“Southeast Texas Arts Council, can we help you?”
“Hi, are you like, the art museum?”
“Negatory my friend.”
“Uh, then what are you?”
This is a common phone interaction here at the Southeast Texas Arts Council (SETAC). We get calls from all over from people about everything from event information from any one of the local organizations with “art” in their name, to folks looking for an appraisal
of a painting they found in their grandma’s attic, to artists wanting to peddle their traveling exhibition. We tend to show up in search results about art and southeast Texas, so we get a lot of hits from people who aren’t quite certain what an “arts council” does. To kick things off, we’re not a museum (unless you count the exhibit of cicada husks Sue brings in every spring and puts on my desk; I suppose the Post-It notes buried in 12 years of dust behind my computer monitor might soon count as relics as well). Neither are we an independent gallery, accredited art assessors, or general event planners (though we do plan and run a few events of our own). Thankfully, despite not being any of these things, we can generally point people in the right direction when they ask us about them because we are, simply put, an arts and humanities aid organization. We exist primarily for artists and arts and humanities organizations. Our focus is rarely on the public at large, preferring to concentrate our efforts on magnifying the work of local artists and organizations. Consequently, though we may not be art assessors, we happen to know some art assessors because we work with such people in pursuit of our mission, which is to promote knowledge and appreciation of the arts and humanities in Jefferson, Orange, and Hardin counties by providing financial assistance, publicity, administrative resources, and advocacy to arts and humanities organizations. Lacking a public facing mission is what generally confuses people. While our organizations know very well what we do, most gallery-goers and audience-attendees might only vaguely remember seeing our logo on a sponsor banner. In an attempt to give ourselves a more forward-facing persona we’ve begun producing our own events. From the absolutely lovely but ultimately unsustainable Montage Arts Festival to the utterly ill-fated Talent Show series, we’ve tried quite a bit and we’ve got more ideas up our sleeves. Among all those attempts, our most successful and enduring event has been the Cajun Heritage Festival. Inaugurated in 2015 as the Carnival des Cajuns and eventually remonikered the much more straightforward Cajun Heritage Festival, our celebration of Acadian French culture has been a popular event from the start. Despite nearly drowning in the rain the first year (we held it at the outdoor pavilion in Downtown Port Arthur) people kept coming back year after year and we wisely moved the venue indoors to the Carl Parker Multipurpose Center on the Lamar State College Port Arthur campus. We’ve had several big names in Cajun music perform on stage including Jo-El Sonnier and Wayne Toups, and every year we book the best in local Cajun musicians to tear it up exile-style with accordion and fiddle. While the festival has grown over the years we aren’t done with development. In 2021 we added the Cajun Caravan to the activities to highlight historical locations and Cajun style restaurants in Port Arthur, Port Neches and Nederland. We hope to continue adding content to the festival that will deepen public appreciation of the unique culture of south Texas and Louisiana Cajuns. Our financial support has historically taken the form of a sub-granting program which has funded dozens of organizations, artists and projects over the years. We paused this program in 2020 to pursue the founding of a cultural district in Beaumont through the Texas Commission on the Arts Cultural District Designation program. Eligibility for funding through the program requires the entity to have a budget in excess of $50,000, so SETAC used funds normally reserved for sub-granting to accomplish this. With the successful designation of the Downtown Beaumont Cultural Arts District and its subsequent success at attaining financial independence, SETAC has been able to return to its long-standing financial assistance program.
