Phoenix Arts and Culture (Arts and Culture) is the designated local arts agency for the City of Phoenix. In March 2024, the department adopted a new mission, vision, purpose statement, and six goals to guide the agency’s work. The staff will create action items, priorities, outcomes, and assigned responsibilities for accomplishing these goals over the next three fiscal years.
Purpose (Just Cause): To enhance Phoenix residents' and visitors' quality of life through meaningful arts, cultural, and educational experiences.
Vision: Phoenix's arts, culture, and educational sector is vibrant, sustained, diverse, and connected to the communities it serves.
Mission: Phoenix Arts and Culture supports, champions, and promotes the City's arts, culture, and educational community, making Phoenix a great place to live, work, and visit.
Goals:
- Increase resources and infrastructure by being bold and assuming greater leadership as an advocate for Phoenix’s arts and culture sector.
- Lead with equity in all agency programs, identify and eliminate barriers that have prevented marginalized groups from fully participating in the agency's programs, and engage underserved communities.
- Strengthen ongoing communications and increase opportunities for the sector to come together through networking, information, convening, and professional development.
- Position Phoenix as an arts destination to promote economic development and uplift neighborhood and cultural identity.
- Advance the department's capacity through collaborations and modeling best practices to ensure stable and effective management.
- Ensure success for the department as it adds new programs, facilities, projects, and staff.
About the Department
Phoenix Arts and Culture is a model LAA that offers all five major services, similar to other major city counterparts located within local government. The agency is most known for its award-winning public art program, which works in neighborhoods with local, national, and international artists to create a more beautiful and vibrant city. This work is funded by a percent-for-art ordinance that funds public art from the City’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP). The department also administers a modest grants program that funds almost a dollar per capita in grant support ($1.7 million). In addition, Arts and Culture manages a portfolio of cultural facilities and offers programs, resources, and research that make a strong case for the arts to demonstrate their economic, social, practical, and educational benefits. The department’s annual budget is around $6 million, with a five-year CIP budget of over $20 million. Arts and Culture also received funding from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency received a couple of allocations from federal recovery funds that allowed the department to offer transformational services to individual artists and the nonprofit arts and culture sector. Arts and Culture’s grantmaking between FY20 and FY24 funded over $10 million. Individual artists have had professional development resources and a funding mechanism for new work. The agency has been able to step up and offer meaningful contributions to direct programming around the city, especially in underrepresented parts of the community. Arts and Culture also received a $1 million Public Art Challenge Grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies that supports temporary public art projects that address important local civic issues in cities nationwide. Phoenix, one of eight out of 150 cities selected for the grant, will commission artists to create shading and cooling installations in response to extreme urban heat.
Planning for the Future
The department is at a pivotal point and must plan, as the agency’s relief funds will be expended by December 2024. The agency’s annual grants program for nonprofit cultural organizations will revert to pre-pandemic days, and the department has yet to have substantial artist programs of note. The City’s general and CIP funds must be relied on to support ongoing and new work, and the state arts commission’s funding may not be included in the State of Arizona’s FY25 budget, which
will cause a reduction in program funding. There is also a forecasted City deficit in FYs 25 and 26, and budget reductions may be considered by City leadership. In addition, the department is taking on the management and operations of the City’s Youth and Education Office, the City’s Archaeology Office, the S’edav Va’aki Museum and Archaeology Center (the City’s only owned and operated cultural center), and the management of four new cultural facilities from the Parks and Recreation Department. These new programs, functions, and facilities will come with budgets and staff from the general fund.
Arts and Culture engaged with Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic consulting arm of Bloomberg Philanthropies that works alongside client cities to improve residents' quality of life. Bloomberg Associates takes a strategic, collaborative, and results-oriented approach to making cities stronger, safer, more equitable, and efficient.
To date, as part of its engagement with Arts and Culture, Bloomberg Associates has completed two significant projects, including comparative research on the agency vis-à-vis 20 local arts agencies in U.S. cities and a 360-degree agency assessment. Both are aimed at helping Arts and Culture understand the impact of its service delivery and its positioning for promoting the City’s arts and culture offer and its robust quality of life for residents and visitors.
For planning, the 360-degree assessment by Bloomberg Associates consisted of nearly 100 stakeholder interviews aimed at:
- Understanding Arts and Culture’s strengths and weaknesses
- Identifying opportunities for collaboration across government and with external partners
- Potential next steps for the agency
- Bloomberg Associates conducted interviews in both individual and group formats, with stakeholders including:
- Agency staff and Commission members
- Representatives of colleague City leadership and departments
- Representatives of partner organizations and local arts funders
- Leadership of cultural institutions
- Grantees
- Local artists
- Community members
Key highlights from the assessment and the comparative research for Arts and Culture and the City are:
- The department has capable leadership and trustworthy, dedicated, and strategic staff. They offer crucial support at the most vulnerable times in an equitable and accessible way. However, the agency is at capacity with the current staff level.
- Monetary support for the arts is far too low outside public art funding, and the City needs a comprehensive strategy for long-term support. Phoenix is the lowest government funder and has the smallest granting and overall budget among the top ten U.S. cities.
- Strengthening advocacy efforts and mobilization to secure more arts funding from the City and beyond is necessary to promote Phoenix as an arts destination.
- The field is eager for more communication, professional development, and convening opportunities, and Arts and Culture is the appropriate sponsor and organizer for these offerings.
- Cultural Infrastructure (performance, rehearsal, and studio spaces) is necessary for Phoenix to remain competitive and arts-friendly and prevent local talent from leaving for neighboring cities like Tempe.
- Equity is crucial for the agency and the current public art ordinance. Many acknowledge that a change to the language might allow for deeper community projects focusing on placemaking, community empowerment, and civic engagement.
- Stakeholders have significant confidence in agency staff and appreciate their strategic approach to the work; however, Arts and Culture’s work has not been fully recognized, and better promotion and recognition of the agency internally and externally would be a valuable endeavor for the City.
The agency must innovate but continue programs and services such as traditional public art projects, grants to nonprofit arts and culture organizations, and management of its cultural facility portfolio.
Bloomberg Associates has presented Arts and Culture with these recommendations:
1. Choose a few “BIG WIN” consensus projects achievable in the next 18-36 months. Among the projects that Arts and Culture might consider are:
- Professional development: Find ways to sustain programs like Arts Corps and Artists to Work
- Convening: Quarterly convenings of grantees around topics of interest
- Communication: Constant information sharing with the field
2. Identify projects that are well-suited to interagency and public-private collaboration. What “sweet spot” issues do Arts and Culture and colleague agencies have in common, and what can be advanced through joint efforts or shared resources?
3. Identify signature aspirations for longer-term planning and investment in the arts and the agency, such as infrastructure, funding, programming, workforce/creative industries, etc. Position Arts and Culture to deliver and have more credibility (i.e., move from a function to a department, which is in progress).
Strategic Work Plan
Following Bloomberg Associates' 360-degree assessment, comparative study, and the agency’s own research, Arts and Culture staff held three division retreats (public art, grants and community engagement, and the facilities, operations, and arts maintenance teams) and one overall staff retreat to discuss the Bloomberg report and create a workplan that meets the agency's priorities for the next 18-36 months.
