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Then, as now, the council was an independent nonprofit that acts as Vermont’s official arts agency. Its office is still in Montpelier, and even the number of staff is about the same.
But much has changed in Aldrich’s 20 years at the arts council, a tenure that ended on Friday. Aldrich announced his decision to step down earlier this year.
Where the arts were still being seeded when Aldrich arrived, the arts sector is now a mature and vigorous stand of trees in the forest of Vermont’s economic, social and cultural life.
“We are at a point where we no longer have to build the arts community in Vermont,” Aldrich said in a telephone interview Tuesday, just after he was honored by the state Legislature. “When it does need to continue to develop, it does it on its own.”
The arts in Vermont are so well established that Aldrich sees a need for a change in emphasis. What artists and arts organizations need now isn’t help taking root, he said. They need help getting more people to look and listen.
“Nonprofits are wired to spend every dollar on programming, and that’s a mistake,” Aldrich said. Most arts organizations spend less than 5 percent of their budgets on marketing and promotion, he added. “I think it needs to be closer to 10 or 15 percent.” Even the arts council spends only around 7 percent on promotion.
Vermont is a cultural destination and needs to promote itself as a whole, as a place with natural beauty, great food, outdoor activities and cultural splendors, Aldrich said.
This is a far cry from where the arts council was when Aldrich arrived in Vermont after a varied career in arts administration.
Aldrich grew up in the Albany, N.Y., area and got his first exposure to the arts in New York City. He earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a business degree from Yale. He spent six years at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in Washington, then produced music programs for the Atlanta Olympic games in 1996 and directed cultural programs for the subsequent Paralympic Games. He and his wife moved to Vermont both for the arts council job and to be closer to family in the Northeast as they started a family of their own.
At the time, the NEA had just lost the first round of the culture wars, suffering a 40 percent budget cut.
But both the Vermont Arts Council and the NEA put in place strategies that tied their work to the public interest. In Vermont, a focus on art education brought art to people who otherwise might not have seen any, Aldrich said.
And the NEA concentrated on making sure its funding reached every single Congressional district in the country, an initiative started by Dana Gioia, who led the NEA from 2003 to 2009. In addition, the NEA channeled 40 percent of its funding straight to the states, bolstering the state arts agencies and bringing in matching donations at the local level.
“Their language has been relentlessly bipartisan,” Aldrich said.
The NEA is so well entrenched that the budget of President Donald Trump, which eliminates funding for arts, humanities, libraries and other cultural institutions, doesn’t faze Aldrich.
“The president isn’t going to succeed, because the Senate, in particular, sees the value of the NEA,” he said.
Aldrich, 59, is moving on for a variety of reasons. After the arts council celebrated its 50th anniversary, in 2015, he realized he’d soon reach the 20-year milestone and started to think about what was next, both for him and the arts council. He and his wife own a real estate business in Montpelier, and they have four children — including triplets — in college. Aldrich has been paying student loan bills as they come due. They started at $900 a month, but by the start of 2017 had swelled to $4,200 a month.
“If I transition to real estate, I won’t have to declare bankruptcy in two or three years,” he said.
Aldrich’s deputy also left for another job recently, so the arts council’s board is taking the opportunity to rethink its leadership structure.
“I think you’re going to see an incredible, continued renaissance of arts and culture” in Vermont, Aldrich said, as the state focuses on building its brand and marketing itself more diligently. “I would like to think that one of my legacies will be to have set all that in motion.”
At the moment, about one-third of the arts council’s $1.8 million annual budget goes to artists and arts organizations. That figure should be closer to one-quarter, Aldrich said, so the council can spend more on promoting the arts more broadly. “To me, it’s a trade-off worth making,” he said.
Now that his time as Vermont’s leading advocate for the arts is over, Aldrich can be less circumspect in his statements.
“I am going to be relentlessly partisan in my advocacy for the arts,” he said. While Vermont has retained a respectful and principled political discourse, “in Washington that’s disappeared.” He laid the bulk of the blame on Republicans.
“I think their behavior, especially in electing Donald Trump, has been a joke,” he said.
The Vermont Arts Council has maintained a nonpartisan profile since its founding. It was created in the fall of 1964, in advance of the National Arts and Humanities Act. In April 1965, thanks mainly to Judge Franklin Billings, a Woodstock Republican who was then speaker of the Vermont House, the Vermont Arts Council was appointed as the state arts council. Aldrich called it “an independent, quasi-state agency.”
His leadership of that agency earned him a standing ovation at the Statehouse on Tuesday. Chard deNiord, Vermont’s poet laureate, wrote a poem for the occasion. Bill Botzow, a state representative from Pownal and a visual artist who led the search committee that chose Aldrich for the arts council job read the proclamation.
“I didn’t think it would affect me as much as it did,” Aldrich said. Afterward, he went back to his office to continue cleaning it up.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
