Pandemic as Portal
Lake Mansion Arts and Cultural Center. Photo/Jackie Clay.
By Jackie Clay
I don’t run. It isn’t that I don’t think running isn’t a useful skill to have. I hear it is great exercise, and people who do run are always so proud of themselves, so it must be useful for health and building one’s self confidence. But I don’t run, and I think the ability to not run in the time of the pandemic is a useful one.
By not running I have more time to examine the world around me. By not running I have learned to better take in my surroundings and try to make sense of them, because isn’t that what many of us have spent time doing lately, trying to make some sense, or find some sort of order in the new madness that is the world we all currently live in?
By not running I have focused more on ambling, strolling, and meandering through life and if ever there was time to slow it down and take a good look at things, now is certainly the time, because, wow, do we all have a lot more time!
I have found that in my personal life not running can lead to dangerous things like mid-day naps and thinking seriously about (but ultimately rejecting) reorganizing the pantry or really deep cleaning my closet. Maybe I should take up running to escape such treacherous thoughts.
In my professional life focusing on very definitely not running has been a virtue. I am the Executive Director for Arts for All Nevada, an organization devoted to creating arts opportunities for the community, but in particular people who have disabilities and who are often not given the chance to learn about this whole other language called art. To create is to express yourself in a way different for all other forms of communication and for someone with a disability, who may have trouble communicating in conventional ways, what a tragedy it would be if you were not allowed the knowledge that creativity and making art is a whole other language in which you might very well be quite conversant. So one of the most important things Arts for All Nevada does is place teaching artists in classrooms—both mainstream and special education—and you can’t put teaching artists in close proximity to people during a pandemic.
When our world closed up shop in mid-March this year, effectively cutting us off from the people we serve, I wondered if there would continue to be a place in this upside down world for the services our organization provided. Actually I wanted to curl up into a ball, put my hands over my ears, shut my eyes tight, and just stay there until the whole thing was over. I don’t mind sharing this less than honorable reaction with the world because I seriously doubt I was the only person on the planet who had that same impulse to try and wish it all away. But one thing I most definitely did not do was run. I didn’t run away from the challenge, instead I learned to sit with it and think on it, walk it around the block, and to look for clues that would help our organization continue on.
Sometimes I have wondered if the world as we knew it was over. The answer to that was—and still is—“yes, kind of, sort of.” As things continue to stretch on and weeks turn into months, that answer has become, “yes, but maybe . . .” Then I read an article in the Financial Times by Arundhati Roy about India and its chaotic response to the pandemic; I was struck by this quote:
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
“A gateway between one world and the next,” somehow that sounded more positive than,“the world as we know it is over.” Moving through the portal that is this pandemic is a choice. Some will stay stuck on the other side, lamenting the unfair changes, the lack of normalcy, looking for someone to blame, but I like the idea of the portal because it feels like a choice that every individual gets to make—do you move through that portal willingly, starting to figure out what your new world will look like, imagining the world anew, or do you get stuck in your longing for the old world and the need to lay blame? I decided that I, and the organization I lead, will face forward and step through that portal into the next world.
Uplifting quotes are wonderful in the moment, but figuring out how to enter that next world, imagining it anew, is still a work in progress. I wanted to share, briefly, what that portal looks like from the inside of a small, arts-oriented, non-profit like Arts for All Nevada, and how we are starting our walk through that portal.
In mid-March most arts organizations pulled themselves into small, self-contained boxes in an attempt to stay safe while trying to make sense of what was happening and how it would affect operations. In our case, classes were cancelled, events were postponed, and staff hours cut. We rent our facilities for weddings, baby showers, retirement parties—lots of small to medium sized events—all of these were cancelled or dates were rescheduled, only to be cancelled later, when we all started to realize that this pandemic wasn’t going to be over in a few months. For a while there was a cloud of defeat and despair that felt like it pretty much permeated the world, but then things started to shift. I noticed it in my thinking about my organization, and I started to see it in other organizations, like little green shoots that start to show themselves in the springtime—people were starting to take this as a challenge to step up.
If you think about it, taking that first step and then continuing forward momentum as you move into a new world takes a lot of work. It also takes a lot of imagination, and if arts organizations—where imagination is a part of our DNA—can’t figure this out, then we don’t deserve to use the word “art” anywhere in our organizational names or mission statements.
In the early days I noticed that organizations we belonged to wanted to meet more. The Reno Art Consortium (RAC), which is a group of arts and cultural organizations from around the Reno/Tahoe area who typically meet once a month, started to meet twice a month. I came to think of these Zoom meetings as all of us huddling together for warmth in this cold new world. It was warming and comforting to share stories of how our individual organizations were dealing with this historic event. (Note to self: living through a historic event isn’t nearly as enjoyable as reading a book or watching a movie about a real life historic event—you can’t skip to the end to see how it works itself out). I have always valued RAC, but I came to appreciate RAC meetings and others like it in a whole new way, as we shared what our coping learning curves were in real time. That slogan, “We’re all in this together,” actually took on meaning, and we were constantly learning about the different ways that a pandemic affects the arts. The challenges a chorus or dance company faces can be very different from what a visual arts organization faces. We learned, and we continue to learn from each other.
From the outside, Arts for All Nevada probably doesn’t look all that different from the way it did a year ago. We continue to place teaching artists into classrooms remotely, either through Zoom and pre-recorded art workshops. We have stepped up the number of free art activities we regularly offer on our website, and we have become adept at putting together art kits, like the Summer Creativity Camp at Home art kits we created as a substitute for our regular in-person Creativity Camps. So I guess you could say we are doing ok. We have become hyper-focused on looking at ways to stay relevant in the community, trying to be alert to needs in the community that we might, in our own way, be able to assist in filling, but in reality nothing is the same.
From the inside, Arts for All Nevada looks very different. We miss people, we miss kids, we miss regular interaction with our beloved teaching artists, and we miss being crazy busy and juggling schedules for art classes during school hours alongside after school art programs, alongside classes taught at our facility. We can no longer open up the Lake Mansion to visitors who would like to tour and get a glimpse into life in 1880s Reno, and we can no longer help brides, who dream of having their wedding in this historic house, turn that dream into a reality.
But we have found strength and support from our friends and funders. Local foundations have stepped up and made sure that the organizations they value and support in regular times are even more valued and cherished in these times of lost revenue. I have been blown away by the support from the City of Reno’s Arts and Cultural Division, Nevada Humanities, and Nevada Arts Council. They have found CARES Act money wherever they can and made sure that organizations like ours, who survive on piecing together little pots of money from multiple grant sources, have the opportunity to access a few more little pots of grant money to help us maintain our operations and work on our plans to move through that portal into a new world. They remind us that we have value in the community and they support us in our efforts to adapt and be of service.
So, like I said in the beginning, I take pride in the idea that I don’t run, especially during a pandemic. It may be crazy to admit, but right now, as much as there is pain and loss and resigned acceptance, I don’t want to gloss over or disrespect those feelings because those are memories that we will also take through the portal with us. Despite the low level depression that lingers, I hope that I will have learned from this experience, and it will make me a better leader for my organization and a stronger advocate for the arts in our community. It will never make me a runner, but it has made me someone who can dodge and weave and someone who can take the elements of a successful pre-pandemic arts program and turn them into a new, improved successful pandemic arts program. I might even be ready to organize my pantry. And I will take pride in not running, because to deny this experience—with all of the horror and sadness—to try and rush my way through it would be to deny the silver linings and the amazing ways in which individuals and organizations have stepped up to create a new world. I want to walk through that portal and know that the world we create anew on the other side was worth it.
Jackie Clay is the Executive Director for Arts for All Nevada at the Lake Mansion Arts and Cultural Center. She holds a BA in History from the University of California, Davis and a MA in History, with a subspecialty in Historic Resources Management, from the University of California, Riverside. She was the Director/Curator of the Sutter County Museum, in Yuba City, California before moving to Reno to take the position of Curator of History at the Nevada Historical Society. She went on to co-own the gift and art boutique, ClayNichols, and later used both her museum and retail expertise at the Nevada Museum of Art as the Director of Retail and Reception Services. Her 35-year career as history curator, museum director, and retail entrepreneur has conspired to bring her to Arts for All Nevada in the directorial role of managing an organization that is both a provider of arts education programming and historic house museum.
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