Arts and culture

The room upstairs.

Rockford is better off with the arts in it. Not softer — better off, in ways you can stand on a street and see.

There is a floor above Bennie’s on First Street that shows the work of people who live here. I have paid for that room out of the shop’s takings for years, before there was a campaign to put it in. So take this page as something I already believe rather than something I worked out for an audience.

A block with a gallery on it is a block people walk down after six. A street with a festival on it is a street somebody from Belvidere drives into town for. A kid who finds out at fourteen that she can draw is a person more likely to still be here at thirty. None of that is decoration. It is the difference between a city people work in and a city people stay in, and Rockford has spent a long time being told to settle for the first one.

So this is an argument I make gladly. It is also split the way everything else on this site is split — what the office controls, what it can only argue for, what it cannot touch — because an advocate who overpromises is worth less to the arts than one who delivers the four things he actually holds. The same three zones apply here as everywhere else.

The room is open for Fall ArtScene this year — Friday, October 2, 5 to 9 p.m., and Saturday, October 3, 4 to 9 p.m., at 126 N 1st St. Both nights, with the rest of the schedule →

What the office actually holds

More than people think, and less than a campaign speech implies.

A mayor does not appoint a single curator or hang a single painting. What a mayor controls is the ground culture happens on:

Permits, street closures and the event calendar. Whether a festival is a three-week paperwork problem or a phone call is a City Hall decision, and it runs on the same permit clock the jobs plan is already about.
Public art in capital work. The city resurfaces streets, rebuilds corridors and puts up buildings every year. What goes on them is a choice somebody makes, and right now it is mostly made by default.
City-owned property and empty ground floors. Studios and galleries are the tenants who will take a building nobody else wants yet. That is the same block-by-block argument as your block.
Showing up, and a calendar that proves it. A mayor’s attention is a real resource, and it is free.

What the office can only influence: the park district and the library, which have their own boards; the school district; private venues and the people who own them. What it does not touch at all: what any of them choose to program.

The schools question, answered honestly

I think every kid should get to make something. I do not get to order it.

There is good research behind the case for arts in schools, and it is better than the usual claim that art class raises math scores. A randomized study across 42 Houston schools found that expanding arts education reduced disciplinary infractions and improved writing achievement and empathy. A separate randomized study of museum visits found gains in critical thinking about unfamiliar work — and the largest gains went to students from rural and high-poverty schools, the ones least likely to get there any other way.

I find that persuasive. It is also not mine to implement. The mayor has no authority over RPS 205, and I am not going to campaign on a curriculum I cannot write. What I can do is turn up as a partner with something to offer — buildings, permits, festival slots, a wall, an audience — and make the argument in public where it can be heard. That is advocacy from a seat at the table, and I would rather call it that than dress it up as a promise.

What the arts do for a city

This is an industry, and it behaves like one.

Nationally, arts and cultural production came to $1.17 trillion, 4.2 per cent of GDP, in the federal government’s most recent accounting — and it grew 6.6 per cent that year while the economy as a whole grew 2.9. It outpaced the country it sits inside. Anyone still calling this a charitable sector is working from a picture forty years out of date.

And the money does not stop at the door. Somebody who comes downtown for a show parks, eats, drinks, and sometimes stays the night; the venue is the reason but the receipts land in four other businesses on the same block. That is the mechanism behind every downtown that has come back, including the part of ours that already has.

Two things I will not stretch. The federal agency has stopped producing that series, so 2023 is where the official number stops. And nobody has produced a figure like it for Rockford — when there is one worth publishing it goes on Rockford Works with a date on it, not into a speech.

On whether culture actually pulls people to a place, the best evidence I know of is a study that used historic German opera houses, sited centuries ago by court politics rather than by any modern economic logic. Regions near them ended up holding more highly educated workers, and grew faster for it. Because the opera houses were placed for reasons that had nothing to do with today’s economy, that is about as close to proof as this field gets: cultural amenities affect where skilled people choose to live.

What it does not show is that putting up a building makes a city grow — other researchers find the independent effect much smaller once everything else is accounted for. So I will not stand in front of a rendering and promise you a boom. What I will say is that the places people cross a state line to visit are distinguished by their music, their architecture, their food and their festivals, and that Rockford has more of that raw material than it currently gets credit for.

How the thing feeds itself

The reason this belongs in a campaign about jobs and streets is that it is not a separate subject. It is a circuit, and City Hall touches four of the six points on it.

A mayor does not set a school’s curriculum. A mayor does set the permit, the street closure, the public art in a capital project and the calendar — and those sit on the same ring.

Schools are one point on that ring, and the one a mayor reaches last. The permit, the wall, the empty storefront and the street closure are four he reaches directly. That is where I would work.

What I’d do

Five things, all of them inside the office, none of them requiring money the city does not have.

One permit path for public events, with a published clock. Same principle as the permit deadline for builders: measure how long a street closure or an event permit actually takes, publish it, and hold the departments to it. A festival organizer working a day job should not need a lawyer.
Every capital project answers the art question before it is built. Not a fixed percentage — a required answer. When a corridor is rebuilt or a building goes up, the proposal that reaches council says what is going on it and who decided. Right now that question mostly gets answered by nobody.
City-owned empty ground floors go to makers first. Short leases, plain terms, on property the city already holds. Studios and galleries are the tenants who will take a room before the room is worth taking, and that is how a block turns.
One public cultural calendar the city actually maintains. Every venue, every festival, every First Friday, in one place, free to list on. The city already runs a website and already has the staff.
The table gets convened, twice a year, by the mayor. The district, the park district, the library, the venue owners, the working artists. Nobody in that room reports to City Hall, which is exactly why somebody has to call the meeting.

Then I would do the unglamorous half of the job: turn up. A mayor in the room on a Friday night is worth more to a small venue than most grant programs, and it costs the taxpayer nothing.

What I’m not promising

A new arts center. Not without a number, a site and a maintenance line, and this campaign does not have those.
New money. Everything above is permits, property the city already owns, capital work already scheduled, and a mayor’s time.
Anything inside a classroom. The mayor does not run the schools, on this or on anything else.
That culture will fix the economy. It contributes. It does not substitute for the jobs plan.

Where the numbers come from

$1.17 trillion, 4.2 per cent of GDP, 6.6 per cent real growth in 2023. U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, released April 2, 2025. BEA posted in February 2026 that it will no longer regularly produce these statistics, so 2023 is the last official year.
The Houston study. Bowen and Kisida, “Investigating the Causal Effects of Arts Education,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2023 — a randomized trial across 42 elementary and middle schools.
The museum study. Greene, Kisida and Bowen, “The Educational Value of Field Trips,” Education Next, 2014 — randomized, 10,912 students across 123 schools.
The opera houses. Falck, Fritsch and Heblich, “The Phantom of the Opera: Cultural Amenities, Human Capital, and Regional Economic Growth,” Labour Economics, 2011.
The limit on that last one comes from the urban-economics literature on cultural concentration in metropolitan areas, and is stated here because leaving it out would make the case look stronger than it is.

Everything else this campaign cites →