Culture’s economic clout rising Plan for N.E. arts groups significant for Bangor

Bangor’s new Maine Discovery Museum on Main Street and the forthcoming University of Maine Museum of Art at Norumbega Hall carry a shimmering promise with their freshly painted walls and smartly designed spaces. If you add the equally central locations of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s offices, two theater venues, two dance schools, an art gallery and a handful of other culture-based organizations downtown, the line-up signals an underlying economy of artists, businesses and workers.

According to a study done last year by the New England Council, the nation’s oldest regional business group, both commercial and nonprofit arts and cultural activity, as well as individual artists, make up about 4 percent of New England’s total work force or “creative economy.” The occupations that make up the arts and cultural sector in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut are not only growing at twice the rate of New England’s overall economy, says the study, but they create billions of dollars in tourism alone.

In other words, while businesses have increasingly supported the arts and culture philanthropically, the study suggests, the time has come for arts and culture to be seen as viable investments with potential for significant returns.

“This blends into what we’re trying to do on a lot of fronts in Bangor,” Bangor Mayor John Rohman said last week. “The creative cluster here is of such a size and scale that you need to pay attention to it as an economic force.”

A year after the original analysis was released, the New England Council late last week released a blueprint for implementing stronger relationships between arts and cultural organizations throughout New England. The 42-page document “The Creative Economy Initiative: A Blueprint for Investment in New England’s Creative Economy,” which is available on the NEC Web site, outlines goals to develop awareness of “creative economy,” its significance and the potential resources for development.

“The study identified a little known sector of the economy that’s as important to this region as any other sector,” Larry Zabar, vice president of public policy at the New England Council, said Monday. “On the heels of the New England Council’s economic report comes a blueprint for how we can exponentially increase investment is this sector of our economy that has shown potential for long-term economic growth.”

Zabar compared the project to building a house. If you have the nails and boards but no plan, you run the risk of constructing a haphazard structure that may or may not be reliable but that certainly has not benefited from the best laid plans by other builders and designers.

But Maine, and the northern counties in particular, know all too well that not all houses are created equal, and sometimes the bigger houses – in this case, Boston, Hartford, Providence and even Portland – get more nails.

For this potential problem, Zabar switched metaphors.

“We believe we are setting up a scenario in which we are not talking about pieces of a pie but about a bigger pie,” said Zabar, who visited Maine five times over the last year during the research stages of the study. “There are things a place like Bangor can do and things it can learn that are particular to a city the size of Bangor. We don’t view this as a competition between cities but as a taking advantage of opportunities.”

Locally, others worry that the plan may be dominated by the interests of larger New England cities. Maine has a rural niche as a model for grassroots cultural activity, but can easily be marginalized by a sparse population, limited regional transportation system, and remote location.

Still, said Robert Libbey, director of Maine Performing Arts Network, the study and blueprint are a good first step in looking into the relationship between arts and culture, business and state lines. He proposed that Maine, in particular, further expand the study’s regional inclusiveness and look to Canada for exchanges.

“If the arts and cultural organizations worked together in a cohesive way, everybody would be better off,” said Libbey, a Bangor resident whose backgrounds in both arts and business have become a necessary combination for arts administrators in the 21st century. “Arts organizations are so busy trying to survive, they don’t get to the big picture and that’s a problem. This document is good at looking at the big picture. It says: Let’s take creative industry seriously as an industry.”

Once businesses realize and accept that the “creative economy” is a major factor in quality of life issues and can help spur economic security and prosperity, the blueprint can move toward becoming a reality, said its authors.

“It’s really a concept and a construct, a way to look at the creative sector that’s obvious but that we’ve never looked at carefully before,” said Alden Wilson, director of the Maine Arts Commission, one of eight partnering organizations for the initiative.

The initiative is sponsored by a handful of businesses including The Massachusetts Port Authority, the New England Foundation for the Arts, utility companies, marketing groups and the Philip Morris Management Corp. None of the sponsors is Maine-based.

Nevertheless, said Wilson, “The blueprint is not just a marketing tool but a way to think differently about where people live and what they do. If there’s a way in which this sector can be seen as attractive to the state and to keeping people here, that’s important.”