On Tuesday, the University of Rhode Island informed Judith Tolnick Champa, who runs the URI Fine Arts Center Galleries, and Roxana Tourigny, who runs the school’s “Great Performances” program, that they will be laid off, effective July 4, and that the galleries and performance program will close.
The decision came suddenly and sent shock waves through the state’s art community. Vesela Sretenovic, a friend of Tolnick Champa and a curator at Brown University’s Bell Gallery, says, “It was such a surprise. It was hard to react. People are still in disbelief.”
A Facebook group “Save the Galleries!!” was set up Wednesday morning by URI photo instructor Zoey Stites to protest the cuts, and by 3 PM Thursday the group listed 100 members, with more continuing to sign up. Tolnick Champa is organizing a public meeting at the university’s main gallery at 4 PM on Tuesday, June 10, to brainstorm “about the galleries at URI and supporting the arts in general.”
“I felt something was coming,” she says. “I know I’m not immune to the financial crisis at my university. I thought they would tell me my budget was slashed. I was called in and told the galleries are done and my job is done, and it’s not a question of quality, it’s a budget question.” She has worked at URI for 17 years.
The cuts are one more result of the state’s budget crisis. The university is facing a $17 million shortfall ($12 million less in state funding, plus a $5 million increase in built-in staffing costs) in its $524 million budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, URI spokesman David Lavallee says.
Staff is being cut through layoffs and retirements. Four sports were eliminated. “The ‘Great Performances’ and fine arts galleries program are not part of our central curriculum, and that’s what the priority is,” Lavallee says. Cutting the two art programs is expected to save $350,000.
Randall Rosenbaum, executive director of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA), says, “The state is in really challenging shape and while these cutbacks are understandable, they’re still tragic. Once you lose a program like this, even if you don’t want to send this message, the message people receive is, this is just not important to us. And I don’t think that is the message the university wants to send. It’s forced to cut somewhere.”
RISCA will likely see cuts in the next fiscal year’s state budget as well. People at Rhode Island College in Providence, a state school that presents art at its Bannister Gallery, are worried about what’s in store there. Spokeswoman Jane Fusco says, “At this time we’re not having any cuts at Rhode Island College.” But the qualification isn’t reassuring.
“Great Performances” usually offered four or five classical music performances, one world music performance, and one dance or theatrical performance annually.
Tourigny also brought visiting performers to local primary and secondary schools and offered master classes with them for URI students. The three university art galleries have averaged 16 shows a year, usually with three on view at any one time.
They were nearly all organized in-house. Tolnick Champa also taught five or six interns from the school each semester.
Kristina Cinquegrana, a Providence graphic designer who interned at the galleries and graduated from URI last year, says “We’re really feeling the cuts of the galleries. And as an alum, I feel really angry because the galleries played such an integral part in my education.”
Tourigny, who has worked at URI for a decade, says, “I mourn the loss of the program for the state. But I think the big problem is the state, not the university. I have no answers to fix that problem, but I don’t think the university had many choices. I think the devastating and egregious amount they had to cut from the program was so broad. When you see them cutting from athletics programs you know it’s egregious.”
She thinks it will take the state 10 to 15 years to recover from these cuts.
“It’s catastrophic to the soul of the state . . . There needs to be protest. There needs to be a clear articulation of what this means to the art community of Rhode Island,” says Patrick Logan, a professor in URI’s communication department and a close friend of Tolnick Champa. “The state’s investment in higher education is a third of what it was 35 years ago. That leaves the question: is higher education that much less important than it used to be?”
Rosenbaum says, “The University of Rhode Island, like many universities around the country, serves as a cultural center for their community. The programs that are cut back -- the galleries and “Great Performances” program -- are community assets. They’re in large part about the role the university plays as a community partner.
“The way our state is laid out, the University of Rhode Island is a cultural center for the South County area. So that reduces the community cultural programming or the southern part of the state . . . Once you institutionalize something and then you lose it, it’s hard to build it back. It takes greater effort to rebuild it, to justify its worth. You almost have to reinvent it.”
