City Arts Director Will Lead Art School
Sue Ellen Heflin, Spokane’s arts director for the past 10 years, will leave her city post Nov. 1 to become executive director of the Spokane Art School.
Heflin described her new job as “a lateral move.”
“It’s an opportunity to shift away from bureaucracy and closer to people working directly with the arts. That’s a real plus for me,” she said Monday, when the change was announced.
Heflin takes over a financially sound non-profit organization with a $250,000-plus annual budget and a faculty of more than 50 artists serving 5,000 children and adults each year. Enrollment in the school’s fall art classes is up 50 percent over last year.
She leaves behind a city arts department facing likely cuts to its $112,000 budget.
“I’m not leaving because I thought they were going to terminate the department,” Heflin said, “but certainly 10 years of budget wrangling and always being on the firing line took a toll.”
City Manager Roger Crum said Monday that Heflin’s $46,000-a-year job will not be filled “before the new year, at the earliest.”
Crum said budget problems are nothing new for the arts department. “But we haven’t faced anything this bad in more than 10 years,” he said. “The local economy has come to a halt, and every department is getting looked at.”
Sue Bradley, who has served as the art school’s acting director since August, when executive director Maureen Davidson married and moved to California, said 20 people from as far away as New York applied for the job.
She said school trustees worry the city won’t fill Heflin’s position, “which would be a great loss.”
But Heflin’s connections and experience “will help us expand and more completely fulfill our mission as the community center for visual arts,” Bradley said Monday.
Heflin’s legacy at City Hall includes enhancing the status of Chase Gallery and encouraging public art throughout Spokane.
She devoted the past six months to helping shape a five-year cultural action plan for Spokane. Dozens of neighborhood meetings and interviews resulted in a document that will go to the Plan Commission Oct. 25.
Heflin agreed to present the plan to the City Council on Dec. 4 and submit a final report to the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave $11,000 for the planning process.
“But then comes the extremely important part,” said Heflin, “bringing people together and looking for funding to achieve some of these goals. That’s a real exciting opportunity.”
Whether the arts department survives “doesn’t depend on one person,” Heflin said. “It will take a lot of people demonstrating to the council that the city needs to support the arts.”
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