Linda Lombardi

Member Spotlight: Allyson Esposito

Posted by Linda Lombardi, Jun 14, 2021 0 comments


Linda Lombardi

Executive Director of Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE) Allyson Esposito is an arts administrator, lawyer, and dancer with more than 12 years of change management experience in philanthropy. Launched in 2019, CACHE supports Northwest Arkansas’ creative community—elevating local creatives; connecting the region with world-renowned leaders; and developing robust, culturally diverse hubs to create. Current initiatives include providing financial support to nonprofits in the wake of COVID-19, a weekly online creative variety that deep-dives into the world of artists, and multiple programs that enrich the region’s music scene.

How did CACHE come about? What was the spark that led to its creation?

Person wearing multi-color floral print blouse
Allyson Esposito, photo courtesy Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange.

Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange was the response to a 2015 Wolf Brown study that explored strengthening the arts and culture infrastructure of Northwest Arkansas. One key finding was the lack of a central agency that could build that infrastructure and provide leadership, connectivity, grants, and advocacy for the arts communities. Northwest Arkansas has troves of artists and creative industries. CACHE acts as a proud ambassador of the culture-bearers, makers, entrepreneurs, and collectives to intersect our region with the world. 

What’s it like to build something from the ground up, especially during a pandemic? 

Seven months after I took the role of founding executive director, the pandemic and the renewed racial justice movements hit, which shifted everything. I and our quickly growing team suddenly had to consider what the model of an arts services organization should be for a whole new era, of much greater urgency—but also potential. How do we genuinely co-create something new in a growing region that strives for equitable resource distribution, sectoral sustainability, and the relief and re-inspiration we all need these days? 

It’s exciting and daunting, to be working alongside local, national, and global partners on what this shift could look like. My greatest energy comes from connecting with and learning from the creatives working at the heart of our communities. While I’ve viscerally missed witnessing some of their ideas manifest in live art experiences and events, our creatives have not stopped pushing and offering innovative solutions to our biggest challenges. 

One of the beliefs of CACHE is that the arts can collectively address critical social, racial, and environmental issues. How do you see that playing out in Northwest Arkansas?

CACHE is working to support and develop our full ecosystem, but we’re placing focus on better partnering with and highlighting BIPOC or LGBTQ+ artists, nonprofits, and businesses. These communities—who lead artistic and creative innovation—have often been overlooked by funders, media, and the larger mainstream. Their perspectives are critical to breaking down the barriers that exist in this country. 

We’re joining alongside the next generation of local arts leadership, who have been doing this work for years and sometimes decades. We’re also thinking bigger about community development and supporting creatives through affordable housing, access to capital, and collaborative spaces to work towards economic empowerment.

The music industry was hit hard during COVID-19. What have you discovered in developing the Music Ecosystem Strategy and Action Plan that might help other agencies support their local music industry?

Our musicians and music community responded with amazing ingenuity right out of the gate a year ago, adapting to both the new URL and IRL realities. For some projects, supporting musicians shifted from booking them for gigs to providing them with the tools and resources needed to go virtual. One of our Bridge Fund grantees—The House of Songs—quickly realized this need among musicians and used their Bridge Fund support to help 56 Northwest Arkansas artists with some form of hardware or software tools—ring lights, internet upgrades, webcams, etc. We partnered with the Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America virtual series, and with these examples and others, we saw musicians taking this new knowledge and running with it, creating and monetizing their own content.

As the world reopens, one of the biggest challenges will be how to do so safely, so we don’t whiplash back into another pandemic spike. We’re working with a coalition of venue owners, promoters, and musicians across the region who are one of eight cohorts across the country working with REVS (Reopen Every Venue Safely), a project of the Music Policy Forum. In the spaces that CACHE currently runs—214 in Springdale and CACHE Studios in Bentonville—we’ve already hosted music and multi-disciplinary events and will continue to ramp those up. 

A singer with long braids in casual dress smiles and holds a microphone on stage
ART PARTY, photo by Corey Lamb, courtesy of Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange.

Our local and regional arts agencies will need to continue to think how they can be supportive through resources, webinars, and trainings to build up the virtual skills of performers—that genie is never going back into the bottle, and that’s a very good thing for our collective creativity. But the same is true of physical space and gathering; it’s something we crave and need as humans, and which brings out the best interaction, improvisation, inspiration in all of us.

In October 2020, you launched OZCast, a weekly online variety show featuring artists and creatives. What’s unique about the approach you took and what’s working about it?

OZCast started off as a way to get money into the hands of creatives ASAP during an incredibly difficult time, by both licensing and commissioning 5-minute works across disciplines. From the start, Director Mario Troncoso and Editor and Animator Lisa Marie Evans, along with CACHE staff, were very intentional with the artists they wanted to highlight—not only looking for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ voices, but also in creative industries that we may not always associate as the “arts”—tattoo artists and chefs alongside cellists and poets. 

Ultimately, we ended up creating a 15-episode series that showcases the diversity and talent of the artists in our region and I think helps shift the narrative of what Arkansas art is right now. It’s a collective calling card for the region—something that both individual artists and our larger scene can make use of to say to the rest of the world, “Check out all the amazing humans we have making art around here.” Behind the scenes, it’s served as some crucial technical, professional, and artistic development for almost 100 of our regional artists, who we know can now go on to make even better work and connect that work to the rest of the creative world.

Dancer wearing black tank top and blue gaucho pants performs in black box space
Photo courtesy Allyson Esposito.

You’re a life-long dancer/choreographer and were the founder and head of Chicago-based dance company Space Movement Project (2004-2015). How does your background in dance relate to your work with CACHE?

Dance, with its specificity, physicality, and intellectuality, never gets easier—as you begin to fully wrap your mind around the skill, the technique, you have to work harder to get your body to execute. There’s something to sticking with dance for nearly 40 years, and truly embracing and loving the challenge of it, that I think translates into my work with this organization. 

At CACHE, we’re building something from the ground up, which is always going to be challenging, but to be doing it as a relative newcomer to the region, through a pandemic, is a whole other set of challenges to work through. I think it’s reminding myself on the hardest days to continue to love each challenge, and that we’re doing this as part of a team—with community, with artists, with organizations, and with cities—to collectively enhance the place we live and love.


Americans for the Arts Membership

This series features the many Americans for the Arts members doing transformative work for arts education, public art, advocacy, arts marketing, and more. An Americans for the Arts Membership connects you with this network of more than 6,000 arts leaders and gives you access to latest professional development and research. You can become a member by visiting us online, sending an email to [email protected], or calling 202.371.2830.

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