Lyric Opera of Chicago Selected for Wallace Foundation Audience-Building Initiative

Lyric Opera of Chicago has been selected for the New York-based Wallace Foundation's Building Audiences for Sustainability effort - a new, six-year, $52-million initiative aimed at developing practical insights into how exemplary performing-arts organizations can successfully expand their audiences, the Foundation announced.

Lyric Opera of Chicago aims to promote the transformational power of great opera, provide a relevant cultural service to Chicago and the nation, and advance the art form's development. As part of the Wallace initiative, which is awarding a $435,000 grant to Lyric, the company plans to test ways to increase its audience by creating programmatic and marketing bridges among its three program strands: The American Musical Theater Initiative, which offers one production each season of a classic work; traditional operatic programming; and Lyric Unlimited, an initiative that seeks to advance the development of the field by exploring how opera can resonate more powerfully with people of diverse backgrounds and interests.

"Lyric is committed to providing a relevant cultural service to our communities," said Anthony Freud, the company's general director. "As a company that is recognized globally for its artistic excellence, Lyric seeks to build upon recent successes in creating new audiences through an expanded array of carefully developed activities.

"The Wallace Foundation grant will allow Lyric to more fully understand its audiences, as they exist today, and test ways in which various programmatic offerings can offer pathways to the development of long term relationships with our customers."

Lyric Opera of Chicago is one of 26 arts organizations from around the country that were selected to be a part of the Building Audiences for Sustainabilityinitiative and noted by the foundation for their artistic excellence. Each organization will design and implement programs to attract new audiences while retaining current ones, measuring whether and how this contributes to their overall financial sustainability. The organizations represent a spectrum of artistic disciplines, from dance and opera companies to orchestras, theaters, and multidisciplinary arts institutions. The selected partners will receive financial and technical support from the foundation to develop, implement, analyze, and learn from their audience-building work. The evidence gathered from Lyric's work will be documented and analyzed by a Wallace-commissioned independent team of researchers, providing valuable insights, ideas, and information for the entire field.

"The arts are essential on both a personal level, providing us with experiences that open us to new perspectives, and on a community level, helping us to find common ground," said Will Miller, president of The Wallace Foundation. "However, attracting and engaging new audiences is challenging for arts organizations because, even as the number of arts groups has grown, national rates of participation in the arts have declined, arts education has waned, and competition for ways to spend leisure time has increased. We are confident that the 26 organizations selected from a pool of more than 300 identified by leaders in the arts nationwide will provide new insights that will benefit the field at large, helping to bring the arts to a broader and more diverse group of people."

Lyric Opera of Chicago will receive grant support from Wallace to fund at least two "continuous learning cycles" of work. Over the course of four years, Lyric will receive funding to develop and implement grant-supported activities (first cycle), study the results, and then use the findings to implement a second cycle of programs. Lyric will also receive funding for audience research to inform the work.

"The Wallace Foundation's investment in sustained audience development is a service to the entire field, said Marc A. Scorca, president and CEO of OPERA America. "All opera companies will be able to learn from the experiences of those organizations-from various disciplines-that will serve as laboratories for innovation through this grant program. We are deeply grateful to the Foundation for its significant contribution to the long-term sustainability of arts audiences and arts organizations."

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