By Kallie Cox
If you’ve ever enjoyed walking through the city and checking out its eye-catching murals, attending a free Shakespeare play in Forest Park, enjoying a performance at the Muny, or savoring a beer and a concert at the Sheldon, then the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis has impacted you on a personal level.
For the past forty years, RAC has funded the arts and sponsored the work of hundreds of playwrights, musicians, visual artists, and creatives of all disciplines.
St. Louis, a midwestern city often overlooked by major publications, awards and art critics, is a vibrant hub of culture, artistic endeavors and community art education, largely due to this funding.
A few of RAC’s better-known grantees include Circus Flora, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and Laumeier Sculpture Park.
RAC leverages public funding from both St. Louis City and the County to ensure all residents have access to world-class art and cultural entertainment. The organization has given more than 7,300 grants totaling more than $115 million over its forty years in existence.
But what caused RAC to form and why does it continue to spend millions of dollars on the arts?
The answer involves one of the best — and oldest — orchestras in the country.
Courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
Campaigning for the Arts
Music is the language everyone speaks and an orchestra belongs to its community, Marie-Hélène Bernard, president and chief executive officer of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra says.
The SLSO takes this message seriously and has deeply entrenched itself in the fabric of St. Louis. As the first woman to serve as president and CEO of the organization, Bernard is in a unique position to witness and usher in a new era of growth for the orchestra.
“It was established in 1880 in St Louis, it is the second oldest in the country, after the New York (Philharmonic),” Bernard said. “So if you think of 145 years of existence, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra has been a center of the cultural fabric of our region and community.”
SLSO was one of the first to obtain a majority female membership, and for the past 40 years of its rich history, the Regional Arts Commission has helped fund its legacy.
Funding the SLSO served as a catalyst to RAC’s formation in 1985, according to Jill McGuire the organization’s first president and CEO.
Initially, the effort McGuire spearheaded in 1982 under St. Louis Mayor Vincent Schoemehl, to enact a small sales tax to fund the arts was rejected.
“We proposed a five-eighth cent sales tax that would create a ‘Regional Convention Bureau,’ create money for the arts, and also create a fund for economic development,” McGuire said. “We won the election in the city, but it did not win in the county. It failed by less than 1%.”
The community continued to submit requests to McGuire and the mayor’s office asking for funding for the arts, particularly the orchestra. They devised a plan to create the Regional Arts Commission through hotel/motel-tax funding, McGuire said.
This measure passed and the city was allotted seven appointees to the inaugural RAC board while the county was given eight. The first year the tax produced approximately $1.3 million for the arts, McGuire said.
Steve Schankman, RAC commissioner in 1985 and co-founder of Contemporary Productions which produces concerts and festivals in the area, said the formation of RAC allowed St. Louis’ major artistic institutions to stay well-funded. However, since RAC’s founding, it has grown to fund the work of numerous individual artists, organizations and projects in the region.
American Rescue Plan Act funding, administered to local governments and organizations throughout the country as a result of the pandemic, was a game-changer for RAC and the work it helps produce, Schankman said.
RAC allocated $9.5 million of these funds to 195 artists and 75 organizations to help with revenue replacement and tourism recovery in the wake of COVID-19.
Beth Bombara, a local musician, testified to the impact of this funding.
“Before COVID-19, 90% of my income came from live performances,” Bombara said. “Suddenly I found myself out of a job and struggling to stay on top of bills — struggling to keep writing and recording new music. The ARPA for the Arts grant enabled me to make my songwriting and performing a priority again.”
St. Louis’ vibrant melting pot of arts and culture makes it a city worth living in, Schankman says.
“It was art and music that put us on the map. I mean, you could say shoes and leather and all the other material things, but when you think of Tina Turner, Miles Davis, Grace Bumbry and the opera, Chuck Berry (…) when you start thinking of all these great musicians and great artists, literary artists. I mean, you can’t beat a community like St Louis,” Schankman said.
Courtesy of St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
SLSO
RAC’s impact on the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra since its founding has been constant and profound.
“RAC has invested significant resources into the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra over the years helping sustain very high artistic excellence in service to the community, ensuring that we also have a lot of artists that locally are working with us,” Bernard said. “We’re the largest employer of artists in the region and also diversity has always been at the center of our mission. So we are also nurturing and sustaining a lot of artists from different walks of life.”
One of the main missions of SLSO is education, Bernard says. It trains young musicians ages 12-22, visits schools and community organizations, and partners with more than 130 organizations annually to provide musical education and enrichment.
“Last year alone, we served 429,000 students, 1,300 teachers, and we’re really anchoring music education from pre-K to college ensuring that everyone raised in our region, and outside of our region as well, has access to a solid music education whether they make this a pursuit in life or just a love that they nurture (in) life,” Bernard said.
Within the orchestra itself, the artistic scope of the ensemble is inimitable, Bernard said.
“Music is a universal language, and there’s something very unique about the St Louis Symphony Orchestra in that you have 100 of the most talented instrumentalists coming together to create a sound and an experience that’s unparalleled,” Bernard said. “The orchestra is there for everyone.”
Courtesy of The Black Rep
The Community RAC Empowers
Another of these organizations that has had an incalculable impact on the region is The Black Rep, a theater company founded by Ron Himes who as an undergraduate at Washington University, took matters into his own hands as he saw a lack of opportunities for Black students in the school’s theater department.
The organization was initially founded as a student group in 1974 and was officially incorporated in 1976.
“We formed the company as a group of students because there was a void that needed to be filled. I think that in a lot of instances, in the early days of the company, that void persisted in the community, and The Black Rep helped to fill that void,” Himes said. “I think we continue to still fill that void by providing opportunities for (Black) and African American (community members) to train, develop and have a place to have their talents showcased.”
Before transitioning to primarily focus on theater, The Black Rep was a multi-disciplinary company that produced cabaret, a spoken word series, dance performances and showed independent films.
“We have been supported by the Regional Arts Commission from the very beginning,” Himes said. “We’ve done capacity building workshops with the Regional Arts Commission, the funding has been very, very important because it has been unrestricted and gone to support operating expenses. And, there have been times when the Regional Arts Commission has been a bridge in terms of funding for us, between seasons and between projects, and they have managed to always be there to help us, whether we were at a peak or in a valley.”
One year shy of celebrating its 50th anniversary, The Black Rep has an exciting year planned for 2025. It will be featuring two rolling world premieres — Coconut Cake which came out of the National Black Theater Festival and The Wash coming out of the National New Play Network.
“We are very, very excited about producing those two world premieres. I think that will take us up to 25 world premieres in our history. And then finally, we’ll be closing the season with August Wilson’s Radio Golf and that will complete the August Wilson American Century cycle for us for the second time,” Himes said. “I’m not sure if there has been a company in America yet that has done all 10 plays twice.”
Today, the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis continues to receive funding from the city and county hotel/motel tax. It uses this funding to provide grants that help fuel artists and organizations that bring new energy to the city. Its most recent grant cycle for organizations and programs opened on Jan. 21 and its Artist Support Grants are opening in late March.
Data from the Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 study (AEP6), completed in 2023 in partnership with Americans for the Arts, helps to illustrate how transformative RAC’s significant investment in the region has been. The report shows the arts and culture sector of the greater St. Louis area generates $868 million and supports 12,000 jobs, revealing the arts as a major economic engine.
Additionally, RAC supports cultural tourism efforts by promoting the work of artists and organizations at St.LouisArts.org. After 40 years, RAC diversifying revenue to meet the needs of the sector and making strategic shifts to respond to the changing landscape are also areas of focus.
