Without affecting its existing programs, the City of Seattle's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs shuffled around some money this year (including making administrative cuts) in order to give a one-time-only round of grants that directly pays employees at arts organizations. The funded jobs had to be "positions that can generate extra revenue to carry out the mission of the organization," and those ended up ranging from teacher trainers to print-shop managers to executive directors to jazz competition contest overseers to social justice training coordinators to raisers-of-money.

The contracts total $260,000, and you can see a full list of recipients with breakdowns at the Arts Mean Business website.

Many of the orgs are familiar names—On the Boards, Gage Academy, Pratt, Pottery Northwest—but five have never before been funded by OACA. Those include the Duwamish Tribe, where $9,200 will pay for a manager of rentals for the longhouse, and ROCKit Community Arts in Beacon Hill, which with the city's $10,000 will leverage its first full-time staff position.

A grant of $11,894 to Arts Corps may help to wipe some of the egg off the city's face after the levy debacle in March.

Since it's a one-time thing involving a buzzword in a mayoral election year—job creation!—who knows what this means long-term. It's good news this morning.

• Courtesy Randy Engstrom
• This guy. Art and marriage equality aren't necessarily related, but we thought you might want to know he stands up for other things, too.

The appointment is an outreach move, which is direly needed since for years the city office has seemed like a limb with no blood flowing to it. Engstrom is a ninja at connecting and showing up. Go to an event, he's there. He knows and/or has collaborated with pretty much every arts worker in the city, with some sustained focus on social justice through the years. He has been working in Seattle for more than a decade.

Mayor McGinn and Engstrom met back when Engstrom was the founding director of Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in Delridge, he said in a phone conversation Thursday evening.

"I feel a very strong overlap with Randy," McGinn said. He described the process:

"We had an interview process. I had a panel composed of Darryl Smith, Michele Scoleri, and Robert Nellams from the center, because they’re good people and Robert was bringing in a little experience as a department head, and then I briefly did an open advertisement. Three finalists were then entertained by a three-person panel from the arts commission to get feedback. And then I interviewed the three finalists, and chose Randy.

I feel a very strong overlap with Randy. His values about the role of arts in our community. And I also really appreciated the way in which he approaches doing the work, which is that, you know, we’ve got a big city government, and there’s a lot of opportunities to partner across city government around the arts, and that’s where he was coming from as a starting place. So it felt like a strong selection. ...I’d met him when he was at Youngstown, he was indeed in a lot of different places, I loved his work with FEEST, I loved the way in which he engaged with youth and his deep concerns about race and social justice, so that’s why I said it’s a very strong values overlap with Randy and me. And his thought processes on the role arts can play in how we get things done in the city—that arts is not a standalone thing; that’s very important to me. That it’s a way of integrating multiple objectives. In city government right now, the way we approach problems is you try to bring in all the departments that touch it and then work collaboratively with the community on how to address it, and I’m just really excited to bring the office of arts and cultural affairs into that, and I value department heads that know how to do that well.

Since relationship-making is a large part of what someone at this level does (and who knows exactly what the hell else they do?), Engstrom seems a smart choice.

He starts Wednesday. The first order of business is stability, he said. (The office's employees got a shock when the previous director left suddenly recently—they didn't know he was going until the day the resignation was announced publicly.) Engstrom said he believes the office does plenty of great work, but hasn't done such a great job of getting the word out about it.

"They just need stable, grounded leadership that has the relationships that can help them be successful," he said in a phone conversation today.

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San Francisco-based Keith Hennessy describes his project Turbulence (a dance about the economy) as "a bodily response to economic crisis, engaging the frictions between disaster capitalism, debt, precarity, propaganda, torture, war, magic and queer identity." There's video here.

Velocity's his host in Seattle this coming weekend, and the dance center is not just presenting the performance but also staging a weeklong series of events under the title Failure: Conversations Around Art + the Economy. (Has the economy failed art? Has art failed the economy? Is art necessarily an economic failure? Is failed art an economic success or failure?)

It starts tonight at Liberty with Body Book Club (bodies and books! My two favorite things!), a roundtable chatting about Cassie Peterson's essay But, What Is Queer Art?: A Paradoxical Manifesto. Body Book Club II, responding to the legendary art curator Harald Szeemann's statements in Failure as a Poetic Dimension, will involve actually using your body, moving in response to his words. That's the one I'm most interested in.

There's more, too, including a talk with Hennessy and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?, on Thursday, and the performances Friday and Saturday, followed by a coffee-and-bageling-about-economy-and-community with Seattle dancers. All info here.