As the bumper sticker says,
By giving art and culture an official seat at the table, the council is acknowledging how vital these assets are to the social and economic well-being of the city — something other New Hampshire communities, including Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Dover, have already recognized.
“At the end of the day, we believe that the city can and should be doing more to support the work of our outstanding arts and cultural organizations,” task force member Sherry Fiore told the City Council. Doing so, Fiore continued, “would result in an increase in social and economic activity.”
The permanent city arts commission, which is to be made up of residents and representatives from the city’s arts and culture organizations and business community, will be able to help promote events and develop new ways to showcase the city and its creative, cultural and historic assets. It also will be able to leverage municipal expertise to, for example, identify grant opportunities and other funding sources and assist organizations and individuals in applying for them. An arts commission at the city level also could provide valuable organizational and administrative support to Lebanon’s participation in any future regionwide effort to promote the Upper Valley’s many and varied artistic and cultural attractions.
Lebanon boasts all kinds of artistic, cultural and historic assets, so the new arts commission will have a full and challenging portfolio. The initial collaborative efforts among arts and cultural organizations in the city — professional operations such as the Lebanon Opera House and AVA Gallery and Art Center, to name just two — revealed that help at the city level was needed, and the nine-member task force quickly determined that its six-month tenure was insufficient even to identify all the questions. “It’s a big apple,” Mayor Sue Prentiss, a member of the task force, told the council, “and we got a big bite out, but there’s a lot more work to do.”
Importantly, the task force recognized that one topic under study — creating a single “arts district” in the city — would likely leave West Lebanon on the outside looking in, a concern that was brought up regularly during task force meetings. At last week’s City Council meeting, Assistant Mayor Tim McNamara suggested that the former Seminary Hill School, with its large and now mostly unused auditorium, could be an excellent venue for events. “It would be a great resource for the entire city but also for downtown West Lebanon,” he said.
That idea, and many other details, are yet to be worked out, of course. The council is now drawing up the rules for the new arts commission and is scheduled to continue the discussion at its Dec. 5 meeting. But now, thanks to the efforts of the members of the city’s arts community and the hard work of the task force, art and culture are well on their way to having a permanent, official voice in city government.