By Sarah Higgins, executive + artistic director, Art Papers
Atlanta’s art community was rattled by the seemingly sudden closing of MINT—a beloved landmark of the city’s nonprofit arts landscape. MINT offered studio and exhibition space for emerging artists.
MINT, like most art organizations, began as an artist-run, volunteer-based project and graduated into a nonprofit, 501(c) (3). This model rose to prominence in the mid 20th century, offering such benefits as tax exemption and qualification for grant funding. It also carries various structural mandates such as financial transparency and a governing board to decide policies, oversee hiring/firing, and hold accountability for fundraising activities. For most organizations, this means funding comes from a combination of grants (local, state, federal, or private foundations), staff-run fundraising initiatives (auctions, parties, galas, etc.), and generated revenue (art sales, studio rent, etc.). This is the default model for organizations that don’t prioritize commercial endeavors, but instead focus on reaching diverse audiences, presenting marginalized perspectives, supporting artists, and offering educational resources—all things that build the foundation of a healthy arts sector. The model has gradually and consistently become unsustainable. It’s held together by the tenacity and dedication of the workers and artists who labor tirelessly to keep it going.
It’s been noted in the press that MINT’s downfall was largely one of poor leadership decisions made over several years. But the same daunting systemic challenges faced by all Atlanta arts orgs were at play in making MINT precarious, and vulnerable to individual missteps that often occur over the years of an institution’s life. A 2023 study by SMU DataArts used multiple metrics to rank Arts-Vibrant Communities. Atlanta failed to rank in the top 20, falling below such cities as Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Nashville. Still, the news about MINT was startling, especially their shameful lack of communication with the artists who were most impacted.
Art organizations are frequently dependent on a dubious symbiosis with real estate developers in which the org is granted affordable space from which to operate, playing a role in gentrification, in exchange for access to the space necessary to stage exhibitions, performances, or to offer working space to artists. Once the location becomes viable for market-rate tenants, however, the assisted ride is over and ousted orgs must survive the expense and disruption of relocation—another dynamic central to MINT’s downfall. Through all these challenges, staff must do more with less, and decisions must never look desperate or informed by scarcity, though they often are. Any whiff of failure could pull back the curtain and expose an infrastructure held together with little more than blood, sweat, and tears.
When Covid hit, everything got much worse. The pandemic’s impact on art nonprofits was like radiation poisoning—terrifying in its initial severity, but then prone to a deceptive period of improvement (as emergency funds flowed in), but that window of optimism is a false form of healing. The damage is done and is likely fatal.
I know this because I work for Art Papers—one of Atlanta’s legacy art organizations, a respected pillar of the community, the longest-running nonprofit art magazine in the US—and the same thing almost happened to us. In recent years, the areas we intersect—art criticism, print media, and longform writing—have suffered severe destabilization. After reaching a harrowing financial crossroads, we concluded that any conventional paths forward for the organization would diminish Art Papers to a shadow of our former relevance in the field—all for the sake of extending the institution’s life a little further, while remaining precarious.
We opted instead to embrace the metaphor of Fire Ecology—the practice of using controlled fires to maintain ecosystem health by burning old growth to fertilize the soil. We have adopted a three-year strategic plan that mobilizes our knowledge, resources, and historic role within our intersecting communities. We will enact the ethos of fire ecology by producing a multi-part discursive project to diagnose, speculate, and report upon the current health of the arts nonprofit and art writing fields. Our goal is to transform the operations of this 20th-century organization to ultimately enrich the ground from which 21st-century models will emerge. Through this work, we’ll celebrate Art Papers’ legacy with a meaningful, controlled, conclusion of operations in 2026, at 50 years.
Like any experiment, some people won’t understand, others will (but might hate it), but some have already rallied to support it. It’s a tired maxim that we often don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone, but the best retort to a cliché is to show people something new. We hope Art Papers’ death-with-dignity plan can offer an alternative to the ignominious end we’ve come to know, and that we’ll certainly experience again if nothing changes.
Art Papers’ Fire Ecology project will offer a range of public programs to explore, educate, and speculate with the community about possible futures for the arts in Atlanta and beyond. We invite you to visit ARTPAPERS.org and keep an eye out for public talks exploring these issues, and more, coming in November. Join in, ask questions, and find an arts org to support, because, now more than ever, every bit of support counts.
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