Presenter Without Peer Olga Garay Made a Lasting Mark in South Florida With Her Innovative Arts

Programming Next Up: The Big Apple

GAIL MEADOWS Herald Staff Writer

When the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York went looking for an arts program officer to dispense its considerable funds to cultural groups nationally, it found Olga Garay.

Garay, said foundation president Joan Spero, ``stood out. She has her finger on the pulse of the hemisphere.''
Indeed. As director of cultural affairs for Miami-Dade Community College's Wolfson Campus since 1990, Garay has brought to the stage such artists as avant-garde Argentine theater director Alberto Felix Alberto, Brazilian ``world musician'' Marku Ribas and the Miami-based Haitian rara group Koleksyon Kazak. Her innovative, risk-taking programming has reflected South Florida's cultural mix and cemented her reputation as a presenter of the cutting edge.

``She put Miami on the map internationally,'' said Caren Rabbino, executive director of the Miami Light Project. ``Nobody else did more to bring the attention of national funders [such as the Andrew Mellon Fund, Pew Charitable Trust, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund] to this community.''

New York's gain is Miami's loss. On Monday, Garay, 45, will begin her new job as a senior program officer of the Duke operation, parceling out $15 million-$20 million a year to the arts from her office in Rockefeller Center, where the foundation oversees $1.25 billion in assets from the late tobacco heiress.

``I trip myself out just thinking about it,'' said Garay, who came to Miami from Cuba at age 8, in 1961.

It will be a dramatic change from her years at MDCC, where she built the campus' cultural outreach from a shoestring operation to an internationally recognized arts presenting organization, named Cultura del Lobo, with a $1.4 million budget.

``She has played a significant role in pushing new directions in the field,'' said Mikki Shepard, director for arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, who met Garay in the early 1980s and recommended her to the Duke Foundation board. ``She is so creative, so imaginative, so resourceful in putting things together with nothing that everyone wants her at the table all the time.''

Garay both seeks out and conceptualizes performances, wins funding to bring artists together and involves a host of eclectic players, including schools and community groups, in the decision-making process. Her taste runs to contemporary, culturally specific work that is often nonmainstream and certainly not commercial, such as the opera Balseros, a joint commission of MDCC, the Florida Grand Opera and the South Florida Composers Alliance, which premiered in Miami in 1997. Her objective, she says, is to foster collaboration among diverse performers and build new audiences.

``I articulate a vision,'' Garay says. ``That is my art.''

On Sept. 14, for instance, 300-400 artists from the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States, including Teatro de los Andes from Sucre, Bolivia, and the Quasar contemporary dance troupe from Goiania, Brazil, will descend on Miami for InRoads, The Americas, a weeklong series of dance, music and theater presentations that will challenge stereotypes.

For example, ``when someone thinks of Mexican music, they usually think rancheras or mariachis,'' said Garay. ``We're going to do jarocha, instead. It's Afro-Mexican.''

InRoads culminates a Ford Foundation grant of $600,000 that Garay won for MDCC in 1995.

``What caught our attention was her effort to link artists from the States with those in Latin America and the Caribbean,'' said Christine Vincent, acting deputy director of media, arts and culture for the Ford Foundation. ``We felt there was a lot of interesting experimentation and exploration going on that we wanted to see shared more broadly.''

Few rules

At the Duke Foundation, Garay will focus on jazz and modern dance during her first year, but beyond that, there are few rules. One of her first goals: to offer a bit of stabilization to groups that struggle for funding.

As an example, Garay points to the national Performing Arts Network, a collective of 50 arts organizations that includes the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Diverse Works in Houston and Painted Bridge in Philadelphia. It has nurtured the inventive work of the Bill T. Jones dance company, the Urban Bush Women and dancers Eiko and Koma, all of whom Garay helped bring to Miami.

But now, after 13 years, major foundations are telling the organization to ``get off the dole,'' said a chagrined Garay. The network, she says, ``still is doing relevant, risk-taking work, so why is it no longer fundable?'' She hopes to offer money that would help ``create an endowment and provide funding in perpetuity.''

Garay also hopes to dispense funds directly to artists, since the National Endowment for the Arts can no longer do so. And, she envisions creating mini-versions of the performance venues at Wolf Trap, Va., and Tanglewood, Mass., at three Duke properties -- a 30-room summer ``cottage'' in Newport, R.I.; a 2,700-acre estate in Somerville, N.J.; and a Moroccan-style mansion in Honolulu.

``I was talking to one of the foundation's consultants about what we could do at those places, and I have to tell you, I didn't sleep that night,'' Garay said excitedly.

Garay is the first program officer to be hired by the Duke Foundation. Duke, a jazz pianist who studied gospel singing with the Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father, and modern dance with Martha Graham, was the daughter of James Buchanan Duke, whose American Tobacco fortune built Duke University and created North Carolina's Duke Endowment. In her will, written 15 years before she died in 1993 at age 80, she stipulated that her money be used to enhance the arts, environment and medical research.

Spero, the Duke Foundation president who hired Garay, said she was looking for ``a presenter, as opposed to someone from the foundation world or the commercial end,'' because presenters are ``hands-on and know what it's like to raise the funds, scramble and manage, yet have a vision.''

Facing reality in Miami

Naturally, much of Garay's sensibilities have been honed by her experiences in Miami. In 1986, for example, she became involved in a censorship battle over Coser y Cantar, a play by New Yorker Dolores Prida, who favored dialogue with Cuba.

Garay, then a relatively new hire at Dade's Cultural Affairs Council, had helped engineer $7,500 to launch a Hispanic Theater Festival. One of the participating groups had chosen to stage Prida's play, which is nonpolitical.

``Three days before the thing was to start, Juan Abreu [a Cuban painter] walks into my office and says, `I'm shutting this thing down.' The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Voice of America were there waiting for my comment.''

It turned out that Abreu had been on Spanish-language radio, reading a letter that protested Prida's sentiments. Typed at the bottom were 34 names of other Cuban exiles.

Ultimately, the performance was canceled, but Ken Kahn, Garay's boss at the time, insisted the play be read aloud on an MDCC stage, with his wife, actress Ann Kettles, as the principal voice.

Said Garay: ``Their son, about age 8, became so accustomed to death threats that he would tell phoners, `My dad's not home right now.' ''

Garay has little tolerance for those who stymie artistic expression. Of the various local incidents over the years, from bombings at the Cuban Museum to Molotov cocktails at the Centro Vasco bistro in Little Havana to ugly protests against Cuban jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, she asks, ``Why hasn't anyone ever been arrested for these acts? What's to deter people if no one ever is caught?''

But Garay learned to work with Miami's reality, admitting that throughout her stint at MDCC, she exercised ``self-censorship'' every day. In 1995, she very much wanted to bring the popular Cuban folkloric rumba group Los Munequitos de Matanzas -- which performed to sold-out houses in major cities in the United States -- to Miami, but felt she couldn't risk the outcome.

Garay whimsically named her presentations Cultura del Lobo ( lobo is Spanish for wolf, a la Wolfson Campus). Her boss, MDCC President Eduardo Padron, liked what he saw.

``We became very much an intricate part of the artistic spirit of this community,'' he said of Cultura del Lobo. ``Sometimes, people try to impose things that don't necessarily match the idiosyncrasies of this community. We've been able to touch every segment.''

A new world

Now that Garay has departed, her deputy, Beth Boone, is interim director while MDCC conducts a national search.

In Manhattan, Garay will share a 700-square-foot apartment with Daniel Diaz, her significant other, who teaches percussion at MDCC's North Campus. He'll seek the same sort of work in New York, but right now, the two are pinching themselves, marveling at a warning issued by Carter Brown, the erudite former director of Washington's National Gallery, when he helped interview Garay for the Duke post.

``If you get this job, it'll be the last bad meal you'll ever have,'' Garay says he told her. But he added: ``It will also be the last honest compliment you'll ever get.''

arts

OLGA GARAY

Born: Santa Clara, Cuba, Oct. 16, 1952. Came to the United States in 1961. Her mother could not find a job teaching Spanish in South Florida schools, so the family moved to Mercersburg, Pa., then Wildwood, N.J., then Live Oak, Fla.

Education: Graduated from Suwannee High School in Live Oak. Earned bachelor's degree in psychology in 1974 from the University of Florida and a master's degree in community psychology from Florida International University in 1982.

Professional: Director of FIU's Center for Rural Education, creating an adult education program for migrant farm workers, 1980-83. Director of grants attainment for the Dade Cultural Affairs Council, 1984-90. Director of cultural affairs for Miami-Dade Community College's Wolfson Campus, 1990-98.