My conversation with consultant and strategist in public policy, arts, culture and creative industries, Kelly Wilhelm, who currently leads the Cultural Policy Hub at OCAD University in Tkaronto. Kelly is a long-time friend and colleague with whom I have had many passionate conversations about art, culture, leadership, life and how to have fun through it all. This conversation was no exception. We talked a lot about precarity in the arts sector but also its resilience. You’ll hear me refer to Kelly’s A New Project on Precarity and Sustainability article in the recording. I love the way Kelly always finds a way to ask good and timely questions.
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What if the arts aren’t in crisis, but are actually a crucial part of the solution to global challenges? Kelly Wilhelm challenges conventional thinking and inspires us to reimagine the role of cultural institutions in today’s world. This episode dives into leadership, equity, and the resilience of the arts sector.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Role of Arts in Crisis
01:16 A Conversation with Kelly Wilhelm
02:25 Connecting Cultural Institutions to Communities
04:53 The Changing Role of Cultural Institutions
06:08 Rethinking Leadership in the Arts
08:51 The Cultural Policy Hub at OCAD University
10:51 Addressing Precarity in the Arts Sector
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Behind the Story
Kelly Wilhelm’s journey began with a concern about the disconnect between cultural institutions and the communities they serve. Beginning her career in Toronto in the late 1990s, Kelly saw the contrast between the work show and stories told in public art galleries and museums, and the diverse communities outside their doors. She became determined to bridge this gap. Her work at the Cultural Policy Hub at OCAD University is an example of her commitment to equity, relevance, and the power of the arts to create meaningful change.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00] Kelly Wilhelm
Part of the answer to that question lies in the arts and culture understanding the role it can have in a time of collapse or crisis, and to understand that itself is not in crisis. I think that's a big point because we hear a lot right now around the crisis that is happening in cultural institutions and in the arts. And in fact, the crisis that is happening is in our world, right? It's an ecological crisis, it's a world order crisis, it's a humanitarian crisis. The arts themselves have a lot to contribute to these moments in terms of meaning, belonging, helping us to process those crises. But the arts themselves are not in a crisis. What we can do, though, is place ourselves within those larger crises and ask the question, what can we contribute that's of meaning and value to people as they experience these other things that are really significant in the world that we're living in right now.
[00:00:59] Claude Schryer
Episode 231. My conversation with consultant and strategist in Public Policy, Arts, Culture and Creative industries Kelly Wilhelm, who currently leads the Cultural Policy Hubat OCAD University in Toronto. Now, Kelly is a longtime friend and colleague with whom I have had many passionate conversations about art, culture, leadership, life and how to have fun through it all. We talked a lot about precarity in the art sector, but also its resilience. I love the way Kelly always finds a way to ask a good and timely question, what can we contribute? There is a lot of talk in the arts community about. And there is precarity. You wrote an article, There is precarity, absolutely, called A New Project on Precarity and Sustainability that I'll put in the episode notes.
And you and I have known each other for a long time. We've talked about all kinds of arts policy ideas and partnerships and this and that. But it's interesting to hear that the arts are going to be. I know they will be more relevant than ever because they always have been in situations, of course, crises and collapse. But the renewal part is also really important. So why don't you tell me a little bit about your whatever you're working on these days and what you're passionate about.
[00:02:25] Kelly Wilhelm
So I've always been passionate about ensuring that, again, those kinds of systems that support cultural expression and our experience of culture and the arts, specifically here in this land, reflect the land and its people. That's been a preoccupation of mine right from the beginning. When I first started studying, it was in the context of museums and art galleries. This is more than 20 years ago, 25 years ago, and at the time, for me, it was a disconnect between the role of what is a public institution and museum and art gallery, and the reality of that public that is outside its doors. And I was at the time living in Toronto and studying at the University of Toronto, and I was doing a project at the Art Gallery of Ontario. And to me, that contrast was so huge because outside the doors of the Art Gallery of Ontario is Chinatown. Outside in the subway on the way to the Art Gallery of Ontario is not the same experience that you have when you're in that collecting institution.
That is an arbiter and a transmitter of cultural value. Right. So for me, very early on, I became preoccupied with this notion of how do cultural institutions, particularly public ones or publicly supported cultural institutions, meaningfully connect with the people that make up the country and the public that they're intending to serve. So for me, a lot of it is around what service can the arts and cultural sectors provide in moments like the one that we're in? And I think we need to be very clear about that when we talk about individual entities within that. And then we need to challenge ourselves to think really deeply about it. When we talk about the impact of the sector as a whole, we make a lot of assumptions, I think, when we talk about the value of what the arts and culture is to the public.
And for me, a lot of it has to do with the mission and the public purpose for which if we're talking about an organization, an organization exists, and the extent to which that organization is providing that meaning, so the meaning and importance in the community that it exists within. Right? Because again, I go back always to this notion that this is a public institution that is there to create value for people. And over time, that value and what, what I think people require of cultural institutions has changed. Right. We're in a post pandemic world. We're in a world where there's a lot of research pointing to the fact that people's sense of belonging is really fragile, that they don't feel connected to their community, to the places that they live, that they have a high, high level of anxiety because of those crises we just talked about, including the ecological crisis and the crisis of climate change.
In that moment, what is the public service that these publicly funded institutions provide and to whom, and based on what values? I've been preoccupied from the beginning of my time in my work with the question of equity. Abso so how do we ensure that these institutions are led, that they. That their choices curatorily, whether that's in performing arts in visual arts, whatever the. Whatever the discipline, are reflective and meaningful to the people that they are there to serve. And what does that look like from a leadership perspective as well? And I think especially in a time like this, like the one we're living in, we have to really ask ourselves, what kind of leadership do we need in our institutions so that we can ensure that they are able to provide this level of public service and value?
[00:06:07] Claude Schryer
Well, let me throw that back at you. What kind of leadership do we need, especially in the arts? I mean, I see it through the creation of work. Right. It's not just the conventional CEO. It's all kinds of soft and malleable and transparent leadership. Right?
[00:06:22] Kelly Wilhelm
Yeah. I think the models that we have right now are very entrenched, especially in the not for profit art sector world. Right. And I think the future depends very much on us opening those models up. This idea that there is a single artistic director or that there is a single administrator, and that those two work together, I think is not functioning the way that we need it to. And again, I'm limiting, you know, this is a very limited scope to arts organizations that work in this kind of a model. This is obviously not true of many, many cultural and arts organizations that are working very differently and I think from whom we can learn.
But if we think about sort of the traditional model, the power structures, the people in those positions of power, the way in which those positions operate, all of that is still based very much in the colonial Western viewpoint of a hierarchical institution with leadership at that level, artistic, one artistic and one administrative, determined by the values that we place around Western arts and culture themselves. Right. It's not a worldview necessarily of the arts and culture, which is more appropriate, I would say. It's not an indigenous worldview, which again, I think is essential in leadership in our sector, for sure, and in our country. So I think we need to be much more flexible in how we think about structure and how we think about how we deliver that meaning. And it isn't necessarily going to be through the ways that we've done it in the past. I'm very preoccupied also with the transition in these institutions from the leadership that founded or saw it through the past into leadership that is going to see it through the future.
So I also am very, very preoccupied with the idea that we need to be mentoring in the work constantly, the generation that is coming up. And I think that we are very, very limited in how we do that for a lot of excellent structural reasons, but we have to remove those limits a Little bit. And make sure that in everything that we value, we are in conversation in the power structures so that people coming in actually have some authority to make changes within those.
[00:08:39] Claude Schryer
Well, maybe we need, like a cultural policy hub in an arts.
[00:08:45] Kelly Wilhelm
Maybe we do art school. Maybe we. We do. What a good idea.
[00:08:49] Claude Schryer
Do you want to tell me about that? Because I was impressed to see that come along, Because I think there's a gap and it's being filled nicely.
[00:08:57] Kelly Wilhelm
Yeah. We're about a year and a half into the work of the cultural Policy hub at OCAD University in the arts and cultural sector. We do not have the same kind of coordination and ability to influence policy that has to do with the arts and culture, nor do we have seats at the table in the conversations around other public policy issues where the arts and culture are really important or could play a really significant contributing kind of role to it.
[00:09:25] Claude Schryer
That's critical.
[00:09:26] Kelly Wilhelm
Yeah. So it's both.
It's both the stuff that happens in decision making around policy for the sector, and it's a much bigger view in addition to that, because now we can't talk about AI, for example, policy, without thinking. I can't anyway, without thinking about the impact on the content creators, the artists whose work is being, you know, is being scraped, is being used, is being reproduced. And now we have really concrete examples of how that is, in fact, contravening copyright law if we accept that as being the basis for how we want to govern that space. But there's. There's so much in that use of artistic work in technical systems that is not being considered as we privilege kind of the technical innovation outcomes. Right. That most of the conversations around AI tend to value over the creator and the rights, the ownership and the rights of the work.
So for me, the challenge is to try to figure out how do we focus the energy of this organization that does exist now at OCAD University, we have at this point identified three very broad policy areas that we believe are both really important over the long term, but also areas in which there's an active conversation happening now by policymakers municipally, provincially, or territorially or federally in Canada, because that's our scope. National at the moment, mostly focused in a domestic way, although we look outside of Canada for inspiration, examples and collaborations. And so those three big areas, the first one is around precarity and resilience. Right. It's what you just referred to, and this notion that in this time in particular, how do we understand the patterns that have created the kind of precarity that we Experience in the arts and cultural sector. And here I'm talking specifically about the not for profit arts and cultural world, because the dynamics of it are different. When you look over at the creative industries like film and television and those kinds of things, there are many elements of precarity, but they operate differently in the creative industries. So we're looking at establishing a bit of a baseline through this study around what is the financial conditions and precarity, what's happening around space for artistic creation and cultural production, what's happening around the workforce, and what do we know in the existing data sets about that piece, which is really important because then we get outside of organizations and into the experience of actual individual artists and creators and what's happening there.
Then the last one that I think is probably going to be very important for how we think in the future is around the models, the governance models. So precarity in the governance models and in the structure around the not-for-profit model that we operate in. Because I think in a lot of ways we're seeing the limits of that model really come alive. And yet we still, I would say by and large our sector still operates on the assumption that in order to succeed as an arts organization, you have to be incorporated as a not-for-profit organization. And the sort of goal is to receive multiyear operating funding from arts funders. That assumption can't hold because the resources can continue to grow at the level that they would have to to be able to provide that level of funding to everyone who has come online. So that whole issue around precarity for me is going to point to this question that we ask about the climate crisis as well.
Because the climate crisis requires us to reevaluate what it means to live within our means. Right? Everyone has to do that in order to cope and feel like we're making any kind of action in response to what we're experiencing. The same, I think needs to be said about the arts sector as a whole, which in many ways, especially if you look internationally, is very well supported. In Canada, the financial support for the arts sector may not be keeping pace with inflation, but we have a pretty well resourced public system and we can debate this and what more might need to look like. But I really believe strongly in this idea of looking at where we have abundance in that system and how we can structure it so that that abundance can multiply.
[00:13:43] Claude Schryer
What action points do you recommend, listeners, based on your experience and work in in the arts and culture?
[00:13:49] Kelly Wilhelm
I think for me a lot of it has to do with being in places where you might not be used to being. I just came back from Toronto from the Democracy Exchange conference, which to me is more than a conference. It is really a bringing together of people from many, many different sectors and perspectives to talk about in what ways can we be really ensuring that that our democracy remains healthy, that we protect the values that are inherent in it? And those conversations featured the arts and culture very strongly. And the point is to get out of a conversation around that is maybe circumscribed by the usual concerns when we talk about amongst ourselves around the art sector and to put that conversation in the context of what do we need as a society, what do we need as a in terms of public good, right? And how can the arts work in a way that contributes to that democratic process? And I find those conversations really inspiring. And I find the response we get from others after those conferences is also really positive.