A Chat with Brett Littman

The Drawing Center's Brett Littman sees an upside to the downturn. (Photo by Michael Halsband)

Last week the Drawing Center in SoHo pulled off no small feat: It dramatically cut the expenses of its gala and came away with a 9% increase in funds raised over last year. While the additional $26,000 doesn't make up for the $200,000 or so the organization has trimmed from its budget this year, it does suggest that good things can happen in a downturn. The Drawing Center's executive director, Brett Littman, offered some details about its gala coup and other adjustments the center has made. We spoke by telephone on Saturday.

How did you approach your spring gala?

The word on the street was that income for galas is down 30-40% this year, so we reduced our goal for gross income and we cut our expenses with more than just a scalpel.

We reduced expenses by $80,000 by cutting on décor and using a different caterer. You want to look presentable, but I think right now you can significantly cut back, because everyone wants to see their money supporting the institution rather than the frills. We’ve always had a very elegant event, and at this event no one could tell the difference. We’ll surely employ this strategy for the next gala.

We wound up exceeding our goal and netting more than we did last year. This year we grossed $375,000 and netted $322,000. Last year we grossed $427,000 and netted $296,000. [The gala prices stayed the same: $25,000, $10,000 and $5,000 for tables, and $750 to $1000 for tickets.] The number of guests was 270; last year we had 320, so it wasn’t a huge drop off.

Anyway this year’s gala was incredible fun. We had a great honoree, Pat Steir, who was so generous with her time and brought out a terrific group of supporters and artists including Marina Abramovic, Brice Marden, Steven Holl, Anne Waldman, Tom Otterness, Donald Baechler and Kiki Smith. The board and others who’ve attended the gala in the past were also very supportive. We had people who bought $1,000 tickets last year who wrote $5,000 checks this year.

How is the Drawing Center weathering the recession?

Things have been pretty rough all around. Fundraising has been pretty complex since last January. We did one stage of cuts in which I took a 20% pay cut and the deputy director took a 20% paycut and three of our senior staff took 10% pay cuts. We rearranged programming to push a show into the next fiscal year and we cut down on travel and extraneous expenses. That shaved 10-15% off the budget, which is now $1.6 million, down from $1.8 million. We’ve reduced the number of shows next year to 6 instead of 8. We’re waiting to hear on our NEA proposal for an arts bailout. I’m not overly hopeful, but $50,000 would go a long way at our institution.

Cuts to the gala budget turned out all right so I have to ask: are there other ways the organization is benefiting from the recession?

It’s been the hardest year in my career of 15 years in nonprofit arts management, but I do see an upside. The downturn has allowed me to rethink a lot of things like publications, the Web site, graphic design. It’s a little bit of a softening of the institutional culture around its own past. And the downturn has allowed me and forced me to do a lot more creative thinking. After Madoff, and what’s happening with the Rose Museum [at Brandeis]…these are different time and the rules are different.

We’ve ramped up public programs, and that's brought in a diverse and new audience of about 2,000 people over the past year. We just finished a series called "Information Architectures" and we have a reading on Thursday [April 23] which we’re doing with Poets House in conjunction with our Unica Zurn show. It’s called "From the Dark Spring of Language."

WIll we see more collaborations from small arts groups?

I’m part of an ad hoc contemporary art museum director group for organizations with budgets under $5 million. There are 30 of us from around the country. At our last meeting we did a count of all the shows we produced last year and all the shows that had traveled. There were 275 exhibitions and maybe 8 or 9 traveled. It's very difficult to collaborate on exhibitions because ever institution wants its own identity. But I have been advocating for collaboration on public programs. For The Drawing Center now collaborative public programs between institutions seems very viable and probably a good place to start.