when we talk about the arts and creative industries, we are talking about well beyond music theater dance, and the performing arts. We're talking about companies that are doing landscaping. We're talking about design. We're talking about graphic companies, and we're talking about any business of which creativity is the defining factor of success. It's a pretty... Broadcasters in there, and everything, journalism is in there. The Bureau of Labor Statistics now tracks this. They started doing it maybe 2015, and we get these numbers every year and we are collectively a $1.3 trillion industry, which is, like, 4.2% of GDP, which is rather mind-blowing for the folks that always go, Yeah arts and culture, they're a little icing on the cake they're not really core. Our industry is bigger than construction transportation and many other fields that... agriculture... that we pay attention to here in the United States. You hear the information on the economic news -- "and there's been so many construction startups, and there's been so many... This is what Ag's doing, and transportation." We're not ever on that list, but we should be. It is data that is critically important, but in Washtenaw County, we're a driver of a lot. We're the assets -- I just had this conversation a couple of days ago. The second, third most important thing that people do when they come here to visit is attend some cultural programming. The first thing -- everybody thinks it's football [LAUGHTER] -- is visiting friends and family and the university, people at the U.
  • [00:32:03] AMY CANTU: Can you give us a couple of examples of projects, partnerships? Maybe a couple that you're particularly proud of?
  • [00:32:11] DEB POLICH: In my whole career? [OVERLAPPING] or in the arts. The Arts Alliance, of course, is now the Creative Washtenaw and we're 20-plus years old. I became the executive director. I'm supposed to be the interim director for eight weeks, and here I am 12 years later as the director. It's worked really hard to bring the sector together to elevate the awareness and value of this sector in our county and I'm hoping that we have made some of those inroads. Projects and opportunities... You know, Creative Washtenaw has tried its best not to duplicate what any other cultural organization, arts organization, is doing. They're doing a great job we don't need to do that. Sometimes we step in when there's no other entity that is obvious and one of those was the PowerArt! Project in Downtown Ann Arbor with the Downtown Development Authority in the City of Ann Arbor. That was an opportunity to showcase it was a public art design project to showcase local artists. By the way, we are very firm believers that public art design programs should include outside of the local artists, but this particular project was supporting that. You might ask, why do we think it's important to go beyond local artist? We love our local artists, but to give an analogy, I always say this. So could you imagine if the Ann Arbor Public Library, District Library, only had books that were written by Ann Arbor authors, or the Michigan Theater was only showing films by Ann Arbor Washington County filmmakers? For us to do what we should do as a community and expose people to everything that can enhance their lives, to have national international and local artists involved with what's going on, is an important and important goal. But PowerArt! was important to us to showcase local, and that's the decisions you get to make with every public art and design project. How far afield are you going to go? What are you trying to communicate and otherwise? It's become very popular. We're actually finishing up a bunch of it right this minute. There are 44 signal boxes in downtown Ann Arbor within the DDA footprint and we just did our last round of that and are in the process right now of installing those. That's been a fun one. There's been others. Creative:impact has been a fun opportunity for me personally. For those that may not know, it's a show I do on WEMU weekly as the host. It's all about showcasing local artists and creatives and creative workers and businesses in Washtenaw county, and what is remarkable is how far afield those roles go. It is the people like Ron Brooks or a visual artist in town that are doing great work, but it's also the special folks that you find that you're like, Really? There's a guy in Washtenaw that syndicates to 400 publications with his cartoon Speed Bump? Yes, the guy who wrote -- that's Dave Coverly -- the guy who wrote One Shining Moment, the Anthem for the NCAA basketball field. His name just flew out of my head, Bartlett. Anyway, he lives in town. We all hang out and walk to the grocery store, and these folks are right there, and they have national and international recognition and appreciation for what they add to the field and to our lives. I'm a fan girl, I love doing the show, because I get to meet people and talk with him. I just had a great one with Jason Fettig, who is the newly appointed head of the University of Michigan Bands. He's not the guy who's out on the field conducting the marching band on Saturdays, but he came to run this program directly from the Marine Corps Band, where he was the director and we got to talk about what that was all about and the history and the pomp and the circumstance of being the president's band. I had so much fun, that was a great show.
  • [00:36:55] AMY CANTU: I'm curious what your thoughts may be about how Ann Arbor has changed in the last few decades. It's gotten much more expensive to live here. How do you see that impacting the arts? How have you seen it impacting the arts? What do you think the challenges are going forward? The next 50 years.
  • [00:37:13] DEB POLICH: [LAUGHTER] If I only had a crystal ball. I came here in '93, I bought my house around that time the first time I lived in town. I always lived outside. I was pretty fortunate to be able to make that happen at a time when there was a down bit in the market. I work for a nonprofit. We have great experiences, but we don't get rich very easily. I can't really reflect on what happened before that because I wasn't here, but I do know, and I appreciate, that within the county -- I think of Washtenaw County as an ecosystem, and the fact that we have rural urban and suburban communities here is a great thing. Fortunately, we're not so huge that it's really difficult to get around. I know that the cost of living here is high compared to what it was, but I also just got back from talking with people on the East Coast and what it costs there or on the West Coast, what it costs there. It's all part of the system. Yes, it's very difficult to afford to live here. It's probably, depending on where you're... -- difficult to afford almost to live anywhere unless you're in that top one 10%. What I also think is that affordable housing is important, but actually, honestly, when I told you, we have 191 cultural non-profits in Washtenaw county, that employ a lot of people, there's only 10 of them that have budgets over a million dollars. We do not invest in this community in our arts and cultural organizations. We do not have public funding that will help them be able to pay people better to do the work that they do so that they can afford to live here. I know we always talk about the cost of an apartment or a rent or buildings or a home, but there's also the other side of it, which is wages that make sense and not constantly strapping folks to try to figure out where their next dollar is going to be. It's an equation that's challenging, absolutely.
  • [00:39:39] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you find that there's less funding now for the arts? I know there have been different moments in time where there have been funding cuts, like in 2011 and several times before that?
  • [00:39:49] DEB POLICH: So define funding cuts. Are you talking about the State of Michigan or are you talking about what's available here?
  • [00:39:53] ELIZABETH SMITH: Yeah, I think that this is referring to government funding, but it could be... You know better than I do. It could be....
  • [00:40:00] DEB POLICH: Most people, when they say funding, they think government funding and they think often national or state. The fact that Washtenaw county is an anomaly across the country, that we do not have public funding here, is just bizarre. We rely on rich people to fund what we do. That's great, we've been able to sustain a lot for the last 30, 40 years through the generosity of people that have means. When we're looking forward, we know that generation is shifting. We know there's a cliff. We know that the wealth transfer will probably not result in the same amount of investment in arts and culture and cultural education. That's frightening here in this community. We're not going to have what we have today if we don't make a change. People might say, Well, so what's wrong with rich people supporting these programs? Well, as much as I have been a fundraiser for my whole career, the reality is, and my colleagues might not say it out loud, but I'm old enough, I can say it out loud: Whether we want to realize it or not, we program to those wealthy people. We do not program to the public in general, which is a large part that you see the product and programs that happen in our institutions being more Eurocentric than they are reflecting the whole community. And the ubiquitous people are not necessarily engaged with or part of determining what is happening in our venues and our theaters, and our locations. Funding today or funding or not -- public funding, the state funding, the National Endowment for the Arts funding -- has essentially been stagnant for 60 years. Sometimes it goes up a nickle, and sometimes it goes down two nickles, or vice versa. But it's a rather silly amount of money. It really doesn't make a huge difference. It helps. I mean, every dollar helps. I don't mean to disparage those agencies because those people work as hard as the rest of us do. It's a value proposition. As important as innovation and inspiration, innovation and invention is in the United States, we don't invest in the people and the creative people that can actually get us to be always innovative and inventive. I'm on my soapbox.
  • [00:42:55] AMY CANTU: That's okay. No, that's fascinating. Is there something that can be done that hasn't yet been done at the regional level?
  • [00:43:05] DEB POLICH: Well, I mentioned that we're an anomaly. Well, there are places all over the country that have public funding, whether it comes from a millage or a tax base or an income tax or lodging taxes or whatnot. It happens everywhere else. Sometimes it is public-private partnerships. Could we, should we? I think back to when the parks millages started back in the 70s or when even the libraries or school or transportation millages happened, it's so much easier... I mean, I know it costs, I know our taxes are high. But to be able to have everybody chip in 100 bucks or whatever to make something happen works in other communities. We just had an exchange here with a group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and they have public support for their arts, and they thrive there. We struggle to keep it solid. I'll tell you, I'm not going to disclose who, but I know many of our -- what I would call institutional cultural organizations -- that are struggling and some are wondering what they're going to do going forward if they're going to be around. So we've got to do something in a millage. Michigan limits what you can do. You can do a property millage. You can get appropriations from your county government or your city government. But there's not much else. The lodging tax could also be applied. But there's not a lot else that you can do in the state. Changing that at a state level is one thing, but also getting our community to make a change here could make a huge difference.
  • [00:44:53] AMY CANTU: This is fascinating.
  • [00:44:55] ELIZABETH SMITH: Yeah, I was curious if you had any more insight to Ann Arbor's relationship with public art. We talked to Margaret Parker and she said that she was trying to get us to have a public art commission, and it's pretty typical for other cities to have that.
  • [00:45:10] DEB POLICH: Absolutely.
  • [00:45:12] ELIZABETH SMITH: Has that attitude changed at all over the years? Or have we gotten further away from that, even though we're getting more public art through murals and the power boxes?
  • [00:45:21] DEB POLICH: The murals are primarily funded privately. The power boxes -- the DDA stepped up to that in this round, we also have some private funding coming into that. It is very typical for many communities. One of my favorites is Toledo, Ohio. They changed their life. They changed their community because or their public art and design programming. The thing about public art and design is that you include the public with it, but you also have to know that not everybody is going to love every piece. My husband and I go to museums all the time. There are things he loves and I don't, and you know it's part of the conversation, too, the exploration. Having a public art and design program in the city of Ann Arbor --which is a legally allowed thing by the State of Michigan; Margaret and her colleagues that helped make that happen -- was a coup. We were all very excited about that percent for art program. I think that there were some mechanics with it in regards to how the city handled it internally, in regards to staffing or prioritizing or not. I think there's a public relations challenge with how the very first project was rolled out, and people got their backs up about it. Some people, not everybody, some people got their backs up on it, and some very loud people made noise in City Hall, and then it ended up going away. What didn't happen in that period of time was that there wasn't a broad-based conversation with those of us in the field who work with other communities around the country, and we know how to do these things, or we know that there are resources to find out how to do these things like a public art program. Please know I'm not disparaging Margaret and her team on this at all. I'm just talking about the broader conversation that the city didn't engage in. When they decided -- City leadership decided to put the public art percent for art program on the ballot, we had a meeting, and this is history. We had a meeting, with over 80 people in the room at NEW Center, with the mayor at the time and the current mayor and others that were pushing to put this on the ballot to answer, once and for all, whether or not Ann Arbor wanted to have a percent for art program, it was at the very last minute of that particular campaign year that you could actually get something on the ballot. The room was adamant that it should not go on the ballot. There was not time to prepare the community to find out, we didn't vet how much we should... You know, there was no preparation. It was like Boom, it's going on the ballot, and we lost. That was, by the way, the first month or two that I was actually working with the Arts Alliance then, now created Washtenaw. It was a really difficult time because that conversation, that situation, the fact that it was voted down -- people didn't know what they were voting for, the language wasn't even vetted -- has now become legend that Ann Arbor doesn't want a percent for art program. I don't think that's true at all. I think we would jump on it again if it was properly put forward.
  • [00:48:56] AMY CANTU: You have been on numerous boards. You have worked with many non-profits in the course of your career. What are you most proud of?
  • [00:49:06] DEB POLICH: I'm going to just say anything having to do with arts and culture and creativity that moves that forward. The other thing that I've been fortunate about is that I would often sit on a board or agree to be on a board. Not so much that I had the time to spare, but there were people I wanted to learn from and on those boards. I was to sit at a table with people that I respected and that I thought had important things to share. That was a lot of times why I raised my hand and said, Yes. Not only did that -- you know, what I gained from those experiences -- but the relationships that were built, have served me well over time. I can't really say one over another, but it was an important experience.
  • [00:50:00] ELIZABETH SMITH: I think we covered... Yeah, anything you wanted to talk about? [OVERLAPPING]
  • [00:50:03] DEB POLICH: I can't let this go without applauding our community for hosting Artrain as one of its residents for a long time. Artrain received the National Medal for Museum Services in 2006, the highest award that any organization can receive in the museum world. I want to brag on that. It was exciting to be recognized on a national level for the legacy that this organization has had starting local arts agencies all over the country. The work of the teams that have put that together -- not only the staff but all the curators and people and the artists that have been involved over the years -- I think that's worth mentioning, to be at the White House, to be receiving this award. It was definitely a highlight. It's not why we do our work, but it was a highlight, and it's worth mentioning in this conversation.
  • [00:51:02] AMY CANTU: We know you're retiring, so thank you for all your years of service, and good luck!
  • [00:51:07] DEB POLICH: Well, thank you. Little nervous! [LAUGHTER]
  • [00:51:10] AMY CANTU: Thank you so much.
  • [00:51:11] DEB POLICH: I appreciate this. Thank you so much, and I'll look forward to seeing the finished product. Thank you.
  • [00:51:20] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL Talks To you as a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.