Debra Polich has served as director of
Artrain, Inc., an independent nonprofit arts organization, for 19 years, In 2012, she added the responsibility of leading
The Arts Alliance, the local arts agency advocating for and serving the creative sector in the Ann Arbor, MI area. These two arts and cultural organizations now have a space and resource-sharing agreement.
Polich earned her degree in arts administration from Eastern Michigan University (EMU) and has more than 25 years of experience in the field. Prior to her tenure at Artrain, Polich served as managing director of Ann Arbor's Michigan Theater. She serves on the boards of ArtServe Michigan and the Ann Arbor Area Convention and Visitors Bureau as well as EMU's College of Arts & Science Resource Development and Masters of Public Administration advisory boards and is an occasional Arts Management guest lecturer.
Polich lives in Ann Arbor, MI with her husband, Russ Collins, also an arts administrator who serves as the executive director of the Michigan Theater.
Artrain Travels the Distance for Art, History, Culture, and Science
Helen Milliken
I am often reflective at the start of a new year. This year, however, I find my reflections (both personal and professional) are more acute than usual. Expecting our first grandchild this spring must be prompting the personal reflections. There is nothing that reminds you of time passing more than having your own daughter and her husband prepare for the birth of their child. As cliché as it is, I really do not know how time passed so quickly – wasn't it just yesterday that my daughter was a baby and I was the new mom?
On the professional front, it seems that our area arts and cultural organizations and leaders are constantly celebrating an anniversary these days. The last year has marked the Performance Network's 30th and the Ann Arbor Film Festival's 50th. The Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and the Michigan Theater are both celebrating their 85th year this year, and next year both the Ann Arbor Summer Festival and Kerrytown Concert House will celebrate their 30th anniversaries. My colleagues are also hitting impressive career marks: Ken Fischer has led UMS for 25 years; Russ Collins has been at the helm of the Michigan Theater for 30 years, and after 33 years as the director of the Art Center, Marsha Chamberlin recently retired. As I congratulate these organizations and leaders, I am in awe of the collective influence they have had on the Ann Arbor area!
It is the passing of one person, though, who believed deeply in the importance of the arts that has prompted my deepest reflections. Helen Milliken, former first lady of Michigan, passed away on November 16th last year. Mrs. Milliken, who holds the honor of being Michigan's longest-serving first spouse, emerged as a leader in her own right. She became a vocal advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, women's rights, the environment, and most importantly to me, an adamant champion for the arts.
Mrs. Milliken co-founded
Artrain in 1971 along with E. Ray Scott, the first executive director of the Michigan Council for the Arts (MCA). When establishing legislation was written for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1965, it appropriated funding for each state to start a state arts agency. The Michigan legislature created the
Michigan Council for the Arts in 1966. MCA was led by a group of arts enthusiasts who took on the task of figuring out how to make the arts available throughout the state. After many, many ideas were put forth and discarded, E. Ray Scott landed on the idea of putting an art exhibition on a train and touring it throughout Michigan. It was an outlandish and expensive idea. E. Ray believed that it would work if he could find the right champion... and he did in Helen Milliken.
E. Ray met with Mrs. Milliken while her husband was still Lieutenant Governor to present his idea of using a train to deliver visual art exhibitions and education programs to Michigan cities. He boldly asked her to serve as honorary chair of this project he called "Michigan Artrain." She quickly grasped how such a project could foster the development of local arts organizations throughout Michigan, provide people in villages, towns and cities access to outstanding art programs, and at the same time promote the fledgling MCA. The only catch was that Mrs. Milliken refused to be an honorary chair and instead insisted on being an active chair. That was, as they say, the beginning of the beautiful partnership. Mrs. Milliken and E. Ray Scott, with dozens of other believers, set about to bring the concept of Artrain into reality.
As Artrain's founders, Mrs. Milliken and E. Ray had the foresight to create an innovative program that would have a long-term impact on the communities it reached. Before Artrain would accept an invitation to visit a Michigan city, the community had to establish a local arts council with MCA assistance. Artrain was an immediate success: it reached 191,000 visitors in 28 cities in 1971, its first year. News of Artrain quickly spread beyond Michigan's borders and within two years, MCA received invitations from other states to share Michigan's unique art museum on a train. MCA, who due to Artrain's success was now a respected state agency, selected the Rocky Mountain region for Artrain's first national tour.
To build support for the Rocky Mountain Tour, Mrs. Milliken – well entrenched by now in her role as Michigan's First Lady and Artrain's chair – invited the wives of the governors in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming to a meeting in Colorado (her home state). Donning her own first, she passed out Michigan Artrain engineer caps to each of her fellow first ladies and set about telling them the virtues of this museum-on-a-train. The first ladies responded enthusiastically, and, with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artrain launched its first national tour in 1973. More than 240,000 people climbed onboard Artrain that year when 35 cities hosted Artrain, and, following Artrain's Michigan model, started local arts agencies. The state arts leaders, so pleased with the alliances they built while bringing Artrain to the Rockies, established the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), the first multi-state regional arts agency in our country.
Mrs. Milliken and E. Ray were astounded that Artrain seemed to have a momentum of its own and, in 1975, they took steps to split Artrain from MCA as an independent not-for-profit art organization.
Today, more than 40 years later, Artrain continues to be one of Michigan's most boisterous arts and cultural ambassadors. It has delivered art and cultural exhibitions and education and capacity building programs to millions of people in more than 850 communities across the US and, for the first time in 2012, Canada. Artrain has shared award-winning art exhibitions and many of the world's greatest artists with millions of people. Countless individuals – from schoolchildren to grandparents – have experienced Artrain and gone on to make art a part of their lives as practitioners, consumers, supporters, advocates, and/or volunteers. More than 80 Michigan arts organizations and hundreds outside the state can trace their beginnings back to Artrain's first visit in their town.
In recognition of its legacy – truly the legacy of Helen Milliken and E. Ray Scott – in 2006, Artrain received the National Medal for Museum Service. This is the nation's highest award for museums.
Artrain has had to adapt in order to remain relevant and current. The 2008 economic crisis pushed Artrain to review its program offerings, funding resources and its definition of delivery. This led to the realization that many communities lacked access to high-quality visual art programs and cultural and museum offerings of all kinds. Artrain decided to broaden its programs to include art, history, culture and science. It also recommitted to its mission of "delivering discovery and – through the power of art and culture – transforming lives, organizations and communities." Artrain's tried and true methods of presenting outstanding programs and then engaging communities to localize those programs to meet their needs and goals, remains a core tenet. Adding new delivery methods to include mobile units, pop-ups in alternative spaces and digital technology has expanded Artrain's service and reach.
Most importantly, Artrain remains busy developing and delivering important art and cultural programming. Here are a few current highlights:
Artrain is international – We continue to work with the National Parks Service, on our first international project entitled "Paths to Peace: A War of 1812 Arts Legacy Project". It is an art education and history program targeting middle school students from the United States and Canada that coincides with the bicentennial of the War of 1812. During years 2012 through 2015, students work with resident artists to create their own artworks in response to what they've learned about history, international relations, and peace movements.
Artrain pilots
CriticCar Detroit in its home state – Journalist Jennifer Conlin (
New York Times, Rolling Stone, Working Women, etc.) selected Artrain to produce her exciting new project:
CriticCar Detroit for which she was recently awarded a Knight Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grant for innovators willing to design new models for art journalism in the digital age. Conlin responded to the Knight/NEA challenge because "space and thought dedicated to arts criticism is shrinking in all traditional news publications. These news sources no longer… provide sufficient dialogue on the local arts scene that is the cornerstone of the economic revival of cities such as Detroit." Launching next spring,
CriticCar Detroit will give voice to creative Detroit by capturing and posting the public's response to a variety of cultural events mirroring Detroit's diversity and creativity. If deemed a success,
CriticCar will expand to other cities.
Artrain's art exhibition continues to tour the nation – Traveling the country, "Infinite Mirror: Images of American Identity" features the personal, reflective, and autobiographical works of established and emerging 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation American artists. These multi-media works use portraiture and figuration as symbols of multicultural populations in present-day America to examine the socially relevant themes of race, gender, religion, history, politics, and family.
In 2013, Artrain will present "Infinite Mirror" in Ann Arbor, Mich. at the Duderstadt Gallery on the University of Michigan (UM) campus. Artrain is partnering with "Arts at Michigan", a program that engages undergraduate students in the arts to foster creative learning, multi-disciplinary approaches, and global perspectives. Plans are underway to use Infinite Mirror's rich subject matters of race, immigration, and cultural assimilation to develop community engagement programs, campus seminars and K-12 educational programs.
This September, I will mark my own milestone anniversary of 20 years as the director of Artrain. Fortunately for me, Mrs. Milliken and E. Ray Scott, who served as MCA director until 1985, remained involved in Artrain throughout their lives. (Scott died in 2010.) I had the great pleasure of getting to know and learn from them what it means to be an arts leader and advocate. Each and every time I visited either of them, after pleasantries were exchanged, they would tell me stories of Artrain's early challenges and successes. Then, slowly they would begin to shake their head from side to side and, in astonishment, would remark "Artrain was supposed to last two years!" Happily, although they got just about everything else about Artrain right, they were wrong about how long it would last!