September 5, 2004 in Features

Recent budget cuts paint a grim picture

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Last September Sarah “Willie” Willamette and her yellow Lab, Bubba, slept on the streets of Spokane. By May she was back downtown, this time directing a crew of homeless artists as they painted a patch of purple tulips, a bald eagle and a huge American flag in the Browne Street underpass.

“For one whole week we had something to do, and we did it and it came out so beautiful,” she said. She talked on the phone last week in her basement apartment in the West Central neighborhood, as Bubba barked in the background.

Willamette lamented the news that city budget cuts will likely end the mural program, which allowed homeless people, troubled teens and others to enliven Spokane streets.

“It was just a blow,” Willamette said.

On Monday the Spokane City Council approved $2.5 million in budget cuts. A total of 28 positions will be eliminated, including the arts department outreach coordinator and half-time secretary. Only arts director Karen Mobley will remain.

Last week Mobley grappled with that range of emotions so familiar to so many managers in today’s economy. She was sad to see her staff leave, concerned about their future and heartbroken to see the vision that inspired her hard-working team diminish.

“My mother has been reminding me since I was 4 that the world is not a fair place, but I still somehow want it to be,” she says.

Mobley will continue to run the Chase Gallery at City Hall and the Percent for Art program which funds public art. She’ll continue to provide an arts directory, an e-mail newsletter and arts awards as well as other leadership, networking and public relations work.

But the programs related to Outreach Coordinator Susan Hardie’s position, particularly the mural project, the February visual arts tour, the Raw Space gallery and the spokanearts.org Web site, will all disappear unless another Spokane group takes them over. Behind-the-scenes networking and artists’ support will end. Gone, too, will be the city art exhibits at the airport.

Mobley says she’s like a pet owner with a box of kittens she’s trying place in good homes.

She’ll remain focused on public art for the city, elements such as the Opera House fountain that give Spokane a unique sense of place. Otherwise, she says, we’ll wind up with a city “where there’s no there there.”

Ideally, says Mobley, the city’s arts menu should serve everyone from the European traveler living on Rockwood Boulevard who wants to come home to view fine art in Spokane to the disabled Vietnam vet living on West First who relies on free city arts events to pull him out of his single-occupancy apartment.

For the homeless artists, painting murals on the underpass brought a sense of self-esteem that came from making a contribution to the community.

“I know when I come around the corner and I see a piece of art, it’s like seeing a pretty flower or a park,” Willamette said. “It uplifts your heart and puts a spring in your step. Those sorts of things are pretty hard to find when you’re on the street.”

“Art is a language everybody understands,” says Kathleen Cavender, a Spokane painter and member of the Washington State Arts Alliance Board. “It crosses boundaries from one neighborhood to the next.”

Cavender felt hurt by the budget cuts. “For me, it’s like a death.”

One of her favorite city events has been the annual community art gallery event in early February called Raw Space.

Mobley would find an empty store or office, whitewash the walls and invite any artist in the community, from amateurs to the best professionals, to display their work. The first year it featured 13 artists. Last year it showed the work of 195.

“It has launched careers,” Cavender says. “People get in there, they sell their work, they find mentors. It has been a pivotal moment for some of these young people.”

Rik Nelson, another Spokane artist, agrees. “The Raw Space was fantastic,” he says. “It was the best opening in town, and it was diverse.”

Mayor Jim West said Wednesday that the city went through a lengthy budgeting process that asked citizens, senior managers and union leaders to rank programs in various categories. The arts’ ranking was low enough to justify closing the entire department.

“The arts commission was not going to be eliminated on my watch as mayor,” he said. Instead, money that might have gone to pay for new library staff was allocated to keep the arts department alive.

“It’s one of the things that makes a community worthwhile,” West says. “It adds not only to the social fabric of the community, but the economic fabric as well.”

When companies consider moving to Spokane, they ask about the symphony, live theater and the vitality of the visual arts, the mayor points out.

So now it’s time for other community groups, no doubt afflicted by a similar litany of economic woes, to offer help. Call Mobley at 625-6050.

Sarah Willamette for one, hopes her organization, People 4 People-Spokane, will find partners in the mural-painting project. She asks that they visit the People 4 People office at 240 W. Sprague Ave. or call 624-1152.

“We’d dearly like to look at anyone else’s ideas to get the paintings going again,” she says. “There’s a lot of places that need a splash of color.”

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