After a three-month search, the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona has tapped a Nogales, Sonora, native to take its top job.
For Adriana Gallego, who grew up on both sides of the Sonora-Arizona border, the opportunity brings her full circle and back home to the city where she became a professional artist and launched her career.
“There’s nothing like the desert borderlands. The community is very culturally rich,” Gallego said last week. “The landscape is so dynamic and beautiful and the air quality is incredible. I know that the heat can be pretty intense for some people, but that’s part of my DNA.”
And Tucson’s vibrant arts community is also part of her DNA.
After decades living in California, Phoenix and Texas, Gallego moved back to Tucson last November when her artist husband, Claudio Dicochea, landed a job with the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Two months later, the Arts Foundation job opened when former Executive Director Carol Varney left early this year for a new job out of state.
Gallego comes to Tucson with more than 20 years of arts administration experience that includes a five-year stint with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, where she was visual arts director and then director of strategic initiatives before moving to San Antonio, Texas, to work for the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She was the group’s first chief operating officer.
“Adriana’s experience at the city, state, national and regional level is outstanding. Her history of commitment to the communities we serve is a wonderful thing for arts and culture in our region,” said Eva Romero, president of the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona board of directors.
Gallego, a University of Arizona alumnus and founding member of Raíces Taller 222 Gallery and Workshop, got her first taste at arts administration with the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.
She said he first priority in her new role is to begin activating local, state and national relationships that will help the foundation help artists “mitigate the loss of income and livelihoods” as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Arts Foundation early this month, in concert with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, set up two $25,000 grant funds to assist gig and visual artists hurt by the pandemic.
“I think some of the things that we have been seeing in the way the inequities have been showing up really bring to light some systemic changes that need to take place so that we can course correct so that people can be enumerated in a way that reflects on their contributions to society,” she said. “The arts are in a very unique position to lift us into the future that is more equitable and economically sound.”
Gallego next week will submit a grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts that could bring as much as $250,000 to Tucson arts organizations that are enduring hardships with the COVID-19 shutdown.
“Our artists and culture bearers working in arts organizations and those that are working in the gig economy, we can’t leave them behind in this process,” she said. “They are a creative workforce that supply important experiences in the social ether.”
