The City Of Austin Finally Has An Arts Department

For a city that’s supposed to care a lot about the arts, it’s always been an oddity that there’s no unified arts department at Austin City Hall.

However, as of Feb. 14 of this year, the city of Austin finally has a real, big city-style department, the Office of Arts, Culture, Music, and Entertainment (ACME). After years of performers, administrators, boards, and venues having to bounce between offices for everything from grants to permits, there’s finally a one-stop shop whose sole concern is the arts. At last, Arts Commission Chair Celina Zisman said, “We have a department that is being actively empowered by city leadership to serve the arts community.”

Its formation has been greeted as great news for the local arts scene – if they’ve heard about it. The announcement was the ultimate Friday afternoon news dump, coming via email late afternoon on Valentine’s Day from City Manager T.C. Broadnax, who wrote that “under a unified office, we can improve how we provide services and create synergistic opportunities that attract tourists, generate revenue, and elevate Austin’s profile as a cultural destination.”

The idea is simple: one stand-alone office within the city manager’s office, reporting to the chief of staff with one voice and working under one unified strategy. The plan is that, with better internal coordination and resource allocation, as well as a new emphasis on community outreach and real development of long-term goals, existing programs will be more effective, and new initiatives will be easier to get off the ground. Angela Means, the inaugural ACME director, said, “With a new city manager and new leadership, the opportunities have presented themselves [to where] I just think the timing is perfect for the city of Austin to take another look at how we structure and focus our efforts on arts, culture, entertainment, and music.”

It would be false to say that the timing could not be better, as “any time before now” would have been an improvement. Across the board, Austin’s arts scene is in crisis. Venues are shuttering at an alarming rate. Organizations are running out of funding. The recent major victim is Big Medium, which ran the annual Austin Studio Tour, the most important showcase for hundreds of local artists. And matters only look to get worse as the Trump administration threatens to end federal arts programs and launch the most dangerous offensive in the culture war since the 1950s. But better late than never.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Kate Meehan, managing director of La Fenice commedia dell’arte company and president of the B. Iden Payne Awards Council. The cultural community has been asking for a dedicated department for years, and its creation isn’t exactly inventing the wheel. “Most other cities have something like this,” Meehan said. After all, one of the longest-running complaints in the artistic community is that the process of navigating the city bureaucracy just to find which department you need to contact to pull a permit or apply for a grant was definitionally byzantine, “so just for economy of labor, we’re finally catching up with the rest of the world.”

One of the biggest stakeholders – or rather, group of stakeholders – to be affected is the Red River Cultural District, which represents 58 members from hole-in-the-wall venues like Valhalla and Elysium to hotels like Hyatt House and Hotel Indigo, as well as institutions like South by Southwest and the German Texan Heritage Society. Executive Director Nicole Klepadlo said she’d first heard rumblings about ACME back in January, and knew that this would result in massive changes to how the district operates. “We are tied at the hip constantly with city staff from various city departments, from parking to an office like this to the Convention Center,” she said.

Take organizing a festival in a public park. Previously, a promoter would have to go to multiple departments for each issue, from permitting to parking. Nagavalli Medicharla, chair of the Music Commission and also mayoral representative on the Arts Commission, explained, “If all the related aspects are consolidated within this one department, it just makes that whole process much more efficient.” Plus, she noted, even if an inquiry turns out not to be ACME business, it’s still their job to help point stakeholders in the right direction.

But after the initial elation over Broadnax’s announcement, there’s been little word from the city about next steps. “It’s been two months,” said Ann Ciccolella, the artistic director of Austin Shakespeare, with clear annoyance, “and no one’s reached out to us.”

Two months may not be a long time to implement changes, but it is a long time to maintain radio silence. Ciccolella’s concerns sum up the general response from the arts community to the ACME announcement, which is best described as a mixture of “What took you so long?” and “Wait, what’s happening?”

Setting the Stage

While many in the community are glad of the announcement, most were blindsided by it. Both the Arts and Music commissions were only formally briefed on ACME’s imminent foundation the day before Broadnax’s announcement. Since then, multiple leading figures in the performance arts and music communities said that the first time they’d even heard about ACME was when the Chronicle reached out to them for this article.

Some had a heads-up about its formation or at least knew there was an ongoing discussion on the matter. Between Sept. 6, 2024, and Feb. 13 of this year, Broadnax met with members of the Arts, Music, and Tourism commissions, the Mexican American Cultural Center, and staff from the Live Music Fund, as well as musicians, leaders from the Asian American Pacific Islander arts community, and representatives from specific groups, including the Diverse Space Youth Dance Theatre, Austin Creative Alliance, and the Motion Media Arts Center. ACA CEO John Riedie said he and members of his board met with Broadnax in November to lobby for the change, and found the city manager was already on board. However, this is Austin, where change happens slowly, so when Riedie found out about ACME a couple of days before the official announcement, “I was pleasantly surprised when it happened so fast.”

While just about every comparable city has had an ACME-style department for decades, Austin didn’t. When asked about the change, Means diplomatically said that it was all a matter of timing, adding that “I always say that we’re a different Austin now than we were back then.”

Behind the scenes, the shift seemed to start jointly in the offices of the mayor and the city manager. Mayor Kirk Watson has been increasingly vocal in his support for the creative sector, calling it “the third leg of Austin’s economy,” and has advocated for more than simply light applause from the political peanut gallery. But just as important was Broadnax, who is used to dealing with a similar department from his time as city manager in Dallas. Commissioner Zisman called him “integral in the action taken in distinguishing a stand-alone arts and culture office.”

So why didn’t Austin have such an office already? The argument always seemed to be that, well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The only problem is that the relationship between the city and arts wasn’t just broken, it was a compound fracture, and the city wasn’t doing much to stanch the bleeding.

Fiddle-Playing at Economic Development

There are many departments that have had a role in the arts, but the biggest player was Economic Development, which ran both the arts grants and the Art in Public Places programs through the Cultural Arts Division. Talking to anyone in the creative community in the last decade, there was an abiding concern that EDD wasn’t paying real attention to the needs and possibilities of the creative economy. Ciccolella put it bluntly, saying that dealing with EDD “has been really difficult – bleak – and that’s been years. Pre-COVID, post-COVID, you name it, it’s been hard.”

Arts came under EDD back in 2002. Prior to that, the Art in Public Places program and the Cultural Contracts Program – a functional precursor to the current grants system – had been run by Parks and Recreation. At that point, City Council contemplated creating a quasi-autonomous Arts Council, similar to Visit Austin, which would be able to access grants not available to the city. Instead, it decided to temporarily park the arts at Economic Growth and Redevelopment Services, which later became Economic Development. Initially, the arts community was glad of the change, especially when the city hired Vincent Kitch as cultural arts program manager, a position more generally referred to as Austin’s arts tsar. On the music side, there was city music liaison Jim Butler, who would later go on to become manager of Creative Industries Development at EGRS. Between them, they were credited with reforming several broken programs – in Butler’s case, with an emphasis on job creation – and giving the arts community champions at City Hall.

Yet the idea of an actual arts department was still in the air. In 2006, city staff commissioned the CreateAustin report, intended to give guidance on the future of the culture sector. Its findings included the recommendation of establishing a new department of Arts and Culture. In 2010, Council endorsed the master plan and that recommendation, but there was no movement from EDD, which fell back on the argument that a Council endorsement was not a specific instruction. Then, when Kitch left in 2011 to head up Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs and Butler retired in 2016, there was no real replacement for either, no action from Council, and no interest from EDD in reducing its fiefdom.

The ensuing years have led to a widespread belief that EDD leadership was both ill-qualified to lead on and fundamentally disinterested in the arts. Critics both inside and outside of City Hall point to their failure to produce an economic impact report since the 2012 study by public policy consultancy TXP, Inc., leaving advocates stuck with decade-old data (there was a 2017 update, but only relating to music). There was no real replacement for Butler or Kitch on staff, and it was just another area in which City Manager Marc Ott and his successor, Spencer Cronk, were broadly seen as being asleep at the wheel. Moreover, no member of Council seemed to be interested in becoming “the arts councilor.” As one City Hall insider noted, as an issue to spend political collateral on, “It’s just nobody’s baby.”

“Every decision has felt so short-sighted,” said Meehan. “No one was thinking about, ‘What does Austin’s art community look like in 20 years?’”

The result was an increasingly strained relationship between the arts community and EDD – and most especially with EDD Director Sylnovia Holt-Rabb. That relationship finally combusted last year after two major reforms.

First, there was a complete overhaul of the city’s arts grants program in 2022 that stripped dozens of established local arts groups of funding they relied upon. Many closed, and others were left scrambling to survive while staging shows with decimated finances. Initiated through EDD’s Cultural Funding Review Process, Holt-Rabb’s decision to shift the program from assisting the whole arts scene to boosting new, emerging, and unproven projects was widely criticized. Ciccolella noted that, rather than talking to the arts community about how to bring new voices to the table, EDD spent a lot of money on expensive consultants, mostly from outside of town and with little knowledge of the local scene.

“We think we could have come up with a great plan, but it’s always that the consultant comes and tells us how to do things,” she said. When the application rubric finally appeared, she noted that it emphasized “social services. … What happened to art? What happened to creativity? All those words were stripped from the applications.”

While the basic idea of expanding support to underserved communities was lauded, Meehan noted that rather than finding ways to assist all groups, “these guys move forward and the whole rest of that economic sector just figures it out on their own while trying to claw their way out of a pandemic.” For established companies, the changes in the 2023 grants were devastating, but the 2024 round felt apocalyptic, with dozens of arts organizations shuttering or facing massive cutbacks. Meehan said, “The problem was that there wasn’t someone looking at the arts ecosystem holistically and saying ‘OK, what’s that doing to the community in the long run?’”

Theoretically, the city’s Arts Commission should have been providing that kind of input, but that’s where the second reform came. Another side effect of the Cultural Funding Review Process’ implementation was to turn it into a weak advisory board, with EDD announcing it would be “recalibrated [from] a directive role to a supportive one.” The problem there is that EDD did not have the authority to make such a change, as the commission’s remit and authority is set by Council – but Council did not step in.

The final straw seemingly came in 2024 when, after years of being stonewalled by EDD, Council requested a report from the city auditor. When they received it, it dryly finished with an observation that “some of the data and expense summaries EDD staff provided included errors and inconsistencies.” The report concluded that “this indicates there may be an issue with data reliability or an inadequate internal tracking system.” That’s a polite way of saying EDD couldn’t tell them where all its money had gone.

EDD was under the gun, and last October Council removed a significant portion of its portfolio by shifting Redevelopment Services, which oversees revitalization projects like Second Street and Mueller, into the Financial Services Department. By late November, rumors started to spread that Holt-Rabb would be leaving, and after 24 years with the city she finally retired, effective at the end of February. However, Broadnax had already made his announcement about ACME two weeks earlier. The buzz around City Hall was that he moved fast to ensure that programs like the grants could be moved out from EDD before the search for a replacement for Holt-Rabb began.

New Desk, Familiar Face

Currently, EDD is operating without permanent leadership, with former Deputy Director Anthony Segura serving as interim. ACME, however, has its first permanent director in Angela Means. Anyone familiar with her work and reputation knows that she is regarded as the definitive safe pair of hands around City Hall: she spent a decade as Financial Services Division manager with Parks and Recreation before moving to the Code Department in 2017, and then served as deputy director of Development Services from 2020 on until getting her first full directorship at ACME in February.

At first glance, what’s missing from that résumé is any arts administration experience. So why does Means think she got the gig? In part, she said, it’s because “my approach, typically, is taking a look at systems, processes, business process improvements, and of course sound financial management.”

The first 90 days of her job are revolving around the process of creating this integrated department – a logistical and human resources mountain to scale. Zisman acknowledged the scale of the task, noting that “ACME seeks to merge together a historically siloed community, and that is no easy feat, especially in a tight budget season.”

In total, the office will be bringing in somewhere between 80 and 100 staff, and combine part or all of nine offices from across five departments:

– Economic Development Department: Cultural Arts, Music and Entertainment, and Art in Public Places

– Parks and Recreation Department: Cultural Centers, Heritage Tourism, and parts of the Office of Special Events

– Development Services Department: Austin Center for Events, and parts of Entertainment Services

– Austin Public Library: Heritage Center

– Aviation: Music and Events

That so much is coming from so many places is a sign of how the city of Austin’s cultural strategy has lacked coordination. “It’s something that’s been needed for quite some time,” Means said.

Having been part of two of those departments, and having worked with the others, gives Means a head start on the operational demands. After all, what she’s doing isn’t like building an office from the ground up – it’s more like building a car from parts of other cars while they’re all driving. Right now, Means said, her job is to balance the needs of all the elements of ACME. On the city side, that means taking all the affected departments and positions and “looking at how we collaborate and work well together, and how we can eliminate those silos.”

However, part of the problem is that these conversations didn’t seem to start until after Broadnax’s announcement. Conversations about which offices to bring in were ongoing into April. City staff whose jobs were partially but not completely dedicated to arts work were left unsure whether they’d be reassigned to ACME, or whether their existing job would continue minus the arts parts. Moreover, internal communications are only half the battle. Means observed, “How we engage with our community is critical.”

C’Mon, Do Something

Right now, the biggest issue for the community is the same as it was with the half-hearted announcement of ACME: communication.

Not only were many arts advocates and administrators blindsided by the announcement, but it’s been a struggle to get any useful information during the restructure. In part, that may be because there’s no dedicated staff to reach out. Since it’s an office reporting to Genesis D. Gavino, Broadnax’s chief of staff, and not – as the CreateAustin report recommended – a separate department, ACME does not have its own public information officer. That said, as one frustrated administrator sighed, “They do have a pretty new website.” (However, adding to the confusion, the arts sections on the websites for departments like EDD are still up.)

Like many, Meehan is still just glad that the city is finally adopting “some big picture thinking” when it comes to the arts. On the more practical, day-to-day side, she said, “personally, I’m really optimistic, in part because there’s one person that I can start harassing.” However, that depends on whether that one person is picking up the phone. Through her day job as partner and director of operations for architecture firm Rhode Partners, she’s part of the Urban Land Institute’s NEXT steering committee, working with the city and nonprofits like RISE, and she noted that even she and other members of the arts community have had trouble getting calls answered as the reorganization continues.

That said, whether it’s ACME taking charge or city leadership finally taking local arts seriously, the creative community is seeing signs of improvement. On March 6, Council instructed Broadnax to update the Art in Public Places program and return with recommendations about long-term care of pieces – a change instituted after controversy over murals and installation at the soon-to-be-demolished Austin Convention Center. Two weeks later, ACME successfully asked Council to drop plans to award three major contracts for artwork to be installed as part of the ongoing construction at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. The contracts, totaling $10.6 million, would have gone to artists from Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Mayor Watson’s Chief of Staff Colleen Pate informed Council that ACME pulled all three items from the upcoming Council work session, and that they would be reassessing the selection process “to ensure meaningful participation from Austin-based artists.”

That’s been seen as an indicator that the city finally understands it needs to make amends to the local arts community. That conviction was reinforced on March 18, when Austin Public Library announced that spoken word artist and advocate Zell Miller III – who had been excluded from the last two rounds of grants – would be Austin’s first-ever poet laureate. Means made it more explicit in a presentation to the Tourism Commission that same month, in which she told commissioners that previous decisions by the city had damaged the local arts scene and led to closures. Speaking anonymously, one administrator praised her for that statement, since “you don’t hear the city admit much, historically.”

That may not seem like a lot, but at this point the arts community will take it. Comparing the first two months of ACME to the EDD era, Ciccolella said, “After you’ve been in prison, everything seems great.”

Yet these actions are one-off gestures of the kind the community has seen before, and what’s needed now is clarity and consistency. Meehan asked, “What is their goal setting? What are they trying to do? What’s the point of this big set of employees? How are they setting their priorities? How responsive are they going to be to the needs of the community?

“I think they’re answering the last question because nobody’s heard from them.”

Ciccolella’s message to ACME was blunt: “Say something.”

For Riedie, a formal mission statement will go a long way. He’s also part of a growing chorus requesting that the Arts Commission get its teeth back. On Feb. 26, less than two weeks after ACME was first announced, 196 members of the arts community, including Riedie, signed a letter from the Austin Creative Alliance requesting that Council overhaul, revamp, and re-empower the commission in a way that it can have an effective role.

More pressing is the annual grant program. Means noted that, long-term, the city will be looking at alternate funding mechanisms rather than depending on the volatile Hotel Occupancy Tax. There are already some options on the table: For the last two years, the Arts Commission has recommended to Council that city arts staff be paid out of general funds and not from the already-strained HOT kitty. Zisman said, “When we see HOT reserved exclusively for programming, and the sector has more than a single source of funding, we will know we are on the right path.”

However, arts organizations are more concerned about what will happen in the short term. Normally grant applications open in May, but there’s no formal indication of a date this year. Commissioner Zisman said that she had been assured by staff that there will be no delay, but Ciccolella has heard talk of applications opening in August, with grants distributed in January to line up with the city’s financial year. “So we could be losing six months of our year in terms of funding,” she said.

Ken Webster, artistic director of Hyde Park Theatre, echoed Ciccolella’s concern. As a performer and director himself, he’s personally impacted by the grant cycle, but as a theatre owner and operator, he’s also worried about what changes could be coming to all the companies and performers that use his space. In the near future, he said, “I’d like for the arts groups to sit down with [ACME] and find out, will they be dealing with finishing up our current grants, or will they start fresh with new large grants?”

With the seemingly inevitable disappearance of federal arts funding, and the infamously penurious attitude of Austin corporations when it comes to supporting the arts, city-backed grants seem set to become more important than ever. After the 2023 grant cycle under the reformed rules, several companies, including the disability-focused TILT Performance Group and the avant-garde Capital T Theatre, went dark. The immediate lesson, Red River Cultural District Executive Director Klepadlo said, is that “it’s showing just how vulnerable our creative arts and music community are. But it’s also showing an opportunity of how the city can affect those ecosystems.”

Now the visual arts scene is struggling with the loss of Big Medium, and the comedy scene is dealing with the upcoming closure and potential relocation of improv mainstay the Hideout. “There’s a lot of people on the bubble,” Riedie said, noting that 25 of 34 local arts groups recently surveyed by ACA said they were not confident they’d be able to maintain operations through 2025. Indeed, ACA itself just had to lay off a staffer for budgetary reasons. Yet this isn’t a local problem. With a recession looming, donations are down across the board and foundations are reconsidering their strategies. Riedie said, “Nationally, everyone’s holding on to their wallets.”

He added that, when the new grants rubric does come down, he hopes it’s refocused back on cultural impact and audiences served. “It’s not a small business program, it’s not an entrepreneur uplift program. It’s really about making sure every visitor and resident has access to a wide array of arts participation opportunities, no matter who they are or where they come from.”

The Music Commission has their own recommendations about the Live Music Fund grants that they hope the new office will act upon. In February, they suggested the pool offer smaller individual grants to more recipients. They’re also looking for a new emphasis on musician and promoter career accomplishments, as well as looking at local economic engagement. Commission Chair Medicharla explained, “Are you hiring local musicians? Are you hiring local businesses for merchandising, PR, creative spaces?” Most importantly, Medicharla said, they want the music grants to center on “true music venues,” where music is “their primary driver.”

However, those issues are more pressing in some areas of town than others. Klepadlo noted that the businesses on Red River have their own immediate concerns related to the current state and fate of Downtown. Her office is regularly contacted by organizations around the nation about how to attract the kind of investment that’s coming to the area, she said, but with that growth, “owning and operating a creative space Downtown comes with higher taxes and higher prices.”

For Meehan, that means the city must get serious about the long-term viability of arts entities, most especially when it comes to the ever-worsening costs of maintaining and owning a venue. She pointed to the Creative Space Assistance Program, a one-off program in 2023 that gave emergency grants to organizations as diverse as We Luv Video, Cheer Up Charlies, and Eastside Silver Prints for venue-related costs. “It was a real lifesaver for people who were renegotiating rent or fixing plumbing that their landlords weren’t fixing for them or just being able to stay in the same space, but that was the only year they did that. And we’ve got all these venues now closing down,” Meehan said. She’d recently talked with one arts group that had been offered the opportunity to buy their long-term venue but only had a week to make an offer. Similarly, the VORTEX, one of the undeniable nexuses of Austin arts, can’t afford to fix its leaky roof.

When it comes to that kind of need for funding, Meehan said, “There’s nothing that’s nimble, there’s no other place for them to go, and there’s no system involved or available.”

And that’s where the biggest underlying concern surfaces. As Klepadlo noted, bodies like ACME are “best practice” for a city, so while she’s optimistic about the change and expects the Red River community to lean into it, it’s an unproven entity that’s still emerging from the EDD era. She added, “All trust has to be built and trust has to be earned.”

Ultimately, what Ciccolella wants out of ACME is for the city to finally live up to two phrases that get bandied about all too readily: ‘transparency’ and ‘arts ecosystem.’ For ACME to really be effective, it has to create a culture of trust that Klepadlo discussed within the arts community, and make sure that it’s not letting any part of that delicate and imperiled ecosystem fall behind. She concluded, “From opera, symphony, ballet to Zell, it’s all part of it.”