The Arts & Culture Recovery Plan.
We must implement a bold Arts & Culture recovery plan.
This campaign is just the beginning. We will work with the city, state, and private sector to:
Get arts workers back to work
Ensure tourists return
Build a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive arts economy
Get every elected official to prioritize Arts & Culture because the $110 billion Creative Economy is an economic engine for the whole city
“The Upper West Side has more artists than any other NYC neighborhood.”
We act now
Connect Businesses with Artists
We’ll help restaurants and hotels recover by providing them with grants or tax incentives to hire professional musicians and entertainers, both enhancing customer experience and employing arts workers in the process.
Repurpose Vacant Storefronts
We’ll work to repurpose available space into art galleries, rehearsal spaces, and music venues, expanding on successful programs like “Art on the Ave NYC” and Chashama.
Revise the Open Culture Law
We’ll demand that unions be brought into the conversation to ensure safe working conditions and fair pay for arts workers, work with cultural institutions to designate appropriate outdoor venues, and open the program to more participants to ensure equitable access.
Create Exclusive Artist Housing
We’ll work to pass legislation to create affordable housing exclusively for arts workers, ensuring that artists and artisans can make New York their home for decades to come.
Open Access for New Yorkers with Disabilities
Access to Arts & Culture is out of reach for too many. We’ll work to ensure New York’s cultural institutions—especially those that receive funding from the City— provide free or pay-as-you-wish entry for all disabled visitors and up to one caregiver.
We ensure relief
We’ll work to ensure that an appropriate portion of the American Relief Plan’s billions of dollars gets directly into the hands of the arts workers who need it—to pay their rent, bills, and other expenses after a year of unemployment—and not only to the institutions that employ them.
We rebuild
Initiate a City-sponsored Sector-wide Promotional Campaign
After 9/11, the state created a promotional campaign to ensure Broadway’s survival. Now, we’ll need a new campaign for the entire Arts & Culture sector. Not just for Broadway, but for all theater, music, dance, comedy, art spaces, and museums, to be beamed across the world trumpeting that the global capital of Arts & Culture is again open for business.
Build Back Better—and Safer
Many of our cultural institutions operate in aging buildings. The science we’ve learned about ventilation during the pandemic has shown us how unsafe some of our workspaces could be even before the shutdown. We’ll ensure that some portion of funding allocated to cultural institutions goes to upgrade HVAC and other systems to make them safer for Arts & Culture workers and consumers alike.
Expand Public Artist in Residence (PAIR)
Artists are creative problem solvers, well-suited to help the City find solutions to tough challenges. PAIR places artists in residence within City agencies, where they forge community bonds, encourage dialogue, and reimagine reality to create new possibilities. We will expand this program, put more artists to work, give more City agencies fresh perspectives, and benefit the lives of more New Yorkers.
Found NYC’s Own International Festival
Inspired by the River-to-River Festival that revitalized Lower Manhattan post-9/11, the City can sponsor an annual multi-borough Olympic-sized festival bringing the world’s arts communities together and celebrating neighborhoods across the city.
Broadcast Live from New York
The city can organize a weekly broadcast of New York City-based live-streamed performances, featuring a plethora of artists across all disciplines, that the entire world can tune in to. Think Jazz at Lincoln Center, but global.
Support Performers in Bars and Restaurants By Modernizing State Liquor and City Zoning Laws
Venues that provide live entertainment often struggle to get liquor licensing, forcing them to decide between selling alcohol and employing artists. I’ll work with state lawmakers to revoke the State Liquor Authority’s power to regulate live music, and work with the Office of Nightlife and other authorities to change outdated and confusing zoning laws, allowing more restaurants and bars to hire more arts workers.
Directly Buy Tickets
As it did after 9/11, the City can directly purchase tickets to performances across the City and distribute them to schools and community groups—opening up access and cultivating the next generation of arts workers and arts patrons—and to tourists, as an incentive to spend money at stores, restaurants, and cultural institutions.
Invest in All Five Boroughs
We’ll work to expand the arts community’s Manhattan-centric footprint by coordinating partnerships between Manhattan-based cultural institutions and those in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island to present events and productions in every Council district, giving each City Council member a reason to personally invest in the City’s arts budget. We will build a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive arts economy and ensure funding goes to communities historically shut out of funding opportunities.
Restore Funding to the Department of Education’s Arts Education Budget to Support Teaching Artists
The City must restore funding to ensure equitable access to arts education for all of our students. We must also streamline the vendor application process to make it easier for artists to secure funding, and allow schools to directly hire organizations with which they have established relationships.
Connect Artists with Schools to Share Resources
New York’s public schools contain thousands of art, dance, music, and theater spaces that sit empty most weekends and for two-thirds of each weekday. The city can share these spaces with local artists, providing affordable work space in communities across the city. Upper West Side Schools have 41 arts rooms, 41 music rooms, and 40 theater rooms.
We get everyone on the same page
We need New York’s elected leadership to understand the critical importance of Arts & Culture to the health of the City’s economy. Because of term limits, two-thirds of City Council members will be leaving office, and there’s a beautiful, diverse throng of New Yorkers seeking to replace them. We’re also in the middle of a hotly contested race for Mayor, with 17 declared candidates so far. And they all want our vote.
So this is what we’re going to do. The Arts & Culture sector is going to host a forum for mayoral candidates to ask them what they’re going to do for us and how they’re going to get our community and industry back up and running. Until November, we’re responsible for holding every candidate accountable to us. We are an enormous voting bloc in this city. We are going to harness our power, organize, and make sure we elect candidates dedicated to saving Arts & Culture to every office.