Adirondack Arts Revival?
- Lauren Yates
- Sep 20
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 17
Following COVID-19, arts organizations are building back better—yet facing more uncertain times.
By Lauren Yates
Published Adirondack Explorer
Moving a Steinway piano one-half mile down the road is no easy task. Ask the runners of Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts (ALCA), who hauled almost 60 years’ worth of costumes and art supplies to a new arts center—a difficult feat rewarded with new housing for artist residencies, more in-house community events and more programming.
A new taproom operated by Hex and Hop Brewery does not hurt, either.
ALCA is just one of several arts centers around the Adirondack Park that are embedded in new facilities projects this year—expansions, relocations and new construction —to replace or revive aging structures and accommodate what arts center leaders say is a swelling interest in the Adirondack art scene. This is a post-COVID comeback bolstered by regional and state investments in the arts.
As many of these organizations have grown older, so have their buildings. Multiple centers started having issues in recent years; A faulty roof at ALCA’s 1920s-era building; broken air conditioning at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts (LPCA), which had to cancel weeks of performances due to dangerous temperatures; a collection at the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center outgrowing the current lodge; and the auto-body-shop-turned-Pendragon Theatre was facing tremendous disrepair, according to Michael Aguirre, the managing director.
Plus, the pandemic brought another new set of challenges to the industry.
Arts in a pandemic
Theaters and cinemas were among the first businesses ordered to close on March 16, 2020, as part of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s initial attempts to slow the spread of coronavirus, and they were among the last businesses to begin reopening one year later—a task made difficult by new, strict health and safety guidelines.
Arts and culture centers across the United States experienced similarly lengthy closures and, according to a report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), similarly dismal economic effects. Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. arts economy shrank at nearly twice the rate of the economy as a whole, falling by 6.4% compared with a 3.4% decline in the overall economy, according to the 2022 study.
Through it all, artists and arts centers in the Adirondacks did what they do best: They got creative.
Within days of state-ordered closures, virtual programming—classes, workshops and lectures—started popping up at centers like the LPCA. At Craigardan in Elizabethtown, which started as an artists’ residency in nearby Keene in 2016, the pandemic planted the seeds for a new community farm that advocated for making art as well as growing food for its neighbors.
“There’s nothing like looking out of your studio window and seeing sheep grazing,” said Craigardan director Michele Drozd.
But for cinemas and performing arts theaters, keeping operations alive was more of a challenge. Performing arts was the overall steepest-declining industry in 2020 alongside air travel and oil drilling—theater experienced a 73% economic decline from 2019 to 2020, according to the NEA study.
When Saranac Lake’s Pendragon Theatre reopened in 2021, attendance had dropped to about 20%—that’s 20 people attending each performance in its 100-seat theatre, compared with around 80% capacity in 2019, according to Aguirre.
The state started to carve out more budget funds to help arts centers and artists recover. Just a year after the 2021 state budget gave $42.5 million to the arts, the 2022 budget included $40 million for a new Arts Recovery Grant Program, $43.1 million in total support for the New York Council on the Arts’ (NYSCA) operating budget and $1 million for arts stabilization grants. By 2025, NYSCA had a $162 million grantmaking budget, which increased for 2026 to $172 million.
Each of these arts projects has benefited from NYSCA funding. Now, arts center directors worry that they are again on the brink of uncertain times.
Funding challenges
In early May, President Donald Trump proposed eliminating the NEA in the upcoming federal budget. The NEA is an independent federal agency established by Congress in 1965 and the country’s biggest funder of the arts and arts education. The agency provides foundational grants to state arts councils, including NYSCA. In the days after Trump’s proposed budget was released, NEA staff said they were asked to resign and arts organizations started receiving notifications that their NEA-provided grants were rescinded. The effort comes as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to reduce federal spending and overhaul cultural federal agencies seen as advancing “woke” ideals.
Aguirre said Pendragon lost an $850,000 federal earmark for the new theater, promised by Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office in 2024, as the 2025 federal budget passed through the House in May. Aguirre said Pendragon is depending on donors and foundations to make up the cost and noted the theater, which received a multiyear NEA grant in 2024, feels like it “cannot depend on future NEA funding for the time being.”
“Scaling back the NEA isn’t just a funding limitation—it’s a signal that the arts aren’t being valued as an essential part of our community, national spirit or democracy,” Aguirre said.
Craigardan has worked closely with the NEA as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has faced program, grantmaking and staff cuts under the Trump administration. Drozd said the cuts have “significantly changed our ability to operate and build in 2025 and 2026—and likely beyond.”
Many nonprofit arts centers are already spread thin, with directors often doubling as grant writers, shoring up funds for operations through private donors, charitable foundations and state grants, as well as counting on area nonprofits such as the Cloudsplitter Foundation, the Adirondack Community Foundation and the Essex County Arts Council—among many others—to help advocate for more arts funding in the park.
Representatives from the Cloudsplitter and Adirondack Community Foundations sounded the alarm on potential cuts to Adirondack nonprofits in a letter to the editor in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in March, citing an Urban Institute report that found government funds provide more than $100 million to nonprofits in Clinton, Essex, Franklin and Hamilton counties every year.
“Between both organizations, we are able to grant around $10 million per year,” they said. “We want our communities to be aware that these private philanthropic financial resources are nowhere near sufficient to keep these crucial organizations afloat.”
And getting the grant is often only half the battle. State grants through the state Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) are reimbursable, meaning recipients such as Pendragon and Tupper Arts must fund that portion of their projects to completion before they can access that grant money. Many NYSCA grants have a matching component and a three-year use-it-or-lose-it rule. Drozd said it is essential to phase out projects to properly manage the cost of growth while bringing in enough revenue to fight inflation and meet construction deadlines within the terms of their NYSCA grant—it is like “mathematical gymnastics.”
In most cases, private donations and community engagement are key to getting projects off the ground. ALCA Development General Director Jean-Marie Donohue said ALCA’s October 2024 purchase of their new property, along with a new arts endowment, got funding in less than one year—a grassroots community effort she said was “nothing short of miraculous.” For the Six Nations Cultural Center, two anonymous donors partnered with the Adirondack Land Trust to secure property for the new building.
But fundraising does not end with a new building or a new property, and when the money does not come through, some art centers find themselves at a crossroads.
In May, BluSeed Studios, a more than 23-year-old arts nonprofit in Saranac Lake, announced it was dissolving and closing. This pillar of the community hosted ceramics, printmaking and other artists as well as local open mics and events. The announcement came just weeks after another Saranac Lake studio, ADK ArtRise, announced it would close its doors in June.
While ArtRise is a for-profit business, BluSeed has largely sought funding from donors and grants over the years. BluSeed board of directors president Jill Michalsky cited increasing costs of operating the studios’ train warehouse-turned-arts center, alongside a declining availability of grants—including a dwindling NYSCA grant, which covered payroll for the studios’ sole employee, director Marissa Hernandez—as reasons for closing.
Comeback
Regardless of grant support, most arts centers reported steadily rebounding interest in programming and offerings since the pandemic. Pendragon has made a full comeback with extended show runs and sold-out performances, and its spring/summer season is full speed ahead—including a series of free arts workshops in area elementary schools. Summer programming is well underway at LPCA and Craigardan—despite some impending construction tape.
Dave Fadden, of Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center, said he believes the Adirondacks’ art scene is growing “in a big way.”
“Other organizations, both big and small, have had more exhibits, plays and concerts from what I can tell,” he said. “Small communities seem to be making an effort to showcase the talent that exists in the mountains with hopes of developing a market for artists.”
Arts centers in the Adirondacks are not just buildings filled with landscape paintings—they are community centers and social hubs. For artists such as Kate Hartley in North Creek, arts centers across the park provide a place for local makers to show and sell their art, teach everything from needle felting to linoleum block printing, and bring rural communities together through creativity.
“It really does engender a sense of community to create together,” Hartley said.
LPCA has paid more $2 million to local artists through artwork sales from the center’s two galleries during the past 10 years, according to its Director of Communications Alison Simcox.
The arts industry added $143.8 billion to New York’s economy in 2021, according to data compiled by the Arts Action Fund, comprising 7.6% of the state’s GDP that year. According to the Americans for the Arts’ Arts and Economic Prosperity study series, the typical attendee to a nonprofit arts and culture event spends $38.46 per person per event, not including the cost of the event.
Aguirre said the pandemic showed the importance of arts centers as public spaces essential to any thriving community. And now, as the centers once again face uncertain financial times, he believes communities should come together through art.
“All this is more reason for why we keep our doors open, why we’ve doubled down on our educational outreach and community partnerships, and why we invest in bringing great artists to our little stage,” he said. “The current administration is fighting to dismantle culture and free expression. This is how we fight back.”
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