Kit Kough is one of the newest members of the Emerging Leaders Advisory Council. As Program Director with the Mayo Clinic Center for Humanities in Medicine she oversees arts programming, special events and recurring medical humanities programming for patients, staff, and the community.

What are you looking forward to in your work with the Emerging Leaders (EL) Advisory Council?
The EL Council is a fantastic opportunity to work closely with my peers. We have a tremendous group with varied backgrounds and a lot of experiences to share. I’m really looking forward to connecting with other emerging leaders both regionally and nationally. I’m enthusiastic about building a strong leadership pipeline for arts professionals. I’m also hoping that my specific knowledge in the arts in healthcare field will be helpful for others looking to expand their work.

As an emerging leader in my late 20s and early 30s, I was desperate for a chance to be heard. I sought out opportunities to get involved with organizations and groups that would both connect me to other people in the field and allow me chances to organize, empower, and lead others. I had ideas. I wanted to share them. And I wanted to learn in the process. As the sun set on my emerging leader status—though I’m not sure exactly when that started happening, just when it was over—I had a pretty stark shift in my attitude about leadership. I found I wasn’t hungry for it anymore—not in the same way, at least.

As I look to my past to see what my task as an arts leader is for the future, I cannot help but think of cultural equity. Succession planning is creating a series of feeder groups up and down the entire leadership pipeline of an organization. While concern for senior leadership positions is what comes to mind, it is the intentional retention of key staff members and volunteers, coupled with sufficient and professional development, that the sector needs. By reading this week’s Blog Salon, you have witnessed evidence from change makers both seasoned and emerging—artists and administrators working across disciplines and sectors from all across the country. As a whole, these individuals are making waves and laying the foundation for cultural equity in their organizations, their communities, the field, and the nation.

There is generally a perception that the arts are a progressive, forward-thinking sector. The attention to racial equity by many arts and cultural institutions may contribute to this. However, in local, state, and federal arts agencies, we’re often bound to the policies and practices largely created and upheld by white people—and far from progressive. While working in the public sector for much of my arts administration career, I have been complicit in adhering to largely inequitable practices—especially when it comes to grant funding. And while my fellow public sector arts administrators and I get excited by moving the needle—even just a little—to make our policies and practices more equitable, we’re still not addressing the core structures that created these inequities in the first place. We focus our attention on moving the needle within these structures, but hasn’t history shown us that these structures don’t (and won’t) work to get us to a more equitable reality?

I am an artist by training, art historian by education, (former/on-hiatus) arts administrator by chance, creative placemaker by practice, and lifelong supporter of the arts by choice. And while most of my career has been in the arts, I’ve never been employed by an arts organization. Most of my life has also involved the arts. Aside from a failed attempt to be a ballerina when I was five, my childhood was defined by art classes and encouraging teachers. Despite having continuous opportunities to pursue artistic and creative interests, I never thought my hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, was a place to experience a diverse or growing arts and culture sector. I wanted to see more people in the arts who looked like me or had a story similar to mine. I also wanted to see the arts outside of purely arts spaces, to be less confined, and to be more accessible to the greater public. However, I had no idea what my career path in the arts would look like, only that I did not want to be a professional artist, nor work in a traditional museum or gallery after college.

I lived in a blanket of fear and anxiety as an artist for the first decade of my career. I remember when my dance teacher told me I wasn’t good enough to get into a prestigious dance school in South Florida. I auditioned for theater instead to ensure my acceptance. I remember booking a national commercial in college for a rhythmic dance routine. My sound and precision were perfect. They used my sound and one of my castmate’s “looks” for the actual principal. She was ethnically ambiguous, which sells more product. Both of these moments seeded doubt in my abilities to succeed in the industry. I always knew it was important to write a vision. Write it down, make it plain. One day, I looked up at a journal full of ideas—planned out with extravagance—and realized that I had not acted on a single one of them. I was only putting pen to paper while in complete awe at the people around me who were actually making things happen.