New York Sets Aside $212 million for Next Year’s Cultural Budget—Another Record for the City

For a second consecutive year,
New York’s arts and cultural budget will be more robust than its
ever been.

At a press conference held today
in Queens, the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) announced its
$212 million budget for fiscal year 2020, which began on the first
of this month. The figure marks a significant increase from last
year’s $198.4 million budget, which was the previous high mark for
the agency, even when adjusting for inflation. The 2019 appropriation for
the National Endowment for the Arts, by contrast, is a mere $155
million.

The DCLA also took the
opportunity to refresh its CreateNYC initiative, a “comprehensive
cultural plan” first announced two years ago this month. The newly
updated version, called the “CreateNYC Action Plan,” distills the ninety-plus tenets of the first
program—pertaining to topics such public art and diversity in
cultural institutions—into five new objectives for the cultural
sector: to increase funding, especially in underserved communities;
to grow “inclusive practices”; to solidify the relationship with
the city government; to tackle the “affordability crisis”; and to
improve arts education programming in public schools.

“The cultural plan gave us an
unprecedented opportunity to communicate with New Yorkers about how
their city has historically supported art and culture, and for them
to tell us how we can make things better,” Tom Finkelpearl, the
Cultural Affairs Commissioner, said in a statement. “Since 2017,
we’ve made major strides in fostering a more equitable, diverse,
and vibrant cultural sector that offers broad access to
transformative cultural experiences. With the CreateNYC Action
Plan, we’re putting a new tool in the hands of residents so they
can better understand the work we’ve done to date, and where we’re
headed next.”

Sections of the new budget are
specifically earmarked for CreateNYC projects, such as the
city’s CulturePass project, allowing New Yorkers with a library
card to gain free entry into museums, and the Language Access
Fund, which aims to
provide cultural programming to locals whose primary language is
not English. Other item lines include support for disability arts,
diversity efforts, energy sustainability, and commissioning new
public monuments.

The 33 organizations in the
Cultural Institutions Group will have access to $10.6 million more
in funding than last year, with the smaller organizations in the
group being eligible for proportionally larger shares. A dedicated
$4 million will be set aside for grants for artists and
collectives—a jump up from last year’s mark of $3 million—while the
budget for the Cultural Development Fund, which also provides
artistic grants—rose by almost $15 million. 

With this new budget, New York
City has now allocated over $1.1 billion in arts and culture
financing since 2017—by far the largest number for a US
city.

“CreateNYC fostered an
unprecedented level of public dialogue among residents that
surfaced many issues around diversity, equity and inclusion that
need to be addressed,” the chair of CreateNYC Citizens Advisory
Committee, Ben Rodriguez-Cubeñas, added. “The work that has
resulted has been inspiring, from a renewed commitment to promoting
a more diverse cultural workforce, to investing in a greener, more
sustainable cultural infrastructure. There is still much that needs
to be done to have a vibrant, diverse, and sustainable cultural
sector with access to the arts for all citizens of New York, and I
applaud DCLA on putting forward the Action Plan to provide greater
transparency on how we can get there.”

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Cultural Budget—Another Record for the City appeared first on
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