A vibrant arts community can spell economic good news for even small rural communities, says LeMoine MacLaughlin. MacLaughlin – a published poet, prose writer and newspaper editor from Wisconsin – will do two presentations in Jefferson County in the coming week.
On Sunday, May 28, he will read from “A Scent of Lilac” at the Tizer Gardens at 1:30 p.m. On Wednesday, May 31, a 6:30 p.m. presentation at the Boulder Community Library will feature a reading of his award-winning short story “The Silence.” All rural areas have rich stories that deserve to be told, said MacLaughlin, but supporting an arts community that can get those stories – along with other art anchored to a place – produced requires business knowledge, he says.
“Arts people tend to be not business people,” says MacLaughlin. But with the right guidance, a community can enable arts to flourish and become a magnet for people who appreciate that, he says. It is something he knows from experience. He and his wife were successful enough at guiding the growth of arts in their small Wisconsin community to found the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts.
The community with just under 3000 population in 2010 – “very middle class” and historically dependent on dairy farms – supports musicians, art shows, drama, writers, dance presentations and more and has been dubbed one of the 100 best small arts towns in America. The arts center is going on 29 years of balanced budgets of around $100,000 per year, MacLaughlin says.
MacLaughlin’s daughter Mary, who lives in Boulder and teaches at Montana Tech in Butte, calls her father a “champion of arts development in rural communities.” Her father’s business savvy plus the artistic abilities he and his wife possess allowed them to do what they love, she says. But she emphasized “it really is an investment.”
MacLaughlin laughs when he says, “We retired when we were 38,” but then grows more serious when he adds, “In a sense we did.” Spending time doing what he loves while benefitting the community around him is truly fortunate, he says. For an art business, or really any business to succeed, says MacLaughlin, it needs to focus on four basic elements: production, personnel, finances and marketing. Interested in helping other communities find the kind of success the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts has found, MacLaughlin co-authored a book about the center’s background.
One program of the center is the Rural Arts Management Project, seminars held once a month for six months to help paying participants from very small communities uncover ways to foster the arts. The center also publishes a monthly, ad-supported newspaper provided free to 6500 people in three counties. MacLaughlin says the center has not flourished because of heavy public funding, calling Wisconsin 48th out of the 50 states in terms of public funding for the arts.
“If you are going to make it in Wisconsin, you better make it because you are responding to the needs of the people,” he says. A healthy arts community can draw a community together and draw people to the community, he says. One of the problems for rural communities is that “we lose our young people,” and “I would like to think that having an active arts organization helps,” says MacLaughlin.
Most artists need to know they are not going to get rich from art, he says, but “if you can break even, then you can keep doing your art.” A community that already has active groups, such as writers, quilters, visual artists, musicians, theater troupes and others can make an arts community work financially but it takes business sense, he says.
