‘Art is essential’: Art advocates from across the state go to the Capitol
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Minnesota poet Bao Phi opened the annual Arts Advocacy Day at the Capitol with a new work performed in the rotunda.
“I wanted to write a love poem to Minnesota in this moment,” Phi said.
“When they stomped over the constitution, you brought out giant paper mache puppets of bears and owls while plastered dinosaur statues watched from the yard,” Phi read.
“You used your protest signs to sled screaming with glee down the hills of Powderhorn Park, because when they came for us, people who believed in all different gods locked arms to shut down the airport, because students walked out of schools and into the streets and said, ‘You won't take our friends, our teachers, our custodians, our neighbors.’”
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Each year, artists, arts administrators, community members, nonprofit leaders and more come to the Capitol from around the state for Arts Advocacy Day, a lobbying event for the arts hosted by Minnesota Citizens for the Arts. Executive director Sarah Fossen says 400 arts advocates showed up Tuesday to speak to their representatives.
“They meet with their legislators, and they talk to them about the importance of how art is essential to their communities, how state arts funding really means the difference between a community theater staying open, teaching artists going into schools and community centers staying open,” Fossen said.
Fossen says the goal is to thank legislators for their continued funding of the Legacy Amendment, part of which is earmarked for the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, and to keep fighting for that funding every year.
Legacy funding comes from a percentage of the state sales tax.
“Our last budget last year was around $100 million that went into the arts in Minnesota, which we're very grateful for that,” Fossen says. “Arts are such a huge economic impact for the state of Minnesota that we actually beat agriculture and forestry combined for economic impact and jobs – just nonprofit arts is a $1.6 billion industry in Minnesota.”
Antonio Espinosa was at the Capitol representing his nonprofit Art From The Inside, which he started after a 20-year career as a correctional officer at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater.
“Art is a tool that could be used for healing and transformation in all of us,” Espinosa.
The nonprofit provides a platform for incarcerated artists, including exhibitions such as “Spoken Heart,” which opens April 19 at Westminster Church in Minneapolis.
“I’m advocating for our senators and representatives to work together and look at the fact that art is important for all of us,” Espinosa says. “My thing is with incarcerated people, but art in our schools, art and in our communities, art in all our state, is important and so we have to work together.”
