Last Updated
April 9, 2020
Work. Shouldn't. Suck. LIVE: The Morning(ish) Show with special guest Deborah Cullinan, Chief Executive Officer, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. [Live show recorded: April 8, 2020.]
Guest: Deborah Cullinan
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
DEBORAH CULLINAN Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) CEO Deborah Cullinan is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on the pivotal role arts organizations can play in shaping our social and political landscape, and has spent years mobilizing communities through arts and culture. Deborah is committed to revolutionizing the role art centers play in public life and during her tenure at YBCA, she has launched several bold new programs, engagement strategies, and civic coalitions. Prior to joining YBCA in 2013, she was the Executive Director of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. She is a co-founder of CultureBank and ArtsForum SF, co-chair of the San Francisco Arts Alliance and on the board of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust. Her passion for using art and creativity to shift culture has made her a sought- after speaker at events and conferences around the world.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck Live, the morning-ish show. On today's episode, Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by Deborah Cullinan. Deborah is currently the Chief Executive Officer of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, found online at ybca.org. She's one of the nation's leading thinkers on the pivotal role arts organizations can play in shaping our social and political landscape and has spent years mobilizing communities through arts and cultures.
Tim Cynova:
Prior to joining YBCA, she was the Executive Director of Intersection for the Arts. She is a co-founder of Culture Bank and Arts Forum SF, Co-chair of the San Francisco Arts Alliance and on the board of Community Arts Stabilization Trust.
Tim Cynova:
Her passion for using art and creativity to shift culture has made her a sought after speaker at events and conferences around the world and we are excited she's joining us today. Without further ado, Deborah, welcome to the show.
Lauren Ruffin:
Hello, good morning. So excited to talk to you as always. I have been watching Jeopardy and I realize this week feels like champion's week. I'm so excited to see all the shiny faces that we have on our show this week. But first, Deborah, how are you? How's your community doing and what's happening in the Bay Area?
Deborah Cullinan:
Well, I am thrilled to be here too. I was just having a good time with the facts that came out yesterday, Lauren. Peanut butter and jelly.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, yeah.
Deborah Cullinan:
And I've been really inspired to get to join you guys in the morning and start the day this way. So thank you for what you're doing.
Deborah Cullinan:
I'm all right. I feel like I am very fortunate to be sheltering with my beautiful family and our cats and dog here in San Francisco. I feel like we are really lucky compared to a lot of other people.
Deborah Cullinan:
In California, as you guys probably know, things are happening a little differently and that we've got this flattened curve. I think for us what that means is a lot less urgency right now and a lot less pain and some time to prepare. It also does mean that we don't know how long this is all going to take. And I think that uncertainty is just [inaudible 00:02:05] for people, so I'm just feeling it.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, the uncertainty is ... I mean, we're getting projections of this lasting anywhere from... We were getting the 30 day increment at the state level but anybody who's thinking further out realizes that we're going to be I think stuck in. Or this is going to become a cyclical part of the new norm for quite some time, possibly over a year or more.
Lauren Ruffin:
So Tim gave you a fantastic intro, but how do you typically talk about yourself and your work and what you do, because you've got your hands in so many different things?
Deborah Cullinan:
It's funny, I was backstage listening to that and just like, "Oh, my gosh!" I'm a mom, I'm an activist. I believe in the role that art and creativity can play in helping us imagine a better future for our world. My career in the arts is an odd one. I didn't come into it knowing that I was going to come into it. I didn't come into it with a formal background.
Deborah Cullinan:
My first gig as you mentioned, was at Intersection for the Arts and I stayed there for a really long time. In some ways I think that one of the strengths that I had is that I was just super naive. I didn't understand the arts, didn't get the field, had a lot of questions, didn't understand how an organization like Intersection, at the time, could be so venerable but also be so vulnerable.
Deborah Cullinan:
I didn't understand why arts organizations, and this is now I'm dating myself a long time ago, but why art organizations thought of art program and community program as two separate things?
Lauren Ruffin:
So with your YBCA hat on, because this is a live show about work, how has the way that YBCA's staff is working and what changes, what's shifted in the last month or so?
Deborah Cullinan:
I feel like one of the things that is really fortunate, if there are those things right now, is that we at YBCA have been undergoing a pretty radical transformation. We had been really considering how a multidisciplinary arts center can move from being a presenter on exhibition things to being highly transactional in terms of its relationship with artists and with audiences. How could it become a real creative home for its community?
Deborah Cullinan:
I think to do that, you've got to start with your team. You've got to practice what you're going to preach. So we've been working for years really at this work. I think people have to understand it takes such a long time, but we've been working for years to really think about the culture of the organization, how we work together.
Deborah Cullinan:
Lauren, you've been to the spot and one of the first things that we did was transform our workspace into a hub, much more of a coworking environment, much more of a collaboration space. In recent years, just in the last year or so, because I hardly know what day it is, we collapsed all of the curatorial departments.
Deborah Cullinan:
We created one program and engagement team and we really worked to be an organization, not a set of silos, not a bunch of different disciplines but a crew that is working together to try to achieve something. I think because of that we're tight knit.
Deborah Cullinan:
We had an all staff meeting yesterday and we rotate who facilitates it, got a group of people that are running all of that and really thinking about the culture of the organization. And there are all these things that are happening that I think are really beautiful. Every single day we get a piece of inspiration from a staff member, something personal, something they point us to along with any practical information we need.
Deborah Cullinan:
That might be from like in the early days of this, we're closed for another week to now information that we can share with artists who are on relief, things like this.
Deborah Cullinan:
One of our staff members, Julie May Lopez just launched a Happy Hour and a Movie and so she's getting all kinds of suggestions for movies that can be live streamed where people can watch together. We have something we call the Virtual Hub. Our collaboration space is called the hub in the physical world, so we made one in the virtual world.
Deborah Cullinan:
We have another staff member named [Mani 00:06:00] who just started a book club. We now have a resource list and one of the things that we are doing for each other is helping each other source hard to get things. The really good news for me is that I'm getting some yeast in the mail from Elizabeth so that my husband can make some bread.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's really helpful.
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah, and that's the team. That's what happens when you really let people shape their space and build their culture.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, so as was revealed yesterday, perhaps I'm a little bit culturally stunted, what movies were recommended thus far?
Deborah Cullinan:
I don't know the answer tonight yet.
Lauren Ruffin:
Okay, oh, it hasn't happened yet.
Tim Cynova:
Probably The Matrix and a tutorial about how to make peanut butter and jelly, Lauren?
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah, yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
All right, cool. I feel like there's some things we might want to crush an atlas in there.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, it's a great list.
Tim Cynova:
Deborah, as you started, you were talking about un-siloing parts of the organization and leading the organization through uncertainty and into new things. Right now, organizations are very much in an uncertain time. I have some of my students from my leadership and team building course that I teach at the New School watching. As a leader who's done this, what advice do you have for leaders and organizations, people in organizations when they're having to go through change in uncertain times?
Deborah Cullinan:
All the stuff. The part where it takes a really long time. The part where it really is about a sense of purpose for people, right? If you can't help someone see their own place in change, they can't find it, and so really being as clear and as specific as possible.
Deborah Cullinan:
I think the flip side of that is you also have to create the conditions where people can live with ambiguity and the idea that change really is, and it's just constant. If we're going to be a relevant organization that is contributing to the community around us, we're going to change constantly.
Deborah Cullinan:
I think it's about that culture and it's about that building of a unit that can sort of navigate that together so that when you don't know where you are, where you're trying to go, somebody else has got your back. People are working together, you're not alone. I can't say it's been perfect. It's been really hard and definitely painful.
Tim Cynova:
Last week we were joined by Laura Zabel, a member of this past year's Powerhouse YBCA 100 Cohort. Scrolling down the website, the list of honorees is amazing. Abby Wambach, Adrian Marie Brown, Ali Wong, Billy Porter, Hassan Minaj, Lizzo.
Tim Cynova:
The list literally goes on and so could I, but why don't I stop for a second so that you can catch people up on what is the YBCA 100 and how awesome is it to have that thing with all of those amazing people?
Deborah Cullinan:
It is the most awesome. Here's the thing, [inaudible 00:08:43] a culture and the team of people that make up organizations like YBCA. The original idea, [inaudible 00:08:48], the original idea was he said, "Yo, Deborah, the people who work here at YBCA are just ...", and I'm using is language, "dope."
Deborah Cullinan:
These people are awesome and we've got to figure out something about top down territorial structures. We've got to figure out how to unleash and tap into the creativity, the connections, the networks of the people who come to work every day in organizations like this.
Deborah Cullinan:
The original idea was really like a team building, let's start this, this dopeness and let's understand this organization. We did this with the first year. It was this very intricate, a moti-designed approach to getting each department [inaudible 00:09:31] department to surface for us their 10 most exciting people, the 10 people who inspired them the most.
Deborah Cullinan:
Then we interviewed each other, we learned about the people and we had a day long retreat and we've settled on this list of 100. At exactly the same time we were hosting Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit and are here.
Deborah Cullinan:
This is also a very awesome event, but I will be real about it. It tends to recycle or it did at least, tended to recycle the same couple of guys that were on the list. I was just sitting there in our conference room with all of these amazing YBCA staffers, looking at this list of diverse and beautiful people, some of whom I knew and was already inspired by, some that I'd never heard of before.
Deborah Cullinan:
It was just a no brainer. This is a public thing. This is something that we should give to the world and that we should share together and it also should become our organizing principle.
Deborah Cullinan:
So every year we name the names. We gather people around those names and then we work deeply with many of the list makers to understand how to pursue some of the most pressing questions that we're facing. It's a very timely question because we're thinking right now about where we're heading and how the way in which we were changing points us in the direction of this.
Deborah Cullinan:
Now, I have been very inspired by Arundhati Roy's piece that I think it came out maybe last week in the Financial Times. I think it's called The Pandemic is a Portal. What she's talking about, at least the way I read it, is that this is a portal that we have to move through and that we have a choice. We can either move through it, really heavily, with all of our baggage.
Deborah Cullinan:
We can bring the racism. We can bring the avarice. We can bring the trauma. We can bring it all with us and we can trudge and fight and try so hard to not move through it. Or we can move through it lightly with very little and if we do that we can change everything.
Deborah Cullinan:
For me, the 100 and the people who are most inspiring to us, those who are really addressing the biggest questions, they're going to carry us lightly through and we have to follow them. Our organization needs to figure out how to do that,
Lauren Ruffin:
That's, one makes me want to get behind the Financial Times paywall, but I do worry about all of the structures that people are so interested in getting back to normal. I mean in their little box of normal, that I feel like we're not having those conversations about how much we should. That's really super powerful.
Deborah Cullinan:
I have to take care because I understand that to move lightly through we have to grieve. Maybe some people were already heading there and so there's less to agree, less to mourn. Where for others it feels all lost. I do understand that first we have to help those who are still heavy to kind of lighten that load.
Deborah Cullinan:
Lauren, I forwarded you a cheers with this, remember?
Deborah Cullinan:
I just think of our arts ecosystem as this extraordinary creative resource. It's up to us. What do we want to do with it? How do we reimagine it so that we can better serve the creativity in our communities and so that we can position the arts as the missing piece.
Deborah Cullinan:
We all know that if we don't build the capacity of our arts ecosystem to work across sectors to help fuel change, we're just not going to get unstuck, as a field but also, I think in the world.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, you and I have talked about that a lot around the, and you said it earlier, how it seems to me the arts and culture sector sees itself living outside of the world with everyone else.
Lauren Ruffin:
I think you're spot on around the need to be collaborative with other sectors if we're going to get through this. I've also really been gravitating towards world builders and writers who are really helping us see what all the possibility that's out there. I'm in the process of digging through ... The Hugo and Nebula awards nominees were announced yesterday.
Deborah Cullinan:
Oh, really.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, so I'm going down that list and ordering, not from Amazon but from Bookshop. I'm feeling really hungry for new ways of thinking and of imagining what can happen.
Tim Cynova:
We have a question from one of our viewers, a frequent viewer. "How is YBCA engaging its cashflow challenges in this moment while retaining, sustaining, honoring its values?"
Deborah Cullinan:
First and foremost, the thing we're thinking a lot about is the disproportionately vulnerable nature of the arts workforce. Right? We're really trying to maintain the staff and take good care of people. We're going to be announcing an Artist For Me Funds soon.
Deborah Cullinan:
For us it's really thinking carefully about that and not just in the short term, not just right now keeping people whole, but thinking about what does it look like to develop the workforce of tomorrow? To the earlier point, how do we think about the arts a little differently and drive demand for artists to work to bring their gifts in service of this larger community issues that we're facing?
Deborah Cullinan:
YBCA, in terms of cash flow, we're okay right now. This is obviously not an easy time but we had already been thinking about restructuring even the way we look at revenue. Moving away from what I would call for lack of better words, a more traditional development shop with a Chief Development Officer and really rethinking things like membership program and thinking a lot about how we can drive revenue through partnerships in service of these broader concerns.
Deborah Cullinan:
A really good example of that right now is that we are collaborating with San Francisco's Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, working specifically on a very large artist-driven project focused on the Census. Specifically, I'm reaching the hard to count communities in San Francisco and raising awareness around those stakes that we face with the Census and this population count.
Deborah Cullinan:
This was brought to us through an extraordinary person named Amy Kish who built this partnership with OCEIA this Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs so that we could work together. What that does for me is it's kind of a no brainer because we're positioning the art and artists as an essential component of a large campaign that will drive participation in civic life. We're also creating financial opportunities for every single one of the artists that we're working with and it's a partnership that brings revenue to YBCA in order for us to hold the structure.
Tim Cynova:
Also another question from one of our frequent viewers, "If the 100 are a source of great hope, what do you see as the greatest barriers to the necessary reimagination and capacity building?"
Deborah Cullinan:
If I'm understanding the question in terms of reimagination and capacity building for YBCA, I think the big barriers for organizations like YBCA and in terms of the reimagination and the capacity building in our world, to me the biggest barrier is actually the lack of imagination and the fear. It's not being willing to take big risks on leadership like those people that are in the YBCA 100, to move us forward. It's sort of a lack of imagination around how we invest in creativity and why we should invest in it first.
Tim Cynova:
That's often one of the biggest disconnects I find working in the cultural sector where there's amazing art that we're producing, we're presenting. Then you look behind the scenes at the organization, you're like, "Well, this is run like any other organization in the 1980s. Why don't we use some of that creativity to create the space that we want, that we want to work in rather than what is prescribed out of a book?"
Tim Cynova:
We have a, "Yes," and a, "Thanks," from your answer. There's about a 30-second lag between when people post online and when we actually see them in the studio. I was able to mark time until that yes came through.
Deborah Cullinan:
Well done. Well done.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, that's right. Thanks. This is also one of those times where I used to take minutes at the board meetings in previous roles and then the conversation got really good and then I forgot that I was the one taking board minutes and then I was like, "Oh crap. I need to go back."
Lauren Ruffin:
I'm the worst note taker. I'm so bad at it.
Tim Cynova:
I feel like that, because I'm like, "This is a great conversation." Then like, "Oh wait, there's other stuff going on that I should be a part of.
Lauren Ruffin:
One of the things I'm also curious about is mission. You've talked about bringing artists into the workforce when thinking about Census. In New Mexico the Census is a really big deal because we have so many super rural communities that are hard to count. Are you looking at your mission differently and or is it simply the how that you're going about achieving the mission is starting to shift or you're thinking about how it might shift?
Deborah Cullinan:
I'm not sure that we're looking at the mission differently. Our mission is really about a belief that art centers, arts organizations can put their resources toward spurring cultural movement. We're very inspired by our board member, Jeff Chang when he talks about the idea that culture precedes change. We want to be part of the change. We want to be able to measure that change.
Deborah Cullinan:
We don't think it's a bad thing to ask an art center or artists to think about how their work fuels societal change. That feels, if anything, it's just more crisp for us now and where we were heading. It's even more clear how we can become an integrated forum, an institute that really is deploying artists in service of civic and public life.
Deborah Cullinan:
When I say that, I know that there's all this art as utility, all of this stuff and it's like, no, it's got to be both hands. We've got to not be afraid of that. We have to believe that we are contributing. If we're afraid to believe that we contribute then we're not trying to contribute.
Tim Cynova:
We have another viewer question coming in here. "Is there a legislative action we should be collectively working to advance?"
Deborah Cullinan:
I think that's a great question. I think as many people do. You had Laura Zabel on last week, and I know she thinks about this a lot as well. I think we can look to programs that have existed in the past like the WPA or the CETA program or even here in San Francisco, the Neighborhood Arts Program.
Deborah Cullinan:
I think whatever we do legislatively, especially in terms of the next Care package or the next relief and recovery package, we should really be thinking about not the arts in a silo, I believe. Not fund the arts, but let's create systems where the arts are integrated and so necessary that they are funded perhaps even more than they are going to be If we just sit outside saying, "We need money. We need help."
Deborah Cullinan:
We have to be of service. We have to be part of moving through the portal. I would think about workforce programs on a federal level. For me, I think the biggest stuff that's going to happen, obviously for a variety of reasons, it's going to be at the local level. So it's about getting federal funding down into the hands of local leaders who can really move policy.
Tim Cynova:
You're a high performing leader in a challenging time. In the best of times being a leader, it can be isolating, can be challenging. How do you approach your resilience and self care in a moment like this?
Deborah Cullinan:
Well, at the beginning I mentioned that I feel very fortunate. I'm home with my husband and my son. We have this amazing energetic nine-month-old Husky and a couple of cats that don't get along but they're very cute. There's a lot about family and about connecting with friends who can inspire right now that feels just really, really central. I think it's super important to take a little bit of time every single day. Where I am, I can go outside and walk safely or take a run safely and that is just a super important part of the routine.
Lauren Ruffin:
Appreciating like those little things that I've always, I shouldn't say I've always taken for granted, but I even more grateful just like outside space. I look at Tim. I'm fairly certain that Tim is like now a part of the chair that he's sitting in, between the ankle and New York.
Lauren Ruffin:
So the leadership, one of the things I've been thinking a lot around leadership right now is that balance between being a happy warrior in the face of everything that's going on and then, how are you talking to your people at like a real level around the change? What's coming and ... I don't know, are you feeling down? How do you maintain the moments of depression and grief that do creep in when you're still having you're leave. I feel like sometimes we can't always be transparent. Do you find that happening to yourself?
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah, I got really, really, really sad last night when I heard that John Prine had passed away. It just brought me back to a certain moment in my life. I had this really weird occasion where I met him very briefly. It's just those moments when something hits you and it's so real.
Deborah Cullinan:
Also, I'm feeling very deeply for some YBCA staff members whose situations have changed so much and they're not ideal, whether it's a roommate situation or a single mom who didn't plan on being alone with her baby boy. All of that stuff. For me, I guess we've got to see that what is so sad and hard about all of this, but how it actually just reveals what was already so sad and wrong.
Deborah Cullinan:
I think about Rebecca Solnit when she talked about the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism being like, "Yeah, it's all cool. So I'm just going to sit back," and hope being, "I believe in something and I'm going to act." That's what keeps me going.
Lauren Ruffin:
My penultimate question is, what's your prediction for how we come out of this?
Deborah Cullinan:
Wow. Okay, so let's go with hope. Let's stick with where I was. It got a little dark there for a second.
Lauren Ruffin:
See, you're like going to manage the response. It's so hard.
Deborah Cullinan:
The thing is we can't come out of this the same. We just can't. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. It wasn't working and we have to be willing to admit that. I want to believe that we will and we will come to something so beautiful that there will just be art and creativity everywhere.
Lauren Ruffin:
Awesome.
Lauren Ruffin:
Well, Tim, you going to land the plane or you want me to?
Tim Cynova:
Oh, I can land the plane. Actually, if I was landing the plane, we would not want to be on this plane right now. Lauren looks at me like, "You're doing this?"
Tim Cynova:
I'm like, "I wasn't planning on it."
Lauren Ruffin:
I think it was the New Yorker, the cartoon where it's like, "How many of you think this pilot's not doing their job and you want me to land this plane?" You know, this random person standing up.
Tim Cynova:
Deborah, it was so great to start our day with you. Thank you so much for taking time to sit down and chat with us.
Deborah Cullinan:
Thank you. Thank you both. It was awesome.
Tim Cynova:
Continue the Work Shouldn't Suck Live adventure with us on our next episode when we're joined by Christy Bolingbroke, Executive and Artistic Director of the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron.
Tim Cynova:
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