For Laura Becker, home is where the art is

Laura Becker moved back to Spokane just this month, and the city she returned to is vastly different from the one she left. As the new executive director of the nonprofit Spokane Arts, Becker says she looks forward to contributing to a thriving cultural scene that she doesn’t remember existing when she was growing up here.

She started to take notice of Spokane’s burgeoning artistic community while working in Seattle for the Washington State Arts Commission, a position that found her traveling frequently to her hometown.

“There was a huge revitalization of the downtown area that I could feel, and there were arts and cultural events happening,” Becker said. “On any given night I would come into town, and there were actually things to do. There were establishments that were opening … where arts were at the center of what they were doing, and I didn’t necessarily feel that before.”

Becker graduated from Mead High School in 1995 and left for Santa Clara University in California with aspirations of studying medicine. Although she had always had an interest in the arts – her late mother was an artist – it was her father, a doctor, who inspired her to originally pursue a medical degree.

“At that time, Spokane was in a really different place,” Becker said. “There weren’t a lot of opportunities for artists – especially young artists – and there wasn’t an art school here I could go to.”

But an art history class changed her academic trajectory almost immediately. “I was on the edge of my seat, so mesmerized by the topic,” she recalled. “For me, that was a huge flashing light: ‘This is what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to be in the arts.’ ”

Becker later transferred to and graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor’s degree in art history in 1999, and she completed graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“That experience was one of the most incredible of my life,” she said of grad school, “so intense and so rigorous and inspiring. You’re around these people who are all doing the same thing you’re doing and they’re really good at it. And you’re sandwiched between Boston and New York, so I was getting exposed to this side of the art world I had never seen before.”

Becker moved back to Seattle full time in 2002, working first as curator of education at the Bellevue Art Museum and later as a visual arts specialist at the Old Fire House, a teen center and all-ages music venue in Redmond.

By 2009, Becker was working as a project manager for the arts commission, facilitating selection committees, contracting artists and managing budgets for art installments in schools and state buildings. Several of those projects brought her to Spokane, including two – “Tesla,” an aluminum and copper sculpture by artist Susan Zoccola, and “Sign Post,” a towering sculpture made of vintage lighted signs designed by the Seattle-based Lead Pencil Studios – that were commissioned for Spokane Falls Community College.

“I saw this sea change happening in Spokane,” Becker said. “Maybe I was different, maybe Spokane was different. Maybe it was a combination of both. But I was really encouraged by what was happening, and I thought, ‘I could go back there. I could live there again.’ ”

During a stint as artist-in-residence and project manager with Seattle’s Department of Transportation, Becker got a call from Shannon Halberstadt, who was resigning as Spokane Arts’ executive director. Becker and Halberstadt had worked together at the Old Fire House, and Halberstadt felt Becker had the qualifications to take over.

“I wanted to downshift to a smaller city – that was a big thing for me,” Becker said. “Seattle had gotten really big at a rate that feels uncomfortable to me. When Shannon told me about (Spokane Arts), I wanted to make sure that the momentum kept going. I felt a responsibility to kind of step in and at least apply.”

Becker was offered the job last Halloween – she says it came as a surprise, since she had considered herself a Spokane “outsider” – and her new Inland Northwest residency has begun again nearly 20 years after she left.

“I started to meet people who weren’t leaving Spokane like I did,” Becker said. “They grew up here, and they were artists or musicians and they wanted to stay here, and they could stay here. That, for me, is the signal of a healthy arts economy, when you can live in a place and support yourself through the arts.”

In her new position, Becker’s main concerns will include serving as an advocate for local artists – supplying them with work opportunities, creating connections between artists, developing working relationships between local businesses and artists – and advancing fundraising for Spokane Arts, which is going into its third year as a standalone organization.

“The real priority for me, in my first year here, is fundraising, and making sure the organization is financially solvent,” Becker said. “A big part of what we do is enlivening the city and commissioning artists to create work, and that’s something I want to continue.”

Ongoing local events like Terrain, Create Spokane, the downtown mural projects, open mics and poetry slams prove that art can create sustainable communities, but Becker says there’s plenty of room to grow. As she did at the Washington State Arts Commission, she intends to “push the envelope” in her work with Spokane Arts: There shouldn’t be, she says, a definitive answer as to what art can be, what it should accomplish and how people should respond to it.

“I want to open people’s minds to temporary artwork experiences, performance, more artwork in the public sphere, more artwork outside of institutions and artwork in nontraditional locations,” Becker said. “Art doesn’t always have to be a beautiful thing. It can sometimes be provocative. It can be controversial. It makes us question ourselves. It makes us look at our surroundings differently. It makes us start conversations we might not have otherwise. It’s a form of expression that I think is really healthy. All of those things are strong community builders.”

Although the Spokane of 2015 appears to be more culturally vibrant than the Spokane of 1995, Becker says there’s still work to be done. Recognizing the social and economic benefits of art are, she says, integral to the life force of a city.

“I want to live in a space where there are shared civic spaces that are enlivened with artwork,” she said. “I don’t want to just look at gray concrete all the time. … Art isn’t always a painting on a wall. It’s a space that you can exist in and an experience you can have. That’s the kind of thing I think Spokane needs more of. They need to be immersed in an environment.”