Episode 13: Connecting Business and the Arts, A Mutually Beneficial Partnership

Nov 27

Katherine Wagner

CEO, Business Council for the Arts

Katherine Wagner is the CEO of the Business Council for the Arts. Her mission is to connect business with the arts and connect the arts with business. She does this by creating primary connections that train and place business leaders on nonprofit boards and through programs that foster synergy businesses with the arts.

Business Council for the Arts (BCA) was founded by Raymond D. Nasher in 1988 as an outgrowth of a 1987 Dallas Citizens Council initiative. Nasher—a Dallas real estate developer, leading philanthropist and global art collector—as well as other key business leaders and Citizens Council members determined that Dallas would have the best opportunity for becoming a prominent business city with parallel growth in the North Texas region’s cultural community.

Using the model developed by David Rockefeller in 1967, Nasher created a new agency. BCA opened in June 1988 as Dallas Business Committee for the Arts, an affiliate of National Business Committee for the Arts.

One of BCA’s roles is to collect data about cultural institutions and programs that have informed and shaped the Dallas cultural policy for decades. Their partnership with Americans for the Arts led to the 2017 Arts and Economic Impact Study, which showed that the arts are not a charity but an industry and that in North Texas nonprofit organizations had a $1.5B impact on North Texas and employs 52,000 people.

Their Leadership Arts Institute program, one of their many programs, has been responsible for training and placing board members in all cultural sectors across the DFW area. Tune in to learn more about the BCA’s work to align business and the arts.