Mentor Of The Month

Q & A WITH WILLIAM HUFFMAN

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When did you realize that you wanted to work in the arts and how did you begin your career?

Interesting question. The funny part is, in earlier years—in fact my first year of University, I was enrolled in premed and had every expectation of being a doctor. The interesting part is you kind of misinterpret wanting to work with your hands and be a surgeon versus what I really wanted to do was work with my hands and be an artist. So I transferred shortly into the first year into the Art History program at The University of Toronto-Sheridan College cooperative program and that’s sort of the beginnings of how I ended up getting involved in the visual arts. So my training really is formal training in art practice and since my University days and a couple of years after University where I was exhibiting I moved very quickly into Arts Administration and facilitation and curating.

You’ve played a lot of different parts in the art world. As you were first emerging into the field did you have plans to take on as many roles—as an arts administrator, a curator, an educator, a writer—as you have in the past and as you continue to do?

I think it’s one of those things where there’s this romantic idea of studying to be an artist and then going into the wide world of visual art and making art and being able to sustain myself, which I think most naive artists kind of going to school seem to have the notion that it’s possible—and in many cases it can be. However for me it was also the realization that there were so many artists trying to be successful and so few people who were passionate about the visual arts and particularly in my case, who were willing to help those artists—to facilitate their careers, to kind of provide a support system. So for me it become of interest and something that I feel very strongly about doing but also really something I saw as a need and so decided that I would dedicate the bulk of my professional practice to helping other artists.

What are the challenges that you face in being involved with so many projects on both a local and International scale?

Well, the first challenge is of course the finances. There are a lot of great ideas, a lot of good will, a lot of people who should be exhibiting and traveling and writing and promoting Internationally, but the money just doesn’t exist. So for me it’s really about, in many ways, trying to figure out where the alternative resources can exist. How can you get the private sector involved? How can you find pockets of funding that we can amass into something that will make it possible for artists to promote their work and to be involved, both Nationally and Internationally? I mean the local community is a very important one, one that needs to be facilitated and I think in my role at Toronto Arts Council we certainly are responsible to a large degree, for making things happen in the city. It’s just when you start to take on larger projects, and artists are very ambitious—artists can dream in big ways, and often the disconnect is that those resources just don’t exist. Also, you know, the idea that when you do one thing in the visual arts it inevitably leads you to doing six or seven other things because again those lack of resources means that a very few people need to be responsible for a lot of things. So for me the idea of curating on one hand and then writing on another, and trying to promote artists and facilitate the grants program here at Toronto Arts Council, in addition to sweeping the floors and cleaning the toilets and all of those things. It really is that much of a dichotomy, where you are responsible for the minutiae of what goes on right up to this most amazing realization of projects and seeing artists and their work come to fruition—all that kind of stuff.

What is it, with all that that keeps you balanced?

That’s a very good question. It has to be one of absolute and total commitment and passion to the discipline and to the stuff that I’ve been doing because there’s really no logic to it. It’s kind of funny that way. When you do try to leas with the business community, let’s say, and you see it more often with, say, The Royal Ontario Museum or The AGO—a number of these organizations are really trying to bring the business community. Particularly emerging leaders in the business community, together with artists and arts practitioners, and how much of a disconnect there is. Whereas young professionals in the business community often say to me “I can’t believe you do what you do for the amount of money you get to do it”. The fact that it seems like impossible odds to somebody outside of the visual arts is actually status quo and business as usual for us. We’re always working up hill. So I think it’s just kind of reconciling all of that and figuring out that you’ve got a lot of responsibilities, you’re not going to get a lot of money to do it but the outcomes can be really, really amazing.

You’ve worked in gallery settings, artist-run centres, Universities and in arts organizations. How did the transition from one career position to another happen for you?

Again, it was—I think, identifying the need and for me there was a period of time when it became really important for me to be an arts administrator, lets say, at an organization with a mandate to promote the arts in general. For instance with the Arts Foundation of Greater Toronto, which eventually transitioned into Arts Toronto. Working on these umbrella things. And for me, something like an arts week out me in touch with everything that was happening in the city, and the core of the network that I have now was developed out of those early jobs. From there you kind of realize, okay, there is now something that I’ve identified as really important. So moving slowly into artist-run centres. For me, I become completely enthusiastic around this idea of artists producing for other artists. It’s kind of in keeping with the philosophy that I adopted early on in my career, after graduating from university. From there it was Canadian Art. I really felt that it was important to kind of go to the magazine and to understand what arts writing was all about and how do you find an audience for criticism. From there to a regional gallery, The Art Gallery of Sudbury, and for me it came out of understanding what was going on across the country via my experience with the magazine and seeing how fascinating it can be to be involved in these centres that aren’t Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver or Montreal. Really exciting things can be happening in these small centres like those centres in Northern Ontario. So it really is from one to the other you connect and reconnect sometimes, and the Toronto Arts Council has put me in a situation where I’m kind of on the other side of the table from where I have been, you know, used to being. Instead of asking for money I’m kind of distributing it, but what makes the perfect fit for me at this point is I’ve accumulated all this information and knowledge and experience working with a breadth of artists and organizations, so I know what the challenges are. So when people come to me and are asking for increases to their funding—or if artists come to me with questions about their project and how does this project reconcile itself with the kind of parameters of our grants programs, we all speak the same language. For me it’s very easy to develop the rapport and to give out the kind of information that people need.    

What is some advice that has stuck with you?

It’s interesting. Everybody’s got lots of bit and pieces of advice, but there’s one piece, and this is very specific, but for me it’s actually resonated in a very big way. When I first got one of my first serious jobs, which was ASpace, an artist-run centre at 401 Richmond Street, one of my mentors at The University of Toronto, John Armstrong, who is a painter and an instructor, said to me, “when you get involved in these organizations, they’re public institutions, they’re very compressed in terms of politics where you’re dealing with a lot of issues within the arts community”. You’re grass roots, and so one of the things that he was saying is you need to adopt an absolute philosophy of transparency and that you need to be able to stand behind everything you’ve said. In fact if you say one thing to somebody you need to be able to say that same thing to another person. And really for me I made a ton of mistakes. When I, when you first become an administrator or a “cultural executive”, if you will. It’s funny because I keep going back to that advice about honesty and transparency, and even extending it to authenticity and generosity and all of those things. That little bit of advice about transparency has really translated into a whole philosophical way of doing things. For me, it isn’t about my promotion, or it isn’t about looking to what my future is going to be. It really is about how to integrate yourself into this broader discussion and the only way you can do that is to have the relationship with the community and transparency is a really big part of that relationship. I think there are a lot of administrators—I see it now, a lot of very ambitious administrators that see things strategically—“how do I move from one place to the other?” and that can be great if that’s what you want to do. There are certainly opportunities for that, but I think that it’s probably always going to be a situation of constantly strategizing about where you’re going to go next as opposed to understanding that you’re a really meaningful contributor to this broader ecology of an arts community.

When and how did you make your debut working on international projects?

I guess the first time that I did a major international initiative was to reinvest, again at ASpace Artist-Run Centre. There was a project many years ago—a British/Canada exchange that ASpace was responsible for and it was basically sending video artists fro Canada to England and artists from the UK to Canada, obviously. We realized that the project was really interesting, really successful at the time. We mined a lot of the archives at ASpace to find information. So the idea was not to recreate the project, but to do part two, which is not uncommon. Anyway it was really fascinating to go—I had never been to Europe before so it was the second time I’d taken a plane and the first time I’d been to Europe, and arrive in London. Of course London being pre- the young British artist movement and also still very hyper. The city was amazing to be in alone and not knowing how to get around. It’s funny because finally when I did get to my first meeting—I can’t remember the organization—very high profile. I’m sure I was intimidated going in and the director came out and said to me “Oh! ASpace Gallery—so amazing to meet you because, you know, we did a project with ASpace during this British/Canada exchange many years ago…” Which of course was, unbeknownst to him, the project that I was going to talk to him about. So one time after the other I would go to these meetings, again intimidated, and find out that there was this incredible pervasive reputation—international reputation—around what ASpace had done ten years, fifteen years earlier, at the time. For me it was really this interesting transition into this international dialogue, of course when you’re going with the weight of an institution or an organization that’s already been recognized. So I think I was lucky to be able to translate that kind of existing reputation, which I had nothing to do with, into being able to get doors open for me. That was sort of the first. I think once you do it—once you do work internationally—it’s exciting because you’re in places that you don’t belong, obviously. So the challenge is to figure out how to belong in those circumstances. The language issue is always kind of exciting to overcome when you’re in a place that there’s this limited relationship in English that you need to find ways to translate what you’re saying and your ideas into something that a broader group can understand. All those challenges I find fascinating and I think are really ones that we need to find better ways to overcome because I think this is really something—particularly with technology, particularly with the ease of travel these days. I think that we should be always thinking about international connections.

Do you have any advice for emerging artists who are writing their first grant applications? Any tips for success?

Yeah, well it’s very funny because you can do as many grant-writing workshops, I can give as much advice as I want, I could tell people what we look for, how they should frame their applications. It’s all about simplicity and ease of reading and whatever. All of that gets counter-balanced with that fact that it’s a hugely competitive process. In any grant program it’s going to be. Whether it’s at a government agency like the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council or Canada Council, or at a private foundation or through a university or college. They’re always going to be oversubscribed because there are way too many people doing really interesting things than there is money to be had. The key thing for me, for propagating success, is knowing what the rules of engagement are. There is going to be disappointment and you can’t let that affect you. You can’t stop applying for grants. You can’t stop making work. There are many examples of artists who after twenty years of making work have been unsuccessful most of the time, in grants programs. I’m not trying to rationalize it or defend it. It’s just basically just the reality of it. When you’ve got a hundred and twenty five applications for twenty-five spots it gets really ugly sometimes. Luckily it’s not one person making a decision. It’s a group of people—it’s a peer assessment—so we have a group of artists and programmers come together to make all these decisions and I’ve seen it and I would not want to be on that side of the table. I love administering the programs, I love chairing those meetings but when it comes to decision-making it’s really, really hard. A lot of people who should be getting money and who should be supported just aren’t getting it. So we work hard on one hand to make sure that our programs are as effective as they can be. We work hard on the other to try to get more money for those programs. In a lot of ways you guys, the arts world—the arts community—the people who are making things and doing things, are way faster and more advanced than our programs are able to keep up. Bearing that in mind I think it’s important for artists to know that it isn’t necessarily a commentary on the success of failure of your work or your application. It really is in most cases a deficiency in the budgets of these programs. So it’s cold comfort I suppose, but…

Also for me in terms of how we manage these programs—Toronto Arts Council and particularly the programs that I can speak for—the grants to programs in visual arts, media arts and literary. Because we know there is this huge community of people doing amazing things, not only are we trying to provide funding through our programs, we’re also trying to be—again—an open and transparent organization. I try to be available to people so that we can talk a little bit about…sure, why you didn’t get a grant and these are the challenges of the program. It’s fifty percent luck, fifty percent skill because of the lack of budget. I also try to make connections between artists and their work and other organizations that may be able to support this work. If I know of a private sector organization that’s looking for that kind of work for an acquisition I am able to make those connections. If I know that a curator is looking for programming that an artist has suitable work for I can make those connections too. So it’s a bit of an added value to the arts council and it’s, I think, happening at every council. Where we’re looking for ways to provide other means, other benefits, for artists than just the cheque through our program, which of course is always nice.