Join us for our thirteenth edition of the Gutterblood Talk Show with our guest host Heidi Schmalbach, and Angela Caranza, Executive Director of Fresh Arts in Houston, Jane Hervey, Founding Executive Director of the Future Front Texas in Austin, and Zac Traeger, Founding Executive Director of The Museum of Human Achievement in Austin.

Austin’s funding for the Arts now falls under ACME, a new City department that merges Art, Culture, Music and Entertainment under one umbrella and grants are financed by a single source: the Hotel Occupancy Tax (HOT), levied to promote tourism, conventions and the hotel industry.

It’s a good thing and we need it. Many of ACME’s personnel have put considerable effort into being more responsive to Austin’s creative community. The issue is, it’s all we got and not enough.

The criterion for grant distribution to artists and arts organizations funded by HOT through ACME is based on values of cultural consumption, equates art with entertainment and enforces public facing requirements that serve Austin’s economic development.

These metrics are beholden to a specific profile in which the arts are funded as a marketing tool for the city to attract tourism rather than an asset to the public well-being of Austin residents and the long-term vitality of Austin’s cultural landscape.

Therefore, these grants don’t have the capacity to serve the full range of what's needed for a healthy arts and culture ecosystem in Austin. Nor should they have to. Philanthropy and endowments, the two major arteries that are deficient in Austin would help, but, again, they’re not the entire solution. Robust cultural centers and creative communities everywhere would fail to thrive without adequate and diverse sources of public arts funding. So, where does that leave us and what should our future look like?

What makes Austin’s art ecosystem distinctive is its collegiality. Some call our open hearted camaraderie weird, but more accurately, we’re an unprecedented mash-up of scrappy, gifted and smart go-getters, game enough to test uncharted ideas and show up for each other in a collective leap of faith. What we have as an art community is extraordinary. How can we own that? Despite its direct relationship to the city's population growth, public brand identity and local economy, what we have is on the line.

Instead of wrangling over scarcity, how do we come together to tap into undeveloped resources that supplement our singular grant pool funded by HOT?

For this Gutterblood episode, we aren’t here to grumble, point fingers or itemize grievances. We're here to ask how do we explore multiple and broader perspectives, identify what we need and put our minds and hearts together to come up with doable, effective and relevant models and solutions that serve us in all our layers and complexity?