Why framing research around“small” and “large” arts organization misses the juicy stuff shaping the 501-C(3) arts sector
Continuing the theme of foundations as sites and expressions of class struggles, class struggles that under racial-capitalism will ultimately be determined by the settler-capital-class (SCC), in this post I explain why when budget size is used as a principal category to study arts organizations, as in this 2024 SMU Arts research “National Trends for Arts and Culture Organizations”, the potential to see the role of the SCC as a key actor in a city’s nonprofit arts sector is entirely missed. While seemingly straightforward and technical, the grouping of organizations by the categories of “large,” “medium,” and, “small” and “BIPOC” and “non-BIPOC” misses the fascinating story taking place: the behind the scene class struggles that are creating these outward differences of budget size and BIPOC/non-BIPOC.
To try and see the class struggles taking place, one method is to look at the direct relationship of the arts organizations’ individual board members to the means of production. In other words, are board members of the capital, managerial, upper working or wage earning class? What is their nationality Euro-American, African-American/New Afrikan, Indigenous, Latine, Asian, Middle Eastern? This lets us determine not simply if they are large or small, information we can glean from their IRS 990, but what are the organization’s governing class forces. This information provides explanatory power to an organization’s geographic location, budget, endowment, staff and, very importantly, the kinds of arts they produce. Here’s a link to definitions of the categories for the following categorization method: If one-third or more members of the board are of settler-capital-class, this is a settler-capital-class arts organization. If more than one-half are members of the professional class or managerial elites, this is a professional/managerial elite arts organization. If more than one-half of the board members are of the salaried-working class, this is an upper working class arts organization. Finally, if more than half of the board members are members of the wage-earning or non-working class, they are members of the wage-earning working class.
We can then intersect this first class analysis with national class. For example, if two-thirds of the board are either European-settler-colonialist or Black/New Afrikans that is the organization’s nationality. If they do not have this level of national cohesion, I categorize them as multi-national. I am using nationality rather than race because race is just a euphemism for European supremacy as I think can be seen in this image below used to correlate foreheads with thinking capacity and where we get the phrase “high brow/low brow.” I do not categorize other nationalities because I am less familiar and leave that to people with greater expertise.
left to right images of phenotypical heads of Europeans to African people
Once I can organize the organizations according to this typology, I can look to see their intersection with budget-sizes, land, endowments, zipcode, and more. This kind of picture gives a much clearer picture, to my mind, of equity or fairness and the kinds of interventions needed in create equity. When we group the organizations by national class and direct relationship to the means of production class, we then can see/hypothesize the strategies and movements of the different classes. For example, noting the capital class organizations also receive the largest contributions from foundations, which are founded by the capital classes, helps to explain why a city may be producing a certain art form that seems to far outstrip a city’s interest.
I offer this methodology because when budget size, or whether an organization is BIPOC or are not, is used as a key category of analysis, rarely is it examined why some organizations are large and some are small? Additionally, it lets us speculate on why BIPOC arts organizations are the only organizations that are racialized even though racialization as a process is primarily to benefit European (White people). Maybe because the class funding the research finds it useful to project Whiteness as universal? Along these same lines, peculiarly, the SMU research names $1M as a large organization. However, large is usually considered the symphony and museum and, in regions of more than 1M people, those organizations have budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. These kinds of “large” organizations in metropolitan areas of more than a 1M people are almost always founded by the settler capital class and in the early twentieth century. However, by making the large category $1M when the median is about $500K, the disparity spread is relatively small. However, if we were to see how much of an arts landscapes resources are consumed by the capital class arts organizations as compared to the upper-working class arts organizations, that might be more startling.
If we look at the board members of the large arts organizations, and I would say these are organizations with budgets of more than $5M, and look at the top budget tier of those firms, I am going to guess that more often than not they are going to meet the standard of being SCC arts organizations. And, if we are able to pull out the Black arts organizations from the BIPOC category and then intersect Black with budget size, I believe we will see that Black organizations are typically in the “small” category because they were founded in the last thirty years by working artists and their boards are likely to be upper working class people. This is important to help explain why they are small because it is this smallness that is often used to rationalize the amount of technical assistance they receive. However, no amount of efficiency or technical assistance will be able to change the fact that these organizations are founded by working artists rather than capital classes and managerial elites and thus their access to capital is what explains the budget size not the managerial skill. Problematically, the artists/administrators working in these organizations whether “small” or “large” may believe the size of their organization is the result of some kind of meritocracy, when little could be further from the truth.
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