Building an Equitable Arts Infrastructure Symposium

The Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group and The University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts are hosting a national symposium focused on the enduring challenge of cultural, economic and racial equity in the nation’s performing arts sector. Over two days, through conversations with cultural professionals and humanities scholars, this convening will address gaps in understanding about how performing artists in the U.S. work and how their work is supported systemically. By defining, theorizing and historicizing new methods and approaches to an equitable arts infrastructure, this symposium will create a foundation for new understandings of how educational institutions and cultural professionals can support each other.

This symposium is free and open to the public. Registration is required to ensure we can accommodate all attendees. 

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Questions about the Building an Equitable Arts Infrastructure Symposium?
Email artsinfrastructures25@utexas.edu.

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Almost all symposium events will be livestreamed by our partner, HowlRound Theatre Commons. No registration is required to join our events virtually.

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Schedule of Events 

Friday, February 28, 2025 

All events will be held on The University of Texas at Austin’s campus at the Harry Ransom Center (300 W. 21st Street, Austin, 78712). 

Welcome from the Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group (9:30-10:00 AM) 

Speakers: Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Charlotte Canning, Sarah Wilbur  

Morning Session - Value/Mission (10:00-11:30 AM) 

Non-profit performing arts organizations are pressured by industry standards and funding demands to prominently include their mission and values statements as part of its story. To this end, it could be argued that an organization’s mission and values are its story. If telling a story is a way of assigning worth to what the story narrates, then the respondents in this session stand uniquely positioned to address: 

• How artists, arts researchers and/or arts intermediaries are defining value in the performing arts today and to what purposes

• How statements of value between arts stakeholders with differential power stand in tension or alignment with artists’ creative aspirations.

• In what contexts are alternative value propositions necessary to manifest change toward greater economic and cultural justice in the performing arts ecology?
   

Led by:
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Professor of Theatre and Dance, University of Michigan
Colleen Hooper, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Dance Education, Point Park University
Todd London, Author, Founding Director of The Third Bohemia
Koritha Mitchell, Professor of English, Boston University
Adam Fong, Program Officer, Performing Arts, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Lunch (11:30AM-1:00PM) 

Hosted by The University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts at the Second Floor Atrium of the Harry Ransom Center.  

Afternoon Session - Data/Story (1:00-2:30 PM) 

Since the quote-unquote digital turn, the transformation of aspects of arts creation, labor and production into digital data has created new forms of valuation and understanding. The automation of aspects of art-making due to technological advances—from the increased adoption of moving lights to the advent of AI-generated content—have fueled vital changes in artistic cooperation that will continue to impact opportunities for future generations of artists working in live performance. From the data being used to account for the value of performance practice (to grantmakers) to the data generated from engagement with technologies that spark the emergence of new performance forms, this last session asks for expert insights on the following questions:

• What historical developments in the realm of data and technology have meaningfully contributed to resource (dis)parity in the performing arts?

• How do existing technologies—however well-intended in their design—contribute to infrastructural inequities in live performance? 

• What kinds of narratives are emerging today, through data collection and technological advancements to advance parity of opportunity, resource redistribution or reparative investments in performing artists?

Led by:
Derek Miller, Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies, Harvard University
Esther Kim Lee, Frances Hill Fox Professor of Theater Studies, International Comparatives Studies and History, and the Director of Asian American and Diaspora Studies, Duke University
Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Dean of the Theatre School, DePaul University
Brian Herrera, Associate Professor of Theater, Princeton University

Late Afternoon Session - Capital/Resources (3:00-4:30 PM) 

Capital in the performing arts is often framed as financial, but the values that the performing arts generate are not only economic. Advocates have frequently argued for the cultural, psychological, spiritual, social and political meanings of the arts, meanings that cannot be easily accounted for on a year-end spreadsheet. If, then, capital is generated in arts organizing through the exchange of commodities for money and through felt impressions that are fundamentally non-monetizable, non-reproducible and unavailable outside of those in immediate attendance. In the spirit of nuancing conversation about resources beyond binary debates about scarcity and abundance, this session asks:

• How do you see artists and arts advocates negotiating multiple forms of capital in their daily work in live performance?

• Through what kinds of strategies are artists and arts advocates struggling--or striking a balance between—generating revenue and generating other forms of meaning (social capital, environmental stewardship, trust)?

• What steps might economic investors in the performing arts take to support noncommodifiable, indeterminate or otherwise “iterative” approaches to performance creation and facilitation in local communities?

• What kinds of programmatic, curatorial or artistic approaches do you see taking shape in response to COVID-era threats to capitalization?

• What new or alternative forms of capital would you like to acknowledge as emergent or operative in the post-COVID cultural ecology?

Led by:
Sarah Wilbur, Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance, Duke University
Michael Sy Uy, Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the American Music Research Center, University of Colorado Boulder
Bob Bursey, Executive and Artistic Director, Texas Performing Arts
Lara Evans, Vice President, First Peoples Fund

Keynote conversation – DR. Maria Rosario Jackson and Dr. Sarah Wilbur (5:00-6:00 PM)

Sponsored by the Oscar Brockett Center for Theatre History.

Together, Dr. Jackson and Dr. Wilbur will discuss the varied roles of the arts and arts research on equitable urban planning and community development.

RECEPTION (6:00-7:00 PM)

Held in the Spence Lobby of the Harry Ransom Center. 

Saturday, March 1, 2025 

All events will be held on The University of Texas at Austin’s campus at the Harry Ransom Center (300 W. 21st Street, Austin, 78712).   

Welcome from the Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group (9:30-10:00 AM)

Speakers: Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Charlotte Canning, Sarah Wilbur  

Plenary Conversation - U.S. Representative Chellie Pingre (D-ME 1st District) and Dr. Charlotte Canning (10:00-11:30 AM) 

Chellie Pingree is a former farmer and small businesswoman, and she has served as the Congressional Representative for Maine’s 1st District since 2009.

Dr. Charlotte Canning is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor of Drama and a recipient of the University of Texas Systems Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. She has won the 2016 Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theater for On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (Palgrave Macmillan) and the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History for The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (University of Iowa Press). She has served as president of the American Society for Theatre Research and Director of the Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism. She is a past chair of the Faculty Council and the secretary of the General Faculty and Faculty Council.

Together Rep. Pingree and Dr. Canning will discuss the possibilities and liabilities of federal cultural policy, particularly as it relates to the performing arts. 

Lunch (11:30-1:00 PM) 

A light lunch will be served on the Second Floor Atrium of the Harry Ransom Center. 

Afternoon Session - Labor/Work (1:00-2:30 PM) 

Artistic production is driven by many people dedicating efforts to create. This session focuses on the practical dimensions of the artistic process and the weather of arts work on the body, individual and collective, in local contexts. Arts and culture workers have long experienced the precarity of participating in a flexible workforce, and the casualized and adjunct character of artistic employment has had a tremendous impact on what the performing arts can and cannot do. Given the multitude of shaping forces impacting arts opportunities previously discussed at this gathering, this session’s contributors will reflect on the following:

• How human labor practices have been affected by the inequitable conditions of creative work. 

• How are artists making demands on the support systems and institutions that they variably inhabit, in light of the increased precarity and vulnerability of the pandemic ecology?

• How or in what contexts can arts labor organizing benefit from broader engagement with labor advocacy in non-arts areas (programs, political education, organizing)?

• What are the current risks in configuring art as a vital and viable form of labor or “work”?
   

Led by:
Patrick McKelvey, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh
Patricia Ybarra, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University
Angie Kim, President and CEO, Center for Cultural Innovation
Laura Zabel, Executive Director, Springboard for the Arts 

LATE Afternoon Session - Market/Audience (3:00-4:30 PM) 

Markets motivate the movement of arts organizers in hidden and explicit ways. Still, markets are often discussed as abstract, de-humanizing forces that shape and constrain the flow of resources and contribute to deep wealth disparity in US culture. Audiences, in contrast, are generally defined humanistically, as the intended publics for artistic production. Since the arts champions that have been invited to contribute to this session each interface regularly with market forces, they have been invited to address the following questions:

• What kinds of market forces de-humanize, exclude or contribute to systemic inequities or in the performing arts

• What kinds of markets have proven “hospitable “to specific ways of working in live performance

• How might arts advocates and those with decision making power in the arts strategically channel resources toward the manifestation of economic and cultural justice through their engagement with market forces?

• How you approach or perceive of quote-unquote “audiences” invested in live performance in light of these ever-changing market dynamics?
   

Led by:
Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud, Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies, University of Washington
Kevin Moriarty, Executive Artistic Director, Dallas Theater Center
Nataki Garrett, CEO and Executive Director, The Ladder Leadership Services
Donna Walker-Kuhne, Founder, Walker International Communications Group

Concluding Remarks and Continuing the Conversation (5:00-6:30 PM) 

After the symposium’s formal gatherings, we want to enter into a time of reflection, brainstorming and planning for the future of arts infrastructures. What provocations do we want to create for the future of arts and cultural workers? Where should we direct energy and focus in the coming year?  

Led by: 
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Professor of Theatre and Dance, University of Michigan 
Charlotte Canning, Professor of Performance as Public Practice, The University of Texas at Austin 

Parking

Parking for the symposium has been generously provided by the University Co-Op at their garage, located two blocks north of the Harry Ransom Center. After parking at the Co-Op garage at 2214 San Antonio Street, please bring your parking ticket to the Harry Ransom Center for validation at the symposium.

These events are co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts, the Department of Theatre and Dance, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Endeavors.