Seattle to the steppes: Local arts manager connects with Mongolia

Dwight Gee is a man you'd never expect to find in a Mongolian ger (yurt), sipping fermented mare's milk and discussing a horsehead fiddle called the morin khuur.

Gee, vice president for community affairs of Seattle's ArtsFund, ordinarily spends most of his time in an office across from KeyArena, working to raise money for King and Pierce County arts groups through corporate grants and workplace-giving campaigns.

For the past three years, however, Gee has also been working tirelessly on his volunteer job: president of the Arts Council of Mongolia-U.S. With help from several funding sources, Gee has used his experience with ArtsFund to establish a sister agency in Mongolia.

It began in 2002, when Mongolian arts manager Tserenpil Ariunaa traveled to America with five other arts managers to learn how arts are sustained here. They met arts administrators and city, state and federal officials, all of whom were happy to talk about how they support arts and culture in the States. "Only [one] man asked us how arts are in Mongolia and what is happening there and what challenges do we face."

That man was Gee, and the managers asked him to help set up an arts council in Mongolia. A country of vast spaces and nomadic traditions, Mongolia also has a long, diverse and proud arts culture. This comes as no surprise to Seattle audiences who heard Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Festival residency at Benaroya Hall in 2002. The haunting power of the Mongolian "long song" singer Khongorzul Ganbaatar and the evocative tones of the morin khuur drew standing ovations from local listeners.

Enduring traditions

The arts are deeply entwined with Mongolia's roots: the "long song" tradition meant communication over the country's vast steppes, among nomadic tribes. The horsehead fiddle celebrates the society's mainstay, the horse — an animal that means transportation, comradeship, milk, food and pre-eminence in battle. Both the wide, empty plains and the motif of the horse are everywhere in Mongolia's visual arts, celebrated in painting, drawing and sculpture.

Outsiders see only the tip of Mongolia's cultural iceberg, as Gee has discovered. His enthusiasm is immense; when you see and hear the art books and the music CDs he has brought back to Seattle, you discover that enthusiasm is fully justified.

"I immediately fell in love with these great people," says Gee of the arts managers who asked for his help. Gee made two trips to Mongolia in 2002 to set up a structure for the Arts Council of Mongolia (ACM). It took some doing.

Originally, the council was made up solely of artists. But to raise money and influence legislation, the council needed a board of directors — people with some clout in the local culture. Gee and the other administrators lined up a member of the Mongolian parliament, an ambassador and several top business people. They registered with the government, wrote up by-laws and created a version of an American arts-organization model that would work in Mongolian society.

Friends in high places

"Our board over there now boasts three ambassadors, of Japan, Turkey and the U.S.," Gee says.

According to the U.S. Ambassador to Mongolia, Pamela J. Slutz, "The structure and practices of ACM have the potential to serve as a model for activities of other nonprofit organizations in Mongolia. Features from fundraising, outcome-based grant-making and rigorous accountability, transparency and whistleblower policies are breaking new ground for an emerging democracy."

Not surprisingly, Gee discovered that setting up the arts council was quite different from doing business in Seattle.

"Historically, personal relationships have been a strong force in Mongolian business," he explains.

"Mongolians are a nomadic people; they think, 'I know you, but I don't know some person way off in the capital.' "

It's especially difficult when Mongolia's arts community is so small. As ACM board member Batsukh Enkhbat puts it, "I think the Grants Committee members, especially from the artistic circle, know 99.99 percent of all grant applicants one way or the other — former colleague, classmate, friend's friend, participation in the same project before, etc."

With the aid of Ambassador Slutz and James Peter Morrow, CEO of Khan Bank, Gee and Enkhbat developed conflict-of-interest statutes for the ACM. Now, for example, the director of an art gallery has refused an invitation to serve on the grants committee, so that her organization will be eligible for future grants.

Modest grants, huge impact

"Thanks to Dwight's very deep involvement, ACM has strong, well-placed fundraising capacity and we do raise around $120,000 every year," Ariunaa says. She calls that number "quite significant" in view of the country's poor economy, and attributes much of the success to Gee. "He works as president, treasurer, secretary, Web designer, grants administrator and fundraiser and all [on a] pro-bono basis. I never met anyone in my entire life who has this kind of commitment, care and efficiency about his job and values. He is a tireless advocate for Mongolian arts."

Gee also has helped create a parallel agency in Seattle, the Arts Council of Mongolia — US. The first grant from the here was a check for $1,000 from Seattle Rotary, to give disadvantaged Mongolian kids life skills through the arts.

"The impact of even relatively modest grants in Mongolia can be huge," Gee says.

In November, Gee sent a wire for $32,000 to his colleagues in Mongolia's capital, Ulan Bator, for several grants to teach and preserve traditional Mongolian art.

Among the projects:

"This is My Culture," an after-school program in the Khovd province, where $9,141 will go to repair and equip the Khovd Music and Drama Theatre so three local traditional masters can begin teaching their skills in long song, throat singing and morin khuur performance.

"ArtsPlus," another after-school initiative, provides two arts education programs in drama and visual art, bringing in Mongolian artists to the schools to interact with students and teachers.

"Birthplace of Chinggis Khan/Khentii Museum Project," celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Mongolian State in 2006 — as well as the 840th anniversary of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, the ruler who unified Mongolia. The $8,367 grant will develop an interactive history curriculum.

"Being there really sealed for me the fact that the world needs to hold onto the culture they have," says Gee. "It is so transporting. It just takes you out of the place where you've been and into a completely new area."

Right now, Mongolia is a bewildering mix of the old and the new, with 15-foot gers housing an entire family with an annual income of $400 — yet there's a growing influx of cellphones. Gee says he was especially impressed to see how highly educated many Mongolians are, speaking not only Mongolian and Russian, but often as many as six or seven languages.

Those international influences are clearest in the visual arts, with annual color publications published by the Arts Council showcasing the incredible diversity of influences in the best new art of the year. Image after image features the horse, that staple of life in Mongolia, and the vast open spaces and steppes of the countryside.

Coming here soon

This spring, we'll have a chance to experience Mongolian culture firsthand: the lively music ensemble Tumen Ekh will come to the Seattle International Children's Festival in Seattle and Tacoma as part of a tour that will take them to such cities as New York City; Washington, D.C.; Denver; and Toronto. The Arts Council of Mongolia-U.S. (www.acm-us.org) has made the tour possible with a $25,000 grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding (of New York).

With Mercy Corps' Seattle office and the Seattle-based Snow Leopard Trust, ACM-US will host a reception following the Tumen Ekh performance May 20 in the Bagley Wright Theatre, to help raise the visibility of Mongolian culture and its Seattle connection.

There's a nice parallel in the fact that Mongolia's population, 2.8 million, is not too different from the service area of this region's ArtsFund (King and Pierce Counties). Maybe that's one reason ArtsFund proved such a good match for the Mongolians in helping them set up a similar agency.

"Nobody visits Mongolia once," laughs Gee, "even though it's a long, long air journey away. We're so happy to be able to bring Mongolian arts across that distance with the Tumen Ekh tour. We're letting the world know about this great culture, and that feels great."

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com