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Artists & Arts Orgs Carry On

Lori Walsh: Artists and art organizations are hit hard during the economic disruption of the coronavirus pandemic. Peter Strong is co-owner of Racing Magpie in Rapid City. He joins us to talk about virtual residencies for artists and much more. Hey Peter, welcome.

Peter Strong: How are you doing, Lori?

Lori Walsh: I'm doing all right. How are you and your family?

Peter Strong: Oh, we're hanging in there.

Lori Walsh: Yeah, one day at a time, right?

Peter Strong: Exactly.

Lori Walsh: So we were laughing with somebody the other day and they were like, "Wow, this isn't funny." And I was like, "Well, you do have to laugh at some of the absurd moments that we're all being put through at this point." Really tough for artists right now, and arts organizations. What are you hearing from people right now?

Peter Strong: Well, the arts, a lot of the arts are built around bringing people together, around creativity and sharing the experience. And so we've all been hit pretty hard. A lot of organizations have had to shut down for the safety of ourselves and our communities. And artists are in that position of losing out on revenue and on sales. They do a lot of residencies or teaching gigs or performances. If you're a musician, you can't come together with an audience any more. So there's some real economic impacts on artists coming from all directions right now.

Lori Walsh: In some ways you can't even come together with your band or with your ensemble or with your theater group. The arts are not necessarily isolated activities as a general rule.

Peter Strong: Right. And on some level it is. Everyone has to practice and has to ... A lot of visual artists work in isolation. But it is about ideas and artwork being passed back and forth between each other in a good way. And that's tough now. So I think we're all trying to ... The good thing is we're all creative and so we're in that stage of trying to figure out what the next steps are.

Lori Walsh: Tell me a little bit about what you're seeing, some of those early next steps. How are people adjusting?

Peter Strong: Well, for a lot of artists, just like everyone else, in general there's a shift to virtual connections. We're using the same tools that a lot of people are using, Zoom and Hangouts and email, FaceTime, all those commercial options that are available to us. But at Racing Magpie we decided to reach out. We created a Facebook group and just called it West River South Dakota Creatives. Just as an opportunity for us to come together and share our stresses and share our ideas and grow as a community within our community. And out of that we just did a Zoom meeting yesterday with almost 20 artists to just start talking about, what is it that we can do? How do we start something while we wait out what's going on with the pandemic?

And really, I've always been impressed by a lot of things about South Dakota artists and the resilience that's there, especially for native artists. Of course, the creativity and thinking forward and thinking about new, what is the new system going to be now, as well as after the pandemic's over? And then the generosity that people have, the willingness to just jump right in and give and share and join in and be a leader or a follower or all of the above. All those things have been just pretty incredible to watch.

Lori Walsh: One of the things that's really difficult is there's things that you can do in person, in a live audience, that feel very natural to people, whether it's playing cover tunes or whether it's having a ticketed event or a ticketed art exhibition, an opening, that sort of thing. There's a financial structure to it. When you shift to online, we are very used to getting those things for free in a lot of ways, which is, the newspaper industry really went through that. People are used to paying for a paper, but they didn't want to pay for it online. And you really had an entire industry that buckled under those expectations. Do you see that that can also be part of the problem, is people are trying to navigate, how can we get things to people, but then how also can we get things to people in a way that honors the value that they have in the economy and in our lives?

Peter Strong: Those are definitely things we have to talk about. Excuse me. I do think that artists have always been in that position, though. I think that there's always a minimization of what they bring to the table creatively and finished product too. And so all those things are the dark parts of where we're at right now. But I do see people, our whole community, they're stepping up to support small business and they're stepping up to be flexible. And I think part of it is following the messaging of arts organizations like Springboard for the Arts in the Twin Cities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and of course The Arts South Dakota and South Dakota Arts Council. Following that messaging and really hoping that people see that value that the arts bring and start loosening up or changing the way that they support the artists.

And at least in the short term, the artists are like, "You know, some of us, we're used to fluctuations in art sales. They come and go with seasons. And we're willing to put out music and show people what we're doing in our studios and do that for free for now." But we do need to start talking about what that economic model looks like in the future too.

Lori Walsh: Tell me about virtual residencies.

Peter Strong: Well, someone shared an organization out of Washington state who has been hit really hard with this COVID-19 stuff. And they had shifted their in-person residency program to this virtual idea. So Racing Magpie, we have a partner nonprofit that just started up last year called Magpie Creative. And we'd done a small fundraiser and we had just a little bit of funds available. And we said, "Let's put that out there and get money into the hands of artists and help people see the value of artists and the arts at the same time." So the idea is, we have applications open through the 31st of March, and we just want to get any West River South Dakota artists to apply. And the idea is that once a week for a month, they would do a live stream from their studio, whether they're a musician, a writer, a three-dimensional artist, two-dimensional artist, anything, and show people that creative process and just let people into their space.

And in some ways doing virtually what we do at Racing Magpie here with artist studios, is showing people that process and encouraging artists and showing them that we value them. And so that's the idea. They're tiny. They're just $200, we're going to do five of them. But we're hoping that it's just enough to help connect all those dots in the short term. And if we find some donors to build that fund, we'd love to do more of those.

Lori Walsh: Where can people put in an application? Where do they start?

Peter Strong: Racingmagpie.com. They can go to our website, and it's a real simple application. Just send us the links to your work and tell us how you've been affected and what you'd like to do. And we'll make those decisions pretty quickly. So by, I think, the second week of April, we'll have those artists chosen and hopefully get the first round of videos up online.

Lori Walsh: Well, we look forward to learning more about those artists as part of the virtual residency program through Racing Magpie and Magpie Creative. Thank you so much, Peter. We really appreciate your time. Best of luck, and keep us posted with how things are changing. Thank you.

Peter Strong: Thanks, Lori.