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Arts Council President and CEO Eric Holowacz on the arts, archery, and the creative power of drawing, then letting go

Upon our first face-to face meeting, Eric Holowacz, the new president and CEO of the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, returned my outstretched right hand with a hug. Researched and informed, I was not surprised by the relatively intimate greeting, considering we were two strangers meeting for professional reasons. But whether or not I was surprised by Holowacz’ gesture, it feels relevant and revealing to lead with this information in a profile of the man who has been tapped to lead the cultural efforts of the capital city. Does everyone get a hug? Did Kip Holden get a hug?

A hug, if it is meaningful and sincere at all, is a moment of vulnerability, an invitation to let your guard down and be yourself. I was willing if he was. And of course he was…because if Eric Holowacz is anything, it is sincere—relentlessly, optimistically, constitutionally sincere.

Holowacz is a native of Columbia, South Carolina, but has lived and worked in the southern hemisphere for much of his career. Having recently returned stateside from his last stint in Mildura, Australia, where he served as arts and culture manager and before that with the Cairns Festival in northern Australia, the bespectacled Holowacz was hankerin’ after a mess of sloppy Southern barbecue. We landed at Jay’s Bar-B-Q on Government Street after a failed attempt to meet at Smokin’ Aces, which was inexplicably closed. It was all for the best since the outside seating at Smokin’ Aces on the hot, humid day of our meeting would’ve wilted the hardiest Southern specimen.

But notice the trajectory: (1) hatch a plan, (2) run into a problem, (3) reach an inspired solution—little did I know that the path to lunch foreshadowed the man’s worldview.

∞

“I like the adage ‘fail harder’,” said Holowacz between forkfuls of barbecue and coleslaw, “Risk-taking led to the innovations that we now embrace as comfortable and good and productive. I don’t set out to fail, but I’m not afraid because I know that failure or something that doesn’t go as planned often leads to a revelation or a new way to do something that’s, in the end, better than where you started.”

One of Holowacz’ lowest career moments, and not-incidentally one of his greatest triumphs, grew out of a project he initiated while director of the arts council in the small South Carolina community of Beaufort. He had been following Chicago’s wildly successful Cows on Parade public art project, for which three hundred artists painted fiberglass cows that were subsequently displayed throughout the city. Beaufort had no public art to speak of, and Holowacz wanted a few of those cows to constitute the town’s first brush with public art. He hatched a plan to entice a dozen or so of the Chicago cows to Beaufort, calling the effort “Cows on Vacation.”

After writing letters to some 180 sponsors, Holowacz received a call from Lois Weisberg, Chicago’s well-connected and influential commissioner of cultural affairs, pledging her support. A dozen cows subsequently traveled to quaint little Beaufort, and the community rallied around its mid-western visitors. Grandmothers took their grandchildren to visit the cows, stories appeared in the local paper, the community shimmered just a little more brightly.

Then early one morning, the mayor came to Holowacz’ door with the news that one of the cows had been set on fire, completely destroyed. The vandalism of a couple of bored teenagers earned Beaufort a black eye on the national stage. Stories disparaging the town appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and, of course, all of Chicago’s media outlets. Holowacz was devastated: “This was the biggest disappointment for all of us, and we really didn’t know how to recover.”

Here’s where the Creative Solution enters the picture. Holowacz received an offer from an artist to resuscitate the cow; the man took the charred remains of the cow away—no direction, no rules—just permission to work his creative magic. When the cow was finished, a community unveiling was held at the fire station and the entire town was invited; the mayor threw off the sheet to reveal a fully outfitted firefighting cow—helmet, boots, hose, and tailored jacket on a fully resurrected body. “[The artist] called it “Backdraft” after the movie,” explained Holowacz. “Backdraft the cow was the greatest comeback over the biggest disappointment in my career. But it was entirely generated by an artist and the kind of creative urge to do something better than a horrible thing. That taught me a lot. I know now that artists can conquer anything, that the creative approach can solve most problems, and that the sense of defeat that you feel with some things is temporary if you believe in them.”

Holowacz does seem to embrace Process-with-a-capital-P, whether it’s fraught with negativity and divisiveness or it’s all rainbows and kumbaya. He’s led the cultural efforts of enough communities and organizations over his twenty-three- year career to understand that leadership is messy. So you better roll up your sleeves and put on a pair of comfortable shoes ‘cause there’s going to be some hard scrabble consensus-building and mediation to slog through. He wouldn’t have put it so starkly. But he did dress comfortably for our lunch date, rolled-up sleeves and all.

Holowacz’ personal entrée into the arts was through poetry, which he began exploring as an adolescent and continued to study under the famous poet James Dickey at the University of South Carolina. The English / art history degree he earned, though, was not exactly a clear path into any particular career. He accidentally, and serendipitously, landed in arts administration when he answered an ad for an internship at the state arts council.

Over the course of his career, he’s sown the seeds of creative enterprise far and wide. From his native South Carolina to Key West, Florida; from Wellington, New Zealand to the tropical northern coast of Australia—and a few other places betwixt and between.

Holowacz’ conception of the arts is as broad as his travels, reflecting the cross-disciplinary nature of his higher education. His view of creativity and culture adopts concepts from art history, accounting, sociology, comparative religion, and anthropology. The anthropological undercurrent is strongest, and, as he put it, forms “his cognate, his third major.” He spoke comfortably about cultural inheritance and identity, sense of place, symbols, and ethnography—a veritable glossary from the back of an Anthro 101 textbook.

With the approach of a humanist, Holowacz sees creativity in general, and the artistic enterprise in particular, as a vehicle for defining and exercising the identity of a group of people. Creativity is inevitable, spontaneous, and ubiquitous; and whether one is an artist or not, he or she still helps manifest this collective creative identity and transmit it to future generations.

That’s not to say that folks can’t be helped along—in that regard, Holowacz plays the engineer:

"I often call what I do cultural engineering because there is a deliberate and planned process behind things sometimes that isn’t spontaneous or immediately genuine and real. But what we [in arts administration] try to do is try to create the platform and the opportunities and the forums for people to then do something natural and spontaneous and innate and real and creative. And part of it is—we all, inside of us, have some creative muscle to flex and some inclination that may be untapped for a while or dormant. Part of it is to make people aware that it’s there and that it can be harnessed and shared and proliferated.”

The Orwellian undertones of the engineering part of the equation notwithstanding, his is, in every possible way, a populist perspective on art, leaving elitists to preen their exclusive sensibilities in the wings.

This is reflected in the two future Baton Rouge projects he identified to me as the ones he was “most in love with.” The first, called Opening Notes, involves the production of a CD containing a diverse selection of music from local musicians representing Baton Rouge’s soundscape. The CD would be given to the ten thousand newborns that arrive in the greater capital region annually. The project, said Holowacz, “does a lot of unusual things that the arts want to do but often can’t figure out how to do. [It] goes into this very profound place called the birth of a person; then it says, ‘We’re giving you something from all of us that is your inheritance of your culture.’ And then it says, ‘Keep this for your life, because it is important. You own it; you can do with it what you want; you can change it; you can celebrate it; you can reject it—but keep it.’”

The other project that has Holowacz’ heart is the Culture Card, a re-envisioned library card that not only provides access to information but also to creative experiences. He explained:

“It’s always just been a library card. It’s always just been for books. So … why don’t we make it useful in other ways, make it be a path to get you into museums or two-for-one tickets to the theatre or Swine Palace or the symphony? What other places can we [include to] provide incentive for people to use that card beyond getting a book?”

The two projects are in their infancy, and Holowacz concedes that their successful fruition will require “hundreds of people who are going to love it with me.” Unfazed by this self-imposed challenge, he added, “but we’ll get there.”

I had been talking with this busy man—father of three girls, husband, community leader—for almost an hour, my pulled pork poboy and curly fries long gone while he continued to work on his meal. He seemed to be enjoying the food, but it’s hard to eat and talk.

Holowacz’ communication style is a persuasive blend of thoughtful reflection, gentle passion, and an enthusiasm that a jaded cynic might consider naïve. He talks and talks about his ideas, reiterating common themes and painting pictures of a dynamic community vigorously engaged in place making. It is gentle, but relentless, in the way that a river or a glacier is relentless—innate and unstoppable. One person at a time, he will explain his vision with the implicit request to help him get there. Over time, he figures he likely will, so long as all the right pieces are in place.

One of Holowacz’ formative books was Zen in the Art of Archery, a mid-nineteenth-century introduction of Zen Buddhism to Europe, which he read in a comparative religions course. The book provided him with a very far-eastern approach to goal tending that he uses to this day, an approach that emphasizes relinquishing the mirage of control in favor of insightful preparation:

“[The book] had an approach to life and achieving that was almost like an anti-approach. And when I work with artists or government officials or university people or whoever, I kind of look at all of the ingredients as wanting to make something happen, and the target wanting to be hit, and the arrow wanting to go to the target… And the archer isn’t really doing it. It’s the fact that he can draw the bow and let it go; that’s all that’s required… If any of those ingredients aren’t in the right mix or are missing, then you’re not going to hit the target… It’s tough because sometimes there’s dissent and negative people, and there are conspiracy theories and there’s all kinds of stuff that happens; and I just keep trying to return to the Zen—find the thing that is going to make everyone productive and happy and hit the target. It’s not us doing it; it’s the energy of combined things that we’re just there to open up.”

Baton Rouge is the box Holowacz is opening next—and he feels a sizeable energy in the city, curling and fermenting and ready to come to fruition. In an interview for another publication, Holowacz remarked, “On the ground and in the neighborhoods, Baton Rouge has one of the strongest community spirits that I’ve ever encountered.”

The antithesis, frankly, of most self-assessments made by Baton Rouge residents, their city a perennial middle child caught between its charismatic siblings—Lafayette and New Orleans. What does he see that the disenchanted don’t?

He recalled his first visit to Baton Rouge, when he attended the annual meeting of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, listening to the place-creation that has been going on for the last twenty-five years: “It did kind of blow me away in a way I didn’t expect,” said Holowacz. “So much vision, leadership, and people doing different things—but all sort of with the ‘I Love Baton Rouge’ pin on their lapel… I just got this overwhelming sense that everyone is working to try to make this new Baton Rouge—whatever it is … There is a sense that, whatever this spirit is, it is driving [Baton Rouge] into some new and robust kind of future.”

∞

When we parted ways, I offered my hand again—always careful not to be too familiar. He offered me a hug instead—always ready to make a new connection. Maybe he sensed that my hand was actually a pretense, that I don’t mind a hug, and that the optimism inherent in such familiarity is…well…hopeful.