"When Mayor Mike Rawlings appointed Valderas to the Cultural Affairs Commission, he was eager to dig in. He served on the panel that created $5,000 service cont...racts for individual artists, and he says he’s grateful for the inside look at City Hall.
But what he saw was disheartening, Valderas says.
The city is willing to spend millions of dollars on the big and glamorous. It agreed last year to pay $15 million over 10 years to bail out the AT&T Performing Arts Center, for example. But there’s less support for individual artists and cultural centers. Consider that Dallas has 14 City Council districts but just four cultural centers. The new $5,000 individual artist contracts are better than nothing. But the City of Houston, for example, recently announced $370,000 in grants for 37 individual artists."
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