A complex visa process is snarling programs that rely on visiting artists. ‘Access to international cultures is essential.’

In 2019 Adam Zanolini, executive director of Elastic Arts Foundation, secured a $50,000 grant, a notable achievement for a small arts-focused nonprofit. “It was the biggest grant I had ever gotten for Elastic,” Zanolini said.

The grant, awarded by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, supported an exchange of artists. The project was straightforward: musicians from Chicago and Mexico City would perform together in a series of paid performances in each city.

Zanolini saw the exchange as an opportunity to offer one-of-a-kind programming for Chicago’s vibrant Latinx audience.

But the cost and complexity of obtaining visas for international artists traveling to Chicago put the project in jeopardy. Zanolini pulled off the exchange, which was complicated by COVID-19 delays, but he did so at considerable cost and needed to dip into his organization’s general budget to make it happen.

“It’s not worth trying to jump through all these hoops,” Zanolini said of the visa application process. “It’s crazy. But the program is so valuable, it would be great if they try to solve the problem.”

This month, arts organizations and government agencies are meeting to discuss the process by which visas are awarded to international artists looking to come to the United States. Some are hopeful about the talks.

But ultimately, congressional action is required for changes to the visa process.

If the process is streamlined, it will be easier for international artists to bring programming and performances to cities such as Chicago.

“Access to international cultures is essential,” said Matthew Covey, an attorney who worked with Zanolini on the visas for Elastic Arts. “If you’re going to develop a community or a nation that can communicate with the rest of the world and understand its role, one of the most important ways that happens is through the exchange of cultures.”

An inefficient visa process also creates long-term, adverse commercial impact. Covey, who is also executive director of the New York-based nonprofit Tamizdat, which seeks to lower the barrier of entry for culture into the U.S., noted that international performers are now looking at venues other than in the U.S., including Latin America and Central Europe. Because that business goes elsewhere, U.S. labels and publishers that would have signed these artists and produced their work lose that potential income.

Over the last 10 years, the number of international artists that U.S. agents have booked has declined, Covey said.

The State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs did not respond to questions about the burdens of the visa process, but a spokesman said in an email that it “is consistently working to improve procedures tied to our worldwide visa processing” for arts and culture and other sectors.”

Elastic Arts’ grant-funded project dates back to March 2020, when it sent seven Chicago artists to Mexico City.

After an enthusiastic welcome in Mexico City, musicians returned home to COVID-19 quarantines.

“It was really weird. It was like a ghost town. The airport was empty. The train was empty. All the restaurants were closed,” Zanolini said. “So needless to say, the Mexican cats did not come up in September of 2020.”

Delays from COVID-19 and its variants continued through 2022. Undaunted, however, the project continued, and Elastic Arts began to secure visas for the Mexico City musicians for 2023 performance dates.

That’s when Zanolini began to realize how difficult it would be to secure visas.

Initially, Elastic pursued a P-3 visa, which is for artists temporarily coming to the U.S. to perform in a “culturally unique” program.

“Elastic specializes in weird stuff, right? We do things that can’t find a home elsewhere, largely kind of experimental, creative, improvised music,” Zanolin said.

Elastic quickly learned that proving cultural uniqueness is stringent. Despite experts supporting these musicians’ work as “a very uniquely Mexico City style of jazz, improvised music and compositions,” Zanolini learned this would be insufficient for the P-3 visa. “They want to see a mariachi band. They want to see people in traditional clothes and playing in really ethnomusicological registered UNESCO heritage music.”

The type of performance Elastic wanted to host was so unique that it didn’t clearly fit into the categories recognized for the P-3 visa, Zanolini found.

“They’ve never heard music like ours. That’s the kind of music we like to make.”

This was frustrating for Elastic: “If there’s no category for what you’re doing when they look it up, you don’t qualify. They’re not trying to listen to your complex argument about playing a kind of music that you can’t really hear anywhere.” Cultural uniqueness seemed to require that the music already exists, he said.

“If they want to let you in, they let you in. No matter how strong your argument is, if it doesn’t fit into what they think the thing means, then it’s not going to fly.”

Covey said the robust effort that goes into cultural uniqueness has caused the visa application process to mushroom out of control, with some applications as long as 4,500 pages.

The determination of cultural uniqueness for a P-3 visa doesn’t stop with, for example, an artist review in The New York Times. Covey said.

“How do we know that The New York Times is important? You include documentation to show how many Pulitzer Prizes The New York Times has won so that you can trust what it said about the artist. How do we know that the Pulitzer Prize is international? (So) you include information about the Pulitzer Prize in order to validate The New York Times in order to validate what they’ve said about the artist.”

“A system that was designed to be fairly flexible and fairly efficient has become incredibly inflexible and inefficient, legally unnecessary, and largely without any particular policy purpose.”

Ultimately, three weeks before performance dates were scheduled, Elastic secured two types of visas for the musicians: a single O-1 visa for the “lead musician” and additional O-2 visas for the rest of the group. O-1 visas are granted to “a person with extraordinary skill in sciences, art, education, business, or athletics,” and O-2 visas are approved for persons “essential” to the performance by the person with an O-1 visa. At a significant cost to Elastic, both financially and programmatically, the group performed in Chicago in September.

On the visa process alone, Elastic spent roughly $8,000, or 16% of its grant.

Once the visas were arranged, other problems followed: the cost of international plane tickets had doubled, one musician now had a conflict, and Elastic had less time to promote the performance. Other rising costs forced Elastic to use money from general operations to run the program.

This is not uncommon, according to Covey. “Where we see this kind of heartbreak is when it’s a local or regional arts organization that doesn’t do this very often. Suddenly, you’ve gone from thinking $190 for three people in a trio and now we’re talking $10,000.”

Expecting artists to apply for the visa merely shifts the existing burden.

Rui Sha, a Chicago-based installation artist from Beijing who spent $7,000 to $8,000 to secure the coveted O-1 visa. Sha pursued the O-1 because it doesn’t require employer sponsorship and gives the greatest flexibility to work as a freelancer in the U.S. Still, the O visa doesn’t guarantee employment, as Sha learned when an arts organization revoked a job offer after learning that she held an O visa.

According to Sha, who did not want to name the Chicago-based institution, the organization explained that it “didn’t really need someone with extraordinary ability to fill this role.”

To generate awareness of these problems and identify efficient solutions, Tamizdat annually publishes The White Paper on Artist Mobility in the U.S. on its website, outlining needed changes, most of which center around efficiency, evidentiary burdens, and timeliness.

After a decade of work, an October meeting is scheduled for various stakeholders, including Homeland Security, Immigration, the Department of State, the National Endowment of Arts, and an ad hoc coalition of arts organizations known as the “Performing Artist Visa Working Group.”

Organized by the League of American Voices and Tamizdat on behalf of the coalition, the meeting will discuss priorities to the process. “This is a response and engagement from the government that we’ve never seen before,” Covey said. “I am hopeful.”