welcome to Inside Louisville, where we introduce you to the people, places and things that make up Kentucky's largest city.

This week, we take a closer look at two legends in Louisville's arts community.

First, we take you inside the oldest operating theater in Louisville.

The Brown Theater first opened its doors 100 years ago.

We'll take a stroll down memory lane and explore how this theater has shaped Louisville's arts scene for a century.

But there was a time when the Brown Theater may not have survived without the help of fund for the Arts, the nation's oldest United arts fund.

That nonprofit arts support organization will soon have a new leader.

We'll sit down with CEO Andre Kimo Stone Guess who announced he is stepping down at the end of this fiscal year.

But he leaves behind his own legacy in the Louisville arts community.

But first, we take you inside the Brown Theater.

Christian Adelberg is with Kentucky Performing Arts, which now owns the Brown Theater.

Thank you for being here.

>> Thanks so much for having me.

>> So what a historic artifact that's here in our city, the Brown Theater.

Take us back to 1925.

>> Sure.

>> What it was like then?

>> Well, the Brown Theater opened in October of 1925, and it's been a mainstay on Broadway, West Broadway since it opened in 1925.

But the story of the Brown actually begins about 50 years earlier, and several blocks west with Macauley's Theater.

A Macauley's theater was located on Walnut.

It was then Walnut Street, now Muhammad Ali Boulevard, and that had been the toast of the town, you know, for 50 years.

And in 1925, it closed and the building was demolished to make room for the expansion of the neighboring Starks building.

And everything from Macauley's Theater was moved to this new space that had been created in the Brown Building on Broadway, and it was renamed the Brown Theater after J. Graham Brown, who owned the neighboring Brown Building and Brown Hotel.

>> Okay.

And so then it is modeled after New York's famous music Box theater.

>> Yes.

>> That's incredible.

I mean, that is a historic theater.

And and so it looks pretty much like that inside.

>> It does.

Yes.

Recently on a trip to New York, we went to the music box to take a look at it, and I was there.

We were in the brown.

It has a 40 foot by 40 foot stage, which is equal to anything in New York outside of the Hippodrome and now the Gershwin Theater, which has a larger stage as well.

But at the time that it was built, I mean, it was you were it was like walking into a New York theater right here in Louisville.

The the opening night performance was a musical revue, which was the Spotify playlist of its day called puzzles of 1925 by Elsie Janis and Elsie Janis was just another toast of the town performance.

So having that caliber right here in Louisville was really, really something else.

>> Yeah, this was that was the place to be.

So but it, like many things, fell on hard times during the depression and in 1930 kind of made a pivot.

>> Yes.

>> Movies.

>> Yes.

Little did anyone know that the the stock market crash was right around the corner, the Great Depression, what was happening.

And because of that, touring productions, theatrical productions really just dried up.

There was there was no money for it, so it was converted to a movie theater in 1930 and remained a movie theater until until the early 60s.

>> Okay.

And during that time, though, it really became a piece of history in civil rights protests.

>> Yes.

In 1959, the theater was hosting the the local premiere of the film adaptation of Porgy and Bess.

And unfortunately, 15 African American students were not allowed into the theater because segregation was the the the law of the land in Louisville at that at that time.

In this the photo that's about to come up.

This was from the Christmas Day protest in 1959, where students from the NAACP Youth Council protested outside the theater.

And that protest actually happened continued until 1963, when segregation ended.

But in this photo, if you look on the far screen left, the young man in that photo is Raoul Cunningham, who later served as president of the Louisville branch of the NAACP for many years.

>> Wow.

Amazing piece of history there that he was involved in that.

And really.

And since then, there's been a plaque that commemorates that and the pivotal role that this place played in desegregation.

>> Yes.

In 2013, the the city celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of desegregation in Louisville, it was held at the Brown Theater.

Given its very important role that it played in the civil rights movement.

>> And that's not the only protest that happened there in the 70s.

Flash forward a little bit.

You had another protest about the musical hair.

>> Yes, yes, 1971.

The the touring company of hair came through Louisville, and that was an extremely controversial performance at that at that time.

And yeah, there was the Christians for decency group was protesting outside the theater, and Louisville police were there as well.

And fortunately, it was a it was mostly peaceful.

There was one little ruckus where somebody came by and said, you've never even seen this play.

How can you protest it when you've never seen it?

But other than that, it was a it was a peaceful protest.

But yeah, that was the that was the hair ruckus of 1971.

>> Yeah.

It has been the center of so many things in Louisville's art history there.

And so it has been through a lot.

And meantime, around this time it went back to being called the McCallie.

>> Yes, yes.

In 1962, the the theater was changed back to live performances from the from the movie theater.

And then in 1972, the Louisville Board of Education contracted with the Louisville Theatrical Association and rechristened the theater the McCallie theater.

The original was Macauley's Theater.

So this was the Macauley Theater that happened in 1972.

>> Okay.

And that's when the Board of Education owned that building.

The Brown.

>> Right?

Yes.

And they owned the Brown Hotel as well.

>> Yeah.

So it's then when did the Kentucky Center then now Kentucky Performing Arts take everything over?

>> Well, the, the the center first became involved with the brown in 1990 because bookings had become more challenging in that space, partially because of this new performing arts center that had opened on Main Street, you know, which was which was taking a lot of the bookings away.

But given the importance of that venue, they wanted to make sure that that there was still being managed correctly.

It was being booked correctly.

So then Kentucky Center President Marlowe Bert took over the management of that of that space and continued.

Kentucky Center continued to serve as the the manager or management of that theater until outright purchasing it outright in 2018.

>> And during that time, too, there was a time when fund for the Arts stepped up and took over the management of it to in order to make some renovations that probably it may not have survived without.

>> Yes.

Yeah.

That in 19 in the mid 1990s, the venue was facing some real, real challenges.

The first part of that was in 1995.

There was a stage door.

Johnny, which was a Tommy Tune musical, was created and teched and built at the Brown Theater.

And that was the first time that a touring Broadway production had been made, essentially in Louisville, and that also served as a fundraiser, which then led to the increase.

You know, the next round of the fundraising, which in 1998 resulted in the theater reopening, re Re Re.

>> Rechristening right.

As it's been through a lot.

>> Yes, back to the brown, but a different brown.

J. Graham.

You know, the originally in 1925 was J. Graham Brown.

Now this was named after W.L.

Lyons Brown theater.

And with that you know, there was all new all new rigging system, computerized marquee, you know, new HVAC system, you know, all of all of the amenities.

So, yes, that happened in, in 1998.

>> All those things that we know and love about the Brown Theater today as it continues and now celebrating 100 years.

Thank you so much for being here.

And when we come back, we are going to talk to the current CEO of fund for the Arts about their history and how they see their vision for the future.

Louisville's fund for the Arts is a nonprofit agency dedicated to supporting Louisville's arts community.

In fact, it is one of the oldest united arts campaigns in the country.

It has raised more than $200 million for the greater Louisville area since it was established in 1949, and the organization has been led by president and CEO Andre Kimo Stone Guess since 2021.

Now, he recently announced he'll step down from the role next year to tackle other projects.

But for now, we welcome Andre and thank you so much for your time.

>> Thank you for having me.

>> As we mentioned there, there was a time when the Brown Theater may not have survived with programs like fund for the Arts, and that's true for a lot of arts organizations in the city.

>> Yeah.

In 1949, the the mayor of the city got together with a few folks in that proverbial smoke filled room and came together and started the fund for the Arts.

Oh, I always say we're the oldest United Arts fund in the country, US in Cincinnati, Arts in Cincinnati.

We sort of go back and forth, but in a joking manner.

But they they came together and it's not it's not lost on me.

The sort of irony of the fact that the that the mayor of the city privatized, if you will, arts funding for the city.

And he really did that in a progressive way, because there is no because of the way that the Kentucky Constitution is written, even if every person in this community raised their hand and said, please tax me on behalf of the arts, we cannot control our own destiny in terms of taxation.

So he knew that.

So he put this organization in place to do things exactly like you said.

So to raise money for arts organizations and to be a backstop in times of need for those organizations over the course of the history of our of our 75 plus years.

>> It is it is such a legacy, supporting in a big way in your most annual, recent annual report, this organization supported 27 area nonprofits with $2.3 million in sustaining grants.

That's incredible.

>> Yeah, I mean, the operating grants are the hardest money to raise the unrestricted.

You know, the thing that goes to pay for salaries and admin and all the things that, you know, the things that people, donors, traditional donors may not necessarily want to everybody wants to program what's on the walls or what's on the stage.

Right?

It's not program, but to fund that.

And so, you know, we've stepped in over the course of our 75 plus year history and done just that, raise money on behalf of these arts organizations so that they could have the money for operations, which are the most which, as I said, is most difficult money to raise.

>> And so you recently announced you're planning to step down next year.

And what are you moving on to?

>> I don't have any plans in particular.

I when I came into this role in 2021, I knew I wouldn't be there longer than five years.

I'm a recovering consultant, if you will.

I've been.

This is my second stop as a CEO, but between my last one and this one, I've done a lot of consulting work with different arts organizations and individual artists and have done work really.

I've been blessed to be able to do work all over the world.

So when this job became available, I saw it as an opportunity to sort of as a long term consultant project, for lack of a better term, to come in and do some things in terms of strategy was in the middle of a pandemic to really look at the organization in a fresh and new I saw, I knew what they had been doing in the past.

I looked at the board.

The board looked like the community that we serve.

And I said, you know, I think I could come in and look at it and create a strategy and a vision that would, you know, be based upon what it is that the community wanted, because the community had just gone through some planning.

Imagine 2020 and imagine 2025.

So it was about building upon what my predecessor, Christine Boone, had done because she had changed the model.

She and the board had changed the model from what was an allocation model where we had there was 14 organizations under cultural partners that the fund for the Arts literally fundraise on their behalf.

It wasn't a grant.

They just fundraised on their behalf.

And she, she and the board changed it into a grant model.

So it went from 14 organizations to 28 organizations overnight.

And it was a grant model, and it opened it up to more organizations.

And then the pandemic happened a couple years later.

So that new grant program needed an opportunity to sort of grow and be and and actually reach out a little further into the community and help the community understand that new direction better.

Because by the time that that that that word had really gotten out, we were, you know, battening down the hatches.

>> Sure.

Yeah.

And so having your leadership after that was was crucial.

I would think that that was an interesting time for the arts.

It still is.

>> Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, one of the first things I did was go on a community wide listening session.

A lot of it was on zoom because, yeah, but, you know, we had office hours and we still do where people can come in, individuals, organizations, whoever.

But I really wanted to hear what the what the community was saying about what it is that they would like to see us do, the things they thought we did well, things that we didn't think we did at all, and the things that we could improve upon.

And a lot of what I heard was exactly what was inside of those two community wide reports.

Imagine 2020 and imagine 2025, which was a an effort that the fund for the Arts led as a citywide planning effort to understand what it is that the arts and cultural scene in this city could be by year 2025.

>> And are you happy with where you are leaving this organization?

>> I am sustainability was always on my mind in terms of where we needed to go, like the backbone of the unrestricted fundraising that the fund for the Arts has been doing since 1984 is workplace campaigns.

There's people all over this community, like folks working in Mailrooms all the way to C-suite that are, you know, giving money out of their own paycheck to help arts organizations throughout this community.

And unfortunately, because of the way that that the workplaces have changed, that we don't have the opportunity to get in as many workplaces as we have.

And as a result, our workplace giving has declined, not because people don't want to give.

It's just because of the structure and the way that getting into workplaces is more difficult.

So that was one of the things that I wanted to look at and address, and we began to look at that.

And we're working on a new crowdfunding model that will allow individuals to do exactly what they were doing back in 1984, which is people would come and say, this is your civic duty.

This is a responsibility for you as a person who's in this city.

We cannot tax you, but you can give freely to to the arts.

And so we're working on that to to appeal to a much wider audience of folks who were or whose children or whose parents may have given in the past.

We want to give them the opportunity to give as well.

>> One of your big legacies is the Cultural Pass app, and how that evolved from you know it.

We'll explain what it is exactly and how the app has really made it different.

>> Well, the cultural pass program is 1212 years old.

It started under Mayor Fischer, and it was a program that was really it's really a one of a kind program in the country.

It was a program to design, and it was married with the summer reading program, the library to combat summer learning loss.

So young people 0 to 21 could go in the past and get a cultural, a literal cultural pass a piece of paper with all of the events that were on it from the summer, from a library, and they could take that and go to, you know, anywhere between 50 and 60 arts and cultural institutions around the community, as well as sign up for summer reading and the libraries.

And they could go and and go and go to the zoo, go to the Louisville Science Center, go to the Kentucky Derby Museum, go to CMAC and experience all these things during the summer, which would really open their eyes up and give them an opportunity to take some of the things that they experience into a new school year, a fresh and new.

And so for the first 11 years of that program, it was analog piece of paper.

So one of the things we wanted to make sure that we did was, is look at how do we bring this up into the new technology.

Everybody's walking around with a phone, right?

So how do we get more access to people that maybe couldn't get to the library or didn't go to the library?

And let them know what's going on in the community for young people.

So we came up with the idea not too long after I started early 2022, and we've been planning for that ever since with our partners Cha three, and we launched it on May 31st, and we had a looking at some preliminary well, the final number is the reports that came in, but I think we had over 50,000 people, you know, children and guardians go through the program this year.

I don't have the exact numbers yet, but I mean, to have that many people in the community, and we didn't really advertise it widely because we, you know, we have a budget to because we reimburse the the arts and cultural institutions and because it was a, an app and it could really sort of get out to the, to the whole world, if you will, the community that we serve.

We wanted to be a little bit cautious in terms of going as wide as we could, but I think next year we're really going to go as far and wide as we can and and put a little pressure on our team in terms of the fundraising to be able to meet that demand, because we know that the demand that that the demand is out there.

>> Yeah.

And for those kids to be able to experience all that Louisville has to offer.

And we talk a lot about how Louisville, for a city its size, has an incredible arts community.

>> Absolutely.

>> I know you're one of those boomerangs, as we call them.

Grew up here in Louisville, left and had a fantastic career and many other cities, and then came back.

And so what's your what are your thoughts on Louisville as an arts community, and do you still plan to stay?

>> Oh, yeah, I mean, my wife and I, we purchased our forever home.

We have a condo on Saint James Court right in front of the fountain.

So like if you sit on our our balcony and you can throw a rock and and hit the and hit the fountain.

So no, we're going to stay.

I mean, we have children that are in other cities who will travel a little bit, but, you know, coming back Louisville's home, right?

I mean, home always has a special place in your heart.

You know, when I first took on the job and I was very transparent, I'm transparent as I, as I, you know, make my exit, that I really did not want to come home and moved to New York in 2000.

I worked at Jazz at Lincoln Center as I was executive producer there, produced concerts all over the world and in New York, left and went to Pittsburgh and ran the August Wilson Center there for a couple of years.

And when we were leaving there, I, you know, looked at my wife and I said, where are we going to go next?

And we had, you know, two school aged daughters at that point in time.

And she says, we're going home.

I said, well, I don't want to go home.

She says, well, I didn't want to go to New York.

So we're even.

Yeah.

>> Compromises everything.

Right.

>> But but coming back here and being for the first eight years, being back, I was actually traveling 150, 202 days a year, going for arts and culture all around, all around the the world, all around the globe.

But when the pandemic hit and we were actually going to leave, we were going to I actually had convinced her in 2020, 2019 that when our youngest daughter graduated from college in 21, we would move to New Orleans.

But then the pandemic happened and we looked at each other and was like, we have to stay.

We have to stay here and be involved.

And I really felt bad because I had been gone.

I'd been back in Louisville for eight years, from 2012 to 2020, and had not been engaged at all.

As a matter of fact, people thought my wife had left me and come back to Louisville because they never saw me.

And so when I saw all of the things that were going on in the city, I said, I have to get plugged back in.

And then that's when the job showed up, and I applied for it and put my name in the hat.

And I think they they blindfolded somebody at the board and they pulled my name out.

And that's how I got.

>> The job, so.

Well.

So what's your vision then for this city?

Where do you feel like the trajectory is going in terms of the arts community or the city as a whole?

>> Yeah, I think we are a city.

That is, we're not necessarily grappling with our identity, but we're trying to figure out, you know, how do we take who we are and move that forward while also bringing in some new aspects of who we want to be?

Right.

I know that bourbon and, you know, horse racing and all those are always going to be part of our identity.

But one of the things that we started under my leadership is a program called I Am an artist.

I have my my pin on here.

And one of the things that we realized that every human being on the planet from the beginning of time creates and consumes art every single day.

I mean, we don't realize it, but we do.

I mean, you can't escape art.

It's everywhere.

So you really consuming it.

Art.

Visual art is everywhere, you know, music, dance, theater, visual, literary arts is everywhere.

But we also we we actually create art every day.

I mean, you know, I'm, you know, did you did you sing on the way to work today?

In the car, you hum along with the tune.

Did you do a little dance on the way to the coffee maker?

You know, are you doodling the corner of a paper in the meeting?

So we're all creating.

We just don't see it like that because we don't see it as a very high level.

And so one of the things to be able to make sure that we are engaging the entire community with art so that we don't so people don't have people can't look and say, well, the arts are over there and I'm over here.

I'm not really a part of that is we wanted to make sure that everyone understood that everyone is an artist.

You may not be creating world class art, but you are an artist.

So we created a campaign called I Am an Artist.

And so as a part of that campaign that when everybody in the city actually stands up and raises their hand up and say, I am an artist and says what they are, what their art is, then you have a city of artists.

So when I talk about and think about a vision for our city moving forward, it is that we are a city of artists.

I think we have the ability because of the cost of living and the beautiful places in, particularly in the urban space with Old Louisville, where I live, and, and Smoke Town, where I grew up in Germantown and the Highlands, and particularly in urban spaces, that there is an opportunity for people to move here and engage with their own art and find an intersection with with what else is going on around the community.

And so I see us as a city of artists, not a city of arts, because a city of arts is a thing where there is art.

A city of artists is about the people, and you don't have art without artists.

So that's my number one thing.

And the other thing is, I see we are a city of neighborhoods, unlike not unlike any other city in the world.

We have this beautiful tapestry quilt of wonderful neighborhoods, and many of them are just named who have their own unique brand of art and personality.

Now, one of the things that's great about art, you could go to the most resourced neighborhood in the community, and you can go to the most under-resourced neighborhood in the community.

But when you start talking to them about their art and how they want to portray who they are through their art, it doesn't matter how many resources you have, it doesn't matter about how much money you have.

As a matter of fact, sometimes I was an inverse relationship.

The less resources that you have, you know, the more vibrant your art is.

And so art is the great equalizer in that way.

And one of the other things that we created through the listening sessions and understanding and reading and adhering to the imagined 2020 and imagine 2025 plan is we created an initiative called Arts and Neighborhoods, and we have a mini grant program.

And what we were hearing from arts organizations is a level of frustration that the fund for the Arts didn't have a grant program for them.

And so people really want that orange logo on their event.

And so we do grants through our mini grant program.

It's a quarterly rolling program, and you can always apply.

And from $500 to $5000 for artists, arts organizations, you know, you could be a business that's partnering with an artist to go and apply for that grant.

So that is a recognition that there is art going on all over this community, and it doesn't matter where it is.

And we want to be investing in that in a meaningful way, to be able to contribute to the understanding of us being a city of artists.

>> You can watch and share this episode anytime.

It's streaming at ket.org, and be sure to give us a follow on social media.

There you can find a timeline of the Brown Theater with all those historic photos and share your memories of the theater.

Your experience with fund for the Arts.

You can find us on Instagram at KET.

Thanks for spending a little time getting to know Louisville today.

I hope we'll see you here next time.

Until then, make it a great week!