Marking a WAA Milestone: An Interview with Tim Wilson
WAA’s Executive Director, Tim Wilson
Tim Wilson, WAA’s longtime Executive Director, will be stepping down next September, and the search for Tim’s successor launched earlier this month.
To mark this milestone, WAA’s Membership & Communications Manager, Lucy Taylor, invited Tim to share some of his most memorable WAA moments, what he’s learned from leading the organization for the past 24 years, and what advice he’d offer his successor.
Tim, you’ve been leading WAA for a long time - almost 25 years?
Yes, my last day will be 25 years to the day! I started on October, 1 1997 and my last day will be September 30, 2022.
That’s a lot of conferences!
The 2022 conference in Calgary will be my 25th as executive director! Plus, I attended six or seven conferences before then, as a WAA member, while I was at Sealaska Heritage and Naa Kahidi Theater.
Can you share a favorite or most memorable conference moment with us?
Larry Grant, Elder, Musqueam Nation (second from the left), with dancers from Tsatsu Stalqayu, Coast Wolf Pack, led by Francis James (with drum) at the opening of the 2015 Indigenous Performance Symposium in Vancouver. Image credit: Coast Mountain Photography.
One highlight that comes to mind was the 2015 conference in Vancouver.
Shane Koyczan’s keynote; Vancouver, 2015; image credit: Coast Mountain Photography.
It wasn't the largest WAA conference, but it was a very successful one - in part because the programming we did there was unique. There was a lot of energy around attendance, and we had a record number of Canadian participants. And then, of course, there was the Indigenous Performance Symposium, which was incredibly successful — and important for WAA, the Indigenous artists who participated, and our community. We spent about eighteen months establishing the right relationships in Vancouver. We formed a special committee to plan the program, including international Indigenous artists and producers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US.
The auditorium capacity was capped at 100, so it ended up being a real hot-ticket event. It was a big effort and a real high point, and the success of the symposium ultimately launched the Advancing Indigenous Performance (AIP) program.
The keynote speaker that year was also very memorable - Shane Koyczan, who had been part of the opening ceremony at the Vancouver Olympics a few years before. He was amazing! He’s a poet and spoken-word artist originally from Yellowknife. His keynote was out of this world – he seamlessly blended his conference remarks with his poetry.
You hold such an incredible institutional memory of WAA. What would you say has changed the most about the organization since you started?
Programming has changed quite a bit over time. There were a lot more opportunities at the state and federal levels for funding and engaging artists when I started than there are now – a result of the 1990s controversy about NEA funding individual artists, the NEA Four etc. That impacted public policy at the local, state, and federal levels - meaning the programs that really got artists out there, the support for the development of new work and touring work - went away. Presenters, who were working and presenting and serving their communities, had less support for artists that may not draw a huge audience. Without that support, they had to rely more on box office. As that trend – the reliance on earned income – continued, the programming changed to be able to get butts in seats.
When I started at WAA, the official showcase program was selected through a lottery. To me that seemed absurd – no one programs by lottery, so why select showcases by lottery? It was one of the first changes I advocated for, although it took a good 5 - 6 years to get that going. The rationale among members, which was strongly held at the time, was that they would rather risk uneven work from the lottery than have someone decide what they should see and not see. The fear was that there would be an established aesthetic or style that would be locked in, and that it would get in the way of seeing a wider variety or diversity of work. What eventually came out of that was that we established rotating panels — which we still have — where only the chair sits for more than one year, so the panel review is always fresh.
The “Cyber Cafe” (top) and Exhibit Hall from the 2000 WAA conference in Denver, CO.
In the mid-late 2000s, there was a growing sense that the conference exhibit spaces weren’t working – the convention centers we used at the time felt like the wrong environment - cavernous, and losing a sense of cohesiveness and community. Plus, we were fairly small, so it was a lot of overhead to cover. We put together a taskforce of members called the Marketplace Taskforce, and spent several years discussing the future of what our convening might be. We came up with a number of ideas including calling it ‘The Commons’ instead of the resource room and moving away from the booth setup to break down the feeling of ‘us vs. them’, which kind of felt like being in a zoo – people coming by and looking and maybe approaching. Instead, we wanted to create a space that was more conversational and less transactional. We introduced alternative exhibits and open and accessible hours, and moved from convention centers to hotels, resulting in a smaller footprint and lower overheads. That was a big innovation. There was resistance, but over time it’s become accepted.
We used to refer to the Exhibit Hall as the Resource Room, because the conference created one of the few opportunities to collect resources about artists and programming – this was pre-internet. You could pick up a brochure, or see a video on a Betamax or VHS machine, and there used to be a shipping office where you could box up the resources you’d collected to ship back home. Or people would bring an extra suitcase to load in all their materials! Now with the internet, the whole function of the conference has really changed dramatically.
Fundamentally, I would say the biggest change of all is how technology has made it easier for people to exchange information and get to know an artist, project, venue – with the exception of live performance, you can do it all from your desk. Especially right now with the pandemic, and for the future, the function of the conference is connecting people.
What about your WAA career are you most proud of?
The establishment of the AIP symposium and then the AIP program I think is easily the thing I am most proud of. It in turn lead to all the equity work WAA is doing through Conexiones, Black Arts @ WAA, and now QWAA and Hyphen + Asian.
2019 WAA Institute in Portland, OR.
The WAA Institute is something else I am proud of. The most recent one was here in Portland, focusing on gentrification and how communities are being affected by systemic racism, largely featuring folx from the Black community. It was a great program, and the work was really made possible by the success of the Vancouver conference - knowing that these kinds of immersive learning experiences can successfully serve the WAA community.
What has been your biggest lesson during your time at WAA?
You have to really listen and make the best decisions you can.
WAA’s membership and constituents are diverse. We have individual artists with their own set of needs and concerns, agents who represent those artists - some commercial, some nonprofit – and presenters. All these different members and their needs and interests overlap and align in particular areas – everyone is involved in putting artists onto stages – but their needs and interests are sometimes conflicting. So, there is no pleasing everyone.
One thing you learn in this job is that you have to look at this organization and this community as a collective of individual niche audiences. What we try to do, ideally, is design different programs, different elements of our services that meet the needs of specific members groups, but one single thing won’t meet the needs of everyone. So, you tailor it – XYZ will help this group, this type of member, this size of organization – and you try to make sure that there’s a menu of features and programs and elements that serve particular niches. But there is very little that you can do that will serve the community as a whole. You really have to think about serving each segment specifically.
Hence the roles of the WAA board and committees?
Tim with WAA Board members and guests at the 2006 WAA conference in Long Beach, CA. Clockwise from bottom, Tim, Myron Martin, Board President (Smith Center), Gail Kalver, Hubbard Street Dance, Ruth Glenn, Director (Anchorage Concert Association), Walter Jaffe, Director (White Bird), Paul King (White Bird), Terry Yagura, Director (Arts for the Schools), and Allen Moon, David Lieberman Artist’s Representatives.
Exactly. Board culture is so important, and I have spent a lot of my energy and focus on developing board culture. You have a strong relationship in order to guide each other and trust each other’s judgment.
Committees have always been the hallmark of my leadership - not something I started, but something I’ve remained committed to. Committees are a lot of work to support – and WAA currently has 15 committees – but each of them is a way of engaging members in the direction of the organization, investing in the future, and ensuring that we fulfill their needs and interests. I think that’s fundamental to WAA’s work.
Is there any advice you would offer the new ED?
I remember when I was first announced as the new executive director, a WAA member I’d worked with while I was director of the Alaska State Council on the Arts, called me and said “Tim, what have you done? Running WAA is like herding cats!” But having come from an environment where I was responsible to many different stakeholders – to funders, to the governor who appointed me, to the council, to the state legislature, to artists, and the public – I was used to working with conflicting interests. So, coming to WAA, I felt ready.
The new ED will need to understand that you can’t please everyone – you have to balance the various needs of stakeholders and find a way forward. Especially right now – with the racial reckoning of this country and the practice of presenting, built, historically, on white supremacy culture – this dynamic of competing interests and complexity is even more heightened as we navigate the changes in our field and society.
Would you have been surprised to know when you started, that you’d complete a 25-year tenure?
Yes, I would have been surprised! Where did the time go?
What will you miss the most about your position at WAA?
This doesn’t happen on a daily basis of course, but the best part of my job is seeing an artist come in, take hold, and take flight. To me, that’s the most interesting, fun, and exciting thing – seeing those artists flourish. I will miss that.
What’s next for you?
I have some ideas! I want to keep working for a few years, and there are a couple of things I am thinking about. I have a second-level sommelier certificate, so I have been toying with the idea of working in a small wine association.
Another idea is doing interim ED work - I like the idea of going in and helping an organization for a few months.
I also have a large film project that I was working on 7 - 8 years ago, that I put aside and haven’t gotten back to. It's a big complex idea that I won’t go into, but it’s a participatory film project – a crowdsourced feature film if you can imagine that. We'll see!