NYC Deserves a Culture Commissioner Who Cares
The city is in a deep affordability crisis that is reshaping who can live and work here, and which institutions can survive.
The cultural sector is ripe for a great commissioner, and the moment demands one more than ever.
As Mayor Mamdani prepares to appoint a new commissioner for the Department of Cultural Affairs, we need a public counterpart who understands that progress is built with civil society.
Throughout the last decade, the field has assumed a more active civic role. Artists, cultural workers, and partners in government and philanthropy have organized through cultural plans like CreateNYC and the People’s Cultural Plan; weekly Culture@3 and New Yorkers for Culture and Arts advocacy calls; coalitions like the Cultural Equity Coalition, Latinx Arts Consortium of New York, Safety Net Coalition, and Voices for Creative New York; as well as shared advocacy — building infrastructure for coordination and accountability. Through the hard lessons of COVID-19, we deepened our attention to equity, labor conditions, and mutual support. In the process, we built durable habits of collaboration: sharing information, coordinating policy asks, aligning narratives, and showing up for one another as public and private systems strained.
In this context, the commissioner’s role is not simply to administer programs. It is to practice partnership as a governing method; to translate what the field knows into policy and budgets; to convene with earned legitimacy across agencies, communities, and funders; and to make City government a reliable collaborator through transparency, predictable processes, and consistent follow-through.
The urgency is obvious. New York is in a deep affordability crisis that is reshaping who can live and work here, and which institutions can survive. At the same time, the cultural ecosystem is reckoning with systemic disinvestment — compounded by years of culture-war politics, shifting private funding priorities, and a cultural governance structure dispersed across agencies and decision-makers, often without clear coordination or accountability.
The good news is that the sector is not waiting to be saved. We are coordinated. We are practiced in collective action, and ready for a commissioner who meets that capacity with reciprocity, collective leadership, and compassion.
This is why the moment demands it — because none of us can face the challenges ahead alone, nor should we envision our city's future in isolation. New York’s cultural life is not a luxury; it is civic infrastructure — how we make meaning, build belonging, improve community well-being, and create economic opportunities for all New Yorkers. The next NYC Commissioner for Cultural Affairs can help make that future real by treating artists, cultural workers, and cultural organizations as co-creators of the city’s story, and by building government as a steady partner in the work of imagining and sustaining a livable, plural New York.
