Getting Arty

How – and why – business and the arts partner up in South Texas
By Jennifer Roolf Laster

Every year, the Laredo Center for the Arts helps area schoolchildren channel their inner Picasso.

Through a variety of programs, including outreach visits and summer camps, the Center brings art – with a capital A – to kids.

And the kids, even those who might never have been to a museum before, love every minute of it.

“They get to learn about art, and they really get into it,” says Rosie Santos, events and sponsorship coordinator at the center. “Everyone has a lot of fun.”

In addition to these programs, the center also boasts annual festivals and gallery tours, as well as a major international juried exhibition each winter.

In other words, Santos says, the center makes sure folks in Laredo and the surrounding communities have a chance to admire the intricacy of a line drawing, be dazzled by the bright splashes of an oil painting, or marvel at the sinuous curves of a modern sculpture. It also hosts a variety of cultural offerings, including dance and music performances.

To get all that done, they count on corporate support.

“We’re a non-profit organization, so we basically work off grants,” Santos says. “Those partnerships help us function. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to offer a lot of the programs we offer.”

Truer words have seldom been spoken about the pairing of arts and businesses. The arts, as an institution, are, in fact, a business, complete with annual goals, budgets and business plans. Those plans include revenue from private donors, as well as attendance/audience fees. But corporate support is critical, say the folks in the know.

For the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg, roughly one-third of the annual budget comes from corporate donations, says executive director Shan Rankin.

“Our community supports us in so many ways, and the straight financial support they provide is wonderful,” Rankin says. With an annual budget just over $1.5 million, the museum uses what Rankin calls the “three-legged stool” approach to funding: one-third from government support (the county, city and state); one third from earned income, and the final third from fund-raising. “That’s our three-legged stool,” she says. “We need every single leg.”

Making it work
Visitors to the Museum of South Texas History can step into the region’s storied past, including a time when riverboats traveled the Rio Grande. (Who knew?) Incorporated in 1967 and opened in 1970, the museum has been consistently recognized as a well-run, well-oiled machine, Rankin says. The founders, she explains, wanted to “do it right,” and that has continued as the museum grew from its original location in the 2,000-square-foot Hidalgo County Jail of 1910 into the nearly 50,000-square-foot premises in which it now operates.

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