Celebrating One Year as a Member of the Cultural Institutions Group
One year ago, BRIC joined New York City’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG), a 150-year-old coalition made up of some of the city’s most esteemed cultural institutions. We became the first media organization to join the CIG. That milestone belongs to everyone who has built BRIC over nearly five decades: the producers, artists, neighbors, community producers, and content creators who have proved again and again that community media is cultural infrastructure.
We did not get here alone. Shout out to our friends at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), especially Commissioner Diya Vij and former Commissioner Laurie A Cumbo. for DCLA’s ongoing and longstanding support of BRIC, from the building of BRIC House to last year’s CIG designation.
When I spoke about this moment at last year’s induction, I referred to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is often taught as a pyramid. At the base are food, shelter, and safety. Belonging and esteem sit in the middle. At the very top is self-actualization, where creativity and the arts usually get placed. That placement carries a quiet assumption: art is what you get to once everything else is taken care of. It is a reward, and so it is optional.
I’m not sure about that. When the arts are treated as the top of the pyramid, the pinnacle, they can be the first thing cut when budgets tighten and the last thing funded when times are good. The people who lose access first are the people who have always had the least of it.
Art is not what a community arrives at after its needs are met. It is how a community understands its needs, names them, and organizes to meet them. It is where belonging is built. It is how people who are rarely heard make themselves heard. Access to culture, and to the means of making and sharing it, is a fundamental need and a right.
Arts are also an engine. They drive New York City’s economy, creating jobs, filling neighborhoods, drawing visitors, training the next generation of creative workers, and building the industries that make New York great. The New York City Economic Development Corporation reports that in 2024, $145B—11% of New York City’s economic output—was generated by the creative economy.Investing in culture is not charity. It is investing in the foundation.
That is what membership in the CIG means to us. It is not a finish line. It is a public acknowledgment that our work belongs at the base of the pyramid. For the year ahead and the ones that follow, that is where we intend to keep it.
Wes Jackson
President, BRIC