A decade ago, Durham was at the height of its much-documented revival. And while the city’s Google-powered technology startups and James Beard-winning restaurants garnered the bulk of national headlines, it was Durham’s vibrant arts community that set the city apart. Much has changed since that era, largely due to the pandemic and cost of living, and arts scenes—both in Durham and around the country—have struggled to bounce back.
The arts are still here, to be clear. But many in the scene—like Laura Ritchie, a former gallery owner and current member of the Durham Culture Advisory Board (DCAB)—are actively thinking of ways to give it a boost and make it more sustainable for artists to live here.
“How do we form connections between the resources and the people that are already here who were more visible 10 years ago, because we were able to be more centralized?” Ritchie wonders aloud. “How do we use what we have better? And then, how do we generate more resources for artists and cultural workers?”
As part of the solution, DCAB, a 15-person joint city-county advisory body, launched the Durham Cultural Roadmap, a plan to guide future arts and cultural programming, in 2022. DCAB then established the Cultural Roadmap Planning Group, which includes representatives from a variety of professional disciplines, to steward the process.
The city and county hired AMS Planning and Research, a consulting group, to kick off the first phase, engaging with over 1,300 residents to help set the table for the process and identify priorities and issues important to the community. Following the completion of this initial phase, local officials brought on MJR Partners, an arts management consulting firm, to shepherd Phases 2 and 3 of the plan development process. Local artists Monèt Noelle Marshall and R. Stein Wexler were also recruited to lead further public engagement.
The organizers expect to conclude public engagement and begin drafting the plan this fall, with adoption scheduled for early 2026.
Artists say that they’re the backbone of Durham’s charm and that local leaders can do more to support them—create more studio spaces for creators to produce and showcase their work, and invest in the kind of public art and special events that can attract both residents and visitors.
“Both the private sector and the public sector need to put their money where their mouth is,” says Wexler. “They use the arts and culture in Durham to attract talent, companies, investment and wealth, and all those people are paying taxes and earning income, and they’re here because it’s a vibrant place—but the people who are creating that work are struggling to stay here because we just don’t have the infrastructure that we need to maintain and grow a vibrant arts community.”
State of the Arts
In 2004, city and county leaders approved a cultural master plan to “advance numerous arts and cultural goals and strategies” over a 15-year time frame. The DCAB was established in 2010 to help manage those efforts. A year later, in 2005, the city council included a resolution that devoted up to one percent of the Capital Improvement Project (CIP) annual budget to facilitate public art installation across the city—a promising step, though the fallout from the 2008 financial crash stalled those investments as local leaders were forced to tighten budgets.
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In 2021, Durham faced similar challenges to those brought forth a decade prior. Economic growth stalled during the COVID-19 pandemic as the cost of living rose. This hit artists hard, particularly live performers who depended on in-person gatherings to make a living. Compared to 2019, hotel occupancy dropped 25 percent, and foot traffic downtown dipped from 10.5 to 8 million visitors a year.
And as Durham began recovering from the lockdown period, artists have been faced with competition from changed consumer behaviors. Folks had gotten used to lounging at home, bingeing Netflix, instead of hanging out at the Pinhook or seeing the newest indie flick at The Carolina Theatre.
The economic environment for artists had shifted. Durham’s cultural workers wanted an updated blueprint to guide investment in the arts, moving forward, and DCAB asked city and county leaders to support the development of the Durham Cultural Roadmap.
During a public engagement meeting on July 23, a few dozen residents gathered at local venue perfect lovers to envision what a more culturally-rich Durham might look like. Large sticky pads along the walls of the room prompted attendees to write down ideas for how to support artists, and what other cities—Boston, Portland, Seattle, Asheville, and our neighbors in Raleigh—are getting right. One prompt posed the question: “What would you like to be able to say about Durham’s arts and culture in 3 years?”
“Weird punk shit is going on,” read one comment.
Attendees used Legos to design models of their municipal artist utopia, building idyllic neighborhoods with amphitheaters, galleries, retail shops, and artist housing all connected by streets lined with trees and sculptures.
“Part of this plan and us sharing our dreams is to say, ‘This is where I want the energy, the economic energy, the spiritual energy, the cultural energy of the city to go,” Marshall told the crowd.
The dreamscape attendees envisioned would require much more public investment.
“A budget is a value statement,” Marshall said. “So when things are not inside of our budget, we’re saying that we do not value them.”
Challenges
In 2011, seven years before the erection of One City Center, back when the block was an open green space home to the “Green Wall” and a large multicolored fish mural, Laura Ritchie opened the Carrack Art Gallery, a zero-commission exhibition and events space located on Parrish Street. Downtown was still establishing itself as a viable destination for food and entertainment, aside from the Durham Bulls and DPAC schedules.
Ritchie wasn’t the only person taking a chance in Durham’s fledgling downtown: Mercury Studio, Motorco Music Hall, Durty Durham, the Pinhook, Beyu Cafe, and other art ventures formed a network of studios and venues where creatives could flourish. Restaurateurs, coffee shop owners, and tech hubs flocked to the city center, too, further cultivating the ecosystem that grew into today’s downtown.
“That was a really special time,” Ritchie says. “There was a cluster of creativity happening in downtown Durham. Everybody was helping each other out. When we ran into an issue and I needed some counsel, I called in Megan and Katie from Mercury Studio to help me out because they were my peers.”
Durham’s artists helped the city find its cool—but such a shift came with a price.
“It was all quite grassroots and scrappy, but Durham has changed since then,” Wexler says. “There’s a lot more money here, and there’s an opportunity for that money to support that scrappiness, to support the grassroots. We just need to connect the dots to make that happen.”
“It was all quite grassroots and scrappy, but Durham has changed since then. There’s a lot more money here, and there’s an opportunity for that money to support that scrappiness, to support the grassroots. We just need to connect the dots to make that happen.”
R. Stein Wexler, artist
The Carrack could offer to take zero commission on art sold in the gallery, allowing artists themselves to keep all their sales. Ritchie says a spike in property tax valuations in 2017 forced even the most benevolent landlord to make difficult financial choices.
“He wanted us there, and worked with us to keep our rent as low as he could,” Ritchie says of The Carrack’s former landlord, “but he suddenly was having to pay three times as much, and so he had to raise our rents. It wasn’t some evil, greedy landlord situation. His reality changed, and our reality changed. I think that happened for a lot of people.”
The pandemic, she says, was the “final blow.”
Ritchie moved the Carrack before shuttering the gallery a year later.
Affordable space is increasingly scarce. When One City Center eliminated the Green Wall plaza and the Carrack left, no artist studio popped up at the luxury tower to take its place, even though one of the retail units has been empty since the center opened in 2018. Liberty Warehouse, originally home to Liberty Arts and the Scrap Exchange, was sold and knocked down to build apartments. Only the modest metal casting facility remains on the site.
Much of downtown’s new construction lacks space for artists in favor of restaurants, coffee shops, and studios that tend to require yoga pants instead of aprons. But galleries and artists aren’t the only ones suffering. The ecosystem of other businesses–restaurants, retail businesses, printmakers, etc.— all benefitted from the vibrant cultural environment that artists supplied. Now, there’s an imbalance.
“SpeedDeeQue did all of our promotional printing,” Ritchie says, offering an example. “They knew us and our schedule well enough that if I hadn’t made it by there on Friday before they closed, they knew I was frantically setting up for a reception and would walk my stuff over without me even asking.”
In 2022, Durham’s nonprofit arts and culture industry supported 3,246 jobs and generated $233,059,155 in economic activity, and $27,141,859 in local, state, and federal government revenue, according to the 2024 DCAB annual report. But those figures don’t tell the whole story: It’s hard to quantify the full impact the arts have on the economy, Ritchie says
One person who understands the intersection of culture and the economy better than most is Durham’s new director of economic development, Joshua Gunn.
Gunn, a Durham native, is a skilled rapper and entertainer, and co-founded Black August in the Park in 2015. After traveling the world as a musician, Gunn pivoted into working as an economic development strategist, serving four years as vice president of the Durham Chamber of Commerce before taking the top job as CEO of the chamber of commerce in Peoria, Illinois, and later Glendale, Arizona. Earlier this year, Gunn was recruited to return home and lead economic development in Durham. He says Durham’s culture is one of the city’s greatest economic assets.
In a June INDY story, Gunn quoted a friend who quipped that: “Raleigh wants to be Charlotte, Charlotte wants to be Atlanta, but Durham just wants to be Durham.” That authenticity, Gunn said, is a “massive economic driver.”
Gunn agrees with Ritchie that the connection between a robust arts and culture scene and creating profit, in the private and public sector, is not always a straight line, but says his office is studying those links to help put a dollar amount on vibes.
“One of the challenges for us here in Durham is: We do a good job of having a moment where the arts are featured, rather than recognizing that it should be a perpetual part of our strategy.”
joshua gunn, director of durham’s economic & Workforce development
“How do you quantify the cool?” Gunn says. “I quantify the cool by the amount of people who decide to live here because they want to be in that environment. They want their company or their brand associated with that cool.”
Public investment in the creative community isn’t just about attracting big business or weekend tourists. Artists are residents of Durham, too, and their work is what gives the city its texture, transforming it from a boring black-and-white silent film into, say, the opening scene in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon.
“One of the challenges for us here in Durham is: We do a good job of having a moment where the arts are featured, rather than recognizing that it should be a perpetual part of our strategy,” Gunn says. “You should always be able to go downtown and find that art and find that vibe and find that consistent energy, and that happens when it’s a part of your strategy.”
Looking Forward
For success, Durhamites look to their friends in Raleigh, where the city spends $5 per person for arts grant funding and has an annual arts budget of $27 million.
“Ten years ago, folks were coming to Durham for the arts,” Ritchie says. “And now, even a lot of Durham artists are going to Raleigh for exhibition opportunities, funding opportunities, and events. So I do think that there’s a lot we can learn right here locally, in terms of creating more funding sources.”
A consistent recommendation from local creatives is for local officials to establish a new department dedicated to arts and culture that would be charged with carrying out the priorities in the culture roadmap. Some of those services are currently carried out by the Public Art Committee, which is housed in the General Services Department. The city also holds management agreements with the Carolina Theatre, the Durham Arts Council, and St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation (Hayti Heritage Center) for $777,179, $743,856, and $292,000, respectively, organizations that develop their own arts programming.
Wexler points to Minneapolis as a possible north star for Durham to aspire to—there, in 2021, city leaders adopted an ordinance to create the Arts & Cultural Affairs Department. In 2024, Minneapolis, a city of roughly 429,000 people, ended up investing over $4 million in arts and culture. Minnesota spends more on arts per capita than any other state, thanks in large part to its “Legacy Amendment,” which increased the state sales tax by three-eighths of one percent from 2009 until 2034. Nearly a fifth of the funding—19.75 percent—is allocated to the arts and cultural heritage fund.
“I think it’s easy for us to think, ‘Ooh, we’re not New York or L.A. or Boston, but Minneapolis is something of a peer city to us, and they’re doing this incredible work,” says Wexler. “I think we could see them as a model. To think of Minnesota as the highest per capita art funding means, you know, North Carolina could be too.”
Last year, the Durham City Council increased its special events grant fund from $195,000 to $400,000. The grants in it are made available to support larger institutions like Full Frame and American Dance Festival, as well as upstart groups Slingshot, an electronic music festival, and Biscuits and Banjos, an Americana festival that debuted earlier this year. Ritchie called the funding increase a “big win” for Durham artists.
Ritchie and her partner, Shirlette Ammons, are knocking on the door of opening a new creative arts venture, Boardinghouse Arts, in downtown Durham. Other arts veterans have also stepped back onto the scene to rebuild the creative class, more recently, with ventures like Night School Bar, Skin and Bones Theater, and Queen Street Magic Boat.
On September 25, MJR Partners is hosting a Cultural Roadmap town hall at Holton Career & Resource Center to wrap up the engagement portion of the planning process.
The final draft of the plan is scheduled to be adopted in early 2026.
“Arts and culture are the magnets that attract business and people to your city,” Gunn says. “We need to do a better job of capturing their economic impact. I think the cities that understand that are very successful in growing their economy.”
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