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In a typical summer, the King Arts Complex would have its annual gala downtown in May, art-infused summer camps for children in June, and Thursday music festivals in July and August.
“So far this year, everything is virtual,” says Executive Director Demetries Neely. “And it makes it hard because people like to be engaged with each other by nature. We’re social creatures. We want to socialize and we want to connect with people. So we’re missing the connectivity. However, we are compelled and intentional about continuing the arts programming. Nothing has stopped for us.”
Neely has been involved with the King Arts Complex for more than two decades, serving on its board before becoming executive director in 2012. Among the changes she made to the organization’s structure were a reduction from 19 full-time staff, including nine director-level positions, to nine full-time staff with three directors.
“Financial sustainability was my goal, and it still is,” Neely says. “I’m proud to say we’ve had a balanced budget every year since I’ve been there. We’ve had a net surplus for … at least eight of the 10 years. And we have a significant net surplus now. We have a significant savings account. We have an endowment. We’ve done a lot of the things that we’ve wanted to do to stabilize the organization.”
This fiscal preparation has helped the organization weather the pandemic, Neely says.
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Neely came to the King Arts Complex with the financial chops to keep the organization solvent, but she was attracted to its commitments to social justice and connecting the community with art.
“Sitting there under the gaze of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, we have a social justice imperative,” Neely says. “That’s attractive to me because I’ve also always been in that space in my life.”
Neely was raised in the Carolinas in a family with six children. Her mother was a piano teacher and gave them all piano lessons.
“My brothers included, much to their chagrin,” she adds.
Many of her siblings became thespians and artists. After going to college in North Carolina, Neely went to law school in here in Columbus. She originally intended to get her law degree and get out, but decided to stay after graduation for family reasons.
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“I was a young mother and … I didn’t want to raise my daughter in a city that’s really congested in big city problems,” she says. “I would say (Columbus) didn’t have big city problems in the ’80s, in the ’90s when I was raising my daughter. … I wanted to make sure that I could raise my daughter in a modest neighborhood, that she would feel safe.”
Neely worked at Nationwide Insurance for more than 20 years before retiring in 2008, and also worked as an attorney in her own private practice, before becoming executive director of the King Arts Complex.
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Though the pandemic caused several of last year’s events to go virtual, be postponed or canceled, Neely oversaw the organization’s response to the killing of George Floyd and the protests, including in Columbus, that followed it last summer.
“When George Floyd was killed, of course, the world stopped,” she says. “I mean, we all were protesting. We were mourning. We were hurt. We were talking. We were thinking. And so we thought, well, we have to do something now individually. We can go downtown and join protests and that would be fine. … But as an organization, we were compelled to do something. I was lying in bed the weekend of the protest that Sunday night. And it came to me that we should protest through the arts.”
The result: The HeART of a Protest.
The project consisted of 46 nonconsecutive days of artistic protest determined by participating local organizations and artists to honor the 46 years of Floyd’s life.
“He lived 46 years.” Neely says. “So let’s just use those years because everybody was focusing on the eight minutes and 46 seconds that the knee was on his neck. I thought, let’s celebrate his life, not how he passed.”
Neely and the King Arts Complex were able to raise nearly $200,000 in under 20 days to launch the project.
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The initial idea was for the project to kick off on Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the emancipation of slaves in the U.S., and run up until Election Day.
“However, as we were gaining ground on Election Day, the committee said, ‘We still have a lot to say,’” Neely says. “This is a movement. It’s not a project, it’s not an initiative and it’s not over.”
The Greater Columbus Arts Council recognized The HeART of a Protest project as one of the Dale E. Heydlauff Community Arts Innovation Award winners last year.
For the project, the King Arts Complex hosted a socially-distant Juneteenth celebration outside its facility June 19, followed by several voting registrations and COVID-19 testing efforts. Efforts became more vigorous at a performance event at Lucy Depp Park, a historical Underground Railroad location, in Delaware County.
“I know we registered over 400 people, and that was our goal,” Neely says.
The overall project provided the community a non-violent way to protest and heal from the Floyd tragedy, she says. For example, a mini concert in September featured singer Christina Myles, who became emotional in front of an audience of about 20 people.
“At some point, she … said, ‘I just needed this so much.’ And she cried. We had to keep giving out tissues,” Neely says. “And in one of her songs … she screamed, hollered, but it was melodic, if that makes sense. She used that platform to cry out her pain.”
Brandon Klein is an editor. Feedback welcome at bklein@cityscenemediagroup.com.
