In April of this year, the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge rolled the dice on a new project: retooling its longstanding Fest-for-All arts festival into Ebb and Flow, a mixed-genre event located on River Road, closer to the Mississippi River.
The new festival’s intention, Arts Council President and CEO Renee Chatelain tells Business Report in its new cover story, was to fortify Baton Rouge’s brand as a river city with an indigenous and evolving arts scene.
And though foul weather shuttered one day of the two-day event, Chatelain says it was a successful. She’s already planning to expand it next year.
“We feel like this is one of the events that is going to help Baton Rouge create its own distinct brand, out of the shadow of New Orleans and Lafayette,” Chatelain says. “All of a sudden, we’re really starting to see a blueprint laid out for us for how this city can become a great arts community.”
For Chatelain, Ebb and Flow was a test balloon for a more sweeping project she launched this fall, a revised mission and a set of goals declaring the Arts Council will take a more active role in building the city’s creative capacity and tracking the economic impact of arts and culture. She’s spent the past few months presenting the new vision to stakeholders and funders.
“We see the arts as being one leg of four that hold this community up,” Chatelain says. “The city’s foundational cornerstones are business and industry, government, education, and arts and culture. The arts need to be on equal footing for Baton Rouge to truly thrive.”
Since its founding in 1973, the Arts Council has served as the regional arts administrator for the 11-parish Capital Region. It’s also the official arts agency of city-parish government since arts and culture is not a function of local government as in other cities.
The Arts Council has largely operated as a flow-through organization for state funding to major local arts organizations and as an advocate for regional arts and culture. In recent years, it has added more of its own programming. The Arts Council says it impacts more than 200,000 people through events like Ebb and Flow, Sunday in the Park and the River City Jazz Masters series.
Now, Chatelain says, the Arts Council plans to also take a more assertive role in demonstrating how the arts impact local economic development and contributes to Baton Rouge’s ability to attract and keep talent and investment. Hard data demonstrating the impact of local arts hasn’t been compiled for the Capital Region.
“We’ve done a lot of valuable studies over the years, especially Create Baton Rouge, which told us a lot about what comprises our arts and culture sector,” says Chatelain. “Now, we want to drill down and find out more about impact.”
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