Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 9, 1991 TAG: 9103090280
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jeff Debell
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Linda Pharis and Joe Turner are the latest victims. Pharis heads the marketing department at Center in the Square, and Turner is its graphic designer. Both are longtime hands.
Their jobs will be eliminated as of April 1.
That brings to 18 the number of valley people known to have been given notice in arts or arts-related organizations as a result of state spending cutbacks and the concurrent decline in corporate contributions.
Center in the Square is the home of Mill Mountain Theatre, the Science Museum of Western Virginia, the Roanoke Valley History Museum, the Arts Council of the Blue Ridge (formerly the Arts Council of the Roanoke Valley) and the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts.
Center had been getting $250,000 annually from the state - approximately a third of its budget. The 1991 appropriation was cut to $178,000, and there will be nothing at all in fiscal 1992.
Center will try to meet the challenge through a fund-raising campaign and through spending cutbacks, including the elimination of Pharis' marketing department.
"It's a real step backward," said an obviously upset Charles Lunsford, general manager of Center in the Square. "The job they've done has been just incredible."
The Arts Council of the Blue Ridge, one of the agencies hardest hit by the fiscal crisis, has a champion in\ Steve McGraw.
McGraw is chairman of the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors and president of the Blue Ridge Region of Virginia Inc., a marketing organization for cities and counties in Western Virginia. Acting in the latter capacity, and using the organization's letterhead, he has mailed 350 letters asking for contributions to the financially stricken council.
McGraw describes the council as the area's "unified voice of the arts" and credits it with having "done a tremendous job of successfully representing the cultural resources of the region for the past decade."
McGraw has put his money where his mouth is. The letter includes a photocopy of his personal check to the council for $200.
\ It's spin-control time at the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra.
In the wake of the recent decision to discontinue the core of four full-time players after this season, 17 members of the orchestra expressed "great concern" in a letter to board president Jim Arend.
The musicians felt they had been led to believe at a Jan. 28 meeting that the orchestra was in reasonably good shape financially, only to learn a few weeks later that the core would be discontinued as a cost-cutting measure. Moreover, the decision had been made before the Jan. 28 meeting.
Their letter requested clarification of that issue, along with a couple of other points, and mentioned a need to "re-establish a feeling of trust among the various elements of this organization."
Arend and the board's personnel committee met with one signatory, violinist William Kinzie, early this week. Kinzie is the players' representative to the board. He said the meeting resolved his own concerns.
"I have no bone to pick with them," he said.
At week's end, a letter meant to address the musicians' concerns was on the way from Arend to the remaining signatories.
The orchestra hired its first full-time musicians in 1987 and has maintained a core of four or five every succeeding season, always hiring them on an annual basis. Intended both to improve artistic quality and to provide an educational and public relations tool, the step was hailed as an important professional advance for the orchestra.
Not surprisingly, there is concern that discontinuing the core will hurt the orchestra artistically. Orchestra manager Margarite Fourcroy said she believes the orchestra has become strong enough to "weather" the absence of a core, which is seen as temporary.
Management has portrayed its decision as an economic one, made in response to economic conditions that are bad now and expected to get worse next year. That hasn't eased the anxieties of the four young musicians who will lose their jobs. They feel they're unfairly having to shoulder the brunt of the spending cutbacks after working for the orchestra both as musicians and as ambassadors to the community.
"We put a lot of heart into it," cellist Mary Hege Crane said. "We just feel like somewhere along the line they forgot about us."
The core was a cornerstone of conductor Victoria Bond's plan for improvement of the orchestra. She made plain her opposition to its discontinuance but has accommodated herself to the decision.
"I have a great deal of faith in the board and I know it does not make arbitrary decisions," Bond said.
\ Work by two Western Virginians is included in the 1991 Virginia Youth Art Exhibit, which is on view through March 31 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
They are Virgil Wong, a senior at Blacksburg High School, and Judith Irene McMillan, a senior at Radford High School.
Thirty-one students from across the state are represented in the show, which later will travel to Mary Baldwin College, James Madison University, Sweet Briar College, Virginia congressional offices in Washington, the State Fair of Virginia and the General Assembly Building in Richmond.
\ A Moneta artist took the blue ribbon at this year's Old Island Days Art Festival in faraway Key West.
She's Susan Loy, a calligrapher. "Babel," her prize-winning piece, takes as its central text a passage from Hannah Arendt's "The Life of the Mind."
by CNB