The creative sector is a vital component of New Bedford’s economic identity, and with the March 2023 allotment of $419,520 in grant money from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, the city is poised to evolve from the COVID pandemic more creatively prosperous than ever.
Facilitated by New Bedford Creative (the arts and culture arm of the New Bedford Economic Development Council), this is a massive increase in funding for arts-related programming in the city. In past years, grant funding has gone to support upwards of two dozen artists, programs and events in the region. But this year ARPA money is enabling the sustenance of more than 70 participants — in the form of 40 artists and 31 projects.
The grants are being used to assist a wide spectrum of creative and cultural initiatives, including organizations such as Buy Black NB, the Cape Verdean Veteran Memorial Foundation, and the Queer Arts Council of New Bedford. It will also enhance education and community outreach, programming for children and youth, in addition to funding for deejays, tattoo artists, filmmakers, textile artists, multimedia artists and more.
“Artists and creative enterprises are small businesses that are one of the central pillars to our work at the NBEDC; it’s a measurable part of our economy,” says Derek Santos, executive director for the EDC. “We want to have the strongest and most diverse local economy possible, and for us the arts and culture sector has great untapped potential.”
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The portion of ARPA money going to NB Creative grants is close to $1.2 million, and part of more than $64 million awarded to the city in May of 2021. The NB Creative funds are being disseminated through three grant programs — Wicked Cool Places, Art Is Everywhere, and ARTnet, and a significant amount of the money is assisting in recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic to a sector that was disproportionately affected.
NB Creative was launched in December 2018 and oversees the city’s first-ever strategic Arts & Culture Plan, a 10-year initiative proposed by Mayor Jon Mitchell in 2016 and passed by the state Legislature in 2017. NB Creative works out of the EDC’s offices and is run by a staff of two, with two part-time senior fellows. Led by Director of Creative Strategies Margo Saulnier, the team includes creative specialist Hendrick Hernandez-Resto and senior fellows Marianella Perry and Zane Cox.
An important part of NB Creative is the Creative Consortium, a group of 24 community volunteers that assists Saulnier with the implementation of the Arts & Culture Plan. NB Creative is funded annually by the city’s Arts, Culture & Tourism Fund, which consists of revenue from taxes on the city’s hotels, capped at $100,000 a year, adjustable for inflation.
An Acushnet native and a graduate of New Bedford High School, Saulnier boasts a music degree from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College. She has had extensive experience in the arts industry, including the production of live shows for the Boston Pops at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Lincoln Center in New York City. She has also consulted in various capacities for Celebrity Series of Boston, including large-scale public outdoor projects. She has lectured in the music industry program at Northeastern University and is the Board Chair of Challenge the Stats based in Atlanta, whose mission is to empower artists of color and use music as a tool for social justice. Saulnier is a board member of the New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks! and participates on the steering committees of AHA! and SouthCoast Spring Arts, and is on the Arts Advisory Committee for the SouthCoast Community Foundation.
Saulnier talked with the New Bedford Light about the effects of the ARPA funds, the role of NB Creative in the city, the future of arts and culture in New Bedford, and more.
NBL: Why are arts and culture important to a city such as New Bedford?
MS: They’re super important because it creates connections between people, organizations, communities and neighborhoods. A lot of times I’ll think about civic engagement and how there’s a lack of civic engagement, but arts and culture is a really engaging, fun, and sometimes provoking way to engage with the residents of New Bedford.
So I think that the arts and culture sector can enhance relationships, whether it’s family relationships, community relationships, or relationships between residents and the municipality. There’s a lot of opportunities that I’ve seen over the five years that I’ve been here and what the artists and cultural organizations have made, and they continue to make a really big impact.
NBL: What is unique and special about the arts and culture in New Bedford?
MS: What is unique and special is the history that we have here, and being an urban seaport is what makes us unique to most cities. And the influx of people who come in through the port. You go back to the whaling days and then the transition into the textile industry and the fishing industry, there are families who were immigrants who have been here for generations.
There is also this kind of new influx of immigrants and people coming in to take advantage of the opportunities here through the various industries of the city. I think that’s what makes us unique – being an urban port city and the mix of cultures and ethnicities that that brings to the city’s population.
NBL: What progress have you seen in four years?
MS: We’ve made incredible progress in four years, even during the pandemic. What I attribute that to is the past 20 years. If you go back 20 to 25 years, you can see the foundation of what New Bedford is known for — the arts and culture sector is a collaborative field. We do a lot of partnerships and collaborations between and amongst different individuals and organizations. The National Park just celebrated their 25th anniversary, the New Bedford Historical Society had their 25th anniversary, AHA! Night is celebrating their 25th anniversary soon. The College of Visual and Performing Arts recently celebrated their 20th anniversary. So within the past four years, all of these anniversaries are starting to take shape, so when I came on there was an amazing foundation and system, a network of people who were already supporting one another. So it wasn’t like I was coming into a place where you had to bring people together for the first time. Everyone was already used to collaborating with one another, being collegial about it and supporting one another. There were a lot of smaller arts and culture nonprofits and a lot of individual artists, so I attribute our progress to that solid foundation.
The progress is also because we began to do more grants — place-making and place-keeping grants called Wicked Cool Places. That was the most forward-facing thing that we did right from the beginning. And then we had our website which has a creative directory of artists and organizations. We also became the pilot city for MassDevelopment’s TDI Creative Cities program at the end of 2019. By the end of the first year of implementing the Arts & Culture Plan we were approached by Mass-Development who said, “Would you be willing to be the pilot city for this initiative that we’ve never done before, but we see that when we go into the cities that the most effective projects that are taking place and engaging with residents are arts and culture. By being willing to be kind of an experiment city for this we were able to add to our grant offerings — so we have Wicked Cool Places and then we added Art Is Everywhere and that program was a boost to our arts-based economic development. That happened right when the pandemic started. The first recipient of that grant was 3rd EyE Youth Empowerment.
Last year, when the federal government passed the American Rescue Plan Act, we submitted a proposal to the City of New Bedford that said we have these great programs (Wicked Cool Places and Art Is Everywhere) and we proposed a third new grant program (ARTnet). Let’s boost the art, culture and entertainment sector for the next couple of years because they were hit really hard during the pandemic. Let’s boost them and create this new program that is specifically geared to individual artists who were hit really hard, because if you’re a musician who depends on gigs for your livelihood, that all went away. So, how can we do our small and important part of providing a working capital grant and some training and development and networking for artists so that they come out in the next year or two stronger than they were during the pandemic?
NBL: What role does the Economic Development Council play with New Bedford Creative?
MS: The role the EDC plays is critical because we are a program of the EDC, they supervise the financial administration. I report to Derek Santos, who is the executive director. The other role that they play is that they have connections to other industries and businesses and that we can introduce artists in the creative sector to those other industries, so that’s a critical role.
It’s amazing how the EDC organization values the arts, culture and the creative sector. It’s so important because a lot of other places might think that the creative sector is the fluff, the frosting. But we actually are a part of the mix, a slice of the cake that helps make up the whole economic engine of the city.
NBL: The NB Creative website is important. What does it contain?
MS: I would love for everyone to use our website. Over the past few years we’ve listed a lot of resources on the website. If someone wants to see the Arts & Culture Plan for the city, we have that available. We also have a Creative Directory where it’s free for any artists of any genre to join. We have a listing of over a hundred artists from all genres of the arts and we’ve been told that consultants and art buyers do use our Creative Directory to hire artists and musicians, and I highly encourage that. We have, of course, our Grant Programs page with the three grants that we facilitate, but we also have a link to a fundraising page with over one hundred funding opportunities, so if you’re a non-profit, artist, or creative enterprise, and you’re looking for funding from other sources, you can check out our fundraising page.
There’s two other things. One is the regional Calendar of Events that you can search by location, date, or type of event. There’s a lot of ways to find whatever events or project or program that you’re looking for. [A few months ago was] the launch of our Media Hub — so we have stories about artists and about organizations in New Bedford and any important announcements that we make we put on our Media Hub. So if anyone wants to experience any of that they can do it at newbedfordcreative.org.
NBL: How is the ARPA grant money going to benefit the arts and culture community in the wake of COVID?
MS: This money is a building off point to fully recover from the pandemic and whether you are an individual artist or a project or an organization where you’re positioning yourself to contribute to the community and the neighborhoods of New Bedford, as well as contribute to your artistic practice, or build upon the projects that you are doing for one of our Wicked Cool Places or Art Is Everywhere grants.
NBL: What is the role of the NB Creative Consortium?
MS: The Consortium is the 24-member, all volunteer leadership group whose responsibility is to assist and help me implement the city’s Arts & Culture Plan. They’re broken down into separate squads and each of them has different assignments, depending on our work plan each year for what they’re going to accomplish.
The Placemaking and Community Squad recently completed a feasibility study for a “Business of Art Center,” where we held some community meetings and interviewed many artists in the region from both New Bedford and Fall River about what would support them with their artistic practices. We also have a Fundraising and Distribution Squad, who reviews the grant applications for Wicked Cool Places, and a Public Art and Facilities Squad, who review artist proposals for Seaport Art Walk, as well as other public art in the city.
NBL: What is the vision for the completion of the Arts and Culture Plan?
MS: It’s an approximate 10-year plan, so at the end of 10 years, we will be able to look back and see what I think is a more vital, thriving arts, culture and creative sector that’s contributing to the well-being of the city of New Bedford that is inclusive of all of the different cultures and ethnicities of people who live here.
Completion is an interesting word because I see this as a continuation of the vision of the plan where everyone has access to and can experience the diversity of cultures here. So I don’t think that we ever want to stop doing that, but at the end of the plan’s time, if we look back and say that we are stronger than before, we’re more connected than before, artists are making a sustainable living, and have access to resources that they need, of all ages from youth to elderly, that everyone has access to arts, culture and creativity.
NBL: What reputation is the city building regionally, nationally, and globally?
MS: My tag phrase is that New Bedford is one of the most culturally unique and creative cities in America, but I would say we can start saying “in the world.” The people who live here now, who have lived here, there is this supportive environment to grow creatively here and I think we have a really fascinating mix of artistic practitioners who are either community or self-taught through being professionally trained and have a degree, and people like that everywhere in the middle. And having all of those types of people interacting with one another makes for some interesting things happening.
NBL: What experiences were you able to bring from larger cities like Boston and New York to New Bedford?
MS: When I look back early in my career, when I worked in the Programming Department at the Lincoln Center, we were a very small staff of five people in a department of a very large organization and we were producing and presenting over 200 shows a year. And then fast forward to Boston, working at the Boston Pops and doing artistic planning, a similarly intense environment, you’re planning for seasons ahead and you’re also producing in the moment multiple, high-profile concerts and tours.
So what I’ve learned over all of these years is that teamwork is extremely important, great communication is very important. Transparency and being willing to listen to multiple points of view and different points of view and being OK with that, a lot of times we are literally creating the future where you’re dreaming up scenarios and different programs that people are going to experience. So that’s what I enjoy, when you can dream up something and then bring it to reality. That’s what I love about working with artists — no matter what genre you’re in, they are always bringing to the table something that is unique, unusual, some people may call some of the ideas crazy, but they’re constantly pushing forward a more inclusive future for us all, and that’s really inspiring. That’s what I love about working with them.
NBL: Did you have an eye on returning to New Bedford when you were working in the larger cities?
MS: I did not. We were living in Boston and my family was still living here. We would visit for holidays, but I was away for 20 years. So, I really was not in the know about all of the amazing cool stuff that was happening here. And one day a friend of mine forwarded me the job description and she said: “Hey, aren’t you from New Bedford? Did you see this?” And it was the job description they posted saying they were looking for a point person for arts and culture in New Bedford. I thought, “Wow! It looks like this was written just for me!” So that’s when I applied, and the first year I commuted back and forth from Boston. And then the whole family moved here and it’s been amazing.
Sean McCarthy is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New Bedford Light.
The CVPA has operated (in part) in the Star Store Building for twenty years but it has been around much longer than that.