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Still Bitsie After All These Years
Arts Council's Clark has survived, and thrived, through fat times and lean
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Business New Haven
1/12/1998
By: BNH
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Once upon a time, Frances T. (Bitsie) Clark of New Haven had another life, working for the Girl Scouts of America. But since 1983, she's been executive director of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, involved in one way or another with just about every important event ever staged here, confidante of corporate and political leaders and, by gosh, one of those leaders herself. And even after all these years and all the water under the bridge, she's still crazy about her job - and crazy about New Haven. So does that make her really crazy? You be the judge.
Now that SNET is going to Texas, are you an optimist or a pessimist about its future involvement in the life of this community?
If this was the first major funder to be taken over by somebody from out of town, I think I would be very frightened and discouraged. But this comes after a long, long, long list of people have left - I mean, I was working in the arts when Armstrong [Tire, long since bought by Pirelli] was giving bundles of money to fireworks on the Fourth of July, funding everything. They funded the arts council on a grand scale. But it's interesting, because people have survived. The cultural life of this city has survived, and has thrived even as more and more of our homegrown companies have been taken over by others.
How has that been possible?
Part of that is because there's been a recognition on the part of the people who did take over these companies that support for what was going on the community was very important, and that it was good business. That's not to say that everyone ended up being great corporate citizens. Some of our wonderful companies that have been taken over used to be a factor [and no longer are]. It's interesting to me that so many of them actually did end up being [continuing] factors. A wonderful example is Centerbank. When Centerbank came in and took over Paul Johnson's Connecticut Savings Bank, everybody thought it was the end of the world. Paul Johnson had been such a great believer in the arts. He purchased tremendous amounts of art from local artists. You could count on Connecticut Savings Bank to fund almost anything that was artistic. And when Centerbank came in, it was like an alien bank from Waterbury, and 'Oh, they're never going to be the same thing” - Well, they ended up being some of the greatest corporate citizens we've almost ever had.
But then First Union bought them, and has basically abandoned us.
Well, that's right. But maybe we haven't done a good enough job with First Union. Maybe we haven't spent time going to talk with them and include them in what's going on. I don't think you can say at all that when companies here are taken over that it's the end of the world. Therefore - to answer your original question about SNET - I'm not pessimistic. I'm hopeful that the Texas company will have the kind of sense that Fleet Bank has had. Fleet's been phenomenal - wonderful funders of small things, of big things...So I'm cautious, but I'm hopeful that [SNET] will be like Fleet has been.
The two arguments are: 1) some bean-counter in Texas isn't going to want to spend $5,000 on a poetry reading in Connecticut; or 2) SNET is a $2 billion enterprise, and if they want to give $2 million or $3 million of it away to be nice, who really cares?
So, one of things this does is possibly make more resources available. An awful lot depends on the individuals involved. I've always thought one of the most interesting things about Pepsi was - actually, two things. One of them was to develop probably one of the greatest sculpture gardens down there in Purchase, N.Y. [corporate home of Pepsico]. The other was right across the street, a great big performance art festival called, I think, SummerFair that went on at SUNY/Purchase. All done with huge amounts of money from Pepsi. Why? Because Donald Kendall, the [then] CEO, understood and loved and cared about art. When Donald Kendall left, they stopped funding it. Same thing with People's Bank and David Carson. He was a person who believed in and understood art. But you could get a CEO or a management team that feels that something else is more important. Maybe education, science, the environment. So it's a toss-up: What is the corporate culture of that organization [SBC Communications] that is coming in? What are they interested in? And what might be a detriment for the arts might be a great boon for the environment.
Part of it is, too, that for 100 years, SNET's top executives were our neighbors and had a personal stake in the community.
Of course. Look at the Sargent family. What's Sargent now? It's owned, I guess, by Swedish people [Assa Abloy Inc.]. Think of what it meant when Sargents were running the United Way, and all the rest of it. We just have to recognize that this is the way the world is going now. We can't sit and feel sorry for ourselves because something that used to be [is no longer]. You have to say, 'What can we do?' For instance: What have we done to actually cultivate the people who haven't been participating in the contributing aspect of [community organizations such as non-profits]. Has anybody ever gone down to Assa Abloy and met the guy who runs it?
Not me.
Has anybody from the symphony or Long Wharf [Theatre]? I haven't gone down there to meet him. I haven't gone down to say, 'Welcome.' You have to ask yourself: Do we just sit and get intimidated, or do we really make an attempt [to engage new companies]? I'll never forget when everybody was trying to get money from U.S. Surgical, when they had gone from being a $25,000 company to a $3 billion company in two years, and nobody could get any money from them. But there was a very clever organization here in town that got to know a doctor who used their sutures and through that doctor, and doing their homework ,and learning what was actually important to that company, was finally able to get a substantial amount of money out of U.S. Surgical?
So, who was it?
The Neighborhood Music School.
The state just gave $10 million to Hartford's Bushnell Memorial for a new, smaller theater. Is that bad for us in New Haven, or does the size of that gift raises the bar for public support of major arts institutions throughout the state?
My tendency would be to say [the latter]. It's important to look at it that way, instead of saying, 'Why did somebody get something rather than me.' When you see the state making a commitment of this kind it raises people's hopes, and perhaps gives them some impetus to begin to make plans to approach the state to fund some of their needs that are similar. So I see this as a positive, and not as 'So-and-so got it and I didn't.'
Does it signal a trend toward state support of the arts in the absence of federal support and the shrinking pool of corporate dollars?
Certainly this governor has been a tremendous supporter of the arts. One of the first things he did was, before he became governor, he promised that a million more dollars would go into the arts. We were all terribly skeptical at the time. But the first thing he did was to see that the Connecticut Commission [on the Arts'] budget got one million more dollars. So from the very beginning he sent a message that he believes in it.
How are arts groups coping with the shrinking pool of corporate dollars, and what new strategies are they using to compensate?
I've been here now 14 years. And what I have seen over that time is increased sophistication on the part of the arts organizations, from the biggest to the smallest, in knowing how to secure funding. Part of it is trying to match an [arts] organization's needs with a corporation's interests. Even small organizations have gotten more savvy that way. They weren't ten years ago.
They didn't need to be. Does the erosion of our corporate base place more financial pressure on the corporations who remain here, such as People's Bank or UI, to cough up even more dollars for non-profits?
I think it puts more pressure on individual donors. There's an increasing interest in how to cultivate individual giving to make up for [dollars lost elsewhere]. I came to the arts council in 1983, and there was a period between 1984 and '88 when the whole community was living high off the hog - there was a lot of money around.
The good old days.
Yeah. I had come from a social service agency where it was almost impossible to get anyone to give you any money, and I could not believe how much money was being given out in the arts. I'm not sure there's actually less [corporate] money being given now, but it coming in different ways. It's coming from different budgets - much more from marketing budgets than it used to be. Contribution moneys have gone away, but there's still a lot of money in marketing.
Among our local arts non-profits, which ones are coping best in the new environment, and which ones seem to be struggling the most?
The lack of money from the National Endowment [for the Arts] has had a major effect on the biggest organizations - Long Wharf, the symphony, and even the museums. That is a very serious problem. Everyone else got money from the National Endowment by way of the state. If you were going to get a $20,000 grant from the Connecticut Commission, probably $8,000 to $10,000 of that came through the state. So the organizations that have been harmed the most so far are the big ones - and individual artists. We've had artists in New Haven who have been recipients of National Endowment grants. They're almost all gone.
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