Austin arts groups feel strains of growth

Austin's fine arts scene has rocked and rolled this year, but not in expected ways.

The general director of the Austin Lyric Opera departed in May, leaving nearly $2 million of debt.

The Long Center for the Performing Arts went the entire season without a permanent director before announcing a hire this month.

Directors at the Blanton Museum of Art and the Austin Museum of Art left their posts. And AMOA abandoned plans for a downtown building and then announced it was discussing a possible merger with Arthouse, the Congress Avenue contemporary arts center.

Board and staff leaders at Arthouse faced national art world scrutiny after renting out an artist's installation during the South By Southwest Music Festival to a corporate entity without seeking the artist's permission.

The reason for all the tumult?

Largely, it's growing pains. But it's also the result of the general economic downturn and the city's philanthropic profile, which favors one-time giving rather than regular support, city arts leaders said in numerous interviews with the American-Statesman.

The numbers reveal the story.

Since 2000, the annual price tag on the arts has mushroomed, challenging arts leaders to find more money each year to keep the cultural offerings in step with Austin's growing population.

Operational budgets for 11 major Austin arts organizations, when totaled, jumped 63 percent in the past 10 years, according to figures obtained by the American-Statesman. And in some organizations' cases, growth has more than tripled in terms of budget size and blossomed by any artistic measure.

Choral group Conspirare, for example, went from having a part-time artistic director and an annual budget of $372,000 to being a five-time Grammy-nominated choir with numerous CD releases, national touring and a budget of nearly $1.26 million.

In the same period, though the city's population has grown 20 percent, the median household income has not increased, limiting families' disposable income for the arts.

A City of Austin demographic profile shows that while Austin's population jumped from 656,562 to 790,390 between 2000 and 2009, median household income dropped from $54,450 to $50,132, or 8 percent, when adjusted for inflation.

Austin donors did step up to pay for several major new arts facilities in the past decade, including the $77 million Long Center, the $10.3 million Butler Dance Education Center for Ballet Austin and the $6.6 million newly renovated Arthouse on Congress Avenue.

But two of the city's biggest cultural building projects — the $83.5 million Blanton Museum of Art and $14.5 million in renovations to the Bass Concert Hall — were paid for largely by non-Austin donors who rallied behind the University of Texas venues. For the Blanton, Austinites anted up $16 million, or 19 percent, of the overall capital campaign, and less than 2 percent of the money for the Bass Concert Hall came from Austin donors.

At the opera, leaders say the economic downturn caught them off-guard. Publicly available tax records show that the organization had a $644,000 deficit on its 2008-09 budget of $4.5 million.

Jo Anne Christian, chairwoman of the opera board , said that in April 2008, a parking fiasco at the newly opened Long Center resulted in hundreds of opera-goers being caught in a major traffic snarl — and shut out of the performance — as attendees of a music festival on Auditorium Shores clogged streets and occupied most of the parking spots in the center's garage. The debacle cost the opera $200,000 in refunded tickets and other lost income, Christian said.

"That put us behind the eight ball before the downturn" in the fall of 2008, Christian said. The organization has had to borrow on a line of credit to fund the loss from that year.

Concurrently, a decline in ticket sales and a drop in annual giving left the organization facing more debt at the end of this fiscal year.

Christian said that accelerated fundraising on the board has recently netted $1 million to make up for that debt as the organization heads into a new season. But to economize, the opera has scaled back performances from four to three for each of its productions and has not ruled out selling its headquarters on Barton Springs Road, a facility it built in 2000 for $4.5 million. It is also considering a spin-off of its Austin Community Music School into an independent entity.