Hey, Big Spender!

Heather Ramsay

| December 1, 2008

Michael Audain is part of a revolution

In the Saanich bungalow where Polygon Homes Ltd. chair Michael Audain lived as a child, there was no art on the walls, only hunting trophies and family photos. But when he was 14 years old, Audain had an experience that would shape the rest of his life.

It was the summer of 1952. Audain was walking past Victoria’s Thunderbird Park, on his way home from swimming lessons at Crystal Garden pool, when he came upon legendary northwest coast carver Mungo Martin. The then-73-year-old Martin – born near Port Hardy and steeped in the rituals, songs and traditions of the Kwakwaka’wakw people – was replicating an old totem pole outside the Provincial Museum (now the Royal B.C. Museum). Audain stopped to watch and asked Martin what he was creating.

“What does it look like?” the artist said.
“It looks like a face, but I can’t tell if it’s animal or human,” Audain replied.

It turned out to be a bear, Audain recalls, but it was Martin’s stories about the deeper meaning in the work – the shamans and the shifting forms of the northwest coast – that still capture Audain’s imagination to this day. It was a “window into another world,” he says – and a revelation that sparked his lifelong passion for visual arts.

The busy developer recounts the story while gazing at the ocean view from Polygon’s offices on West Broadway in Vancouver. Paintings by B.C. artists such as Jack Shadbolt and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun line the walls, along with photos by Rodney Graham, Tim Lee and others. Audain, whose B.C. lineage extends over five generations and includes Robert Dunsmuir, B.C.’s wealthy 19th-century industrialist, sits back in his chair, closes his eyes and warms to one of his favourite topics. Art, he says, is taking up more and more of his time these days. His private foundation, the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, aims to support B.C. art and has pumped $10 million over the last seven years into aboriginal arts initiatives, arts education and public gallery programming. Since 2004 Audain has also offered a yearly lifetime achievement award for B.C.’s visual artists; the award is now set at $30,000. Past recipients include E.J. Hughes (2005), Eric Metcalfe (2006) and Jeff Wall (2008).

Audain is, by all accounts, the most important arts philanthropist living in B.C. today. In September alone, his foundation donated $500,000 to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) to establish an endowment for First Nations artists, and $2 million to the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) for the purchase of work by emerging artists. Audain doesn’t like the term philanthropist (“It’s such a grandiose word”), but, no matter what you call them, wealthy patrons such as Audain – who has also served as a trustee with the VAG, the Vancouver Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada and as a member of the B.C. Arts Council – are an essential, and growing, part of B.C.’s arts community. Combined with an increasing reliance on blockbuster shows to boost ticket sales, philanthropic funding marks a dramatic shift in the way B.C. galleries and museums now pay their bills.

Historically, the route to sustainability for arts organizations has been through government coffers. Core operating funds for groups such as the Vancouver Symphony Society and the Vancouver Opera used to come largely from the federal and provincial government through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage and the B.C. Arts Council; municipalities would contribute to administrative budgets (and help fund civic infrastructure, including Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth and Orpheum theatres), while corporations would help out with marketing and public relations. But Mauro Vescera, director of special projects and programs in the arts at the Vancouver Foundation, says that the trend today is for public funds to move away from guaranteed long-term operational funding and toward one-time project funding. The lack of funds for operating costs means many smaller arts groups spend hours writing proposals, trying to cobble together enough money to pay for programming, as well as salaries and hydro bills. “For a mid-size theatre company, that’s tough,” says Vescera.

When the B.C. Arts Council started in 1996, the total grants budget for arts organizations and individual artists was only $11.8 million; after 10 years, the allocation inched to $14.1 million in 2005-06. That small increase left B.C.’s per capita arts council funding at seventh among the 10 provinces, with only Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick contributing less. This year the province did heed the call for more money – but instead of boosting the allocation to $32 million a year as arts lobby groups had demanded, it created a $150-million endowment, which is expected to add only $5 million to the annual pot. Federally, arts organizations aren’t doing much better. A study prepared for the Canada Council in 2005 shows that England’s arts council provided $24.36 in arts grants per capita, whereas the Canada Council only shelled out $4.73.

That’s far above the $0.44 per capita that the U.S.’s National Endowment for the Arts provides – but, unlike the States, in Canada most arts organizations still rely on government sources of funding. Compare the flagship galleries of Vancouver and Seattle. In 2005 the Seattle Art Museum received only four per cent of its $18 million in operating revenue from government sources; 40 per cent was raised through contributions from individuals, foundations and corporations; 25 per cent was raised from earned income through admissions, store and café, while investment income, in-kind gifts and other sources made up the rest. By comparison, 27 per cent of the VAG’s $12-million 2006 budget came from government sources, 27 per cent from individuals, corporations and foundations, and 38 per cent from earned income.