Wandering Friday’s opening reception for the “Chroma Zone” art show at Blue Triangle Union Square, Susan Berstler ran into a lot of people she knew. “I talked to about 45 different people, and it was all about the same thing,” said Berstler, who runs her own gallery in Somerville, the Nave. “It was, ‘What’s going to happen next?’”
The topic was the Somerville Arts Council, where Greg Jenkins has been asked by new mayor Jake Wilson to step down after nearly a quarter-century and the city’s creatives wonder who will be next to lead the eight-person agency, budgeted for $946,351 in the current fiscal year.
Jenkins announced his departure Feb. 12 on Instagram, calling the move “surprising, and not at all what I wanted.” He identified March 6 as his final day in office in a text Sunday and said he had “no plans yet” for afterward, except “Rest!”
Wilson confirmed the change Feb. 13 on Facebook, but was out of town during school vacation week and unable to take questions. He wasn’t able to add much publicly in a conversation Sunday to what is a personnel matter guided by legal constraints.
A search process will be addressed “with the stakeholders,” Wilson said. “We scheduled a meeting with the board for this week.”
Letter-writing campaign
In the meantime, elected officials have been sent some two dozen letters over the past few days from artists wondering what will be the council’s “new direction” mentioned by Jenkins and who will lead the council there.
“Allow the staff and board to be included in the search for a new director, and please make sure the current priorities remain relevant,” wrote Emily Arkin, a former chair of the council, in a letter Friday letter whose format and main arguments repeated in many others. The senders ranged from employees at Esh Circus Arts to artists such as Melissa Glick, Kathryn McKellar of Opera on Tap and Matisse DuPont, who ran The Art Haus teen center with Somerville Parks and Recreation.
Though most followed the same structure and used the same words, Berstler and artist, cartoonist and Open Studios organizer Bekka Teerlink Wright, one of the first to send out the email, said there was no real organizer of a campaign.
“It’s not being organized by any particular entity. It’s concerned artists of various types sharing with their networks and encouraging people to reach out, since advocacy is its best when it’s coming from individuals,” said Wright, who’s had a Somerville art studio for 17 years.
Newcomer artist Bridget Nicolo added detail to her own email, sent Sunday. “Artists from around the country move to Somerville specifically to be part of the active, healthy arts community,” she wrote. “I moved here in the fall after spending two years commuting here for the same reason.”
Nicolo pointed to Somerville Open Studios, Porchfest and other “annual arts festivals that fuel Somerville’s economy, livelihoods and quality of life.”
A culmination in “Come Talk Art”
The swan song for Jenkins’ time with the council will be “Come Talk Art,” Berstler said. The event is to bring together artists, musicians and other creative people from Somerville, Cambridge and Boston concerned about affordable workspaces. It is set for 6 to 8 p.m. March 2 at Warehouse XI, 11 Sanborn Court, Union Square. Though identified as being sponsored mainly by the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission and the volunteer coalition #ArtStaysHere, “it was very much Greg’s initiative that was pushing that,” Berstler said in a Saturday phone call. “The meeting’s going to happen, but what happens after that?”
“Our concern is just making sure that the mayor understands that the Arts Council really gets a lot of credit for creating the sense of community we have here,” Berstler said. Like many, she is interested in seeing a search for Jenkins’ replacement done “with input from the Arts Council staff, the Arts Council board and members of the arts community.”
The letters, and artists’ concerns, are “actually pretty separate than from Greg leaving,” Berstler said.
A model from the past
The council’s board called for its involvement in a “deliberate and focused” search in a Feb. 13 letter to Wilson, matching what the community of artists is saying: “We want to make sure that someone’s not just appointed, but that there’s a proper search,” Berstler said.
There has been only two executive directors over the decades the council has existed: founding director Cecily Miller and Jenkins. Berstler recalls from her own time with the council how then-mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay put together a job listing with input from the board and people in the arts community, leading to a committee interview process that recommended Jenkins – largely unknown in Somerville but “doing really great work in Boston at the time.”
The lack of clarity about what’s next is frustrating, Wright said, especially considering the worry from artists about losing space in Somerville as it gentrifies, when the council has been seen as supporting artists and championing their causes regionally. The feeling is “that’s kind of at risk right now,” Wright said.
“There’s lots of rumors on the Internet, and it’s hard when there’s not much official information,” Wright said. “That’s lot of the worries – what is the reasoning behind this? Where are things going?”