ON THE LAST day of August, 2014, Gabriella Calicchio arrived in her new office at the Marin Center to begin her job as director of Marin County Cultural and Visitor Services. That was the day her markedly adventur-
ous and creative career in the arts circled back to Marin
County, the place the Vermont native met her husband and
the place she describes as her “true home.”
The chronology of the decades that led Calicchio to
her current role as chief advocate for the arts in Marin
County reads like an epic journey, almost 20 years of arts
leadership experience spanning the globe from England
to Australia, from Boston to the Bay Area and then back to
Minneapolis. In 2011 Calicchio, then the managing director
for the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, was
beckoned to San Francisco to run the Walt Disney Family
Museum. Three years later, when previous Marin County
Cultural Services Director Jim Farley retired, the board of
supervisors chose her to replace him and she moved back
across the Golden Gate to her beloved Marin. Now she and
her husband, an actor she met when she was director of the
Marin Theater Company (from 2001 to 2007), are happily
ensconced in San Anselmo, raising their two children.
Calicchio admits she initially had some reservations
about working in a government environment, but three
years into the job she finds her excitement about what is
possible in the county has only grown. We sat down to discuss the achievements she’s most proud of and her vision
for the future of the arts in Marin.
You worked in the nonprofit arts sector most of your adult
life. What drew you to this position? I’d known my prede-
cessor Jim Farley for years, and I’d always thought, “That’s
an amazing job with incredible potential for our com-
munity.” I was hired on a platform that Cultural Services
should have a larger role in the community. I believe the
county should play a leadership role in convening artists
and arts organizations, giving them a collective voice, and
raising the profile of the arts in this community. How do
we develop a county where the arts are publicly valued and
where we as a community feel it is critical to support the
arts for the future of Marin County? So people don’t just
say they’re driving through Marin County to get to wine
country, or to go to a beautiful point on Mount Tam, but
they actually say, “I’m going there because there is this
show and this gallery,” or they say, “Have you ever heard of
this amazing little theater company in Marin?” We want
Marin to become a destination for the arts as much as it is
a destination for the beauty of our natural landscape.
What will it take to make that happen? I believe that we
need to establish a dedicated funding source for the arts.
In 2011 the Marin Arts Council went defunct and over
the last decade the Marin Community Foundation has
reduced their funding for the arts. There is no central
agency that serves the collective arts ecology. And yet we
know that we have more artists per capita than any other
county besides L. A. So we are launching a county wide
process that will look at all the data and the economic
impact of the arts in our community, things like how many
adults work in the creative sector. We will gather as much
data to reinforce our case for a number of goals such as
comprehensive arts education for elementary-age students
or affordable housing for artists. When we have the data,
we do the lobbying and advocacy to get something on the
ballot to support the arts in a sustainable way. It’s not
just about getting a singular funding source to spread out
among hundreds of arts organizations; it actually means
investing in education for our young people so there are
adults a generation or two from now who understand the
value of and appreciate the arts.
What would youth arts look like in your dream world?
My dream would be funding to support comprehensive
arts education in our public schools. Every second grader
would have the opportunity every day to be exposed to a
theater program in the school, would have the opportunity
There is no central agency that serves the collective
arts ecology. And yet we know that we have more artists
per capita than any other county besides L.A.
