Fri 11/22
Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur came to the Beck Center in Lakewood Friday morning to talk with community arts leaders about how to work together to grow the arts & culture sector in Ohio.
In attendance were representatives from the Cleveland Orchestra, the Music Settlement, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Greater Cleveland Aquarium, Karamu House, Theater Ninjas, Cleveland Public Theater, and many others.
Kaptur talked about the various strengths of the region and her district, which sprawls along Lake Erie’s south shore. It’s the longest coastline of any congressional district, she said, with thousands of acres of wildlife refuges that attract 200,000 visitors a year and the second largest number of boating licenses.
She pointed to that as one of a number of distinctive regional assets — along with its science and technology sector represented by NASA and its large, world-class medical sector — that could be leveraged to collaborate with the arts. Mentioning that visitors to Cedar Point typically spent only a half day, she suggested that working together to promote all the region’s diverse attractions could result in a higher profile — and attendance — for the arts.
She talked about how even the small amount of money the federal government allocated for arts and culture was under attacks by austerity advocates in D.C. and urged people to contact their representatives and make them aware of the importance of the arts and the impact of arts institutions on their local economies. She said that the arts not having a centralized lobby group, like many industries and businesses, often meant that their voice was not heard as loudly in Congress as it should be.
In response to a question from the audience, she detoured briefly to talk about how unbalanced trade deals have hurt not just the region but the country, sending millions of jobs overseas.
She also talked about one of her pet topics, the negative influence of vast sums of special-interest and billionaire money on elections and how it causes many elected officials to put the interests of a few over the interests of the majority of their constituents.
Following the presentation, she posed for a photo with everyone in attendance (above).
Lakewood, OH 44107