national endowment
for the arts
a history

1965–2008

national
endowment
for the arts
a history

1965–2008

Edited bymark bauerlein
withellen grantham

national endowment for the arts
washington, dc

Editor: Mark Bauerlein
Associate editor: Ellen Grantham
Production manager: Don Ball
Design: Beth Schlenoff Design
Cover photo: Terry J. Adams, National Park Service
202-682-5496 Voice/TTY(a device for individuals who are deaf or hearing-impaired)Individuals who do not use conventional print materials
may contact the Arts Endowment’s Office for AccessAbility at
202-682-5532 to obtain this publication in an alternate format.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
National Endowment for the Arts.
National Endowment for the Arts : a history, 1965–2008/edited by Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham.
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn 978-0-615-23248-5
1. National Endowment for the Arts—History.
2. Federal aid to the arts—United States—History.
I. Bauerlein, Mark. II. Grantham, Ellen, 1979– III. Title.
NX735.N384 2009
700.973—dc22
2008049381

“ The arts and sciences are essential to the prosperity of the state and tothe ornament and happiness of human life. They have a primary claim
to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind.”
George Washington

Contents
Foreword . . . vii

Part I: The History Of The NEA
Introduction . . . 1
Chapter 1: Hope and Inspiration . . . 5
Chapter 2: A New World Beckons . . . 13
Chapter 3: A Fresh Direction . . . 31
Chapter 4: A Long Summer . . . 55
Chapter 5: The Reagan Era . . . 69
Chapter 6: Culture Wars . . . 89
Chapter 7: What Is to Be Done? . . . 111
Chapter 8: Broadening the Agency’s Reach . . . 127
Chapter 9: In Dark Hours . . . 137
Chapter 10: Building a New Consensus . . . 147
Epilogue: A Great Nation Deserves Great Art . . . 167
Part II: The Impact Of The NEA
Dance . . . 171
Literature . . . 185
Media Arts . . . 197
Museums and Visual Arts . . . 209
Music and Opera . . . 223
Theater . . . 241
Appendices . . . 254
Index . . . 280

ForewordThis history of the National Endowment for the Arts attempts togive a concise, documentary account of the agency’s major activities over the past
forty-three years since its creation by the United States Congress. The book provides
not only an authoritative survey of major programs and influential personnel, butalso examines the complex and evolving role of the agency in the cultural and political life of the United States during that time. The history of the Arts Endowment isan eventful and sometimes controversial one, to be sure, and we have sought to present its many achievements and difficult episodes with candor, clarity, and balance.
Many hands have contributed to the book. Early drafts were prepared by Stephen
Schwartz, Jon Parrish Peede, and me, with careful review and revision by Eileen
Mason, Larry Baden, Ann Guthrie Hingston, Karen Elias, Felicia Knight, Tony Chauveaux, Patrice Walker Powell, Michael Faubion, and Victoria Hutter. Other NEA staff
including Gigi Bolt, Tom Bradshaw, Shana Chase, Mario Garcia Durham, Maryrose
Flanigan, Carrie Holbo, Sunil Iyengar, David Kipen, Leslie Liberato, Pennie Ojeda,
Jeff Speck, and Paula Terry contributed to the book. Ellen Grantham led the editorial
team in the book’s final stages, assisted by Laura Bradshaw, Michael Dirda, Jr.,
Michael Kettler, Eleanor Steele, and Jena Winberry. Don Ball managed the book’s
production.
I would like to thank all the previous NEA chairmen, whose memoirs, papers,
speeches, and publications offered a wealth of information and perspective. Many
former employees and associates were interviewed for the book, including Anne
Arrasmith, Ann Meier Baker, Ed Birdwell, Gigi Bradford, Linda Earle, Henry Fogel,vii

Leonard Garment, Jay Gates, Adrian Gnam, R. Philip Hanes, Jr., Omus Hirshbein,
Murray Horwitz, James Ireland, Arnold Lehman, Margaret M. Lioi, Rick Lowe,
Robert Martin, Nancy Netzer, Brian O’Doherty, Earl A. Powell III, Peter Prinze,
Ralph Rizzolo, Marc Scorca, Patrick J. Smith, A. B. Spellman, Andrea Snyder, Ana
Steele, Jac Venza, William Vickery, and Joseph Wesley Zeigler.
As the project progressed, we decided to add several sections focusing on theEndowment’s impact on six key fields in the arts. Written by the NEA directors ofeach discipline, these chapters highlight programs, policies, and influence of the
National Endowment of the Arts in each area. Several individuals helped the directors prepare these chapters, including David Bancroft, Court Burns, Wendy Clark,
Carol Lanoux Lee, Janelle Ott Long, Juliana Mascelli, Anya Nykyforiak, Georgianna
Paul, Katja von Schuttenbach, Mary Smith, Jan Stunkard, Jeff Watson, Laura Welsh,
and Alice Whelihan.
Mark Bauerlein

viii nea: a history

part i

The history of the nea

IntroductionT

he national endowment for the arts—the NEA—is aunique agency in the panoply of federal institutions. Created by the Congress of theUnited States and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the NEA was not intended
to solve a problem, but rather to embody a hope. The NEA was established to nurture
American creativity, to elevate the nation’s culture, and to sustain and preserve thecountry’s many artistic traditions. The Arts Endowment’s mission was clear—to
spread this artistic prosperity throughout the land, from the dense neighborhoods of
our largest cities to the vast rural spaces, so that every citizen might enjoy America’s
great cultural legacy.
The National Endowment for the Arts differs greatly from the prior federal arts
programs established earlier under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) withwhich historians have most often compared it—the Federal Arts Project and Federal
Writers’ Project. These New Deal programs were created in the 1930s to employ jobless artists and writers during a national economic crisis. Out of the 15 million
unemployed victims of the Great Depression, nearly ten thousand were artists. New
Deal administrator Harry Hopkins defended federal support for artists by saying,“Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.” In many instances the Federal Arts
Project and similar efforts associated with it, such as the photographic work of theFarm Security Administration, bolstered President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s politicalvision of how the nation would recover from economic devastation.
By contrast, the Arts Endowment was created neither to provide work for the unemployed nor to deliver a political message. The idealistic optimism expressed at the1birth of the NEA was very different from the hopefor restoration of American prosperity during theDepression. In the NEA’s case, hope bore no connection to despair, but functioned purely as anexaltation of the spirit.
The distinctive origins of the federal arts programs of the New Deal and of the National Endowment for the Arts were reflected in the kinds of art
with which each federal initiative was associated.
The New Deal programs produced art, most memorably in the visual fields. Murals, such as thoseby Thomas Hart Benton, and other paintings in a
A mural created by the Brandywine River
School artists in the 1930s as part of therecognized style, some with a similar visual
Works Progress Administration (WPA).
approach, became a hallmark of WPA-produced
The mural hangs in the John Bassettart. Other artists not subsidized by these programs
Moore School in Smyrna, Delaware.
(Photo courtesy of Smyrna School District)echoed this style. A school of “WPA art” thus
became a major phenomenon of the New Dealera. Paralleling the political mission of WPA art in supporting New Deal programs,
such works also reflected a commitment on the part of many artists in that epoch tocollectivist values and the promotion of government in society. In 1940, President
Roosevelt spoke of the effects his arts policy initiatives had on the American public:
They have seen, across these last few years, rooms full of paintings by Americans,walls covered with all the paintings of Americans—some of it good, some of it not
good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive—all of it painted by their own
kind in their own country, and painted about things they know and look at often
and have touched and loved.
Neither the Arts Endowment nor the artists or arts administrators who advised
the agency over the past four decades have sought to align the NEA with a sociopolitical agenda. Nevertheless, the NEA has some elements in common with that of
New Deal programs for artists and writers. The first and most obvious similarity isthat both strived to bring culture to the people. The second is that both endeavors
represented irreplaceable records of the intellectual and ideological challenges thathave gripped America. During the New Deal, the photographic scrutiny of Walker
Evans, Dorothea Lange, and others subsidized by federal arts programs did not turn2 nea: a history

away from the drama of America struggling to rise from economic deprivation.
Similarly, in America over the past 40 years, a wide range of works supported by the
NEA, as well as the occasional controversies that have accompanied its activities,
have reflected social and cultural changes in direct and illuminating ways. Few federal agencies can offer the public or future historians so thorough and eloquent a
record of American cultural development as the NEA.

introduction

3

Pablo Casals performs for President John F. Kennedy, Puerto Rican Governor Luis Muñoz Marín,
and other distinguished guests in the East Room of the White House, November 13, 1961.
(Photo by Robert Knudsen, White House/John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library)chapter i

Hope and InspirationW

ith the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960,
enthusiasm for America as a nation dedicated to the arts seemed poised to become awidespread movement. Even before the election, at the end of the Eisenhower
Administration, a precursor of this new energy in the arts was witnessed when poet
Carl Sandburg and actor Fredric March addressed a Joint Session of Congress on
February 12, 1959 to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
At President Kennedy’s inaugural, on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, his Administration’s commitment to creativity was symbolized by Robert Frost reciting a poem,“The Gift Outright,” from the ceremonial dais. Though gusty winds that day rendered him inaudible, the image was captured on television and stirred the public
imagination. The Abstract Expressionist painters Franz Kline and Mark Rothko,
whose works were anything but conventional, also attended the historic occasion.
Another prominent artistic moment associated with President Kennedy’s term
was cellist Pablo Casals’s performance at the White House in 1961. The Casals event
was notable in a number of ways, which President Kennedy emphasized in his opening remarks. First, it was intended not only as homage to Casals, but to Puerto Ricoand its reforming governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. Second, President Kennedy pointed
out that Casals, who was 84 when he performed in 1961, had also played in the
White House for President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Finally, President Kennedy
alluded to Casals’s refusal to return to his native Catalonia, which was then under
the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The President closed his remarks with thewords, “An artist must be a free man.”5

At the end of 1961, President Kennedy further recognized the significance of thearts to the national well-being when he sent Labor Secretary Arthur J. Goldberg tosettle a pay dispute between the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the American
Federation of Musicians. On announcing the resolution of the conflict, Goldberg
called for government subsidies to the performing arts and proposed that businessjoin with labor in supporting the arts.
A high point in the intellectual history of the Kennedy Administration involved
the French Minister of Culture, novelist, and essayist André Malraux. A flamboyant
and venturesome cultural figure from the 1920s through the 1970s, Malraux had
played host to the Kennedys when they visited France in 1961. The following year,
Malraux came to Washington, where First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy returned thefavor. A White House dinner for the French minister included performances by violinist Isaac Stern, pianist Eugene Istomin, and cellist Leonard Rose. During his visit,
Mrs. Kennedy asked Malraux if France would be willing to allow Leonardo da Vinci’sMona Lisa from the Louvre to be exhibited in the United States. Malraux assented—
to the shock and alarm of French diplomats, who considered the decision hasty. But
in January of 1963, Malraux returned to Washington to introduce “the greatest picture in the world,” which was displayed at the National Gallery of Art. The painting
was also shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and returned toFrance aboard the SS United States on March 7. In the 27 days the Mona Lisa was on
display in Washington, DC, more than half a million people came to view it.

A New Conception
Notwithstanding the breadth of American creativity and the power of federal authorities, the United States had never established a permanent official body dedicated tothe proposition, enunciated by President Kennedy, that the nation has “hundreds ofthousands of devoted musicians, painters, architects, those who work to bring aboutchanges in our cities, whose talents are just as important a part of the United States as
any of our perhaps more publicized accomplishments.” To recognize their contributions to the United States, President Kennedy named August Heckscher, grandson ofa Gilded Age industrialist who founded the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New
York, as his special consultant on the arts. Heckscher, described by the film critic
Richard Schickel as “humane, sweet-tempered, rational, and liberal-minded,” had along list of accomplishments outside the art world—a master’s degree in government
from Harvard, service with the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, member

6 nea: a history

President John F. Kennedy meets with Special Consultant on the Arts August Heckscher andHeckscher’s son in the Oval Office. (Photo by Robert Knudsen, White House/John Fitzgerald
Kennedy Library)of the U.S. delegation at the United Nations conference in 1945, and chief editorial
writer at the New York Herald Tribune in the 1950s. After serving under President
Kennedy, he went on to be Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs Commissioner for
New York City.
Heckscher completed the report, “The Arts and the National Government,” inMay 1963, and submitted it to Congress and the President six months before President Kennedy’s death. A few months earlier, in January, Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY),with co-sponsors Senators Joseph Clark (D-PA), Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), andClaiborne Pell (D-RI), had introduced S.R. 165 “to establish a U.S. National Arts
Foundation,” and in April Senator Humphrey had introduced S.R. 1316 “to establish
a National Council on the Arts and a National Arts Foundation to assist the growthand development of the arts in the U.S.” Initial co-sponsors of S.R. 1316 besides
Clark, Pell, and Javits, were John Sherman Cooper (R-KY), Russell B. Long (D-LA),
Lee Metcalf (D-MT), Jennings Randolph (D-WV), Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT), andHugh Scott (R-PA). Supported by the Senate’s actions, Heckscher’s report led to theestablishment of the President’s Advisory Council on the Arts, the direct predecessor of the current National Council on the Arts.

hope and inspiration

7

President John F. Kennedy viewing a model of the National Cultural Center by its architect, Edward
Durell Stone (2nd from right), with future NEA Chairman Roger L. Stevens looking on (far left).
(Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Center Archives)

President Kennedy’s death delayed the appointment of members to the Advisory
Council. But his vision for the arts did not perish with him. At the time of Kennedy’s
assassination, a proposal was already in the works for a National Cultural Center in
Washington, DC. The project was launched in 1958, when President Dwight D.
Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act—legislation authorizing construction of a performance and educational space that would be independent andprivately funded. (President Eisenhower’s role in the project is memorialized in the
Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center.) In 1961, Roger L. Stevens, who later
became the first chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was named
chairman of the board for the new performing arts center, which became The John
F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—a national memorial to the late president. Jarold A. Kieffer, the first board secretary and executive director of the project,wrote in his 2004 memoir, From National Cultural Center to Kennedy Center, “With8 nea: a history

bipartisan support in the Congress, President Johnson . . . signed legislation authorizing that the Center bear Kennedy’s name and providing a grant of $15.5 million in
public funds. Congress specified that this grant was to be matched by an equal sum
that the trustees had to raise from strictly private sources.”
President Kennedy’s legacy remained as much represented by Heckscher’s efforts
as by the new center. Significantly, Heckscher avoided discussing what America
needed from a federal agency for promotion of the arts. In a somewhat flat, governmental tone, his report broached topics that would be non-issues in the first four
decades of the NEA, such as acquisitions for “government collections of art, publicbuildings, American embassies,” as well as urban planning in Washington, postal
rates, copyright laws, employment of artists to memorialize military events andspace-exploration episodes, and a wide range of other official concerns.
Yet Heckscher’s report did identify the essential stimulus for the creation of a newfederal arts agency—the historical development in American society that propelled
the process to fruition. America in the 1960s was different from America at the endof the nineteenth century, when its wealthy elite created many of the major cultural
institutions in the U.S., and different from America stricken by the heartbreak of theDepression, when citizens needed reassurance that their collective dream could be
renewed. When Theodore Roosevelt hosted Casals at the White House, and the New
Deal hired artists and writers, impetus for such efforts came from above. Heckscher’s report described an avid interest in the arts felt among the populace, and thisdemand was fueled by growing prosperity and rising expectations. Heckscher wrote,“Recent years have witnessed in the U.S. a rapidly developing interest in the arts.
Attendance at museums and concerts has increased dramatically. Symphony orchestras, community theaters, opera groups, and other cultural institutions exist in
numbers which would have been thought impossible a generation ago.”
Heckscher offered a simple explanation for these trends—namely, “increasing
amount of free time, not only in the working week, but in the life cycle as a whole.”
Heckscher paid due homage to President Kennedy’s ideal of an America that would
lead the free world to victory over totalitarianism. As Kennedy once said, “The life of
the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very
close to the center of a nation’s purpose . . . and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.” Most of all, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts wasunquestionably a product of youthful energy and presidential leadership of the
1960s, reflecting a broader interest in the fine arts that began to flower in America
after the Second World War.

hope and inspiration

9

America was changing profoundly, with more Americans attending college thanever before. As baby boomers matured, so did America’s taste, habits, and mores.
Far from the traditional centers of culture, people were demanding a local presence
for music, dance, theater, and visual art. More and more, along with European immigrants who wanted classical culture, citizens were claiming the heritage of Walt
Whitman, Edward Hopper, Frank Lloyd Wright, Martha Graham, Louis Armstrong,and other great American artists as their birthright, and they wanted access to musiceducation, dance performances, professional drama, and regional artists. The
National Endowment for the Arts, it turned out, would play a central role in heedingthat call.

10 n e a : a h i s t o r yRoger L. Stevens, NEA Chairman 1965–69. (Photo courtesy of Kennedy Center Archives)chapter 2

A New World Beckons

After President Kennedy’s death in 1963, the missionof founding a federal arts agency passed to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had credentials
as a world-changer in his own right. A southern Democrat, he had broken with thetradition of his region and party to advocate for full African-American citizenship,
which he would finalize two years later with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of1965. President Johnson was also the only American president to have served his
political apprenticeship as part of the New Deal. At the beginning of his career, he
was the director of the National Youth Administration in Texas, a New Deal agency
created to provide education, recreation, counseling, and part-time jobs to highschool and college youth. President Johnson carried forward the Rooseveltian tradition in the form of the “Great Society,” and quickly warmed to the task of establishinga federal arts agency. He also clearly sought to maintain the youthful and sophisticated persona of the Kennedy Administration.
Soon after becoming President, Johnson named Roger L. Stevens as America’s
first full-time presidential arts advisor. Not only had Stevens served at the top levelon the project that became the Kennedy Center, but he was also a successful Broadway producer and a board member of prominent arts institutions. Stevens began
working for passage of a set of Congressional measures intended to realize thevisions of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. On December 20, 1963, after hearings
by Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), then-chairman of the Senate Special Subcommittee on the Arts, the Senate passed S.R. 2379, which combined provisions of the twoearlier bills. Three weeks later, on January 8, 1964, Representative Frank Thompson

13

(D-NJ) introduced H.R. 9586 “to provide for the establishment of a National Council
on the Arts to assist in the growth and development of the arts in the U.S.” and H.R.
9587 “to provide for the establishment of a National Council on the Arts and a
National Arts Foundation to assist in the growth and development of the arts in the
United States.”
Senators Claiborne Pell, Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), and Jacob Javits (R-NY) weremajor figures in modern American politics, and all represented the well-establishedliberal strains of the Democratic and Republican leadership in the 1950s and 1960s.
All three espoused the vision of America as a dominant world leader in culture andeducation. Senator Pell had overseen hearings on the proposed legislation beginning in October 1963—before the death of President Kennedy—and concluding
after two months of debate. Senator Pell, known as a consistent supporter of American education, backed the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities
as well as the NEA. He opened the 1963 hearings with a momentous statement: “Ibelieve that this cause and its implementation has a worldwide application; for as
our cultural life is enhanced and strengthened, so does it project itself into the world
beyond our shores. Let us apply renewed energies to the very concept we seek toadvance: a true renaissance—the reawakening, the quickening, and above all, theunstunted growth of our cultural vitality.”
Senator Humphrey was the first to speak in the 1963 discussion on the Senate
floor. He had begun his career in elected office as a reforming mayor of Minneapolis,
taking leadership of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor movement. Known as a“fighting liberal,” he had worked for social betterment while also combating Communist influence in Minnesota. He won his first Senate term in 1948; the same year,
he led a floor fight at the Democratic National Convention for a commitment toAfrican-American civil rights in the South.
Senator Humphrey’s tone during the 1963 hearings was characteristic of hisstrong personal commitment, as well as his eloquence. He declared, “This is at besta modest acknowledgement . . . that the arts have a significant place in our lives, andI can think of no better time to place some primary emphasis on it than in this day
and age when most people live in constant fear of the weapons of destruction whichcloud man’s mind and his spirit and really pose an atmosphere of hopelessness formillions and millions of people . . . if there was ever an appropriate time for the consideration of this legislation it is now.” Senator Humphrey observed, “The arts
seldom make the headlines. We are always talking about a bigger bomb . . . I wonder
if we would be willing to put as much money in the arts and the preservation of what

14 n e a : a h i s t o r yhas made mankind and civilization as we are in . . . the lack of civilization, namely,
war.”
Senator Javits, a Republican, was no less a representative of moderate liberalism.
A friend of labor and civil rights, he embodied local reform traditions in the Empire
State—a practice that drew support across party lines. In the same 1963 Senate colloquy, he said, “Congress is lagging far behind the people in its failure to recognize thenational importance of developing our cultural resources through support of thearts. It is high time that Congress took a real interest in this very essential part of ournational life. Our national culture explosion is reflected in the number of arts festivals held this year, the growing number of new cultural centers in cities throughout
the country, and the increasing list of state and local governments who have set up
arts councils on the pattern of the New York State Council on the Arts.”
In the past, Javits noted, most support came from philanthropic organizations,
not from the federal government; but private funding was no longer enough. Furthermore, Javits continued, “Almost every civilized country in the world provides
some assistance to the development of its art and culture.” He added, “Some of themost renowned cultural institutions in the world would not be able to exist without
government support,” citing the Comédie-Française in Paris, the Danish Royal Ballet, the Old Vic Theatre in London, and the Vienna State Opera.

National Council on the Arts Established
Approval for the arts proposals was delayed in the House, but in August 1964, legislation to establish the National Council on the Arts (NCA) passed the House ofRepresentatives by a vote of 213 to 135. The Senate adopted the bill the following day
on a voice vote. On September 3, the National Arts and Cultural Development Act of1964 was signed by President Johnson, establishing the council with 24 members to“recommend ways to maintain and increase the cultural resources of the nation andto encourage and develop greater appreciation and enjoyment of the arts by its citizens.” One month later, an appropriation of $50,000 was approved for the NCA.
In March 1965, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund issued a report entitled The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects (Nancy Hanks, a future chairman of the Arts
Endowment, was the project director). The publication maintained that federal support was crucial to the future of the arts in America. The first meeting of the National
Council on the Arts was held on April 9–10 at the White House and the Smithsonian
Institution’s Museum of Science and Technology. Council members discussed

a n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 15

numerous issues, including revision of copyright laws, fine arts decoration of all
future federally financed buildings, annual awards for outstanding artists, assistance to public television programming in the arts, improved cultural facilities andprograms in national parks, transfer of surplus property to nonprofit arts institutions, and the recognition of museums and cultural centers as public facilities equalin importance to libraries and schools.
The council established subcommittees for each artistic discipline. These subcommittees came back with proposals to train professional arts administrators, toprovide direct support to dance companies and resident professional theaters, toestablish the American Film Institute, and to preserve oral traditions. The council’s
second meeting took place in Tarrytown,
New York, on June 24, 1965. At Tarrytown, the recommendation was madethat creative artists be aided financially, torelease them from other employment sothat they might concentrate on creativework.

A Distinguished Roster

Composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, violinist
Isaac Stern, and president of the Metropolitan
Opera Association Anthony A. Bliss talk at one of thefirst National Council on the Arts meetings in
Tarrytown, New York. (Photo by R. Philip Hanes, Jr.)

16 n e a : a h i s t o r y

The National Council on the Arts in 1965
counted among its members some of themost distinguished and talented artists,
directors, and academics in the UnitedStates. Appointed by President Johnson,
the first council included novelist Ralph
Ellison; Paul Engle, poet and longtime
director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop;
actors Elizabeth Ashley and Gregory
Peck; Oliver Smith, theatrical designer,
producer, and painter; William Pereira,architect and former film producer;
Minoru Yamasaki, architect; George
Stevens, Sr., film director and producer;
composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein; choreographer Agnes de Mille;violinist Isaac Stern; sculptor David Smith; and newsman David Brinkley. By February 1966, the council had added four new members: Herman David Kenin,president of the American Federation of Musicians, who stepped in following David
Smith’s death in May 1965; novelist John Steinbeck, who replaced David Brinkley
after work demands forced the journalist to withdraw; writer Harper Lee; and painterRichard Diebenkorn.
Museum directors and organization leaders included René d’Harnoncourt, director, the Museum of Modern Art; Albert Bush-Brown, president, Rhode Island Schoolof Design; James Johnson Sweeney, director, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and aleading historian of modern art; Anthony A. Bliss, president, Metropolitan Opera
Association; Stanley Young, executive director, American National Theater andAcademy; Warner Lawson, dean, College of Fine Arts, Howard University; Otto
Wittmann, director, Toledo Museum of Art; R. Philip Hanes, Jr., president, Arts
Councils of America; Eleanor Lambert, honorary member, Council of Fashion
Designers of America; Father Gilbert Hartke, Speech and Drama Department,
Catholic University of America; and, ex-officio, Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary, Smithsonian Institution. Roger Stevens was named chairman.

Early State Arts Councils
During the same year the Arts Councils of America (ACA), later known as the
Associated Councils of the Arts, a precursor to the National Assembly of State Arts
Agencies, expanded and opened its first office in New York. Nancy Hanks, futurechairman of the NEA, played a key role in firmly establishing the ACA. Hanks was
a Southerner, and much of the work that culminated in the inauguration of ACA
had begun in North Carolina, where business entities in Winston-Salem had joineda council to support the arts to improve the state’s national reputation damaged byimages of poverty and racial turmoil. A similar major business initiative took place
on a national scale in the fall of 1967, when David Rockefeller and other corporate
leaders inaugurated the Business Committee for the Arts. Chaired by C. Douglas
Dillon, who had served as Undersecretary of State under President Eisenhower andas Secretary of the Treasury in the Kennedy Administration, and later as presidentof the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the committee aimed to devise strategies tobring the business and arts communities into partnerships and more effective
forms of mutual support.

a n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 17

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Arts and Humanities Act on September 29, 1965.
(Photo courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library)

An Agency Is Born
On September 29, 1965, President Johnson signed the National Foundation on theArts and the Humanities Act establishing the National Endowment for the Arts andthe National Endowment for the Humanities. The Arts and Humanities Act included language clearly reminiscent of the Kennedy-era pledge to enhance America as a
global exemplar: “The world leadership which has come to the United States cannot
rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be founded upon
worldwide respect and admiration for the nation’s high qualities as a leader in therealm of ideas and of the spirit.”
That affirmation appeared in the “Declaration of Purpose” that Congress included
as the second section of the act. It further stated:• “The encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in thehumanities and the arts, while primarily a matter for private and local initiative, isalso an appropriate matter of concern to the Federal Government;

18 n e a : a h i s t o r y• “A high civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone but
must give full value and support to the other great branches of man’s scholarly andcultural activity;• “Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens and . . . must therefore
foster and support a form of education designed to make men masters of their technology and not its unthinking servant;• “The practice of art and the study of the humanities require constant dedicationand devotion and . . . while no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create andsustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry
but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”

The First NEA Grants
With its first appropriations bill signed October 31, 1965, the Arts Endowment started its inaugural fiscal year with only eight months remaining, a budget of $2.5
million, and fewer than a dozen employees. The first NEA grant was made to theAmerican Ballet Theatre in December, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey presented the organization with $100,000. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes
wrote at the time, “History, or at least a tiny footnote to history, was made. . . . At thehome of Oliver Smith, co-director of American Ballet Theatre with Lucia Chase, thefirst presentation of money was made by the National Council on the Arts.” The New
York Herald Tribune commented, “The Treasury of the United States has saved anational treasure.”
Other initial grant recipients included:• The Martha Graham Dance Company for its first national tour in 15 years;• A pilot program in New York City, Detroit, and Pittsburgh entitled Poets in the
Schools;• Choreography fellowships to Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, José Limón, andPaul Taylor.
The first complete series of grants was made in fiscal year 1967, with a budget ofnearly $8 million. These early grants illustrate the great range of projects the Arts
Endowment has supported since its inception, as well as its expanding reach acrossthe nation. They included:• In architecture, planning, and design: 11 grants were awarded, totaling $281,100,
to the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the Lake Michigana n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 19

The first NEA grant was made in 1965 to the American Ballet Theatre, shown here performing
Swan Lake. (Photo by Martha Swope)

Region Planning Council, among others;• In dance: seven grants totaling $177,325, reaching companies as geographicallydiverse as the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College and a Washington
State Arts Commission summer residency in the Pacific Northwest;• In education: ten institutional grants and five awards, totaling $892,780, to college graduates of art programs;• In folk art: one grant for $39,500 to the National Folk Festival Association, later
renamed the National Council for the Traditional Arts;

20 n e a : a h i s t o r y• In literature: the first series of grants to 23 creative writers as well as grants tonine literary organizations, totaling $737,010;• In music: 18 grants totaling $653,858, to the Composer Assistance Program andto recipients such as the American Choral Foundation, symphony orchestras in
Denver and Boston, and the New York City Opera to expand a program allowing
training and on-the-job experience for young singers and aspiring conductors;• In public media: four grants totaling $788,300, in support of a range of educational television programs in the arts;• In theater: 23 grants totaling $1,007,500, including awards for resident professional theaters such as the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Arizona
Repertory Theatre, Cleveland Play House, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Seattle Repertory Theatre;• In the visual arts, 60 individual grants and a range of other awards were given,
totaling $735,995. Visual arts grants included funding for public sculpture in
Philadelphia, Houston, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, as well as support for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in
Fort Worth, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
In the fall of 1966, regional panels had begun convening to discuss the first NEA
grants to visual artists. The New York panel included Metropolitan Museum curator
Henry Geldzahler; painter Robert Motherwell; critic Barbara Rose; and sculptor
George Segal. Segal had previously denounced the concept of a governmental program to fund the arts as resembling “Soviet-type” manipulation of culture, but hewas convinced to participate after discussions with Chairman Roger Stevens.
In retrospect, the first NEA Literature, Visual Arts, and Dance Fellowships are
impressive in their critical perspicacity. In the visual arts, the roster of 60 names
included numerous artists then outside the mainstream, such as the California
artists Wallace Berman, Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, and Gary Molitor. The first
grantees on the East Coast and in the Midwest were equally remarkable. In New
York, Alfred Leslie secured one of the many timely grants the NEA would award over
the years to assist artists in dire need. A successful artist in gallery sales, Leslie
turned from abstract expressionism to portraiture in 1962. The NEA panels that met
in 1966 had not considered him, but subsequently a fire destroyed his studio, alongwith a considerable inventory of his most recent paintings. His NEA grant came in
the aftermath and rescued him financially. He went on to receive the Award of Merit
Medal in Painting for lifetime achievement from the American Academy of Arts andLetters in 1994.

a n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 21

In literature, the first fellowships assisted notable writers of fiction and poetry
such as Maxine Kumin, William Gaddis, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Richard
Yates. The NEA also awarded three grants to biographers made jointly with the
National Endowment for the Humanities, including one to Faubion Bowers, biographer of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, and one to Allan Seager,
biographer of the poet Theodore Roethke.
For choreography, as noted above, the first round of grants went to Alvin Ailey,
Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, José Limón, Alwin Nikolais, Anna Sokolow,
and Paul Taylor—an exemplary roster of talent. One of the works subsidized, Martha
Graham’s Cortege of Eagles, inspired by events in the Trojan War, was eventually performed using the final set design created by sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The piece hadhistorical value for another reason, as Graham later wrote: “The last time I danced
was in Cortege of Eagles. I was seventy-six years old . . . I did not plan to stop dancingthat night. It was a painful decision I knew I had to make.”

Involvement with the New Trends in Art
These initial grants demonstrated that the NEA was closely involved with the current
movements and trends in American creative life. In the visual arts the agency supported pop art and neo-surrealism, while at the same time it fostered appreciation ofother styles and genres. The Arts Endowment did not reward only establishedartists; it encouraged young and fresh talents previously overlooked or growing in
acceptance. Other front-line figures in the historic roster of 1967 visual arts grantees
included Leon Polk Smith, Mark di Suvero, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Manuel Neri,Tony Smith, and H. C. Westermann. None of these artists were traditionalists. The
exacting modernist critics Hilton Kramer, then of the New York Times, and Thomas
Hess, of ARTnews, praised the choices as excellent. All of the grantees had been
selected by their colleagues, and none had applied for NEA support. The new agency
had not yet adopted a mechanism for applications.
The other areas of creativity saw equally impressive awards in the first year. Architecture, planning, and design grants were made for landscape beautification,
including hiking and bicycle trails, town redesign, and a series of environmental
guides. The architectural and environmental theorist R. Buckminster Fuller
received a grant to erect one of his innovative geodesic domes at the 1967 Festival of
Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.

22 n e a : a h i s t o r yHundreds of Grand Rapids, Michigan, residents turned out for the 1969 dedication of Alexander
Calder’s La Grande Vitesse, supported by the NEA public art initiative in 1967. (Photo courtesy of
the Grand Rapids Public Library)Film, Television, and Dance
A remarkable achievement of the early years of the NEA and its mission to support
film was the creation of the American Film Institute (AFI), a durable and productive
partnership between the U.S. government and the movie industry. An innovative
grant was also made in 1967 to New York National Educational Television (WNET)
for two programs on American fashion designers, including an award-winning documentary on Pauline Trigère. In the same year, dance benefited substantially from
NEA assistance, with funding provided for the Association of American Dance Companies, the City Center Joffrey Ballet, and individual recipients.

Arts Education
From the beginning, education in the arts has been an area of significant investmentby the Arts Endowment. In 1967, education grants included major financing of anational film study program by Fordham University to develop film and television
training curricula for elementary and secondary schools—an idea that remains

a n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 23

American Film Institute
By the mid-sixties, the U.S. film industry
was more than 75 years old, and manygroundbreaking works of early cinema
were aging past the point of preservation.
Recognizing the danger, the newly founded National Endowment for the Arts
moved quickly. It commissioned a study
by Stanford Research Institute to explore
the prospects for a new institution, andthen joined the Motion Picture Association of America and the Ford Foundation
to create the now renowned American
Film Institute (AFI). Gregory Peck chaired
the first board of trustees, and producer

The American Film Institute, founded in 1967
with funding from the NEA, has preserved
thousands of films, such as Broken Blossoms(1919) starring Lillian Gish. (Photo courtesyof AFI)

24 n e a : a h i s t o r yGeorge Stevens, Jr., became its first
director.
The NEA provided an initial grant of$1.3 million to AFI for a project to collect,preserve, and archive nitrate films. By
1971, more than 4,500 films had been
recovered and preserved. Through continued NEA funding, the American Film
Institute expanded to establish a National
Center for Film and Video Preservation,
publish the AFI Catalog of American Feature Film, and create national exhibition
programs. In 1987, the NEA’s funding for
AFI activities reached its high point withawards totaling $3.5 million.
Though Arts Endowment support
decreased over the years, AFI is still thriving. The institute presents more than
3,000 events annually, including film festivals and workshops. Its prestigious Life
Achievement Award has honored Billy
Wilder, Frank Capra, Elizabeth Taylor,
Sidney Poitier, and many others for theircontributions to film history. AFI maintains its mission of preservation, and asof 2008, more than 27,500 feature films,
shorts, newsreels, documentaries, and television programs dating from 1894 to thepresent comprise the AFI Collection at the
Library of Congress. Among its recent acquisitions are a ten-minute 1912 film, A
Fool and His Money, produced by the firstfemale director, Alice Guy, and starring
an entirely African-American cast; andThe Life of General Villa (1914), featuring
Pancho Villa.

revolutionary today. A large grant, especially in 1967 dollars, of $681,000 was madefor a Laboratory Theatre Project to assist in training secondary school students inclassical drama. The project supported professional theater companies in three cities
with free performances for secondary school students on weekday afternoons and for
adults on weekends. It was aimed at improving the quality of school instruction bymaking high-quality theater presentations integral to high school curricula. The
three pilot cities were Providence, Rhode Island; New Orleans; and Los Angeles, andperformances included Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, George Bernard Shaw’s SaintJoan, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals. The
spirit of this early NEA program was later revived and transformed through the
Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, under future NEA Chairman
Dana Gioia.

Literature
In 1967, the Arts Endowment’s Literature Program awarded 23 grants to individual
writers. In fiction as in the visual arts, the awards demonstrated a clear recognitionof excellence. Eleven years after his NEA grant, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote in
Yiddish and whose works were traditionally published as serials in the New Yorkdaily Forward, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His NEA grant permitted him
to finish his novel The Manor. Tillie Olsen, whose literary career had begun amid theidealism of the 1930s, was only then emerging as an influential figure in American
feminist letters when she received her NEA grant. Richard Yates has come to be seen
by literary critics and readers as a leading voice exploring alienation and lonelinessin mid-century America.
Literary institutions, including the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines,
were chosen in the first series of grants, which provided advice and funds to publications such as Poetry, The Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and The
Virginia Quarterly Review. In addition, the Endowment provided $25,000 to theWatts Writers’ Workshop, established by the novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg in the aftermath of rioting in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965. The
Experimental Playwrights’ Theater received a total of $125,000 to produce plays byRobert Lowell at Yale University and by Studs Terkel at the University of Michigan.
In addition, the NEA funded Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope, one of the landmark dramatic works of its time starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander—who
would become Arts Endowment chairman in 1993.

a n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 25

The NEA funded the original production of Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope, starring
James Earl Jones and future NEA Chairman Jane Alexander. (Photo courtesy of Arena Stage)

The first poets to receive individual NEA grants included Maxine Kumin, Mona
Van Duyn (who later became the first female U.S. Poet Laureate), Hayden Carruth,
Robert Duncan, and Kenneth Patchen, as well as the translator I. L. Salomon, who wascompleting the translation of works by modern Italian poets such as Dino Campana.
The presence of Duncan on this list demonstrates the range of tastes exemplified bythese grants. He was a West Coast figure of mystical bent whose work was known
mainly to other poets, though his poems are affecting in their humor, tenderness, andwisdom.

Music
The Arts Endowment’s early grantmaking covered the full range of musical fields,with funds going to projects ranging from professional development institutes toorganizational workshops, from individual fellowships to major productions. In

26 n e a : a h i s t o r y1967, large grants supported national tours by the Metropolitan Opera and the San
Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theater, along with a grant to Carnegie Hall’s
Jeunesses Musicales, a youth program. The Metropolitan Opera grant enabled thecompany to give additional performances for labor groups and students in manystates so that new audiences could be exposed to the art form. Grants were distributed to composers through a Composer Assistance Program that had begun in 1966
and was administered by the American Symphony Orchestra League and the American Music Center. More general assistance to composers, totaling $30,000, wasenabled through the Thorne Music Fund.
Several music projects funded in the first years displayed the variety of support for
the arts. A 1967 grant to the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, enabled
the organization to bring the International Society for Music Education Conference
to the United States for the first time. A 1967 grant to conductor and violinist Alexander Schneider supported a project to meet the acute shortage of string musicians in
the nation. Matching grants awarded the same year to Hofstra University and to Violin Finishes had a preservation goal: respectively, a laboratory workshop on thetechnique of repairing string instruments, and an experimental analysis of violin varnish believed to have enriched violin quality and resonance more than 200 years ago.

Early Congressional Review and Debate
In 1968, the NEA encountered the first critical Congressional review of its programs, and the scrutiny extended to fellowships for individual artists. In that year,
after an acrimonious legislative debate, the Endowment’s budget stood at $7.2 million, with grants made to 187 individuals and 276 organizations. New NEA
programs included a groundbreaking initiative for dance touring and support formuseum acquisitions of works by living American artists.
Some legislators expressed anxiety that the NEA would escape federal oversight,
as well as bypass the cultural norms of the American majority. Others saw money for
new styles in art as a form of state censorship of more traditional styles. Portrait
painter Michael Werboff remonstrated, “Under the protection of the Federal [authority], there is nothing to which the traditional artist can appeal for defense of theirrights as contemporary American artists. . . . It puts the traditional American artist(s)into the hands of their worst enemy.” His view was echoed by Representative John
M. Ashbrook (R-OH), who warned that the NEA could “reward the avant-garde
artists and discourage the traditional artists.” Meanwhile, Representative Williama n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 27

Scherle (R-IA), who was an early critic of the Arts Endowment, questioned the wisdom of any government spending on the arts at all. He commented, “I do not feelthat it is past time to give thought to the propriety of Government-subsidized arts.”
There was even more Congressional outrage concerning a particular project theArts Endowment undertook in partnership with private foundations, including theRockefeller Foundation—The Theatre Development Fund (TDF), later known for its
discount TKTS booth in New York City. In 1968, as now, serious plays were increasingly difficult to produce in New York (then the source of most of the work seen
nationwide) due to steadily rising costs and economic pressure for blockbuster hits.
TDF had two goals: one, to facilitate production of artistically meritorious work; andtwo, to attract students, teachers, and audiences less likely to attend because of highticket prices.
The program sparked instant criticism. Some critics cast the program as a way tosupport dramatic works that nobody wanted to see. Headlines such as “Funds Will
Aid Shaky Plays on Broadway” and “$200,000 Fund to Help Sagging Stage Shows”
were echoed on Capitol Hill, as members of Congress attacked the initiative as“absolutely ridiculous” and a “prime example of government waste and stupidity.”
Representative Frank Bow (R-OH) reminded his colleagues that the Vietnam War
was on, and “We cannot have guns and butter. And this is guns with strawberry
shortcake covered with whipped cream and a cherry on top.”
Congressional advocates of the NEA and its partner agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities, recommended an authorization of $135 million (divided
evenly between the agencies) over two years, plus administrative funds and funds tomatch donations to the two Endowments. Congress instead approved a single-year
budget for the NEA of only $7.8 million for 1968. Wary of spending money on artists
during an expensive military conflict overseas, the House of Representatives passed
an amendment abolishing grants to individuals, but this measure was rejected in
the Senate. The controversy over grants to individual artists continued to simmer,
however, and would stimulate debate over the Arts Endowment’s role in American
culture repeatedly in subsequent years.

The Panel Process
In fiscal year 1970, the NEA budget marginally increased to $8.5 million, and a systemof application review replaced the more informal process that had operated from the
beginning. In November 1965, the National Council on the Arts voted to use advisory

28 n e a : a h i s t o r yDancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham was
one of the artists who participated in the NEA’s
panel review of grants. (Photo by Jack Mitchell)

panels in the grants review process. The
first panel on dance met in January
1966, and the first music panel, chaired
by Aaron Copland, met in April 1967. By
the mid-1970s, the panels would include, among others, dance experimentalist Merce Cunningham, fiction writer
Donald Barthelme, jazz performer
Cannonball Adderley, composer Gian
Carlo Menotti, and producer-director
Joseph Papp, the indefatigable impresario behind free Shakespeare productions in New York’s Central Park. By
1977, the advisory panel members andconsultants numbered 437 in total,though some of them served in two different capacities.

an agency established
As Lyndon B. Johnson prepared to leave the presidency, Roger Stevens’s tenure as
Arts Endowment chairman approached its end. Stevens had worked with vigor anddedication in the founding stages of the Arts Endowment. The agency was established, but with no existing institutional legacy to draw from in the federal system.
Yet the NEA proved healthy enough to survive a time of heightened political passions
and cultural ambitions. By increasing the funding available for the arts, and by broadening access to artistic activities, the Endowment had successfully begun to serve
existing and growing demands for the arts in American society.
R. Philip Hanes, Jr., an original member of the National Council on the Arts who
had challenged the chairman on critical issues, remembers Stevens as “a wonderfully wise and capable man who could achieve anything he felt was worth an effort—
even what literally everyone knew was impossible. Washington was called a city ofNorthern charm and Southern efficiency. Not the least of his achievements waschanging our nation’s capital from a backwater to a cultural Mecca. And the National
Endowment for the Arts could never have happened without him.”a n e w w o r l d b e c k o n s 29

Nancy Hanks, NEA Chairman 1969–77. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)chapter 3

A Fresh Direction

As the nea grew from year to year, so did its reputation.
Much of the credit goes to an event one might never have expected, the 1968 electionof Richard M. Nixon and his appointment of Leonard Garment to the White House
staff as his special consultant. A New York attorney, Garment’s areas of interest andcompetence included the arts and humanities. When Roger Stevens’s term as NEA
chairman expired two months after President Nixon’s inauguration, Stevens’s
deputy chairman, arts educator Douglas MacAgy, who had transformed the teachingof art on the West Coast in the 1940s, was appointed acting chairman for six months.
Nancy Hanks, who was destined to leave a deep impression on the NEA, succeeded
Roger Stevens as the Arts Endowment’s chairman on October 6, 1969. Hanks’s leadership at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and her tenure as head of the Arts Councils of
America gave her an important national perspective on arts funding and public policy. Born in Miami Beach on December 31, 1927, she graduated from Duke University
after a childhood spent in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and North Carolina. She servedin the Eisenhower Administration as an assistant to Nelson Rockefeller at the newly
created Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and as a White House assistant for special projects. She then moved to New York where she worked for the
Rockefellers until 1968.
Garment took responsibility for shepherding Hanks’s appointment through theconfirmation process with the assistance of another friend and supporter, Michael
Straight, who became her deputy chairman. Before her appointment, Hanks met with
President Nixon, who assured her of his support for the agency’s continued funding.

31

Prior to being named chairman of the Arts Endowment, Hanks had articulated avision for national arts policy in a 1968 article. She wrote, “In dollar comparison to
our national needs for defense, for poverty programs, for health, for welfare, or for
education, the requirements for the arts are minuscule. The support required for thearts, for the improvement of our cities . . . will come from a myriad of individuals,
foundations, corporations, as well as governments.”
Hanks began her tenure with enthusiasm. In an interview with the New York Timessoon after her confirmation, she commented, “A great orchestra or a fine museum isa natural resource, like a park. It must be maintained. I believe this, and so does the
National Council [on the Arts].” She later recalled in an oral history, “I do not remember having any real question about which way the agency would go. I knew almost all
the program directors well. . . . They had used their little money wisely. You had astrong basic staff. You had a very good Council. Therefore, right from the beginning,
I had a feeling of total confidence in the people I was working with.”

Hanks’s Circle
The appointments of Garment and Hanks reflected a commitment to the arts thatfew would have ascribed to Richard Nixon, who, in fact, had an abiding love of classical music. Garment maintained that President Nixon’s support for the NEA represented a conciliatory gesture to liberal intellectuals, who were increasingly disaffected by the combat in Vietnam. Garment had looked toward a life as a professional
jazz musician, playing the tenor saxophone, and he dropped out of college during
World War II to perform. He was eventually drafted, and his place in Teddy Powell’sband, for which he had been playing, was taken by Lee Konitz, who would later gain
fame as an exemplar of the West Coast style of cool jazz. Garment was dismissedfrom the service on medical grounds, and returned first to jazz and then to college.
His new band included Larry Rivers, later acclaimed as a painter, and a young
flautist-saxophonist named Alan Greenspan, who would one day become chairmanof the Federal Reserve. A few years in college led Garment to the legal profession,and he began a career as a New York investment lawyer. Nixon, after a failed gubernatorial bid in California, moved to New York and joined the law firm where Garment worked. Six years later, Garment joined President-elect Nixon in Washington
to help him assemble staff for his Administration.
Other distinctive personalities served in the agency during the Nixon Administration, or, as many NEA veterans refer to it, “the Hanks administration”—a justifiable

32 n e a : a h i s t o r yPresident Richard M. Nixon holds an informal meeting in the Oval Office with NEA Chairman
Nancy Hanks and Special Consultant Leonard Garment in December 1969. (Photo by Karl
Schumacher)claim, since Hanks’s tenure extended beyond Nixon’s to 1977. Michael Straightserved prominently as her deputy chairman. A writer, philanthropist, and former
editor of The New Republic, Straight became a close colleague and biographer ofHanks. Straight had served as an unpaid advisor to the State Department, and,briefly, at the Interior Department, during the New Deal. He was offered an advisory
position in the Kennedy Administration, which he had turned down because of hisformer association with a Soviet spy ring. By 1969, after he had briefed the Federal
Bureau of Investigation on his knowledge of Russian espionage, Straight was
cleared to work under Hanks.
One of the first major events during Hanks’s chairmanship was a reception tohonor veterans of the New Deal’s arts programs. Participants included the paintersa fresh direction

33

Jacob Lawrence, who created iconic works about African-American life, such as Ironers (1943)
pictured, was one of the artists honored by an NEA-sponsored reception for participants in the
New Deal arts programs. (Photo courtesy of the Phillips Collection)

Milton Avery, William Gropper, Philip Evergood, Adolph Gottlieb, Jacob Lawrence(named to the National Council on the Arts in 1978), Louise Nevelson (one of thefirst recipients of the National Medal of Arts), and Isaac and Moses Soyer. In a memoir of Hanks, Straight recalled that “most of them could not believe that two
bureaucrats of the Nixon Administration wanted to honor them. There was a great
deal of laughter before the party ended—and a few tears.”
Hanks herself had been viewed with suspicion by some in the arts community
with traditional artistic tastes. They feared that her work as a staffer to Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers—who, as a family, were involved in founding theMuseum of Modern Art in New York and were aggressive promoters of the artistic
avant-garde—would entrench an experimental bias in the NEA.

34 n e a : a h i s t o r yFirst Controversies
Throughout her first term, Nancy Hanks confronted a series of controversies that tested her leadership and strained relationships between the Arts Endowment and members of Congress. One commotion erupted over a grant awarded to the 1969 issue ofAmerican Literary Anthology, an annual volume of writings drawn from literary journals. The editor of the volume, George Plimpton, included a work by Aram Saroyan,
son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan and a practitioner of a visual verse style of writing known as “concrete poetry.” Saroyan’s contribution consistedof a one-word concrete poem that had been published a year before in the Chicago
Review. It read, verbatim, “lighght.” The grant was attacked in Congress, most notably
by Representative William Scherle (R-IA), who denounced the Endowment for devoting $750 to the project. A second dispute followed, involving Plimpton’s acceptanceof a so-called “obscene” work by poet and rock performer Ed Sanders for the 1970
American Literary Anthology, prompting the NEA to withdraw support for the annual
volume.
The next year, Nancy Hanks and Michael Straight confronted another unexpected
controversy. The Arts Endowment had awarded a $50,000 grant to Arena Stage’s
outreach program, Living Stage, for performances for inner-city high school youth
in Baltimore. The project encouraged the kids to express their reactions to the play inwhatever idiom they wished. Notwithstanding an agreement between Living Stageand Arena Stage that only performers and youngsters would be present, a Baltimore
newspaper reporter secretly viewed the improvised work, and later wrote that the
youngsters were being encouraged to use profanity by the Living Stage actors. The
story reached Congress swiftly, and occasioned lengthy and personal conversations
between Hanks, Straight, several members of Congress, and the leadership of Arena
Stage and Living Stage. The controversy dissipated, but took up considerable timeand effort.
In 1974, another controversy erupted over an NEA grant that proved to be one of
the most significant crises in the agency’s early history. Writer Erica Jong received a$5,000 NEA Literature Fellowship in 1973, and soon after her novel Fear of Flying
was published. A provocative work dealing frankly with sexual themes, Jong’s novel
included an acknowledgement to the Arts Endowment, raising questions about theEndowment’s sponsorship of sexual content. Even though the chairman of the Literature Advisory Panel in 1973, who had recommended the grant, was the prominent
book editor Simon Michael Bessie, contention over Fear of Flying extended to thea fresh direction

35

U.S. Senate. Only with significant help from pro-Endowment legislators was thecontroversy resolved.

Hanks’s Vision: Art for All Americans
Historian Joseph Wesley Zeigler, in a detailed history of government funding for thearts entitled Arts in Crisis, noted that Nancy Hanks “had preserved the essential balance between artistic freedom and Congressional concern and oversight.” Hersuccesses with both political parties, the arts community, and elected officials
enabled her to expand the Arts Endowment in several different directions. August
Heckscher, President Kennedy’s conceptual developer for federal arts support, hadenvisioned programs that would imitate the European model, in which central governments supported national theaters, museums, cinema, dance companies, andliterary and language academies. The NEA under Hanks, however, preferred to forge
numerous partnerships with nonprofit arts organizations, rather than underwrite
the budgets of official state-sponsored arts groups.
Hanks favored support of local and regional institutions that would extend accessand foster broader creativity. To encourage a wider range of applications and an
expanded geographic reach for NEA-funded works, she clarified and strengthened
the process for awarding grants. To distribute federal funds more widely, she committed to assisting state arts agencies, reflecting her earlier experience in helping
establish the New York State Council on the Arts. She has been described as understanding art as a medium for public betterment, and many of her programs such as
Artists-in-Schools reflected her sense of duty to the American citizenry as well as toAmerican artists.
Hanks’s “art-for-all-Americans” approach won newfound support from legislators, most of whom represented districts far from the artistic centers of the country.
In 1971, the NEA’s budget was doubled, from $8.2 million for 1970 to $15.1 million.
Hanks’s and Straight’s deliberation with legislators made the increase possible. The
Artists-in-Schools Program, with $900,000 from the U.S. Department of Education, sent more than 300 artists into elementary and secondary schools in 31 states.
Such programs were not only artistically meritorious, but also represented Hanks’scommitment to ensure the Arts Endowment reached young audiences with few
other opportunities to experience the arts. At the same time, the NEA expanded thescope of its programming. Music now included jazz and orchestras, and photography was added to the Visual Arts Program.

36 n e a : a h i s t o r yJoining Hanks, Garment, and Straight in the NEA leadership was Brian O’Doherty, who was recruited during the MacAgy term and arrived with Hanks in 1969. A
former editor-in-chief of the influential magazine Art in America, he would direct the
NEA Visual Arts Program and then the Media Arts Program for a total of 27 years.
O’Doherty was an iconoclastic intellectual even by the standards of the arts scene of
the late 1960s. He had been a friend and collaborator of Marcel Duchamp, one ofmodernism’s most inventive personalities, and admired the surrealist poet and critic
André Breton—sure indications of his artistic tastes.
As suggested earlier, some believe that the Nixon Administration viewed support
for the NEA as a means to quell discontent regarding foreign policy decisions in
Indochina. Michael Brenson, a commentator on the Arts Endowment, argued in
Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in
America that Brian O’Doherty “helped the Endowment to maintain its credibility
among the most vocal and activist artists during some of the most explosive years of
the Vietnam War.” Garment and William Safire, another central figure in the Nixon
Administration, both remember how support for the arts figured in the politics ofthe day. In the 2006 Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, Safire recalled,“I knew this remarkable woman [Hanks] during the Nixon years in Washington
when I worked in the White House. My fellow speechwriter, Ray Price, was enlistedby this Rockefeller Brothers arts enthusiast in the cause of federal support for thearts. . . . Expectations were low, to say the least, for President Nixon’s support of thearts. But Nancy Hanks and Ray had a powerful ally in Leonard Garment. . . . Nancy
kept in close touch with Len, providing all the artistic arguments, and Len in turnworked over the President, who admired Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia
Orchestra. But I can hear Nixon’s voice now, saying to me from his place in purgatory, ‘You know, Bill, there’s not a single vote in this for me.’”In his own 1989 Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy, Garment
explained why he thought President Nixon favored the Arts Endowment. The
extraordinary funding increases “did not come about just because the powers thatbe suddenly changed their minds one morning and decided it was time to give
culture the respect it deserved. Nor did it happen mainly because President Nixon
was persuaded of the concrete political benefits that support for the arts would
bring him. More important was that Richard Nixon knew the extent to which theVietnam War had turned America into two mutually hostile camps. The president
wanted for his own an issue that would not divide his audience into sympathetic
hawks and hostile doves. It was more an effort to soften and survive than divide anda fresh direction

37

conquer, but this was the reason my arguments found favor.”
While the political motivations have faded with the passage of time, the fact
remains that President Nixon’s support for the Arts Endowment eventually transformed the NEA from a tiny federal program into a significant policy leader in thearts.

Hanks’s Balancing Act
Nancy Hanks had the extraordinarily difficult task of navigating the political turmoilof the Administration, the political protests of the intellectuals, the populist tastes ofmany legislators, and the popularity of extreme positions within the art world.
Thanks to her own talent for political persuasion and her recruitment of talented
aides, Hanks prevailed again and again, and the agency evolved accordingly.
As the 1970s wore on, attitudes toward the NEA gradually changed, bringing newpressures on its grantmaking. For a new generation of artists, the NEA was part ofthe existing environment rather than an innovation. Many of them, according to Zeigler’s Arts in Crisis, “had come to believe that they were entitled to federal funding:‘You, the United States, should be paying for me to create, because I’m here and I’mcreating. As an artist, I’m an important member of the society—and so the society
should be supporting me.’” At times, these artists would pressure the Arts Endowment to consider them, rather than the American public, the proper focus of theagency’s attention. To this constituency, the Endowment appeared more a foundation than a public agency.
In addition, the great expansion of higher education during the 1960s produced asignificantly larger number of aspiring artists than had existed in the 1950s. From1950 to 1961, first-year college enrollments nearly doubled from 2.2 million to 4.1
million. That figure more than doubled again to 8.6 million in 1970, then rose to 12
million in 1980. Many of these students were recruited to arts programs, and after
graduation pursued arts careers.
During these transformative years under Hanks, NEA funding rose from $9 million in fiscal year (FY) 1970 to $99.9 million in FY 1977. With a soaring budget and,in accord with Hanks’s ambition—to increase the spread of Endowment grantees
across the country—the NEA became a central influential institution in the world of
American art. In a 1974 article in the New York Times Magazine, writer David
Dempsey praised Hanks as “the person who has done as much as anyone in government or out, to bring about this change in attitude.” Once labeled “the lady from

38 n e a : a h i s t o r yCulture Gap,” Hanks had become the fourth highest female appointee in the Nixon
Administration.
Still, the Arts Endowment continued to have its problems. Even NEA supporter
Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), according to Dempsey, wondered whether the paintings the government was paying for were “realistic,” that is, representational, or “didthey consist of doodles and swirls?” Dempsey saw the new Visual Arts Director
Brian O’Doherty as fitting ably into an environment of “young, bright, dedicated,and suitably hip” staff. Dempsey also observed, “The joy of giving has nurtured a
new type of government bureaucrat”—something few expected from the Nixon set.
He noted that the NEA had come on the scene as private arts funding “was beginning to shrink,” yet this took place simultaneously with a “culture explosion.” Thereasons for the latter phenomena were identified by August Heckscher during the
Kennedy Administration as “more leisure and affluence for the average person . . . a
new generation of college-bred taste makers in small towns and cities, life-styles
modeled on artistic rather than commercial values.”

Organizational Expansion

Helen Milliken, then First Ladyof Michigan, engineered Artrain’s
creation in 1971, with support fromthe NEA. (Photo courtesy of Walter
P. Reuther Library, Wayne State
University)

The NEA under Hanks was as prolific as it waswell financed, and the national outreach continued. Beginning in 1971, 55 state and jurisdictionalarts agencies (including the District of Columbia,
American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the
U.S. Virgin Islands) received Basic State Grants
from the Arts Endowment. Illustrating her dedication to serving every citizen, one of Hanks’sfavorite projects was Artrain USA, a railroad service that brought a locomotive and six coaches carrying silversmiths, macramé artists, potters, andsculptors to towns in Michigan that had no museums. It began as an idea of the Michigan Council
for the Arts, which recruited Helen Milliken, thelieutenant governor’s wife, to raise $850,000 for
the local project. “It was tremendously importantto have the backing of the NEA when we went tobusinesses and major industries asking for fund-a fresh direction

39

ing,” Milliken recalls. “It was the key; we couldn’t have raised that kind of money without that initial boost.” Soon afterward, when Milliken became the first lady of the Stateof Michigan, she was able to expand Artrain USA into eight of the Rocky Mountainstates, with the Arts Endowment providing funding for half the cost of the trips.
Artrain USA later expanded its operations across the Western states, touring to 30
towns in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, andWyoming. Television reporter Charles Kuralt showcased Artrain USA as it moved
through Idaho and Wyoming. Artrain USA continues to this day, and has visited
more than 725 communities in 44 states and the District of Columbia, changing
shows every two or three years. The 2006 tour, Native Views: Influences of Modern Culture, provided a contemporary Native-American art exhibition. As of 2008, this tour,
funded with an NEA American Masterpieces grant, had reached more than 160,000
people in 95 primarily rural and Native-American communities across America.
NEA funding doubled in 1972 to $31.5 million, allowing expansion of existing programs and the establishment of support programs for opera and jazz. A total of $2.3
million was awarded in dance to choreographers including Alvin Ailey, Trisha
Brown, and Alwin Nikolais; national tours of American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet; dance companies such as Salt Lake City’s Ballet West; and a broad rangeof smaller companies.
Music programs received $9.8 million, the largest discipline share. Smallerawardees ranged from the Mobile Jazz Festival to the Bach Society of Minnetonka,
Minnesota. More than $5 million went to orchestras in all areas of the country,
including Shreveport, Louisiana; Toledo, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida;
Honolulu; Boston; Seattle; and Chicago. And $3 million was directed toward Central
City Opera in Denver, Houston Grand Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe
Opera, the Mississippi Opera Association, and many other companies.
The impact of early Arts Endowment grants is well expressed by Joan Woodbury,
co-artistic director of the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Salt Lake City. In 1972,
Ririe-Woodbury received support to participate in two of the agency’s dance programs, Artists-in-Schools and Dance Touring. The aid “sent this small dance company from the West on a course of national and international service,” Woodbury
recalled in 2006. “For the nine-year life of these two programs, the company toured
to almost every state in the Union. They developed artists, commissioned new works,
and developed artist-teachers to fulfill their goals.” The agency had identified a worthy
but fledgling organization and granted it sustainability. “Without the ‘stamp of
approval’ from the NEA . . . very few of the accomplishments of this company would

40 n e a : a h i s t o r yhave been possible,” Woodbury continued,“We can proudly say, with many others, ‘We’restill alive and kicking.’”
Initiated in the NEA’s earliest years, by 1974
the Dance Touring Program included 94 companies reaching audiences in 48 states andtwo special jurisdictions for an aggregate ofmore than 400 weeks, truly a revolutionarychange in the American dance landscape.
Other programs had similar impacts. Artistsin-Schools, whose pilot Poets in the Schools
also began in the Stevens years, reached morethan 5,000 schools in all 50 states and five special jurisdictions by 1974, including hundredsof thousands of children and teenagers in thefields of dance, crafts, painting, sculpture,music, theater, film, folk arts, and design.
Many leading authors and poets received
grants of $5,000 each in 1972, including StanWriter Eudora Welty, center, wasappointed to the National Council on
ley Elkin, Etheridge Knight, William Meredthe Arts in 1972, joining other members
ith, Carl Rakosi, James Schuyler, and William
such as jazz pianist Billy Taylor (right)
Jay Smith. Regional film centers were now
and museum director E. Leland Webber
funded through a Public Media Program. In(left). (Photo by David E. Hausmann)
1972, President Nixon authorized the Federal
Council on the Arts and Humanities, chaired by Nancy Hanks, to create the Federal
Design Improvement Program. The program was intended to examine and upgrade
design in the federal government, including architecture, graphic design, and standards for design procurement.
There were now ten discipline-based advisory panels with members generally
serving staggered three-year terms. The panels had begun as “peer panels,” andstemmed from a 1965 resolution of the National Council on the Arts calling for thechairman to “appoint committees of interested and qualified persons or organizations to advise the Council with respect to projects, policies, or special studies as may
be undertaken.” The panels had been formalized in 1969, and by 1973 there weremore than 200 members. The painter Roy Lichtenstein participated, as did theauthors Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Other prominent authors also serveda fresh direction41

in various capacities. For example, the Mississippi writer Eudora Welty was appointed by President Nixon to the National Council on the Arts in 1972, and she served on
the Arts Endowment’s Twentieth Anniversary Committee of Leading American
Artists in 1984.

Hanks’s Second Term
Nancy Hanks was reappointed NEA chairman in 1974. Her first term had seen aseven-fold increase in the Endowment’s budget, which now stood at $64 million.
By the end of 1974, President Nixon had resigned, succeeded by President Gerald
R. Ford, who appointed Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President. President Ford cameout early in support of the agency, recalling the civic impact of an enormous 42-ton
sculpture by Alexander Calder in the center of what is now Calder Plaza in Grand
Rapids, Michigan—Ford’s hometown. The sculpture had been funded by a grant in1967 of $45,000 from the Arts Endowment’s nascent Works of Art in Public Places
Program, and it had become a symbol for the city. Each year on the anniversary of
Calder’s birth, the city hosts an arts festival encompassing ten city blocks and attended by half a million people. According to City Historian Gordon Olson, the project“changed the role of the arts and public sculpture in the life of this community.”
In part because of growth in personnel, the Arts Endowment moved from its homein the Shoreham Building at 15th and H Streets to the McPherson Square Buildingon K Street, which also housed investigators of the Watergate scandal. “Every day we
had to face a battery of television cameras when we arrived and left work,” recalls Ann
Guthrie Hingston, who served under Hanks and again under Chairman Dana Gioia
as director of Government Affairs. A few years later the agency moved again to
Columbia Plaza in Foggy Bottom, which also housed the U.S. Bicentennial Commission headed by John Warner, later a U.S. Senator from Virginia.
The Arts Endowment’s tenth anniversary was celebrated September 29–30, 1975,
first at the LBJ Ranch, then at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum at
the University of Texas at Austin. The event coincided with the public opening of thepresidential papers on the arts and humanities and included the participation of
Lady Bird Johnson, Nancy Hanks, Roger Stevens, Hubert Humphrey, Jacob Javits,
Kirk Douglas, Jamie Wyeth, and Beverly Sills. Thirty years later, in 2005, the NEA’s
fortieth anniversary also would again be marked with programs and discussion at
the LBJ Library and Museum.

42 n e a : a h i s t o r ySaving the Old Post Office
The Old Post Office Building at the cornerof Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street,
NW, is one of the most unusual buildingsin the nation’s capital. Sited midway
between the White House and the Capitol,
the building was completed in 1899 as a
new home for the United States Postal
Department and the District Post Office.
W. J. Edbrooke, supervising architect of
the U.S. Department of Treasury, designed
the building as an anchor to help revitalize
an area that had become a notorious slumby the late nineteenth century.
The structure exemplifies the Romanesque Revival architecture of its time—
marked by round arches, horizontal silhouettes, and heavy rough-cut stone walls.

The Old Post Office Building in Washington,
DC, which was preserved due to the efforts of
NEA Chair Nancy Hanks. ( Photo by Terry J.
Adams, National Park Service)

It was also the city’s tallest building, next
to the Washington Monument, thanks to
its 315 foot high clock tower. Soon after its
completion, architectural tastes changed
and Classical Revival became the dominant style. Compared with this new
aesthetic of marbled elegance, the Post
Office seemed dull and stodgy. Appleton’sBooklovers Magazine declared in 1906
that the structure “will require obliteration
by dynamite before it can be brought into
harmony with its surroundings.” Every
proposal up to 1974 for improving Pennsylvania Avenue called for its removal. By
the early 1970s, the structure sufferedfrom wear and neglect, and a permit for its
demolition was at last approved.
“Don’t Tear It Down”—a citizens actiongroup that is now the D.C. Preservation
League—battled to save the Old Post
Office. Nancy Hanks, chairman of the
National Endowment for the Arts, joined
the fight with William Lacy, then NEA
Architecture and Environmental Arts
Program director and an advocate forthe adaptive reuse of historic structures.
Hanks persuaded Congress to fund afeasibility study in 1974 and promoted legislation to fund the building’s renovation.
She testified before the Senate and proposed moving the NEA’s offices there. Her
commitment saved the structure.
Renamed the Nancy Hanks Center in
1983, the Old Post Office is a national historic landmark, and houses the National
Endowment for the Arts, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and thePresident’s Committee on the Arts and the
Humanities.

a fresh direction

43Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Act
In December 1975, President Ford signed the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Act. U.S.
Representative John Brademas (D-IN) played a prominent role in shepherding theindemnity legislation through Congress. (In 1976, Representative Brademas would
again serve the cause of the arts by cosponsoring, with Senator Pell, a four-year reauthorization of the Arts Endowment’s operations.) The new legislation facilitated theinsuring of art, artifacts, and other objects for exhibition in the U.S. The dollar valueof art and other objects from other countries that could be insured by the government at any one time was $250 million. With this program in place, extremely
valuable works of art housed around the world could now be transported to the U.S.
for exhibition with their value protected in cases of damage, theft, or vandalism.
With the entry of major works of art and archaeological artifacts from abroad, America saw the beginning of massive, “blockbuster” museum shows on major themes inart history, ranging from the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharaohs to retrospectives of
the greatest modern painters and sculptors.
Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, andformer member of the National Council on the Arts, hailed the program many years
later. “Because of the indemnity program,” he commented in a 2000 NEA publication, “members of the public get to experience tremendous works of art that theywouldn’t normally be able to see unless they could travel to the countries of origin.”
The indemnity program is staffed and administered by the Arts Endowment onbehalf of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Applications forindemnity are reviewed by the council, which consists of the chairmen of the Artsand Humanities Endowments; the librarian of Congress; the archivist of the UnitedStates; the director of the National Science Foundation; the secretaries of State, theInterior, Commerce, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development,
Labor, and Veterans Affairs; and other public officials.

Challenge Grants
Congress established the Challenge Grants program in 1976 during the final
months of Chairman Hanks’s tenure with a special allocation in the Arts Endowment’s appropriation. NEA grants to organizations typically required one-to-one
matching funds; however, Challenge Grants required at least a three-to-one match,
initially in new or increased non-federal support. In reviewing Challenge Grants

44 n e a : a h i s t o r yThe Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has presented many world treasures through theindemnity program, such as Splendors of Imperial China in 1996. (Photo courtesy of Metropolitan
Museum of Art)

proposals, the Arts Endowment evaluated applicants’ organizational and managerial
capacity in addition to artistic quality. Under the new program, federal grants of up
to $1 million leveraged private funds for the construction of arts facilities, the development of endowments and cash reserves, or major artistic initiatives. Challenge
Grants proved hugely successful, generating many times the government’s investment and helping arts institutions build solid financial foundations to sustain themthrough hard times.
The first round of Challenge Grants awarded $27 million over two years to 66
organizations. Recipients included the Joffrey Ballet in New York, the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the American
Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, as well as many other prominent institutions.
One example of the program’s effectiveness is Young Audiences, a nationwide network of more than 5,000 performing and visual artists presenting nearly 100,000 arts
programs and services to eight million young people, teachers, and families. According to Richard Bell, executive director of Young Audiences, “Challenge Grants in the
1980s and early 1990s resulted in a 30-fold increase in the organization’s endowment,a fresh direction

45

with matching grants and gains of $6.5 million from the private sector.”
Representative Norm Dicks (D-WA) spoke fondly of the impact of Challenge
Grants on private giving for arts organizations in his state. In the early years of the
program, four Seattle organizations received grants totaling $1.7 million in federal
funds, which generated a minimum of $5.2 million in new private funds (in 1979
dollars). The Seattle Symphony Orchestra received $600,000 to eliminate an accumulated deficit, augment its endowment, and meet increased operating costs as it
approached its fiftieth anniversary. That year, Representative Dicks joined NEA
Chairman Livingston Biddle in Seattle to announce three more Challenge Grants: to
the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Opera, and the Seattle Repertory Theater. The
Challenge Grants program operated successfully for 20 years until the agency’s
budget was severely cut in FY 1996. During the lifetime of the Challenge Grants
program, the NEA awarded nearly $203 million.

Arts on Radio and Television
Another area of achievement came through the initiatives of Programming in theArts (later called the Arts on Radio and Television). Several outstanding individual
programs in the early 1970s received Arts Endowment funding. Allan Miller’s 1973
film The Bolero, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a
performance of Maurice Ravel’s piece, won an Academy Award for Best Live Action
Short Film. The 90-minute television dance special American Ballet Theatre: A Close
Up in Time (1973) profiled various ballet and dance performances, and Alvin Ailey:
Memories and Visions (1974) featured selections from Ailey’s work.
In January 1976, two series changed the profile of the performing arts on television,and both were developed with funding from the Arts Endowment. Dance in America
was a groundbreaking program that used the “true-action method,” originally developed to cover football, to capture live performances on film. Jac Venza and WNET
adapted this method to film dance, and fused the television medium with the choreographer’s art. Famed choreographers including George Balanchine, Robert Joffrey,
Martha Graham, and Alvin Ailey teamed with television directors Merrill Brockway
and Emile Ardolino to restage works specifically for the small screen. The first broadcast season of Dance in America included performances by the Joffrey Ballet, Twyla
Tharp, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Pennsylvania Ballet. At the sametime, the Arts Endowment funded a study of the Joffrey Ballet to determine whether
increased television broadcasts would cut into live attendance at the theater. The study

46 n e a : a h i s t o r yFred Newman, Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Garrison Keillor perform a skit during an episode of A
Prairie Home Companion. (Photo by Jason Bell)found that television exposure of ballet performances actually increased attendance.
The other series was Live from Lincoln Center, one of the most successful programs ever produced for broadcast on public television. The Arts Endowment
provided funding for, among other things, development of low-light-level camerasthat could record live performances without disturbing the performers or the audience. Live from Lincoln Center’s first season featured André Previn conducting the
New York Philharmonic with Van Cliburn, the New York City Opera performing The
Ballad of Baby Doe, and American Ballet Theatre’s Swan Lake. The year 2008
marked its 32nd season, and the series produced six shows a year for a national audience averaging five million viewers per performance.
Another award in a different medium had a similar long-term impact. In 1974, a
grant from the Arts Endowment helped Garrison Keillor and Minnesota Public Radio
launch A Prairie Home Companion, which has grown into one of the most listened-to
radio shows in the country. In testimony before Congress in 1990, Keillor highlighted

a fresh direction

47

the “seed” aspect of NEA grants: “By the time the show
became popular and Lake Wobegon became so well-known
that people thought it was real, the Endowment had vanishedfrom the credits, its job done. When you’re starting out . . . itseems like nobody wants to give you a dime. When you havea big success and everything you could ever want, people
can’t do enough for you. The Endowment is there at the
beginning, and that’s the beauty of it.” Speaking before the
Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities,
Keillor went further, noting that “today, in every city andstate, when Americans talk up their home town, invariably
they mention the arts.” He termed this growing respect for
the arts “a revolution—small and lovely—that the EndowFuture U.S. Poet Laureate Ted
ment has helped to bring about.”
Kooser received his first NEA
Other awards bore fruit in the careers of Arts EndowLiterature Fellowship in 1976.
ment literary grantees as well. Among authors who received(Photo courtesy of Ted Kooser)
NEA fellowships during Hanks’s tenure, the following
poets went on to win the Pulitzer Prize:• Donald Justice (NEA 1967, 1973, 1980, 1989, Pulitzer 1980)• Louise Glück (NEA 1970, 1979, 1988, Pulitzer 1993)• Stephen Dunn (NEA 1973, 1981, 1989, Pulitzer 2001)• Charles Simic (NEA 1975, 1979, Pulitzer 1990)• Charles Wright (NEA 1975, 1984, Pulitzer 1998)• Philip Levine (NEA 1976, 1981, 1987, Pulitzer 1995)• Ted Kooser (NEA 1976, 1984, Pulitzer 2005)• Natasha Trethewey (NEA 1999, Pulitzer 2007)
One of Nancy Hanks’s significant personnel decisions was to hire the AfricanAmerican poet and jazz writer A. B. Spellman in 1975. Spellman first served as aconsultant in arts education, from which he was promoted to leading positions in
the Expansion Arts Program. In 2005, Spellman recalled the origin of Expansion
Arts, a major addition during the Hanks period: “It was founded and named by mypredecessor, the late Vantile Whitfield. . . . Its purpose was to find and develop professional arts organizations that were, according to the letter of the guidelines,‘deeply rooted in and reflective of the culture of minority, inner-city, rural, and tribal
communities.’ We were responsible along with folk arts for . . . expanding the cultural
portfolio of the Arts Endowment.” The program had a strong social grounding, as it

48 n e a : a h i s t o r yExpansion Arts Program
In 1971, the National Endowment for theArts introduced the Expansion Arts
Program to honor the nation’s cultural
diversity. Vantile Whitfield, recruited by
Chairman Nancy Hanks as the program’s
first director, led the NEA’s initiative toexpand arts resources beyond the familiar
opera, orchestra, ballet, and museum
settings.
For 25 years, this program nurtured
community-based arts organizations from
America’s inner-city, rural, and tribal communities. Many of the program’s first
grantees later became nationallyrenowned—Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theater in New York, Appalshop in
Kentucky, Arte Público Press in Texas,
Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in
Washington, Institute of Alaska Native
Arts in Alaska, Lime Kiln Arts in Virginia,
Japanese Community and Cultural Centerin California, and Urban Gateways in Illinois. Hundreds of mid-size and smaller
nonprofit organizations benefited frominitial NEA funding and still remain vitalcommunity anchors today.
The Expansion Arts Program is also
credited with launching several national
projects. Two of these resulted in new
NEA programs: the Advancement Program formed in 1983 to respond to thecultural field’s growing interest in managerial guidance, and Local Arts Agencies
began in 1984 to address the NEA’s general policies at the municipal level. Anothersignificant project sponsored by theAppalshop—whose dedication to preserving
Appalachian culture includes producing
documentary films such as Sunny Side of Life
about old-time country music—was one of theorganizations originally supported by the
NEA’s Expansion Arts Program. (Photo by Bill
Blanton)

Expansion Arts Program was the Community Foundation Initiative (1985–1994),
through which 27 national foundations
developed peer-review practices andestablished permanent endowments forongoing investment in community-based
art projects.
During the program’s 25 years ofoperation, many of its grantees competed
successfully in other NEA programs andgarnered support from other arts funders.
Following significant budget cuts during
the mid-1990s, the NEA integrated the
Expansion Arts Program into various discipline programs of the organization.

a fresh direction49was “geared to low- and moderate-income groups and to people living in rural communities, towns, and inner-city neighborhoods.” Leading the effort, Spellman
sought to “assure [emphasis in original] that no American will be denied the opportunity to reach his or her artistic potential because of geographic, economic, or othersocial or cultural restraints.”
During the next 30 years, Spellman would play an important role in many major
Arts Endowment programs, most notably the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowships. Spellman remembered, “In 1975 when I came here jazz was in about the same position as
Expansion Arts. Most of the arts establishments simply would not touch it. . . . On the
National Council on the Arts the attitude, unfortunately, was the same. Billy Taylor
and I had many heated arguments with council members about giving some parity
to jazz with classical music in the guidelines of the Arts Endowment. David Baker
had many arguments with several council members, including, of course, the latepianist and cultural critic Sam Lipman, again about jazz as a fine arts form. And, ofcourse, David was able to change Sam’s point of view.” Spellman also summarized
the contribution of the Arts Endowment by commenting that after the passage of 30
years, “We see a much, much more inclusive arts world today than we had in 1975.”

A Research Agenda
Research was explicitly recognized as a central undertaking of the Arts Endowment
in 1975. That year, the National Council on the Arts approved the first program budget for the agency’s Research Division, headed by Harold Horowitz, a 47-year-old
architect who came to the agency from the National Science Foundation. The
Endowment’s new focus on empirical data collection and analysis was augured by
an important study from 1974, Museums USA: A Survey Report. Produced by anagency contractor, the study proved critical in advancing quantitative research forthe field. By documenting staff levels, attendance, membership, budgets, andregional trends in museums in the United States, the report sparked substantive
policy discussions about appropriate support mechanisms for these institutions. In
the ensuing decades, the Research Division (later named the Office of Research andAnalysis) would repeat this pattern in other areas. Under Horowitz and others, thedivision issued reports documenting the “state of the arts” for various disciplines
and extended those inquiries into artist employment, arts participation, and otherdomestic indicators that would be used to guide policy.
Two years after the division’s founding, Joseph Coates, assistant to the director of

50 n e a : a h i s t o r ythe Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, stated at an agency conference
that he welcomed a “long-term commitment on the part of scholars to a program ofarts research; not the kind of in-and-out contract research [ formerly conducted].” Hepredicted, “The issue will arise whether the Endowment should be doing basic or
applied research. I believe that at this stage it should be committed to appliedresearch; research that has a high utility element.” Since then, the NEA has continued to be a leading source of such research studies in the arts and arts education.

Hanks’s Legacy
During her tenure, the Arts Endowment’s support reached all 50 states and six U.S.
territories. Nancy Hanks expanded the Arts Endowment’s operations and career
staff, while developing seed grants for major arts institutions and supporting highprofile initiatives such as the U.S. Bicentennial celebration, which occurred near theend of her second term.
Nancy Hanks’s legacy was one of outstanding dynamism, and the effects of her
years as NEA chair were far-reaching. One of Hanks’s noteworthy achievements was
her role in establishing the state arts agencies. By 1977, at the end of her second
term, state legislative appropriations for state arts agencies stood at $55.7 million,
more than half the NEA appropriation of $99.9 million that year. Other importantsuccesses of her chairmanship were the impressive expansion of the audience fordance and the extraordinary spread of regional theaters. As Peter Donnelly, managing director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, stated in 1976, “What has beenaccomplished in the last decade with the assistance of the Endowment has beenquite phenomenal. A theater which for all practical purposes did not exist except in
New York has been created nationally.”
Yet Hanks’s greatest accomplishment was to bring more federal money for thearts to more communities in the United States than ever before. Her success indoing so—and the popularity of an “arts-for-all-Americans” vision for the agency—
may be measured by the Arts Endowment’s growing budget in the eight years under
Hanks, which increased by 1,400 percent. In 1978, the last year funded under her
chairmanship, the NEA’s appropriation stood at $123.8 million. To appreciate thescope of the increase, consider that $124 million in 1978 is equivalent to approximately $405 million in 2008. Moreover, the 1978 funding served a total populationin the United States that was three-quarters the size of the 2008 population (223
million compared to 304 million).

a fresh direction

51

Thomas Hart Benton’s The Sources of Country Music portrays 17 nearly life-sized figures andillustrates the various cultural influences on country music, including a train, a steamboat, a blackbanjo player, country fiddlers and dulcimer players, hymn singers and square dancers. (Image
provided by The Country Music Foundation)

Grants were offered in many new areas, including aid to exhibitions, crafts fellowships and workshops, apprenticeships, and a fellowship program for art critics.
Hanks provided support for the final work of the great American muralist Thomas
Hart Benton, who died in 1975. The Sources of Country Music, a monumental painting, was commissioned for Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum,with the grant application submitted by Bill Ivey, who would become NEA chairman
more than 20 years later.
With the end of the Ford Administration and the election of President Jimmy
Carter, Hanks’s eight years of service with the Arts Endowment concluded. Michael
Straight recalled that the chairman had “a sense that she was accepted by the incoming Administration, but the sense was illusory.” When Hanks sought to influence
President Carter, her attempt, according to Straight, was too personal—she found a
way to meet the new chief executive directly, little realizing that he was a man who
preferred contact through his staff. President Carter understood that she expected tobe reappointed to head the Arts Endowment, but he did not even request that she
continue until a successor was appointed.
The example of Nancy Hanks’s leadership lived on well beyond her tenure, how-

52 n e a : a h i s t o r yever, and the devotion she inspired was enduring. Original National Council on theArts member R. Philip Hanes, Jr., provided a telling sign of her character: “WhenNancy discovered she had cancer, we all knew that she was not well; but she would
take no one at all into her confidence. . . . She was without question one of thestrongest and ablest human beings I have ever known and one of the most giving
and selfless.”Three weeks after her death in 1983, President Reagan asked Congress to name the
Old Post Office complex, which she had sought to save, the Nancy Hanks Center. On
April 19, 1983, the building was dedicated as the new home of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the President’s
Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the Institute of Museum Services, and
the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. The Old Post Office at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW in Washington, DC, was renamed the Nancy Hanks Center, inrecognition of her tireless efforts to save the building from demolition and as a fitting
tribute to her long and productive tenure as chairman of the NEA.

President Jimmy Carter with NEA Chairman Nancy Hanks in August 1977. (Official White House
photo)

a fresh direction

53

Livingston L. Biddle, Jr., NEA Chairman 1977–81. (NEA File Photo)chapter 4

A Long SummerIn november 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Livingston
Biddle to the chairmanship of the Arts Endowment. Biddle came from a distinguished American family, graduated from Princeton University, and served as anambulance driver in World War II. He wrote popular novels before coming toWashington to be a special assistant to Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), his roommatein preparatory school and at Princeton, who was a key figure in drafting the legislationthat established the Arts and Humanities Endowments. Biddle also had served as
NEA deputy chairman under Roger Stevens, and later served as Nancy Hanks’sCongressional liaison. A Washington insider, he was steeped in the workings of legislation and policy.
Chairman Biddle approached his position with a desire to refocus on the role which
Congress initially envisioned for the Arts Endowment. An integral part of that role,
Biddle claimed, was a strong partnership between the government and the private
community. The emphasis on the role of the private sector led Biddle to recommend
three essential provisions for progress in the cultural life of the nation:• Responsibility should be primarily based on private and local initiatives;• A comprehensive restriction on federal interference in the determination of
NEA grantees, which Biddle defined as “a provision basic to freedom of expression
and the creative spirit of the arts,” should be in place;• The Endowment must be guided by a council of private citizens.
Biddle noted that when he was nominated to the chairmanship, “there [had] beensuggestion that the arts may be subject to politicalization . . . mean[ing] . . . subject to55

Joan Mondale converses with National Council on the Arts member Theodore Bikel during an NCA
meeting. (NEA File Photo)

inappropriate governmental pressures.” He maintained, “The law prescribes a catalyst role for the government . . . to encourage, not dominate, to assist without
domineering.” Biddle regretted “words like ‘elitism’ and ‘populism’ being used tosuggest a polarization of the arts,” noting that “elitism can indeed mean quality, canindeed mean ‘the best,’” while populism “can mean ‘access.’” He urged a policy
bridging the two ideals, resulting in “access to the best” as a guiding principle.
He had a strong ally in Vice President Walter Mondale’s wife Joan, a ceramicist
and the author of a book entitled Politics in Art (1972), as well as honorary chairperson of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Prior to the 1976
election, Mrs. Mondale had served on the board of directors of the Associated Councils of the Arts, a private association of state arts agencies and community arts
councils. During her years in the Vice President’s residence, she filled the house with
examples of contemporary American painting, sculpture, and crafts. She encouraged the placement of art works in federal buildings, and in Congressional testimony
she urged legislators to alter the federal tax code so that estate taxes would not affectthe families of artists so heavily. For her efforts, she earned the title “Joan of Art.”
Under Biddle’s leadership, the Endowment continued to enjoy rising funding, the56 n e a : a h i s t o r ytotal reaching $158.8 million in 1981. In the first year of the Carter Administration,
the NEA made several decisions that strengthened its impact on American intellectual life and improved its outreach to underserved communities. One was theestablishment of a 23-member task force to assess the needs of the Hispanic arts
community in the U.S. and to develop a means to respond to Hispanic artists andorganizations. Other initiatives included the Office of Minority Concerns to act as aclearinghouse for minority artists and art groups in dealing with the NEA, and theestablishment of the Folk Arts Program with its own staff.

Folk Arts Expansion—NEA National Heritage Fellowships
The Folk Arts Program had come under the directorship of Bess Lomax Hawes, adistinctive individual in the NEA’s chronicles and in the wider context of American
cultural history. The Arts Endowment’s program of National Heritage Fellowships
originated with Hawes’s tenure as director of the Folk Arts Program, beginning in
1976 and continuing beyond her retirement in 1992. Based on the Japanese customof designating expert craftsmen and artisans as National Treasures, the NEA National Heritage Fellows receive a one-time award recognizing individual artistic excellence and their efforts to conserve America’s many cultures for future generations.
The Arts Endowment had long been a strong supporter of folk and traditional arts.
According to Burt Feintuch, editor of The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the
Public Sector, the agency’s Folk Arts Program “legitimized the traditional arts in theeyes—and budgets—of agencies around the nation, democratizing and pluralizing
the concept of the arts. NEA seed money rooted most of the state programs, resulting in a national network of public sector folklorists who, in turn, began to till thesoil of their own states.” One NEA folk arts panelist, Barre Toelken, recalls an incident after dinner in a New Mexico village after the agency funded a centuries-old
play, Los Moros y los Cristianos. When the panelists finished their dinner at a local
restaurant, “an elderly man stepped forward and said, ‘We only want to thank you for
helping us to keep our culture. I’ve lived here since before the income tax came to be,
and this is the first time any of our money ever came back to help us.’”
The NEA National Heritage Fellowships boosted folk arts to a new level of prominence. In 1985, Hawes observed that “these fellowships are among the most appreciated and applauded, perhaps because they present to Americans a vision of themselves and of their country, a vision somewhat idealized but profoundly longed forand so, in significant ways, profoundly true.” Although the creation of the fellow-

a long summer

57

ships was announced in 1980, at theend of Biddle’s chairmanship, the first
awards were made in 1982, during thepresidency of Ronald Reagan. Since
then, the NEA National Heritage Fellowships have been bestowed upon adiverse selection of individuals who
have “made major contributions to theexcellence, vitality, and public appreciation of the folk and traditional arts.”
The first honorees included the blues
singer Sanders “Sonny” Terry and his
frequent partner in performance, guiBlues artist Brownie McGhee was one of the first NEA
National Heritage Fellows in 1982. (Photo by Tom Pich)tarist Brownie McGhee, as well as the
Mexican-American singer Lydia Mendoza, bluegrass musician Bill Monroe, and traditional artists producing Westernsaddles and ornamental iron.
Since its inception, the NEA National Heritage Fellowship has become the mostimportant honor in the field. In the blues tradition, the influential John Lee Hooker
received the fellowship in 1983. In 1984, the recipients included Clifton Chenier, theaccordion master of the Cajun zydeco style; Howard “Sandman” Sims, the leading
African-American tap dancer; and Ralph Stanley, the Virginia mountain banjo player, singer, and composer. In 2000, after his fellowship, Ralph Stanley would gain
national fame when his songs were used on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’
film O Brother, Where Art Thou? In 2006 he received the National Medal of Arts. As
the years have passed, the program has expanded beyond standard “folk music” andAfrican-American blues to include the musical styles and craft specializations of
Native-American and other indigenous and immigrant cultures.
Since the first NEA National Heritage Fellowships were presented, many genresof popular creativity that were seldom thought of as “American folk” expressions
were represented and honored, illustrating the assimilation of new ethnic communities into the life of the nation. Recipients have included a Native-American
ribbonworker, a performer on the Slavic tamburitza, Hawaiian musicians and craftworkers, a Cambodian court dancer and choreographer, a Lao singer, Bukharan andBosnian Jewish singers, a Ghanaian-American drummer, and such genres as Chinese opera, the north Indian raga, and Basque poetry.

58 n e a : a h i s t o r yAlthough it is an individual honor, many recipients regard the fellowship as
broader recognition. Gerald Bruce Miller, Skokomish elder and 2004 NEA National
Heritage Fellow, announced at the fellows banquet held in the Great Hall of the
Library of Congress: “I want to extend my gratitude on receiving this award to all of
our ancestors who left us the gifts that we exhibit today; the gift of the song, the giftof the dance, the gift of the story, and the gift of creativity. As long as we keep these
traditional arts alive, we speak for our people.” Michael Doucet, Cajun fiddler andcomposer, reflected upon his 2005 NEA National Heritage Fellowship: “You know,
it’s interesting—it’s a national award but it really comes down to your community
and what you do for your community. I was very fortunate to be around when a lot of
people born before 1900 were still alive—the ‘old-timers,’ as we call them now. I
think that’s where most of my inspiration comes from. It’s really a process of a continuation—I wouldn’t be getting this award if it wasn’t for people who came before me.”The NEA National Heritage Fellowship program embodied the daring soul of Bess
Lomax Hawes herself. By 1960, Hawes was already a leading figure in the development of folk music as a commercial medium, participating in folk festivals on bothcoasts. She served on the faculty of California State University at Northridge before
coming to work at the NEA. In honor of her powerful legacy, the Arts Endowment
inaugurated in 2000 a special recognition
within the NEA National Heritage Fellowships: the Bess Lomax Hawes Award for“achievements in fostering excellence,
ensuring vitality, and promoting public
appreciation of the folk and traditionalarts. To be considered, nominees should
be worthy of national recognition andmust be actively engaged in preserving thefolk and traditional arts.”
The Arts Endowment has also played anessential role in the creation and support
of a network of folk arts coordinators basedat the state, regional, and local folk arts
agencies and other cooperating nonprofit
organizations. In addition, statewide folk
Bess Lomax Hawes, director of the NEA Folk
and traditional arts apprenticeship pro- Arts Program from 1977–92. (Photo bygrams, allowing master traditional artists Michael Geissinger)a long summer59

to pass along their unique skills and knowledge, have been developed in more than 35
states with NEA funding. Direct grants continue to support festivals, touring, documentary and media projects, exhibitions, and educational programs.

Opera, Musical Theater, and New Music
Folk art was not the only area to see fresh developments during Biddle’s chairmanship. In 1979, Ezra Laderman, composer, teacher, and later dean of the Yale Schoolof Music, became director of the NEA Music Program. In the same year, the Arts
Endowment introduced a New Music Performance program to support organizations performing or presenting contemporary compositions. The first grants totaled$352,500 and ranged from $1,500 to $28,000. The Arts Endowment’s Contemporary Music Performance Program granted $441,500 for performances at institutions
such as the New Music Consort of New York, while its Composer/Librettist Programgave $525,420 to individuals and institutions including the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, which had long been associatedwith the musical avant-garde. Recipients under the Composer/Librettist Program
included the composer William Bolcom of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Lukas Foss of
New York City, along with many others.
In 1978, Biddle established the Opera-Musical Theater Program to provide support for “that art form which has a lasting luster in the history of American art.” A
new panel, representing opera and musical theater together, adopted a policy statement linking classic expressions with popular traditions: “Whether comic or
serious, earthy or elevated, music theater, from the time it moved from the courts tothe public arena over two centuries ago, has been part of a tradition of people’s art at
its best. The Opera-Musical Theater Program hopes to eliminate the barriers which
separate the various forms of music theater, and to help create an atmosphere ofmutual respect and appreciation. . . . The program emphasizes the creation, development, and production of new American works, as well as experimentation with newforms and techniques.”
Carlisle Floyd, an American opera composer and recipient of the 2004 National
Medal of Arts, as well as the 2008 NEA Opera Honors, participated in the Arts
Endowment’s panels from 1976 to 1978, a period he remembered a quarter-century
later as “an exciting time in the Endowment.” Floyd was a leading figure in the creation of the Opera-Musical Theater Program (later, Opera returned to the broader
Music Program, and Musical Theater to the Theater Program). He was joined from

60 n e a : a h i s t o r ySpoleto Festival USA
The Spoleto Festival USA is one of theworld’s premiere arts festivals, drawing
70,000 to 80,000 spectators for 17 days
and nights each spring to Charleston,South Carolina. The only arts festival hosted by an entire American city, Spoleto
Festival USA features more than 120 concerts and performances by established andemerging artists from the U.S. andabroad. Spoleto offers many artistic styles
and forms, including classical ballet, modern dance, opera, chamber, symphonic,
and choral music, jazz, theater, and the literary and visual arts. Since its inception,
the festival has hosted nearly 200 world
premieres and American debuts, from
Praise House by Urban Bush Women to
the Spoleto-commissioned Tenebrae, achamber music work by Osvaldo Golijov,
to noteworthy presentations such as themonumental, 18½-hour Chinese opera,
The Peony Pavilion. Festival performancestake place throughout the city in churches,theaters, and other public spaces. Piccolo
Spoleto, the outreach arm of the festival,
provides low- and no-cost performing, literary, and visual arts events in a range ofcommunity settings. Each year Piccolo
Spoleto presents more than 800 events
showcasing artists from the Southeast
region.
The world-renowned arts celebration
started in 1977, when the Festival dei Due
Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) in Spoleto,
Italy, set up an American counterpart withhelp from the National Endowment for theArts. The next year, the NEA provided$50,000 for administrative and artistic
expenses for musical performances, along

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley (left) with
Gian Carlo Menotti, one of the founders ofSpoleto Festival USA, at the 1988 opening of
the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, a free festival
sponsored by the city taking place during thesame time as the international festival. (Photo
by Bill Murton)with $35,000 for audience development
and $25,000 for a television recording ofSamuel Barber’s opera, Vanessa. In 1979,
the NEA granted $7,000 for a Spoleto
mini-festival in Charleston. The American
festival became independent of its Italianparent in 1993, and the NEA has remained
a significant and steady supporter.
Spoleto Festival USA has helped transform Charleston into a thriving tourist
destination. Since the festival began, thecity’s annual visitation has increased
threefold; each year, attendees spend an
estimated $44 million in the Charleston
area. Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr.
concludes: “If we invest more in the arts,
we will get a high return in terms of theeconomic and physical and social development of our cities.”

a long summer

61the musical theater side by composers
Stephen Sondheim and John Kander, as
well as producers Hal Prince and Stuart
Ostrow. In a 2004 interview, Floyd recalled,“We had made a case that opera had morein common with musical theater than withregular classical performance. The association [between the genres] made sense
because opera and musical theater alikeused costumes and other elements of performance differently from classical musicpresentations. At the first meetings theopera people were afraid the musical the- Opera composer Carlisle Floyd, who served
ater people would consider them dull—but on Arts Endowment panels from 1976–78.
(Photo by Jim Caldwell)they came to realize a basic agreement.”
The program also provided for the creation and performance of new operatic and musical theater works. In the same period,
demonstrating that the traditional classical music categories would remain central to
the Arts Endowment’s work, the Music Program recognized choruses and chambermusic as separate fields requiring support.

The Biddle Way
Biddle began his leadership of the NEA with a major fiscal decision. He removed
ceilings on grants, which allowed advisory panels greater discretion in recommending grant amounts. In 1978, under the rubric “Unity, Quality, Access,” Biddle
explained this decision: “The test all applicants for Endowment support must meetthus becomes the test of quality. If a project of extraordinary merit is in need of funding, is it reasonable to dilute quality as a standard by imposing an arbitrary limit on
support?” He distributed funds far and wide in an ever-increasing quantity of new
initiatives that sought to parallel the growing innovation and variety in the arts andto reach a diverse American public.
Many more new programs emerged in the Biddle years. The chairman formalized
support for “multidisciplinary presenting” of cultural programs at institutions suchas New York’s Lincoln Center. The Arts Endowment also launched its first major
joint venture with the National Endowment for the Humanities. This effort was a

62 n e a : a h i s t o r ymonth-long symposium entitled “Mexico Today,” which consisted of concerts, poetry readings, films, panel discussions, dance performances, and exhibitions of art
and photography. “Mexico Today” visited nine American cities and was seen by nearly half a million people.
In 1979 the NEA’s funding reached significant levels. In dance alone some 360
grants were awarded, accounting for $7.9 million. The enormous growth and diversification of the arts during the decade raised new challenges for the agency. Nancy
Hanks had convened a Management Task Force to examine the growth of the agency
and make structural recommendations. One suggestion was that the Humanities
and Arts Endowments no longer share administrative personnel. In 1978, withapproval from Congress, the Arts Endowment became self-sufficient and hired its
own administrative staff. Until that point, the two agencies had shared staff forbudget, finance, and personnel management.
According to Biddle, the great problem for the arts in America was “the danger offragmentation.” When special interests come into play, he maintained, “they candiminish the value of the art, for although art does a great many good things in theworld for a great many people, it does them best when it is free. No task is more
important now than to keep the arts free—free from their own politicization, freefrom limiting special interests, free to experiment and explore.”
For Biddle, if the pursuit of innovation becomes too strong, art threatens to fragment into islands of expertise, and may end up “forced to serve special interests.”
The connection between artists and the public is broken, coteries form, and artworks lose their universal appeal. While he considered it the Arts Endowment’s
responsibility to promote experimentation in art, it also has a duty to keep art central
to American society. Much of Biddle’s chairmanship might be interpreted as aneffort to steer a difficult course between those two mandates.

Revised Structure
Outside pressures not only broadened access to the Arts Endowment’s funding, theyalso compelled various internal adjustments. Annually, when the chairman of the
U.S. House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee held hearings on the NEA’s
budget, not only was the Arts Endowment’s chairman called to testify, but theagency’s program directors also were asked to provide a status report. Representative
Sidney R. Yates (D-IL), the subcommittee’s chairman, took great enjoyment in learning firsthand the latest developments in each arts field.

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63

As the Arts Endowment’s budget grew, aperception of favoritism and conflicts ofinterest by individuals serving on grant panels sparked concern in both artistic andgovernmental circles. Deputy Chairman for
Programs Mary Ann Tighe wrote, “How panelists are selected seems to be a subject ofparticular interest to the arts community.
Our process is a subjective one . . . the staff,
generally the program director in consultation with individuals in and outside theEndowment, makes the list, with at least
one-third of the panel changing every year.”
Nevertheless, reappointments of some panelists for longer periods of time had occurredsince the Hanks period. Biddle reorganized
the panel system and enforced the standard
that a panel member could only serve for up
to three consecutive years.
The NEA also carried out a discipline-bydiscipline audit of its practices. In 1979, theNEA added two new areas of support to its
NEA Dance Program Director Rhoda Grauer
with dancer/artistic director Edward Villella attraditional dance programs—artistic personthe twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of thenel and rehearsal support—which helped
National Association for Regional Ballet in 1980.
companies pay for existing and new artists(Photo by V. Sladon)and performers as well as rehearsal time.
Rhoda Grauer, then-director of the Dance Program, noted that the United States was“the center, virtually the Mecca, of the international dance community.” Grauer
praised the field of American dance as one in which “there are choreographers who
use classical vocabularies and choreographers who invent whole new languages of
movement.” In dance instruction, according to Grauer, “Though we have few
national dance conservatories and though training in this country has evolved independently and erratically, much of our teaching and our dancers’ technical andperformance standards are among the world’s finest. Still, acceptance has not comeeasily. In 1965, there was only a handful of high quality, fully professional dancecompanies in the United States, almost all of them in New York.”

64 n e a : a h i s t o r yIn the field of literature, then-program director David Wilk described the NEA’s
Residencies for Writers Program, which had existed for several years, as “an attempt
to put writers in personal contact with their audiences.” The NEA had by then spent
several years assisting the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, an entity thatbrought together and supported small press journals. The NEA “increased substantially its support for innovative and experimental projects attempting to solve theproblems of distributing and promoting fine contemporary creative literature.”
These included funds for book buses run by the Plains Distribution Service of Fargo,
North Dakota, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. In 1979,“small presses” drew $380,000 in federal funds.
Many creative writing fellowships awarded during Chairman Biddle’s term went tofledgling writers who subsequently became major figures in the literary world, including Jane Smiley, T. C. Boyle, Paul Auster, Alice Walker, and Tobias Wolff. One of themost noteworthy literary grants of the era supported the work of an author who hadtaken his own life ten years earlier. In 1979, the Arts Endowment awarded Louisiana
State University (LSU) Press $3,500 to
defray publishing costs of a comic novel, A
Confederacy of Dunces, by unknown writer
John Kennedy Toole. Toole had finished themanuscript in the late 1960s while stationed with the U.S. Army in Puerto Rico,
where he had taught English to Spanishspeaking recruits. After several publishers
rejected the work, Toole committed suicide
in 1969. But his mother, Thelma Toole,assisted by novelist Walker Percy, managed
to place the work with LSU Press. With theArts Endowment’s help, the work was published in 1980. It was a critical and commercial success, selling 50,000 copies thefirst year and winning the 1981 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction. It has since been translatA Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy
ed into 18 languages, and there are nearly
Toole was published in 1980 by Louisiana
two million copies in print.
State University Press with support from theIn 1979, the Endowment funded severArts Endowment. (Image courtesy ofLouisiana State University Press)
al projects in the area of new media. Witha long summer65

a budget of $8 million, the Media Arts Program under the direction of Brian O’Doherty continued to fund the American Film Institute as well as radio, television, film
and video projects, and media arts centers. At the time, O’Doherty warned that “private funds for media arts centers [had] not been forthcoming in significant amount,”
and that “the work of the independent artist, which maintains an individual voice ina mass medium overwhelmingly devoted to commercial ends, is still a misunderstood and underexploited resource.”
The direction of the Visual Arts Program had passed in 1977 to James Melchert,
an artist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In the NEA’s 1979
Annual Report, Melchert summarized the state of his discipline and its relationshipwith the NEA by noting that in one year 7,000 painters, sculptors, crafts artists, andphotographers had applied for grants. Most of them were necessarily rejected, with
grants awarded at a ratio of three to one hundred applications (the broader ratio in
the NEA was one grant to four applications). Melchert was avid about defending the
grantees that were chosen and the criteria for their selection. “We are not successoriented, in the conventional sense,” he wrote in the Annual Report. “Our ideas of
success are different from the usual ones. A fellowship . . . might mean only that theartist spent his time testing new ideas, learning which led up blind alleys and whichwere artistically valid. We do not require our artists to be . . . popular, either, which issometimes quite different from having artistic merit.”

The Regional Representatives
In 1980, the Endowment finally reached its full complement of what were called“regional representatives.” The regional representatives were the centerpiece of aprogram initiated in 1972 by Nancy Hanks that would promote better communication between the Arts Endowment and individuals and organizations in different
areas of the country. These representatives, most of whom worked out of theirhomes (and suitcases) with only part-time clerical help, provided vital links between
the NEA and those in near and distant states who might otherwise have regarded thegrowing agency as a faceless and faraway bureaucracy. At the end of Chairman Biddle’s term, the program had grown to 12 men and women employed to provide
information, contacts, and free services to artists, organizations, and the public.
The “reps” traveled extensively throughout their regions, conducted workshops,
represented the NEA at special events, assisted would-be applicants, assuaged
unsuccessful ones, and answered hundreds of mail and telephone inquiries. Tied to

66 n e a : a h i s t o r ytheir regions, with a history of involvement with arts organizations, they brought theagency leadership into closer contact with local conditions. They reduced the senseof isolation that many actual and potential applicants felt, helped people all over thecountry learn about the NEA—in particular its grants review process—and enabledthose at the Endowment to understand more fully the needs, trends, populations,and regional differences that characterize the arts in the United States. The numberof regional representatives was reduced to seven a few years later, and the program
ultimately ended in 1991.

Major Accomplishments
Reporting near the end of his term, Livingston Biddle wrote in 1980, “The Endowment has had some controversial moments; and yet controversy is the yeast thatmakes the creative loaf rise.” During Biddle’s chairmanship, he and his staff took
advantage of a relatively tranquil era to expand support for diverse artists reflecting
American society. The Biddle era was one in which the Arts Endowment attained awell-defined stature as an institution representing American creative aspirations.
There were difficulties in trying to reflect a splintering and volatile art world, but Biddle met them by developing new programs for historically underrepresented
groups, supporting both traditional and avant-garde art.

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Frank Hodsoll, NEA Chairman 1981–89. (NEA File Photo)chapter 5

The Reagan Era

T

he election of President Reagan in 1980 brought a different
philosophy to the federal government, and initially, many in the new Administrationquestioned the propriety and expense of a public agency funding the arts. The NEA’s
next chairman, Frank Hodsoll, faced a number of challenges, including a funding
cut. By the end of his second term in 1989, however, the NEA emerged with a budget
increased to $169 million. Important new initiatives such as the American Jazz Master Fellowship—now known as NEA Jazz Masters—and the National Medal of Arts
were created, and the agency assumed the mantle of leadership in arts education. At
the same time, and deriving primarily from Hodsoll’s background in government
and public policy, the Arts Endowment focused on building infrastructures and support networks for the arts, cultivating new audiences, and fostering sustainability
among arts organizations.
Hodsoll came to the Arts Endowment from the staff of the Reagan White House.
With a background as a lawyer and U.S. Army officer, and with 14 years in the Foreign Service, he had joined his friend James A. Baker III in the Reagan election
campaign. While working on the campaign, Hodsoll was asked to look into the reasons why Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director David Stockman wastrying to “zero out”—completely abolish—the NEA.
Interviewed almost a quarter-century later, Hodsoll recalled that, at the time, hebarely knew what the NEA was or why it was targeted for elimination. As it happened, the matter was an early expression of the “culture war” between liberals andconservatives that was then emerging in American life. A former U.S. Representa-

69

tive, David Stockman viewed the NEA as
one of many examples of the federal government’s excessive influence in publiclife. Inheriting a sluggish economy and alarge federal deficit, Stockman was looking for programs to cut in order to restrict
the size of the federal government.
The first indicators of the new Administration’s direction were not promising.
Under the alarming headline, “Pages from
Budget Director Stockman’s ‘Black Book’”(Washington Post, February 8, 1981), a story
appeared with the following notes andcomments about a proposed 50 percent
budget cut: “Reductions of this magnitude are premised on the notion that theActor Charlton Heston was a member of
Administration should completely revamp
the Presidential Task Force that studied arts
federal policy for arts and humanities supand humanities issues in 1981. (Photo by
port. For too long, the Endowments haveJohn St. Clair)spread federal financing into an everwider range of artistic and literary endeavor, promoting the notion that the federal
government should be the financial patron and first resort for both individuals andinstitutions engaged in artistic and literary pursuits. This policy has resulted in a
reduction in the historic role of private individual and corporate philanthropic support in these key areas.” The Reagan Administration had to consider whether arts
funding should continue at existing levels when cuts were to be made in welfare andother social programs.
Initially, Livingston Biddle bore the responsibility of defending the Arts Endowment, but for the most part, Hodsoll led the fight in the Reagan White House. Reagan was not strongly motivated to abolish the Endowments. As an actor himself, thePresident had many friends in the arts, including Charlton Heston, Reagan’s successor as president of the Screen Actors Guild and an early member of the National
Council on the Arts. In addition, the Heritage Foundation, an intellectual redoubt of
the Reagan revolution, in its first Mandate for Leadership volume (1980), endorsed
the purposes of the Arts and Humanities Endowments, while urging greater adherence to those purposes and better management of Endowment programs.

70 n e a : a h i s t o r yIn response, the Reagan White House established a presidential task force tostudy whether the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment
for the Humanities should continue. Headed by Hannah H. Gray, president of the
University of Chicago; Daniel J. Terra, art collector and ambassador-at-large for cultural affairs; and Charlton Heston, the task force held hearings and ultimately
recommended keeping the Endowments alive and well funded. In accepting thereport of the task force, President Reagan pointed out that the two Endowments,
beginning in 1965, “account[ed] for only 10 percent of the donations to the arts andscholarship. Nonetheless, they have served an important role in catalyzing additional private support, assisting excellence in arts and letters, and helping to assure theavailability of arts and scholarship.” The task force eventually became the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, established by Executive Orderin 1982.
Hodsoll asked to be considered for the chairmanship of the Arts Endowment.
“Everyone said I was nuts,” he later recalled, as President Reagan agreed to namehim NEA chairman. Frank Hodsoll was sworn in as the fourth Arts Endowment
chairman by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on November 13, 1981, with the three
former NEA chairmen—Roger Stevens, Nancy Hanks, and Livingston Biddle—
present at the ceremony. By the time he assumed the post in November 1981,
however, a number of discipline directors had resigned. Hodsoll had ample opportunity to reappoint existing program directors or select new ones.
Hodsoll expressed optimism about his mission. In 1981, the final year of the Biddle chairmanship, the NEA’s budget rose to nearly $160 million. The following year
Hodsoll had to contend with a cut of 10 percent, to $143.5 million in 1982—the firstbudget cut in the Arts Endowment’s history—but the reduction was far less than the
50 percent proposed by Stockman, and more favorable momentum was gathering.
“The arts in America are alive and well,” Hodsoll wrote. “Our country continues tohave the greatest variety of excellence of any country in the world. There are dozens
of regional theaters . . . there are painters and sculptors everywhere. Post-modern
architecture begins here. [There is] a greater variety of first-class orchestras than in
any other single country. We are a world center for ballet and modern dance. There
are great museums. And artists from around the world continue to flock to thiscountry. This is a tribute to the nation.”

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The NEA Jazz Masters Program
The year 1982 saw the inauguration of one of the NEA’s most significant programs,
the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship, a lifetime achievement award honoring outstanding exponents of an art form that is undeniably unique in its American origins andcharacter. The award was conceived in April 1980 when Aida Chapman, then assistant director of Music, wrote a position paper in which she posed several ideas forhonoring the jazz field, including establishing a Jazz Hall of Fame. By the time the
NEA acted, it was 1982 and the first NEA Jazz Masters Fellowships were awarded
under Adrian Gnam’s leadership as director of Music.
The first trio of NEA Jazz Masters, named in 1982, represented distinct traditions
and levels of experimentation in music: Roy Eldridge (1911–89), Sun Ra (1914–93),
and Dizzy Gillespie (1917–93). Eldridge, a trumpeter, was a leading representative ofthe transitional generation between Louis Armstrong’s Dixieland, the big-band era,and the bebop style. Eldridge had played in the Teddy Hill band with saxophonist
Leon “Chu” Berry, a brilliant performer whose career ended when he died in a car
accident at age 33.
Sun Ra, originally known as Herman “Sonny” Blount, was a remarkable innovator
famous for his cosmic spirituality and “space alien” persona, as well as his startling
improvisations and pioneering use of electronic music. He moved from issuingand selling his own albums in the 1950s to producing a multimedia show, the Sun
Ra Arkestra, which included singers, dancers, martial artists, film, and original
costumes.
John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was an authentic giant of the bebop era; he and Charlie “Bird” Parker were its two leading figures. The impact of Gillespie’s innovations
is heard in the work of every jazz trumpeter who followed him, and his compositions
have been played and replayed. In the 1940s, Gillespie formed a big band, and fellow
musicians included such future stars as Yusef Lateef and John Coltrane; his rhythm
section brought together John Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke, and Ray Brown.
The latter four went on to organize the Modern Jazz Quartet, and all were laterselected as NEA Jazz Masters.
In the years that followed, the NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship became America’s
most prestigious honor in the field. In 1991, when jazz biographer D. Antoinette
Handy was Music director, the NEA enhanced the program by having the recipientscollect their award during a concert ceremony. The first ceremony was held at theSheraton Hotel in Washington, DC, with support from Chevron (USA) and the

72 n e a : a h i s t o r yYamaha Music Corporation. The eventswere coordinated by the Charlin Jazz Society in conjunction with the 18th Annual
International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE) conference, and the evening
celebrated all 27 previous NEA Jazz Masters along with four new inductees: DannyBarker, Buck Clayton, Andy Kirk, and Clark
Terry. Wynton Marsalis served as master of
ceremonies.
In 2008, Arts Endowment Chairman
Dana Gioia noted with satisfaction that inthe 26 years since the NEA Jazz Masters
program began, not only has the award’s
prestige grown, but also the individual
stipend has reached $25,000, and the
Dizzy Gillespie was one of the firstnumber of awards given each year has
recipients of the NEA Jazz Masters Awardrisen from three to six. One of thesein 1982. (Photo by Martin Cohen)awards, the A. B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy, named for the veteran agency official and jazzhistorian, is presented to a non-performing jazz advocate who has made major contributions to the field. Cultural critic Nat Hentoff received the first NEA jazz advocate
award in 2004.
Since 1982, the NEA Jazz Masters award has encompassed outstanding talents
across the generational span, from Count Basie to Cecil Taylor, from Ahmad Jamal toDave Brubeck, from Ella Fitzgerald to Tony Bennett. The extraordinary variety of jazz
idioms reflected what A. B. Spellman called “the old jazz principle that ‘you’ve got tomake it new.’” For many years, the NEA Jazz Masters award had been presented at aconcert held during the annual conference of IAJE. Working with Jazz at Lincoln Center, and with funding from the Verizon Foundation, the NEA also produced an online
curriculum for high school students called NEA Jazz in the Schools.

National Medal of Arts Established
In 1984, President Reagan signed legislation establishing the National Medal of Arts
as the nation’s highest award to artists and art patrons. This presidential award was

the reagan era

73President Ronald Reagan presenting the National Medal of Arts to visual artist Romare Bearden in
1987. (Photo by Mary Anne Fackelman-Miner, White House)destined, like other NEA honors, to become a hallmark of American creative excellence. Drawing from nominations by private citizens, members of Congress, andarts groups, the National Council on the Arts makes recommendations and submits
them to the President. The medal itself was designed by sculptor Robert Graham following a public competition.
The National Medal of Arts was first presented at a White House luncheon on
April 23, 1985. The first set of recipients included a stellar group of American artists
and patrons:• Elliott Carter, composer• Ralph Ellison, novelist• José Ferrer, actor• Martha Graham, dancer and choreographer• Lincoln Kirstein, dance impresario• Louise Nevelson, sculptor

74 n e a : a h i s t o r y• Georgia O’Keeffe, painter• Leontyne Price, opera singer• Dorothy Chandler, patron• Alice Tully, patron• Paul Mellon, patron
Another recipient was not an individual, but a corporation, Hallmark Cards, Inc.,
for its longstanding support of the arts.
National Medal of Arts recipients in the second Reagan Administration included
film directors Frank Capra and Gordon Parks, composers Aaron Copland and Virgil
Thomson, painters Willem de Kooning and Romare Bearden, choreographers Agnesde Mille and Jerome Robbins, folklorist Alan Lomax, philosopher and critic Lewis
Mumford, fiction writers Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow, and poets Howard Nemerov
and Robert Penn Warren—a constellation of the nation’s most creative talents.

Twentieth Anniversary
In 1985, the NEA celebrated its twentieth anniversary. On March 25, the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a special Oscar to the NEA for its service
to the arts, and six months later, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
awarded the Arts Endowment an Emmy. Frank Hodsoll was renominated as NEA
chairman, and President Reagan declared September 23–29 of that year National
Arts Week. First Lady Nancy Reagan served ashonorary chairman of the Twentieth Anniversary Committee, headed by Charlton Heston.
Widespread public support for the Arts Endowment was manifested in more than 800
NEA anniversary events around the country.
Additionally, the NEA’s budget rose to $164.7
million.
As another marker of its twentieth anniversary, the Arts Endowment sponsored Buying
Time, edited by Scott Walker, an anthology ofwork by recipients of the NEA Literature Fellowships over the years. Published by Graywolf
NEA Chairman Frank Hodsoll (right) sharesPress in St. Paul, Minnesota, the volume com- the agency’s Academy Award with President
prised an anthology of America’s best poets Reagan. (NEA File Photo)

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75and short-story writers. The poets in Buying Time included John Ashbery, John
Berryman, Louise Bogan, Lucille Clifton, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Louise
Glück, Galway Kinnell, Etheridge Knight, Stanley Kunitz, Philip Levine, W. S.
Merwin, Kenneth Rexroth, Muriel Rukeyser, May Sarton, and Charles Wright.
Fiction was represented by Paul Bowles, Raymond Carver, Louise Erdrich, John
Gardner, John Hawkes, Maxine Hong Kingston, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, and Tobias Wolff. The playwriting section featured the work of
Maria Irene Fornes. It was an extraordinary roster of literary talent and a fitting tribute to two decades of NEA support of literature.

Grant Patterns Continue
At the onset of the Reagan Administration, the NEA’s grants, based on peer review,
generally followed the patterns previously established. Many of the same institutions continued to appear on lists of grantees, prompting concern about the
rigor—or lack of it—in the application review process.
Determined to ensure that the panels forwarded only artistically worthy applications for funding, Chairman Hodsoll personally reviewed hundreds of applications,
including supporting materials and panel notes. Applications which he believed
failed to meet the standard of artistic excellence, lacked adequate support for funding, or raised policy issues were selected for additional review and discussion by the
National Council on the Arts at its quarterly meetings. In some instances, a majority
of council members agreed with the chairman’s judgment and recommended thatthe applications be rejected. In accordance with the NEA legislation, Chairman Hodsoll made the decisions himself, after considering the recommendations frompanels and the National Council on the Arts.
Hodsoll was assisted in this regard by Associate Deputy Chairman for Programs
Ruth Berenson, whom he had brought to the Arts Endowment from her earlier work
as art critic and writer for the National Review. The panels were required to document more fully, and for the record, their recommendations—not just reasons forrejections, but their rationales for funding, reinforcing Hodsoll’s resolve to support
only the most artistically meritorious among the 20,000 or more applications
received each year.
In 1982, Hodsoll emphasized that private donations for the arts would remain themost important component of arts support in a “pluralistic system . . . in which noone sector dominates.” But he also called for new practices needed to address devel-

76 n e a : a h i s t o r yCowboy Poetry
If asked for an example of cowboy poetry,
many Americans might only know Dr.
Brewster Higley’s lyrics for “Home on the
Range.” Cowboy poetry, however, is a
vibrant and beloved genre, with fansacross the United States. Influenced by
the rhythms of gospel, hymns, and othermusical genres, its ballad style—characterized mostly by rhyme and authentic
detail— has roots that stretch back to
the 1860s. Since then, wranglers andbuckaroos have entertained each otherin bunkhouses and on trail drives withpoems they have memorized or made up
on the spot.
The year 1985 marked the beginningof the National Endowment for the Arts’contribution to this unique art form withsupport for the first annual Cowboy Poetry
Gathering, held in the railroad town ofElko, Nevada, and sponsored by the Western Folklife Center. To prepare for the
event, folklorist Hal Cannon and his colleagues surveyed ranchers to explore theheritage of contemporary cowboy poetry
and determine its popularity. The reach ofcowboy poetry surprised them all whenattendance at this first gathering of cowboy poets in the middle of winter exceeded
five times the expected number. Within
five years, dozens of similar festivals
emerged across the Western United States,and by the mid-1990s, that number had
increased to over 150, followed by numerous poetry books, CDs, magazines, andanthologies. Several of the more famous
cowboy poets, including Baxter Black, Wally
McRae, and Waddie Mitchell made numer-

Cowboy poet Wallace McRae, also an NEA
National Heritage Fellow, has been performingat the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering inElko, Nevada, since its inception in 1984.
(Photo by Tom Pich)ous appearances on radio and television.
Today, the week-long Elko festival
attracts 8,000 enthusiasts and adds morethan $6 million to the local economy.
Women, too, are now participating indroves. Cannon remembers that morethan 50 corporations and funders turned
him down for help, but the Arts Endowment’s support was steadfast: “The NEA
support was a very important indicator oftrust, and helped us to get cowboy poetry
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77

Idaho Shakespeare Festival, here performing Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors, has
benefited from support by the NEA and the Idaho Commission on the Arts over its more than 30
years. (Photo courtesy of Idaho Shakespeare Festival)

opments such as the acquisition of film companies and publishing houses by business conglomerates, the increasing predominance of “blockbuster” exhibitions atmuseums, and a decline in adventurous repertoires produced among performing
arts institutions. His approach demonstrated a far-reaching economic and institutional understanding of the arts in America, one that recognized new financialpressures on arts organizations and the need for a different kind of public support.
Hodsoll developed a six-part strategy for the NEA:
• Providing long-term institutional assistance to the best of the arts organizations,
big or small;• Encouraging broader audiences for advanced and diverse art forms;• Increasing efficiency in grantmaking by promoting anticipatory planning by arts
institutions;• Reinforcing links among federal, state, local, and regional arts organizations;• Stimulating broader private support;• Initiating a system of arts information delivery.
Efficiency, stability, partnership, and sustainability—these new concepts took

78 n e a : a h i s t o r ytheir place beside the traditional ideals of artistic excellence and artistic heritage, andthey were reflected in several accomplishments during the decade.
A noteworthy instance of two of those goals, long-term assistance and federalstate-local links, is the Idaho Shakespeare Festival (ISF). In the words of the
managing director and later member of the National Council on the Arts, Mark Hofflund, “ISF is the product of modest and steady federal support over many years
through a highly scrutinized, professional and publicly engaged process of federal
leadership at a statewide level. There is nothing immediately notable or sexy in this.
It generates no medals or headlines or sound bites. In 30 years, this organization has
progressed from an annual budget of $4,500 to $2,500,000—with assets of$5,000,000 from a campaign to build an amphitheater situated among 12 acres ofriverside habitat.” Furthermore, the success resulted from two parties: “The greatest
cumulative source of support for ISF, during these decades, was none other than the
Idaho Commission on the Arts—as supported by the NEA.” Indeed, Hofflund adds,
Idaho “likely would not have an arts agency had the NEA not encouraged its creation
40 years ago.”

Congressional Controversies and Influential Critiques
In 1984, while the agency was reforming its grants process and expanding into newprograms, another controversy erupted when Representative Mario Biaggi (D-NY)
stepped forward to protest the funding of a production by the English National
Opera company of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
This version of Rigoletto, advertised as being set among Mafiosi in New York’s Little
Italy, was judged by some as demeaning to Italian-Americans. Biaggi was joined in
his complaint by Rudolph Giuliani, then associate U.S. attorney in New York, andvarious Italian American advocacy groups. Representative Biaggi called Chairman
Hodsoll to testify at a special Congressional hearing. The Rigoletto uproar eventuallydied down, but the episode demonstrates the sharp scrutiny applied to the Arts
Endowment whenever an organization it funded produced art that verged on controversial topics and touched on edgy themes.
The battle heated up again in 1985, when Congressmen Tom DeLay (R-TX) andDick Armey (R-TX) declared that the Arts Endowment had violated its mandate byawarding grants to authors of poetry that the two legislative critics described as“pornography.” As reported in the New York Times, Representative Armey argued
that authors of obscene verse continued to benefit from Arts Endowment grants as a

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The Mayors’ Institute on City Design
The Mayors’ Institute on City Design is apartnership between the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Conference ofMayors, and the American Architectural
Foundation. In 1986, Mayor Joseph Rileyof Charleston, South Carolina, proposed
the idea of a program that would give mayors a better understanding of how design
can improve their cities. He presented thisidea to the NEA’s then-director of Design,
Adele Chatfield-Taylor, who secured funding to form the Mayors’ Institute on City
Design. Now in his eighth term, Mayor
Riley notes: “Mayors come to the Instituteas regular people but, I promise you, theyleave as zealous apostles of good urban
design. You can see the light bulbs go off intheir minds.”
The structure of the Institute has remained the same since its inception: eightmayors and eight designers, all locked in aroom for two-and-a-half days—no staff, nomedia, no sound bites or grandstanding—just 16 men and women talking about
design. Each mayor brings his or her city’s
most critical urban design challenge todiscuss, and following the case-study
method, the teams generate creative solutions. As of 2008, a Mayors’ Institute takes
place somewhere around the country
every 60 days. In addition to more than
750 mayor alumni, the institute can also
claim more than 400 designers, who haveoften commented on learning as muchfrom the mayors as the mayors havelearned from them.
Mayors who have attended credit theexperience as transforming the way theylook at their cities. As one alumnus, U.S.

80 n e a : a h i s t o r y

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (at podium)
leads a press conference for the Mayors'
Institute on City Design's special session on
the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes. (Photo by
Aaron Koch)

Representative Kay Granger, former mayor
of Fort Worth, Texas, said, “Throughout
my three terms, I kept coming back towhat I had learned at the Institute andapplying it to my city. I can think of three
specific success stories that were the direct
result of my participation. These included
the creation of the grand boulevard in theplace of a torn-down overpass, the rebuilding of our downtown library, and thereorientation of the city toward its waterfront. Honestly, in terms of what will last
beyond me and into the future, the Mayors’
Institute had greater influence than anything else I did while in office.”
As of 2008, more than 750 mayors haveparticipated in the NEA’s Mayors’ Instituteon City Design. The program’s successalso led to the 2005 creation of the Governors’ Institute on Community Design, aspinoff initiative intended to help governors practice good community design andinnovative planning.

consequence of cronyism within the NEA. By this he implied that former grantees,
who had become panel members judging the appropriateness of applications,would then reward those whose work resembled, supported, or justified their own.
Such allegations constituted a legitimate area for Congressional oversight.
Indeed, a public agency distributing funds in a competitive process must avoid eventhe suspicion of inside dealing or unfair practices. In 1979, the Washington Post
commented, “The charge that a ‘closed circle’ of acquaintanceship runs the [Arts]
Endowment through overlapping appointments to panels and committees is a serious one, and one both the Arts and Humanities [Endowments] have been guilty offor a long time. Beside the obvious wrong of creating situations where friends makegrants to friends, or friends of friends, there is also the patently unhealthy set-up inwhich stale ideas recycle like so much dead air.”
The Armey-DeLay criticism also had been anticipated in a number of articles
about the Arts Endowment in literary and political journals. Hilary Masters, fiction
author and son of the distinguished American poet Edgar Lee Masters, published acritical examination of the Arts Endowment’s Creative Writing Fellowships in Georgia Review in 1981. Titled “Go Down Dignified”—a phrase from a Robert Frost poem
“Provide, Provide” about securing wealth and fame—the article noted the charge ofcronyism directed against panelists, and also observed that most grants went to writers in New York and California. “Few found their way to Middle America or to theSouth. States like Oklahoma, Michigan, Georgia, and Indiana received only two
grants each. Louisiana, Kansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi got only one each. Both
West Virginia and Utah received only one fellowship each, and theirs were given to
writers with no permanent residence in those states. Missouri received none,” Masters observed, adding that a disproportionate amount of grant money had been
awarded to writers connected with certain small presses. In one case, seven writers
associated with Big Sky Press were among the 267 winners of fellowships out of apool of 3,750 submissions—evidence to Masters of an interlocking relationshipamong publishers, authors, and panelists. The Georgia Review printed a “Restrained
Response” to Masters by NEA Literature Director David Wilk, who asserted that
Masters misrepresented the grants review process and cherry-picked from the statistical data. Nevertheless, Masters’s scathing essay caused much commentary in theliterary world.
Armey and DeLay were joined by Representative Steve Bartlett (R-TX), who proposed an amendment to the NEA’s 1985 funding bill prohibiting awards to artists
whose work could be considered “patently offensive to the average person.” Though

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81none of the cited poems were written when any of the authors were NEA grantees,
the objections were powerful nonetheless. Congressional staff members even cameto the Arts Endowment facility and searched through Literature grant archives looking for more controversial material.
Led by Chairman Hodsoll, the NEA repudiated the challenge to its grantmaking
by issuing a firm defense against attempts to impose federal regulations on literarycontent. Professor Cleanth Brooks, a surviving member of the influential “New Critics,” a group of literary critics and scholars whose methods dominated mid-century
American literary study, came forward to declare Congressional censorship a “cureworse than the disease.” He also suggested, “A properly educated public should be
able to act as their own censors.” On the other hand, John Illo, a professor of English
at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, soon responded in the letters columnof the New York Times, finding it “surprising” that Brooks “should not know the difference between the right of publishing without restraint and the privilege of being
subsidized.” After he left the Arts Endowment, Hodsoll expressed agreement withIllo’s position, noting, “I make a fine distinction (some would argue too fine) between
content standards and administrative common sense that respects the expectationthat taxpayers have that their taxpayer dollars will not be used to offend them.”
Nevertheless, internal notes on the political debate, written by NEA Congressional
Liaison Anne Marie Barnes and circulated to NEA staff, included the statement,“The Endowment would not have been established if there were any suggestion that theFederal government, or any instrumentality of it, would in any way influence the content
of supported art. [Emphasis in original] The Endowment was not to become a Soviet
art czar or Ministry of Culture.” Clearly, the Arts Endowment was still struggling
with the general problem of how to negotiate the competing demands of artistic
freedom and public standards, and soon the NEA would undergo much more severe
attacks.

New Programs
In summing up the situation of the NEA at the close of its second decade, Hodsoll
pointed out a new economic constraint in the arts: “Notwithstanding increasing
overall support for the nonprofit arts, it is important to note that, especially in theperforming arts, expenses are increasing, in some cases even faster than revenues.
We need a better sense of how great these difficulties are. We also remain concerned
about the reluctance in many quarters to produce, present, or exhibit programs that

82 n e a : a h i s t o r ylack the drawing capacity of ‘stars’ or ‘blockbusters.’ The tension between marqueevalue for its own sake and artistic excellence remains; the only question is whether
that tension is producing greater imbalances today than previously. Most importantly, we are concerned that 61 percent of American adults do not participate in most of
the arts we support; hence, our priority for arts education and television programming in the arts.” Both were essential to sustaining future audiences for the arts.
In 1986, the promise of television’s creative engagement would be partly fulfilled
by funding of the Public Broadcasting Service series on American artists, American
Masters. The first season included documentary profiles of critical figures in the history of American culture, including the architect Philip Johnson, author Katherine
Anne Porter, actor Charlie Chaplin, singer Billie Holiday, conductor James Levine,composer Aaron Copland, painters Thomas Eakins and Georgia O’Keeffe, and playwright Eugene O’Neill. The series also included a collaborative project amongplaywright Arthur Miller, German director Volker Schlöndorff, and the cast of thecinema version of Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a classic of the modern theater.
The concluding years of the Reagan era saw many other positive developments in
the Arts Endowment’s support of media arts. The NEA had supported the foundingof the National Center for Film and Video Preservation as a subsidiary of the American Film Institute. The center is an archive for film and television products whose
holdings are at the Library of Congress and other archives. Its mission, to advancetechnology for rescuing and reproducing film and television originals, has resulted
in the transfer of black and white products from fragile and hazardous nitrate-based
stock to acetate, research to resolve a range of separate problems associated with thedegradation of acetate stock itself, the application of special technologies for thepreservation of color films, and research on the preservation of videotape. In 1986,
AFI initiated a two-year national moratorium on the disposal of television programming and began preparing comprehensive national guidelines for the selection of
television programs for retention and preservation. The center held the first national
conference for local television news archives in 1987, and the guidelines were distributed to the nation’s television networks, broadcast groups, and production
companies in 1988.
The Dance Program supported a landmark event when the Joffrey Ballet produced The Rite of Spring in 1987. Led by the choreographer and historian Millicent
Hodson and her husband, Kenneth Archer, the Joffrey Ballet reconstructed the choreography of ballet genius Vaslav Nijinsky, set to the score of Igor Stravinsky. The
Rite of Spring had not been staged with the complex Nijinsky directions since its

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The NEA supported the reproduction of The Rite of Spring by the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, whichused the original sets, costumes, and choreography from the 1913 production. (Photo by Herb
Migdoll)tempestuous premiere in 1913 in Paris, when it sparked a riot. The 1987 revival featured the original sets and costumes designed by the Russian mystic philanthropist
and painter Nicholas Roerich. The event proved to be notable in the history of ballet.
The reconstructed version of The Rite of Spring has been adopted into the repertoryof the Kirov Ballet in Russia and presented many times since. In supporting the project, the Arts Endowment demonstrated its crucial role in maintaining artistic
legacies, making a famous episode in the history of ballet accessible to a broad
American audience.

A New Priority: Arts Education
Chairman Hodsoll’s commitment to arts education resulted in an ambitious
research study published by the Endowment in 1988, entitled Toward Civilization.
The study sounded a grave and dignified warning about the decline of arts instruction in the K–12 curriculum. In the foreword, Hodsoll wrote, “We have found a gap

84 n e a : a h i s t o r ybetween commitment and resources for arts education and the actual practice of arts
education in classrooms. Resources are being provided, but they are not being used
to give opportunities for all, or even most, students to become culturally literate. The
arts in general are not being taught sequentially. Students of the arts are not being
evaluated. Many arts teachers are not prepared to teach history and critical analysis of
the arts.”
This statement articulated a new theme of arts education at the NEA. Whereas
previous efforts had focused on placing artists in the schools and exposing children
to arts activities, Toward Civilization emphasized learning and study, with the great
traditions of art and culture at the center of the curriculum. In this sense, it accordedwith the broader movements of education reform in the 1980s signaled by documents such as the Department of Education’s influential report, A Nation at Risk
(1983), and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ controversial study ofhigher education, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). These reform documents emphasized content knowledge and basic
skills, and they helped inspire the standards movement in K–12 education, but they
didn’t take the arts much into account. Toward Civilization insisted the arts be an
essential part of a regeneration of elementary and secondary education, and the call
was heard throughout the arts education community. The report would beanswered a decade later with the establishment of National Standards for Educationin the Arts.

Closing Achievements
The close of Hodsoll’s tenure saw otherefforts to survey the arts in U.S. society. Hodsoll initiated the Arts in America reports,
which offered inventory and analysis of
America’s artistic resources and issues. He
also helped create the National Task Force on
Presenting and Touring the Performing Arts.
Administered by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the task force aimed tostrengthen arts presentation and to reinforce
the networks of presenting organizations,performers, audiences, and communities—

The 1988 NEA report Toward Civilization
explored the lack of arts education in thenation’s schools.

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85

once again underscoring Hodsoll’s emphasis on the infrastructure of arts support.
President Reagan summarized the importance of the Arts Endowment’s work at
the National Medal of Arts presentation in 1987: “Why do we, as a free people, honor
the arts? The arts and the humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. Theylie at the very core of the culture of which we’re a part, and they provide the foundation from which we may reach out to other cultures so that the great heritage that isours may be enriched by, as well as itself enrich, other enduring traditions. We
honor the arts not because we want monuments to our own civilization but because
we are a free people. The arts are among our nation’s finest creations and the reflection of freedom’s light.”
As Arts Endowment chairman, Frank Hodsoll had demonstrated strong leadership and management skills, securing budget increases, setting a new agenda forarts education, and addressing serious criticisms originating from inside and outside the federal government. The NEA’s programs and awards were going strong,
and the National Medal of Arts, the NEA National Heritage Fellowships, and the
NEA Jazz Masters awards had become distinguished honors. The Arts Endowment
appeared to be primed for even further growth and success.

86 n e a : a h i s t o r yJohn E. Frohnmayer, NEA Chairman 1989–92. (Photo by Michael Geissinger)chapter 6

Culture WarsIn september 1987, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art(SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, received a grant of $75,000 from the
NEA to support the seventh annual Awards in the Visual Arts program, known as
AVA-7. The idea for AVA began under Chairman Hanks as a model for public-private
partnership programs. The NEA grant was matched by a total of $75,000 from the
Equitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. These grants enabled the
SECCA jury to meet and select ten artists, including photographer Andres Serrano,
to showcase their art in a traveling exhibition. The Arts Endowment played no partin the selection process. Nearly a year later, in July 1988, the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) received an NEA grant of $30,000 for a
retrospective of works by another photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who soonafter died in 1989.
The AVA-7 exhibition opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in May
1988. It continued through the middle of July, then traveled without incident to theCarnegie-Mellon University Art Gallery in Pittsburgh before being displayed, again
without protest, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from midDecember through January 1989. AVA-7 included a photograph by Serrano thatshowed, in a blurred focus, a crucifix as seen through a golden liquid. The title of thework was Piss Christ.
The Mapplethorpe exhibition, entitled The Perfect Moment, was an extensive retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s career, which opened at the ICA in Philadelphia in
December 1988. Unlike Serrano’s image, Piss Christ, which was hazy in appearance

89Richard Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc in New York City in the 1980s. (Photo by David Aschkenas)

but provocative in title, the Mapplethorpe exhibit included graphic sexual images
under a mild title. The Mapplethorpe show was installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from February to early April, and was then scheduled for the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington beginning July 1, 1989. These appearanceswere to be followed by stops at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the University
Art Museum in Berkeley, and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, to conclude at the end of August 1990.
In November 1988, national elections were held, and President Reagan was succeeded by another Republican, George H. W. Bush. The themes raised by these two
exhibitions seemed a far cry from the dominant foreign and domestic policy issuesof the campaign—the Cold War, the Middle East, violent crime—but they soon
erupted into a controversy that would affect national politics through to the nextpresidential election.

90 n e a : a h i s t o r yUproar
The furor over the Serrano and Mapplethorpe images began just as another heatedcontroversy was winding down. In 1981, a massive steel sculpture by Richard Serra,
Tilted Arc, was placed on the plaza in front of a federal office building in Manhattan
by the General Services Administration (GSA). An Arts Endowment panel had recommended Serra for the commission through its advisory role in the GSA’s “Art inArchitecture” program. Although the work was intended to improve the aesthetics of
its location, workers who used the space claimed that the sculpture was obstructive
and discomforting. For years they complained loudly about the work. In spring
1989, it was removed in the middle of the night at the orders of a regional administrator of the GSA.
The Tilted Arc affair principally involved people who made daily contact with theartwork, and the impact of the incident was largely confined to local citizens andpeople in the art world. News of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe exhibits, however,would spread far beyond the art world to become a major political story across thenation. After the AVA-7 exhibition closed, the Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, executive director of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi, saw thecatalogue containing Serrano’s Piss Christ. He condemned both Serrano and his
work, initiating a public campaign against the show and the agency that helped
make it possible. Thousands of like-minded citizens across the country flooded Congress with protests. Wildmon called for the dismissal of the “person at the National
Endowment for the Arts responsible for approving federal tax dollars.”
At the time, the Arts Endowment was in transition. Frank Hodsoll had departed,and the Bush Administration had not yet nominated a successor. The acting chairman, Hugh Southern, had served as deputy chairman under Hodsoll. On April 25,
1989, Southern issued a statement intended to moderate the growing tumult. It
said, “The involvement of the National Endowment for the Arts as a funder of theSoutheast Center for Contemporary Art follows Endowment panelists’ advice, andthat of the National Council on the Arts. The Endowment is expressly forbidden in
its authorizing legislation from interfering with the artistic choices made by its
grantees. The National Endowment for the Arts supports the right of grantee organizations to select, on artistic criteria, their artist-recipients and present their work,
even though sometimes the work may be deemed controversial and offensive tosome individuals. We at the Endowment do, nonetheless, deeply regret any offense
to any individual.”c u l t u r e w a r s 91

The statement did nothing to blunt
the hostile reactions. Criticism of theArts Endowment in Congress was led
by Senators Jesse Helms (R-NC) and
Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY), and echoed in
the Washington Times. Joined by 22
other Senators—including several Democratic standard-bearers such as Bob
Kerrey (D-NE), Dennis DeConcini (DAZ), Harry Reid (D-NV), and Tom
Harkin (D-IA)—they released a letter
in May denouncing Serrano’s work as“trash” and demanding a review of theArts Endowment’s award procedures.
Telephone calls and letters poured
into the agency complaining about
Serrano’s work. In a June broadcast, telSenator Jesse Helms was a frequent opponent of the
NEA. (Photo courtesy of Senator Jesse Helms Senateevangelist Pat Robertson added his voice
Papers, Jesse Helms Center Archives, Wingate, NC)
to the chorus attacking Serrano and theArts Endowment. Southern replied tothe protesting senators with a letter on June 6, 1989, to Senator D’Amato stating thathe “personally found [Serrano’s photograph] offensive,” but pointed out that the selection of the art had been made by SECCA’s jury, not by the Arts Endowment itself.
Southern said that the Arts Endowment and the National Council on the Arts promised a review “to ensure that Endowment processes are effective and maintain the highest artistic integrity and quality.” However correct they were, his communications did
not give the angry legislators what they wanted—a guarantee that the NEA would notsupport projects containing works that outraged public taste.
The battle heightened as columnist Patrick Buchanan and theologian Jacob
Neusner—a member of the National Council on the Arts—weighed in, each in a distinct venue and with considerable differences of style and tone. Buchanan used the
Washington Times editorial page as a forum to blast offensive artworks, many ofwhich were not funded by the Arts Endowment. He cited the commercial film, The
Last Temptation of Christ, and a mural of revolutionary icons Lenin and Castro on a
private building in Manhattan. Buchanan called on newly elected President George
H. W. Bush to purge the Arts Endowment.

92 n e a : a h i s t o r yFrom his position at the program of Judaic studies at Brown University, Neusnerwrote a letter to Senators Helms and D’Amato, “I wish the Endowment leadershipwould simply say . . . we goofed and we’re sorry. Because we did goof and I for one am
sorry and also, I personally am enormously chagrined.” Within days of Neusner’s
letter, on May 31, 1989, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) called on the Arts Endowment
to cut off funds to SECCA for five years.

Mapplethorpe Controversy and Congressional Reaction
At almost the same time, the Mapplethorpe exhibit began to generate controversy,
beginning with the show’s cancellation by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in June 1989. As a demonstration of approximately 60 people outside the
Corcoran ensued, the decision caused a huge uproar in arts circles throughout thecountry. The Washington Project for the Arts exhibited the work in July–August
1989. The clamor over Mapplethorpe became noticeably louder just as Congress
began debating H.R. 2788, the appropriations bill for the Interior Department andRelated Agencies, which provided funding for the Arts Endowment. Four criticalamendments were offered. Three of thesewere defeated: one to eliminate the Endowment’s entire appropriation for fiscal year
1990, another to cut its grants and administration appropriation by 10 percent, andanother to reduce its budget by 5 percent.
A fourth amendment, offered by Representative Charles Stenholm (D-TX), called for a
reduction of Arts Endowment funding by$45,000—representing the $30,000 NEA
grant that had been awarded to ICA for the
Mapplethorpe show and the $15,000 that hadgone to AVA-7 to exhibit Serrano. The Stenholm amendment carried, and the bill passed
the House.
When the Senate took up the NEA’s appropriation bill, Senator Helms inserted language Robert Mapplethorpe’s Calla Lily, 1986, part of
The Perfect Moment exhibition that toured inprohibiting the Arts Endowment from using
1988–90. (© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation,
any appropriated funds for materials deemed used by permission)c u l t u r e w a r s 93

“obscene or indecent,” including those denigrating belief in a religion or non-religion, or debasing any person on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or
national origin. “Obscenity” was defined as works which include “sadomasochism,
homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex
acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political,
or scientific value.” Other amendments were introduced to ban for five years all
direct grants to SECCA and to the ICA at the University of Pennsylvania, and to shift$400,000 from the agency’s Visual Arts Program to other Endowment programs in
the areas of folk arts and community arts—even though the Mapplethorpe grantcame from the Museum Program, not Visual Arts.
When the final version of the bill emerged, the Senate had provided $250,000 tocreate an independent commission to review the Arts Endowment’s grantmaking
operation. The amendments to take funds from the Visual Arts Program and toplace a ban on SECCA and ICA grants were not included. Thus, at that point, thecontroversies had not resulted in reduction of the NEA’s budget. Conservatives inpublic life and several Republicans in Congress, however, maintained their suspicion of the Arts Endowment, and to many the names Serrano and Mapplethorpe
were now tokens of moral corruption inside the agency. Into this heated and confusing climate, new Arts Endowment leadership arrived.

Frohnmayer’s Chairmanship
In July 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed John E. Frohnmayer to head
the Arts Endowment, and in November he was sworn in as the agency’s fifth chairman. The moment of Frohnmayer’s arrival could not have been less auspicious, but
the new chairman displayed an attitude of optimism.
A Washington Post writer characterized the reaction to one of Frohnmayer’s publicappearances in Oregon, his home state, directly after his nomination to the chairmanship, as “giddy applause.” Frohnmayer was a successful lawyer—specializing in
the First Amendment—an art collector, and chairman of the Oregon State Arts
Commission. He had studied for the ministry before choosing law as a profession.
In his memoir, Leaving Town Alive (published in 1993), Frohnmayer wrote that
before accepting his appointment he had considered the Arts Endowment chairmanship to be “the best job in the country,” one which he “had always wanted.” Infact, he had unsuccessfully lobbied for the post at the beginning of the Reagan era.
As a state arts leader in Oregon, he had experienced the benefit of NEA assistance to

94 n e a : a h i s t o r yJohn E. Frohnmayer is sworn in as NEA Chair on November 13, 1989, by President George H. W.
Bush. (Photo courtesy of George Bush Presidential Library)

the state agencies, writing that Oregon had received “money to help fund full-time
directors for local arts councils, and this small amount of assistance increased thesecouncils from three to 14 over a two-year period.” In his pre-appointment interviews,
he argued that the “Endowment could be extraordinarily helpful to the President[George H. W. Bush] as he sought to bring the country together.”
Frohnmayer also wrote in his memoir that he had been asked in his pre-appointment interview by White House staff what he would do if the Administration had adifferent point of view about a particular program from his own. He responded, “I
would try my best to persuade the Administration that my point of view was right, butthat I was a team player, and if I failed to persuade, I would do the Administration’s
will.” As he soon realized, however, it would prove difficult to balance the competing
demands of different constituencies as the culture wars came to Washington.
Frohnmayer remembered being “hopeful that Serrano and Mapplethorpe would
be history by the time I got to the Endowment.” But Serrano and Mapplethorpe were
history only in the sense that they had become permanent symbols. Indeed, at thetime of this publication the grants and the controversy are nearly two decades old,
yet the two names have been incessantly repeated by critics of the Arts Endowment,
though to ever-diminishing effect. Likewise, the reputations of both artists havebecome inseparable from the NEA controversy.

c u l t u r e w a r s 95

The NEA’s Rural Arts Initiative
For more than two decades, the National
Endowment for the Arts had focused onbringing the arts to underserved communities—including minority and inner citycommunities—through its Expansion
Arts Program. In 1989, the NEA expandedthat focus of underserved communities toinclude rural areas with the developmentof the Rural Arts initiative. Designed“to assist rural arts organizations thathave considerable potential to develop
artistically and administratively,” the program lasted three years, and state arts
agencies typically received grants of up to$40,000 to support two to five rural arts
organizations.
In 1991, arts councils in Alabama,
Alaska, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, New
Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin received nearly $400,000 to help
“exemplary rural arts organizations withinstitutional potential.” Overall, Rural Arts
enabled arts agencies in 22 states to augment existing initiatives or to develop new
ones. Projects supported under the initiative included Virginia’s artist residency
program at rural community colleges,
Idaho’s Arts in Rural Towns that trained
performers and presented arts events forcommunities of fewer than 5,000 people,
Oklahoma’s self-directed study and practice guide for older adults, and Arizona’s
Tribal Museum program that assisted
the state’s many Native American tribes

96 n e a : a h i s t o r yMusician Phil Baker enjoys a laugh withstudents in a concert in Clear Lake, South
Dakota, as part of the 1989 Touring Arts
Teams, a rural arts initiative funded by the Arts
Endowment. (Photo courtesy South Dakota
Arts Council)

in documenting and preserving theircultures.
Although the Expansion Arts Program
no longer exists as a separate division, theArts Endowment has continued to bringthe arts and arts education to rural areas
through direct grants and partnerships
with state, local, and regional arts agencies.
Later national initiatives strengthened thismission with programs such as American
Masterpieces, a touring and arts education
initiative that as of 2008 has supported
more than 200 projects in various disciplines across the country.

Fighting on Two Fronts
To comply with Congressional mandates, the new chairman inserted the wording of
the obscenity clause into the terms and conditions governing all NEA grants. His
decision satisfied the Administration but evoked virulent attacks from a new group ofdissenters: artists and arts administrators who had previously looked to the agency
for support. The arts community began accusing the NEA of failing to defend freedom of expression, and soon the outcry became a complaint of censorship. The arts
community also accused Chairman Frohnmayer of “selling out” to censors. Composer Leonard Bernstein refused the 1989 National Medal of Arts as a protest against thechairman’s policies, and New York theater director Joseph Papp denounced Frohnmayer as “out-Helmsing Helms” and as “a person not to be trusted.” Papp put his
denunciation into action in 1990 when he turned down two NEA grants totaling$323,000, one a $50,000 award to support the Shakespeare Festival’s annual Festival
Latino. Another organization, the Bella Lewitzky Dance Foundation, won a grant thatyear, but when it submitted a request for payment, the company manager refused tocomply with the new terms and conditions of the grant. When the Arts Endowment
insisted the grantee abide, as required by law, the company filed suit.
The Arts Endowment now found itself fighting a war on two fronts. Some arts
advocates labeled the new wording in the grants’ terms and conditions a “loyalty
oath.” Frohnmayer later claimed that he had adopted the language as “an invitation
to a lawsuit, which I hoped would lead to a finding that the language was unconstitutional.” Because of the obscenity clause, a number of artists regarded the Arts
Endowment’s grant contracts as “a symbol of repression,” and many artists and arts
organization directors refused to serve on panels. In 1992, no fellowship awards
were granted for sculpture because the members of a Visual Arts panel had resigned
in protest.
In his memoir, Frohnmayer continued, “My course was set and I wasn’t going tochange it.” After the insertion of the new language into grant terms and conditions,
he stated his opposition to the politicization of art, while expressing surprise when
protests grew among the artists opposed to his policies. Joseph Wesley Zeigler, in his
book Arts in Crisis, identified the cause of Frohnmayer’s dilemma: “His failure tounderstand the [Washington political] system led him to overreact to Congressional
moves, while at the same time he underestimated the anger in the arts world at the
NEA’s refusal to support cutting-edge works. . . . This inflamed artists while failingto assuage the conservatives.”

c u l t u r e w a r s 97

The difficulty in defining a consistent policy in this polarized climate was visible
within a month of Chairman Frohnmayer’s confirmation. His first direct conflictwith artists involved Artists Space, a nonprofit New York gallery. Artists Space was
opening a show, with $10,000 in Arts Endowment funds, about the impact of AIDS
on the arts community. The exhibit included depictions of sexual activity, as well as acatalogue replete with highly polemical statements. Examining the catalogue,
Frohnmayer consulted with National Council on the Arts member Jacob Neusner,
who informed him the catalogue included violent attacks on public figures—including fantasies by artist David Wojnarowicz of setting Senator Helms on fire withgasoline and throwing another conservative legislator from a high building—that
had not been included in the original funding proposal submitted for the show.
Chairman Frohnmayer decided to suspend financing for the exhibit, on the groundsof its political nature. A week later, however, he reversed his decision, and restored
the $10,000 grant with the proviso that the funds would not pay for the catalogue.
His decision only inflamed the situation, and Zeigler observed, “For the next two
years, 1990 and 1991, Frohnmayer was caught in the middle of the crisis.”

The “NEA Four”
The next chapter in the saga started with the performance art of Karen Finley. Zeigler explained, “In the world of ‘underground’ culture, Karen Finley was a darling:admired by the cognoscenti, and unnoticed by the wider public.” A performance inwhich she poured chocolate sauce on her naked body brought her to national attention when it was the subject of a column by Washington journalists Rowland Evans
and Robert Novak, who offered an unattributed description of the performance, by“an Administration insider,” as “outrageous.” At a stormy meeting in May 1990 in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that would be long remembered, the National
Council on the Arts voted to defer for four months a group of 18 grants for Finley andother performance artists, that had been recommended by the Arts Endowment’s
Theater panel. Of the 18 grants delayed, 14 were eventually recommended for funding by the National Council and awarded by Chairman Frohnmayer. Along withFinley, the remaining artists not recommended were John Fleck, Holly Hughes, andTim Miller. These individuals sued the Arts Endowment and came to be known in
the arts community as the “NEA Four.”In his memoir, Frohnmayer described these individuals as “boldly and confrontationally taking on social issues about which there was tremendous societal debate.”

98 n e a : a h i s t o r yWhile Evans and Novak claimed that “White House sources” had said that Frohnmayer was “adamantly against disapproving any of the recommended applications,”
Frohnmayer later protested this was untrue, and that he did not have a planned
course of action. But, Frohnmayer had already written to White House aides Andrew
Card and David Bates about an upcoming Finley performance, which the Arts
Endowment had previously funded, that from all appearances the performance “wasdefensible on its artistic merit.”
The ferocious public debate over the Arts Endowment’s grants approval process
and a lawsuit by several newspapers led the agency to change its policy on National
Council meetings. In August 1990 the National Council on the Arts opened its grant
review sessions, which had previously been closed, to the public.

Ongoing Accomplishments
Although the controversies persisted, theregular business of the Arts Endowment
proceeded apace. As in every previous year,
the agency reviewed thousands of applications, awarding grants to arts organizations
and artists. Thirteen distinguished artists
living in Hawaii, South Dakota, and Puerto
Rico, among other places, received NEA
National Heritage Fellowships. Composer
George Russell, pianist Cecil Taylor, andbandleader Gerald Wilson were honored as
NEA Jazz Masters.
The Arts Endowment continued to offer
crucial support to significant projects. Visual Arts grants funded artist residencies atstate universities in Colorado, Illinois, New
Jersey, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, andWashington. The Art in Public Places program, which helped local governments andorganizations place art in public spaces,
supported commissions at Duke University
Medical Center, Las Vegas City Hall, and the

Snake Path, 1992, by Alexis Smith at the
University of California, San Diego, was fundedthrough the NEA’s Art in Public Places program.
(Photo by Philipp S. Ritterman)c u l t u r e w a r s 99

Luis Jiménez, 1977 and 1988
NEA Visual Arts Fellowships
Visual Arts Fellowships were awarded from1966 to 1995, providing financial support
for American artists, often at crucial points
in their careers. One of those artists assisted by the program was Luis Jiménez, whoreceived fellowships in 1977 and 1988.
Mostly working in large fiberglass sculptures, Jiménez was building a reputation as
an important American artist at the time
he received his grants.
Jiménez was born July 30, 1940, in abarrio of El Paso, Texas. His artistic interests began in his father’s custom sign

Luis Jiménez’s statue Vaquero stands in frontof the Smithsonian American Art Museum in
Washington, DC. (Photo by Don Ball)

100 n e a : a h i s t o r yshop, where he learned the techniques of
welding and spray-painting. Jiménez later
built upon these metalworking and painting skills with work influenced by Diego
Rivera and other Mexican muralists.
Graduating from the University of Texas
at Austin, he moved to New York City in
1969, where he held his first exhibition.
After moving back to El Paso in 1972, hecreated large fiberglass sculptures celebrating Mexican-American culture and myths.
Jiménez cited the 1977 NEA fellowshipas being crucial to his success as an artist:“This grant helped me develop the concepts I used to create my first public work,
Vaquero, for the City of Houston, an
NEA Art in Public Places commission.”
A cast of that piece stands in front of theSmithsonian American Art Museum in
Washington, DC.
He received another NEA grant in 1988,
helping him to finance a new workspace
and to travel to La Napoule, France. “Thecontact with artists from other countries,
specifically the Africans, was enormous—for them making art is literally a life anddeath struggle,” Jiménez said about theexperience. “In addition, the distance actually enabled me to focus on my projects
back home, and I worked on sketches andworking drawings.”
Luis Jiménez died on June 13, 2006,
after an accident in his Hondo, New Mexico, studio involving one of his large
sculptures.

Wyoming Game and Fish Department, and for highway overpasses in San Diego.
Preservation remained a central focus of the Arts Endowment funding to museums. The conservation grants in 1990 numbered 73 and totaled $1,169,800 inprogram funds. The Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, forexample, received money to conserve furniture and woodwork designed by Frank
Lloyd Wright in his Zimmerman House. The Toledo Museum of Art won a grant toconserve a collection of Islamic ceramics, while Oberlin College received funds tosupport work on Gustave Courbet’s Castle of Chillon, and the Detroit Institute of Arts
received a grant to conserve three monumental stained glass windows by John La
Farge.
These were not unusual awards. Each represented the thousands of worthy projects
evaluated and supported by the agency at the same time that media attention andpolitical pressure focused only on a tiny group of controversial works of art.

Research Studies
Amid the din, the Arts Endowment continued to carry out some remarkable
research projects with significant impact on different arts fields. One of the mostimportant was the publication Survey of Public Participation in the Arts: 1982–1992(SPPA). The SPPA was the third in a series of national population surveys designedby the NEA research staff to collect data on the U.S. population’s engagement in thearts. Data on the consumption side of the arts was thin. Until 1982, little reliable
information could be found regarding how many and how often American adults
visited museums, attended theater, listened to opera, read poetry, and in various
other ways participated in the arts. The Arts Endowment’s Research Division set out
to increase the knowledge base by designing a questionnaire and commissioning
the U.S. Bureau of the Census to compile a sample of respondents and conduct thesurvey. More than 17,000 people were interviewed in 1982, making it the largest single survey of U.S. arts participation ever. In 1985, another statistical survey was
conducted, providing the first opportunity to draw comparisons and explore trends
in arts participation among the American public.
The 1992 SPPA followed the same basic procedures, but used more clearly articulated definitions and more sophisticated data collection. With a ten-year gap
between it and the first survey, and with the respondent pool broken down by age,income, race, education level, and gender, the 1992 report signaled important
trends in arts participation and supplied arts organizations with invaluable informa-c u l t u r e w a r s 101

tion on audiences. Among the findings:• From 1982 to 1992, the attendance rate at art museums and galleries rose almost
five percentage points.
• Audiences for opera, classical music, and jazz on radio increased by 49 percent,
60 percent, and 71 percent, respectively.
• Literary reading rates (fiction, poetry, drama) fell by three percentage points.
The 1992 SPPA generated a front-page article in the New York Times on February
12, 1996. Written by Judith Miller and titled “Aging Audiences Point to Grim Arts
Future,” the article was the first of several to profile a troubling trend, the “graying of
the arts” phenomenon documented in the SPPA results; that is, younger age groups
were not participating in the fine arts at the rate their parents did when they wereyoung. Future surveys would be conducted in 1997 and 2002, confirming the “graying” pattern while building a uniquely broad and consistent database on arts
participation for researchers, educators, journalists, and policymakers, as well as
arts organizations.
The data from the first surveys in 1982 and 1985 also provided material for another significant report, Arts in America 1990. This was the second in a series of reports
requested by Congress on the status and condition of the arts in the United States.
Arts in America 1990 gave the agency the opportunity to reflect upon changes in thearts during the 25 years of the agency’s existence. The report recounted dozens ofprojects and artworks funded by the Arts Endowment, but perhaps most impressive,given the political climate, were the trends in arts production and participation. The
United States had experienced a remarkable growth in the number of arts organizations and artists, amount of public and private support, and size of audience:• In 1965, there were five state arts agencies with combined appropriations of $2.7
million. By 1990, there were arts agencies in all 56 states and jurisdictions with total
appropriations of $285 million.
• In 1990, local arts councils numbered around 3,000, with 600 having full-time
staff.
• Private sector giving for the arts, humanities, and culture grew from $44 million
in 1965 to $7.5 billion in 1989.
• Performing arts attendance from 1965 to 1988 rose from nine to 24 million forsymphony orchestra concerts, three to 18 million for opera, and one to 15 million for
nonprofit professional theater.
The Arts Endowment’s impact on generating non-federal support for the arts wasdemonstrated by other statistics, cited in Arts in America 1990:

102 n e a : a h i s t o r y• In 1989, the NEA’s $119 million in organizational grants generated $1.4 billion
in non-federal funds.
• By 1990, the NEA’s Challenge Grants totaling $237 million had been matched bymore than $2 billion in new non-federal funds.
• In 1990, all four Pulitzer Prize recipients in poetry, fiction, drama, and music
had been recognized earlier in their careers with NEA fellowships.
Arts in America 1990 contained testimonials from arts leaders about the benefitsof an Arts Endowment grant, not only providing money, but something far morevaluable in the long term—recognition. Joan Myers Brown, founding artistic andexecutive director of the Philadelphia Dance Company, Philadanco, explained it well:“The impact the National Endowment for the Arts has made on predominantly
African-American dance organizations since its inception can be exemplified by thehistory of the success of organizations such as Dayton Contemporary Dance Company of Ohio, Dallas Black Dance Theatre in Texas, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company in Denver, Colorado, and Philadanco in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Being able
to move into the main or national funding stream because of the approval of theEndowment opened doors to local agencies, foundations, and community-based
funding in our areas. This ability to compete for grants, often given only to the moreestablished cultural institutions,allowed what were often considered ‘grassroots’ or ‘communitybased’ to secure a stronger footing in the field.”
The Arts Endowment also reported in Arts in America 1990 on
the economics of working as an
artist in the United States. A
1989 Columbia University studyof 4,000 artists found that threefourths of them earned no morethan $12,000 annually from theirart. Rising medical costs hit
hard during the 1990s, affecting
artists not only because they tend
The Philadelphia Dance Company (Philadanco)
to be self-employed but also beperforming White Dragon, choreographed by Elisa
Monte. (Photo by Lois Greenfield)
cause of the physical hazards toc u l t u r e w a r s 103

which many in the arts are exposed. Another NEA research study, which was later
published in 1993 as Dancemakers, found that the average annual income choreographers earned from their artistic work in 1989 was $6,000, while their professional
expenses totaled $13,000. Including money earned in other pursuits, a dancer’s average income reached only $22,000. Dancemakers was, recalls Andrea Snyder, executive director of Dance/USA and former NEA Dance Program assistant director, “thefirst study of its kind to reveal the true economic life of today’s choreographers. It
quickly became one of the most important references for the dance field as it made thecase for increasing resources and services to artists making dances.”
Arts in America 1990 concluded on a triumphant note: “Over the past 25 years, theNational Endowment for the Arts has been most effective at helping to create adiverse network for public support of the arts and increasing the number and qualityof arts institutions.” The figures provided a strong argument for federal support for
the arts, demonstrating the public’s responsiveness to public funding and the enduring impact of grant awards.

The Independent Commission
In the middle of 1990, an Independent Commission mandated by Congress to study
the National Endowment for the Arts began its work. Comprised of 12 members,
plus a staff of eight, the commission was co-chaired by John Brademas, the former
Indiana Democratic Congressman and co-sponsor of the 1965 legislation creating
the Endowments, and Leonard Garment, who, as an assistant to Richard Nixon, had
played a leading role in increasing the Arts Endowment’s budget under Nancy
Hanks. Soon after the Independent Commission held its first meeting, the “NEA
Four” sued the Arts Endowment, alleging that their grant applications had beendenied illegally.
The mandate of the Independent Commission was twofold. First, it was charged
with reviewing the Arts Endowment’s grantmaking procedures, including the panel
system. Second, the commission was to consider whether standards for publicly
funded art should be different from those for privately funded art. These issues
reflected the primary criticisms leveled at the Arts Endowment; namely, that its
grantmaking process was afflicted by cronyism, and that it had funded works too far
from the mainstream of public taste.
The commissioners identified the fundamental cause of the Arts Endowment’s
crises as a deep change in the national sensibility. They wrote, “Today, twenty-five years

104 n e a : a h i s t o r yafter its creation, the system no longer works
as it once did, for reasons that the NEA’s
founders could not have foreseen. On certainsocial and cultural issues, the nation has
become more polarized. As with other federal
agencies, these developments affect the NEA
and the environment in which it operates. . . .
The Independent Commission believes it istime to restate what the founders of the NEA
took for granted: The National Endowment for
the Arts is a public agency established to serve
purposes the public expresses through its
elected representatives.”
The Independent Commission went on tostate, “While the artists and the arts institutions receiving NEA funds are indispensable
Former Indiana Congressman Johnto the achievement of the purposes of theBrademas co-chaired the 1990 Indeagency, the NEA must not operate solely inpendent Commission reviewing thethe interest of its direct beneficiaries. As with
NEA’s grantmaking procedures. (Photo
courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau)
every federal agency, the Endowment must do
its part in pursuing worthy social objectives
but the agency cannot let such goals take precedence over its primary task ofstrengthening the role of the arts in American life.”
In its most substantial comments, the introduction included the following: “Publicly funded art . . . should serve the purposes which Congress has determined for
the Endowment. It should be chosen through a process that is accountable and freeof conflicts of interest. . . . Insuring the freedom of expression necessary to nourish
the arts while bearing in mind limits of public understanding and tolerance requires
unusual wisdom, prudence, and most of all, common sense.”
Reconciling freedom of expression and public acceptance, however, is a delicate
process, especially when voices from both sides become extreme and antagonistic.
Few public agencies had to contend with clashing cultural forces as intensely andsensationally as the Arts Endowment did in these days. The commission’s call for
NEA leadership to exercise wisdom and prudence was not an easy task with so manyin the government, the press, and the art world making conflicting demands.
Regarding grant panels, the Independent Commission pointed out a similar diffi-

c u l t u r e w a r s 105

culty, noting that “making decisions about awarding grants to the arts is not an
objective activity, subject to quantitative measures or improved by formulaic prescriptions. Professional expertise, aesthetic discernment, and an awareness thatfederal funds are being expended—all these qualities are essential to the successful
grant making by the NEA.”

Assessing the NEA’s Record
In examining the record of the Arts Endowment, the commission took testimony
from arts professionals, NEA employees, and prominent figures in the arts and public life. Individuals testifying included Theodore Bikel, then-president of Actors’
Equity and former member of the National Council on the Arts; Samuel Lipman,pianist, publisher of the conservative New Criterion monthly, and also a former council member; theater director, teacher, and critic Robert Brustein; free speech litigator
Floyd Abrams; and constitutional expert Theodore B. Olson, who later served as U.S.
Solicitor General under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2004.
Drawing from the same data that went into Arts in America 1990, the Independent
Commission determined that the NEA had “helped transform the cultural landscape of the United States.” When the Arts Endowment was founded, the number ofsymphony orchestras in the nation totaled no more than 110, but in 1990 the number had risen to 230. Opera companies had increased from 27 to 120, while state folk
art programs had exploded from one to 46. Dance companies jumped from 37 to250, and art museums from 375 to 700. The number of artists in the United States
had tripled. The commission report summarized the work of the Arts Endowment
by affirming that “a relatively small investment of federal funds has yielded a substantial financial return and made a significant contribution to the quality ofAmerican life.”
The commission also determined that “although there are deficiencies in theoperation of the Endowment and some mistakes are inevitable, these problems canbe ameliorated, if not eliminated, by a combination of Congressional guidance andoversight, significant reforms in grant-making procedures and prudent administration of the Endowment. These goals can be achieved while at the same time assuring
both freedom of expression and accountability for expenditure of public funds.”

106 n e a : a h i s t o r yCommission Recommendations
The Independent Commission developed a series of recommendations concerning
publicly funded and privately funded art, grantmaking and panel procedures, therole and responsibilities of the National Council on the Arts, private-public partnerships, and obscenity.
The commission found that the standard for selecting publicly funded art “mustgo beyond” that for privately funded art. With regard to “aesthetic or artistic qualities,” both should be judged only on the basis of excellence. Government support,
however, must bring with it criteria beyond artistic worth; publicly funded art must
not ignore the conditions traditionally governing the uses of public money, andmust serve “the purposes which Congress has defined for the National Endowment
for the Arts.” These must include meeting professional standards of authenticity,
encouraging artists to achieve wider distribution of their works, and reflecting thecultures of minority, inner-city, rural, and tribal communities.
The commission recommended that the preamble of the legislation authorizing
the establishment of the Arts Endowment “be amended to make clear that the arts
belong to all the people of the United States.” Next, the Independent Commission
recommended reforming the grants application process. The commission called forthe strengthening of the authority of the chairperson; for the National Council on
the Arts to be more active in the grants process; for the elimination of “real or perceived conflicts of interest”; for the evaluation of grant applications to be “fair,accountable, and thorough”; for advisory panels to be broader and more representative in terms of aesthetic and philosophical views; and for it to be made “clear that
the National Endowment for the Arts belongs not solely to those who receive its
grants but to all the people of the United States.”
On the issue of obscenity, the commission affirmed that “freedom of expression isessential to the arts,” but also that “obscenity is not protected speech,” and that theArts Endowment “is prohibited from funding the production of works which areobscene or otherwise illegal.” It also declared, however, that the Arts Endowment is
an “inappropriate tribunal for the legal determination of obscenity, for purposes of
either civil or criminal liability.” It also recommended that Chairman Frohnmayer
rescind the requirement that grantees certify that the works they proposed would
not be obscene.
The commission concluded with an affirmation: “Maintaining the principle of anopen society requires all of us, at times, to put up with much we do not like but thec u l t u r e w a r s 107

bargain has proved in the long run a good one.” The report was a major factor in theongoing status of the Arts Endowment. While it was prompted by the immediate
controversies, the commission took the occasion as a moment to reflect the differentpressures and viewpoints in American life and culture. Its recommendations
marked a serious attempt to renegotiate the competing demands from artists, arts
institutions, journalists, politicians, and the public that had affected the Arts Endowment from the start.

Discord Continues
Unfortunately, the Independent Commission report did not dispel the atmosphereof conflict that had become attached to the Arts Endowment. While worthy grants
continued to be awarded, uncertainty characterized its policymaking. In November
1990, the Endowment approved, “without opposition and almost without discussion,” in the words of the Washington Post, grants to two of the NEA Four, Karen
Finley and Holly Hughes, only two months after the group had filed their suitagainst the Endowment. In December 1990, Chairman Frohnmayer announced
that he would approve a fellowship to New York visual artist Mel Chin, one he had
previously turned down.
By then, the presidential primary campaigns had begun. For the first time in its
history, the NEA became an issue in a national election. Republican contender
Patrick Buchanan, who as a newspaper columnist had castigated the NEA, was running on a “culture war” platform that combined virulent attacks on the Arts
Endowment with the threat to close it down (and “fumigate the building,” he addedin a New York Times article). The negative public perception of Frohnmayer as anineffective leader increased with these assaults, and the agency’s situation worsened. With few supporters, Frohnmayer submitted his resignation to the President
on February 21, 1992, becoming the only NEA chairman to resign under politicalpressure. Soon after, Buchanan unveiled a campaign advertisement claiming thatthe sitting Administration had “invested our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show.” Administration spokesmen denounced the ad
as “demagoguery,” but a great amount of damage had been done to the image of the
National Endowment for the Arts. The agency had lost support in Congress, theWhite House, the media, and from the public.

108 n e a : a h i s t o r yJane Alexander, NEA Chairman 1993–97. (Photo by Martha Swope)chapter 7

What Is to Be Done?

In 1993 the Arts Endowment’s budget was largely intact. The scars of
the previous four years were civic and political, but in financial terms the NEA had
remained unaffected. In 1987, its budget had stood at $165 million, and in 1992,
with a Democratic majority in Congress and George H. W. Bush in the WhiteHouse, the Arts Endowment’s budget was at a historic high of $176 million.
John Frohnmayer had been gone for almost a year when William Jefferson Clinton
was inaugurated as president. From May 1992 to January 1993, Dr. Anne-Imelda
Radice had served as acting chairman. (Radice would go on to posts in the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities during thepresidency of George W. Bush, and would eventually become director of the Instituteof Museum and Library Services in May 2006.) During the transition Madeleine
Kunin, deputy secretary of Education, held the position of acting chairman of theArts Endowment, while the day-to-day operations of the agency were managed by
Acting Senior Deputy Chairman Ana Steele, the only NEA staffer remaining who had
been employed by the agency from its inception.
On October 8, 1993, Jane Alexander was sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as the Arts Endowment’s sixth chairman. The first artist to
occupy the position, Jane Alexander was born in Boston in 1939 and educated at
Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Edinburgh. She had never been
involved in party politics, although she had been active in the protest movements of
the 1960s and 1970s. She was an accomplished stage and screen actress who had
won a Tony Award in 1969 for her performance in The Great White Hope by Howard111

Sackler, a production mounted at Washington’s Arena Stage with Arts Endowment
support. Alexander had also received an Oscar nomination for the movie version of
the same work, released in 1970, and an Emmy in 1981 for her performance as aconcentration camp prisoner in the network television movie Playing for Time.
Another Emmy would come in 2005 for her performance in Warm Springs.
Alexander came to the Arts Endowment at an extremely difficult point in its history. As reported in the New York Times, Alexander testified at her Senate confirmation
hearing in September 1993 that her priorities would include informing the country
that the great majority of the projects financed by the Arts Endowment were noncontroversial. Over the next four years she traveled to all 50 states and Puerto Rico to
examine the status of the arts and to improve understanding of the role of the Arts
Endowment and its work. Despite her leadership, the agency underwent massive
budget cuts and compulsory changes. Through this crisis, Alexander managed tokeep the agency operating, and oversaw the reorganization necessitated by the
reduction of appropriations. By the time she left the Endowment in 1997, the immediate threat to the agency’s existence had passed. Its budget had been drasticallyreduced, its regulations had been tightened, and its operating freedom had been
narrowed. However, media scrutiny was still heavy, conflicts with artists were unresolved, and Congressional disapproval remained firm.

Alexander’s Beginning
In her memoir, Command Performance (2000), Alexander recalled being handed abriefing book intended to prepare her for “questions about controversy.” Shortly
after being nominated, she noted that she “was fortunate that [she] had seen none of
the works in question and could respond noncommittally when asked about them.”
The briefing book suggested that she declare she was “not thoroughly knowledgeable about the actions taken by the former Administration . . . nor . . . about current
controversies. In the future I look forward to working with the Senate on thoseissues and all other issues regarding the Endowment.”
In her written statement submitted at her Senate confirmation hearing, Alexander stated: “I believe strongly that the sound and fury of the past few years over [a]handful of controversial grants must end . . . I cannot promise that under my chairmanship the arts will be free of controversy. The very essence of art, after all, is tohold the mirror up to nature . . . I can, however, assure Congress that I will follow thestatutory guidelines on funding to the very best of my ability to ensure that grants

112 n e a : a h i s t o r yChairman Alexander being interviewed by Maine reporter Felicia Knight (later director ofCommunications at the NEA). (Photo by Harold Ulmer, Maine College of Art)are given for the highest degree of artistic merit and excellence. . . . My goal for thearts is that the best reaches the most.”
Yet, disputes over content continued to bedevil the Arts Endowment. The lawsuit
filed by the NEA Four had progressed through the court system and, in fact, changed
its focus as changes were made in the Arts Endowment’s legislation. The initial complaints by the artists were, one, that their applications were rejected for politicalreasons; and two, that the contents of their applications were released to the public—a violation of the Privacy Act. When the “standard of decency” provision was includedin the NEA’s 1990 legislation, however, the plaintiffs added a First Amendment
count to their case. A district court found in favor of the NEA Four in 1992, and theNinth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court ruling. In June 1993, at the recommendation of the Department of Justice, the Arts Endowment settled thecomplaint of Finley, Hughes, Miller, and Fleck, who had claimed their rights had
been abridged when Frohnmayer rejected their grants in 1990. The NEA followed
the Justice Department’s recommendations on the basis that Chairman Frohnmayer
had failed to follow “legal procedures” in the case. This was only a partial resolution,
however, pertaining only to their specific applications. The artists continued theirw h a t i s t o b e d o n e ? 113

lawsuit, joined by the National Associationof Artists’ Organizations, challenging theconstitutionality of the “decency” provision.
The months-old Clinton Administration
appealed the decision to the Supreme Court,
which would later rule in favor of the Arts
Endowment in 1998.
Amid these disputes, however, Alexander found much cause for optimism in theagency’s programs. In her first annual
chairman’s statement in the 1993 Annual
Report, Alexander wrote with satisfaction
about “the transformation of the old Officeof International Activities as the fullfledged International Program . . . One of
the new program’s first concrete achievements was creation of the United States/
Canada/Mexico Creative Artists’ Residencies, the first trilateral exchange program of
The Bond Street Theatre’s collaboration with theTheatre Tsvete of Sofia, Bulgaria, on a production
its kind.” She also reported on the expanof Romeo and Juliet for audiences in Kosovo wassion of ArtsLink, supporting exchange bymade possible through the NEA international
U.S.
artists and arts administrators with
program ArtsLink. (Photo by Marko Georgiev,
courtesy of Bond Street Theatre)
their peers in Eastern and Central Europe.
During Alexander’s tenure, the publication Dancemakers, a study warning of under-financing of “the very creators of America’s great cultural export, dance,” which Alexander described as “an endangered
species,” was issued. Other noteworthy outcomes of her term included a new grantto the American Heritage Center and Art Museum at the University of Wyoming in
Laramie, and two projects supported by the Challenge Grants Program: the expansion of Black Culture on Tour in America, run by the Carter G. Woodson Foundation,
to include a Mid-Atlantic and New England touring circuit; and the establishment ofa filmmaking academy at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Innovative music
initiatives included Chamber Music Rural Residencies, in Georgia, Iowa, andKansas, while a Media Arts grant supported a 26-episode radio series Wade in the
Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions.

114 n e a : a h i s t o r yA National Meeting
In 1994, the Arts Endowment hosted in Chicago the first federally sponsorednational conference on the arts, “Art-21: Art Reaches into the Twenty-first Century.”
Underwritten by 18 corporations and foundations, the event brought together morethan 1,000 participants to discuss national arts policy, with four topics: the artist insociety, lifelong learning in the arts, the arts and technology, and expanding
resources for the arts.
The conference opened with an address by Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development Henry Cisneros, who spoke about expanding resources for the artsand concentrated on an issue the Arts Endowment had made central to its work for
decades: outreach to distressed communities. “The arts can help fight violence,
crime, and gang problems in our inner cities,” Cisneros affirmed. The Washington
Post described Art-21 as a convocation that “wrestled with doing innovative programs with less funding.” Noting that the “buying power” of the agency had declined
46 percent in the previous decade, the Post noted that for “Cisneros and others . . .
the only way to justify increased arts funding is to broaden the role of arts in society.”
Addressing the gathering by video broadcast, President Clinton said that the mission of the NEA was “to enliven creative expression and to make the arts moreaccessible to Americans of all walks of life.”
Art-21 was one of the significant projects of Alexander’s chairmanship. She
defined federal policy as chiefly about guidance and assistance, emphasizing that art
starts at the local level. She stated, “Open up the doors to your institutions and to
your workshops . . . We then begin person by person, child by child, to build a new
America.”
The sentiment was ambitious. One logical place for making such a great change,
especially at a time of political crisis, was in the field of education. In 1994, with thesupport of the Endowment, the National Standards for Education in the Arts, which
detailed basic requirements for “what every young American should know and beable to do in dance, music, theater, and the visual arts,” was published. The report,
which included benchmarks for each major arts field from kindergarten throughhigh school, appeared simultaneously with other Clinton Administration reforms in
education. Later it helped educators at the state level to draft content and skill standards for curricula for grades K through 12.
At the same time, the Arts Endowment Research Division released Trends in Artist
Occupations: 1970 to 1990, which described the rising popularity of the arts as a

w h a t i s t o b e d o n e ? 115

career path. The report analyzed data from the U.S. Census to reveal a 127 percent
increase in people identifying themselves as artists over the two decades.
In her second chairman’s statement, in 1994, Alexander quoted Walt Whitman,
who had declared, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
Among other things, she stressed the emerging use of technology to “share art andideas” and linkages between donors, arts organizations, and communities. The federal government was already beginning to plan Millennium Projects in anticipationof 2000, and Alexander endorsed a statement by President Clinton that “our dedication to the arts today will shape our civilization tomorrow.”

Thirtieth Anniversary—and a Decisive Budget Battle
In 1995, the Arts Endowment celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. In the two previous fiscal years, Congress had trimmed the NEA’s budget from $174 million to $170
million, and then from $170 to $162 million. Agency staff was also reduced. These
small cuts, however, reflected only the beginning of a shift in Congressional support.
A major restructuring of the NEA had begun, and the most severe and debilitating
cuts would come in 1996.
The budget and staff cutbacks reflected the impact of an aggressive strategy directed against the very existence of the Arts Endowment by a group of Republican
legislators under the leadership of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. During the1994 election campaign, many Republicans ran on a political platform called the“Contract with America” that included a call for the elimination of the Arts Endowment. The Republicans had won and were now in the majority in both the Houseand Senate for the first time in 40 years. As part of the new political reality, chairmanship of the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee—with authority overfunding of the Arts and Humanities Endowments—transferred from Sid Yates (DIL) to Ralph Regula (R-OH).
In a January 8, 1995, op-ed in the Washington Post, columnist George Will exhorted Republican legislators to “Give Them the Ax,” referring to the two Endowments
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Will wrote, “Because government
breeds more government and develops a lobbying infrastructure to defend itself,
every state now has a humanities council.” While leaders in the arts regarded it as
the expansion of public support for culture throughout the land, Will labeled theArts Endowment a pork-barrel scheme. Will concluded, “If Republicans merely trim
rather than terminate these three agencies, they will affirm that all three perform

116 n e a : a h i s t o r yChairman Alexander at one of the many Congressional hearings on NEA funding, with Senator
Alfonse D’Amato to the right. (Photo by Ann Burrola)appropriate federal functions and will prove that the Republican ‘revolution’ is noteven serious reform.”
The threat facing the Arts Endowment was no longer simply more budget cuts,
but the threat of total elimination. The agency had not been authorized since 1993,
leaving it vulnerable. Authorization committees gave advocates and critics an additional playing field in both chambers. In May 1995, Representatives William
Goodling (R-PA) and Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) introduced legislation thatwould reduce appropriations for the Arts Endowment and its sister agency, theNational Endowment for the Humanities for fiscal years 1996, 1997, and 1998 withcomplete elimination of funds by October 1998. Although the authorization bill was
voted out of the House Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, it
was never voted upon by the full House. A similar bill introduced by Representative
Phil Crane (R-IL) gained 33 co-sponsors but failed to be considered by a committee.
Meanwhile in the Senate, the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, chaired
by Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-KS) took up reauthorization supported by
Senators James Jeffords (R-VT), Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Christopher Dodd (DCT), and Al Simpson (R-WY). At one of four hearings, Chair Kassebaum declared,“There is support for the work of the National Endowment for the Arts” and added“Clearly we have to answer some constituent concerns that really do still question

w h a t i s t o b e d o n e ? 117

whether this is a function of federal government.” Kassebaum was among several
Republican lawmakers to offer legislative proposals in the debate over the NEA. She
introduced an amendment that would trim NEA money by 5 percent per year andused the opportunity to speak out against a grant to a California arts center that ran
performances on sexual themes.
The NEA remained intact but with lower funding levels. The House Appropriations Committee had slashed the agency’s FY 1996 budget by 39 percent from $162
million to $99 million. A thorough reorganization followed, which required severe
cuts in staffing. Eighty-nine employees were let go through the Reduction in Force(RIF) process, and 11 who were eligible chose to retire. In total the Arts Endowment’s
staff shrunk by more than half.
Michael Faubion, later to become NEA’s director of Council Operations anddeputy director of Government Affairs, recalled the difficulties of the drastic downsizing, “During this time, there were constant rumors of what would happen if theagency’s budget was cut in half, or worse. The potential for layoffs was very troublesome. A few staff members left before this could happen to them, knowing that thelast to have begun work would be the first to go. Once the decision was made about
who had to go and who had to stay, all of us still had to work side by side for threemonths—very uncomfortable.” The reductions took effect in late 1995 and early
1996. Simultaneously, the federal government was shut down for the month of January. Faubion remembers, “Those of us who still had jobs were instructed not tocome into work. Then, the worst snowstorm to hit Washington in years came at thesame time. When we finally returned to work, we had completely different offices
and jobs, and different people to work with. It was a surreal experience.”

Surviving the Budget Cut and Congressional Reforms
The budget cut was much larger than any previously imposed, but at the same time
the agency earned national honors. January 1995 saw the premiere of American Cinema, a new series on public television, supported by the Arts Endowment as part ofthe millennium celebration of twentieth-century American art. Chairman Alexander
accepted a Tony Award on behalf of the agency, which recognized the significant
work of the Arts Endowment in the expansion of American regional theater. Further,in 1995, for the first time, the NEA National Heritage Fellowships were presented at
the White House with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton presiding.
In her Congressional testimony that year, Alexander defended the Arts Endow-

118 n e a : a h i s t o r yment. She declared, “A great nation supports and encourages the education of allits people. A great nation recognizes thatthe life of the spirit, of the human mind, iswhat endures through the passing on
from generation to generation of a heritage that says: this is who we are, this is
who we were, and this is who we will be indays to come. That heritage is manifested
through the arts, the humanities and thesciences. That heritage is what we seek tokeep alive at the Endowment for the Arts.”
Later, in the NEA’s 1995 Annual Report,
Alexander stated “the most poignant of all
our partnerships came about in responseFirst Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (left) presented
to tragedy.” Following the 1995 bombing the NEA National Heritage Fellowships at the Whiteof the Oklahoma City federal building,House to bluegrass musicians Jim and Jesse
the Arts Endowment led a design initia- McReynolds. (Official White House photo)
tive to foster community reconstruction.
A design workshop convened entitled “We Will Be Back: Oklahoma City Rebuilds.”
In 1996, a Rockefeller Foundation report showed that, notwithstanding the cuts,
the Arts Endowment remained the largest single financial supporter of the arts in
America. Still, the chairman was forced to face the new reality that “with fewer dollars, we must become more resourceful.” And so Alexander instituted several“sweeping changes” to restructure the agency:• Reduction of 17 discipline-based grant programs to four funding divisions: Heritage and Preservation, Education and Access, Creation and Presentation, Planningand Stabilization;• Addition of combined arts panels—a new layer of review—over the new four
funding divisions;• Establishment of Leadership Initiatives to give the agency programmatic flexibility.
Of the grant-making changes undertaken during her tenure, none was more
painful for Chairman Alexander than the Congressional mandate to eliminate allindividual artist grants, with the exception of the Literature Fellowships. Thischange would remain an ongoing point of controversy in the artistic community forthe next decade.

w h a t i s t o b e d o n e ? 119

Over the next three years (1996–1998), Congress instituted a series of dramaticreforms affecting the agency’s operations and grantmaking policies including:• Elimination of grants to individuals with the exceptions of the field of literatureand honorific fellowships for jazz musicians and folk and traditional artists;• Elimination of grants to organizations for the purpose of sub-granting to otherorganizations or artists, except for regional, state, and local arts agencies;• Elimination of seasonal or general operating support grants to organizations;• Authority for the NEA to solicit, accept, receive, and invest gifts or bequests ofmoney, property, and services;• Capping of agency funding to any one particular state at 15 percent (excluding
multi-state projects);• Reduction of the National Council on the Arts from 26 to 14 private members
appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and the addition of six exofficio seats for members of Congress appointed by the House and Senate
leadership;• Increased percentage of program funds allocated to state arts agencies from 35
percent to 40 percent.
The Congressional reforms strengthened language contained in the agency’s
1990 authorization that funding priority be given to underserved populations.
Congress also required that the NEA establish a separate grant category for projects
that are national in scope, or that provide access to the arts in communities inunderserved states.
The Arts Endowment had previously functioned as a compartmentalized grantmaking body, with financing awarded through specific arts disciplines. Under theold structure, for example, symphony orchestras competed with each other for
grants from the NEA’s symphony budget. Under the new reforms, a symphonyorchestra would compete against a dance company or a literary magazine, whose
project fell in the same division, such as Education and Access.
According to Alexander, the new structure would ensure equitable opportunities forsupport, but would be more rigorous. In addition, the new structure would more accurately reflect cross-fertilization among disciplines. She pointed out that “contemporary
art often marries genres—poetry and song, digital art with film, design and drama,”
adding that “one of the outcomes that we hope for is collaboration among arts organizations, not only for fiduciary reasons, but for aesthetic growth and experimentation.”(This new arrangement proved temporary, however, and by 2005 grants were awarded again for projects in specific disciplines.)

120 n e a : a h i s t o r yAs the severe cutbacks were implemented,
the Arts Endowment continued generating
fresh and exciting projects. In 1996, the American Canvas project began, with meetings incities such as Charlotte, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio; Los Angeles, California; Miami,
Florida; Rock Hill, South Carolina; Salt Lake
City, Utah; and San Antonio, Texas. American
Canvas hosted discussions of arts support inthese cities and improved strategies for arts
integration into communities. Open Studio, a
project for free Internet access to arts organizations in all 50 states, along with a mentoring
program for ten sites to be used by artists on theWorld Wide Web, also began in 1996 in partnership with the Benton Foundation.
American Canvas analyzed anddiscussed the major issues faced bythose in the nonprofit arts, compiled
from public forums in seven different
communities.

The Battle Continues

In 1997, the NEA faced multiple efforts to abolish it. Although Congress had imposed enormous budget cuts, House Speaker Gingrichonce again targeted the Arts Endowment for liquidation. In April, Gingrich told a
Washington news conference that rich celebrities and entertainment executives
should donate their own funds to establish a private endowment, or “tax-deductible
private trust.” Hollywood personalities including actor Alec Baldwin, speaking for
the Creative Coalition, an entertainment industry lobby, rebuffed the suggestion.
Baldwin commented, “Arts belong at the national table.” But public intellectuals of afree-market bent, such as economics professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, backed the proposal for a private arts endowment, which Cowen argued
would “decentralize taste and promote diversity.”
On June 26, 1997, the FY 1998 appropriations bill for the Interior and related
agencies was voted out of the House Appropriations Committee with $10 million for
the NEA, just enough money to shut the agency down. Before the House floor
debate on the bill occurred, a rule was passed, by a vote of 217–216 that allowed botha point of order against the unauthorized agency and for the presentation of an

w h a t i s t o b e d o n e ? 121

Arts Education Partnership
One of the National Endowment for theArts’ major accomplishments in the fieldof arts education is the Arts Education
Partnership (AEP), a collaborative projectof the U.S. Department of Education, theNational Assembly of State Arts Agencies,
the Council of Chief State School Officers,
and the NEA. Established in 1995, the AEP
serves as a meeting ground for organizations and researchers to explore how topromote and sustain the arts in the school
curriculum. Under Chairman Jane Alexander and Senior Deputy Chairman Scott
Shanklin-Peterson, the partnership wasformed to support and enhance arts education in the schools.
Richard Deasy was the founding director of the AEP. For more than a decade, he
led this coalition of more than 100 arts,
education, business, philanthropic, and

The Arts Education Partnership createdreports such as Critical Links, which exploredthe role of arts in a child’s cognitive
development and academic performance.

122 n e a : a h i s t o r ygovernment organizations to promote theessential role of the arts in the learningand development of every child and in the
improvement of America’s schools. Each
year, the coalition convenes national meetings with unique themes such as “Arts
Education and Standardized Tests.” Hundreds attend, and experts in arts pedagogy,
child development, and education policy
present the latest research to teachers,
foundation leaders, and arts organization
personnel.
The AEP also issues reports based on
the coalition’s meetings, activities, andresearch in the field. The topics of thereports include the arts and academia, thearts and social development, assessing arts
education, and training educators in thearts. One report, Critical Links: Learning in
the Arts and Student Academic and Social
Development (2002), is recognized as aseminal document in understanding
the role of the arts in a child’s cognitive
development and academic performance.
Another AEP publication is Third Space:
When Learning Matters (2005), a study ofthe positive impact of arts education inunderserved schools. The AEP collaborated with the National Assembly of State
Arts Agencies on Critical Evidence: How
the Arts Benefit Student Achievement(2005). This booklet provides policymakers, educators, parents, and advocateswith non-technical language on current
research on the value of arts learning
experiences. The AEP also offers online
resources, including a directory of participating organizations, publications, andother arts education advocacy resources.

amendment to provide block grants to the states for arts education. The deciding
vote was cast when Representative John McHugh (R-NY) switched sides. McHughinsisted that while he “always felt the government has a role in arts funding,” he was“looking for a way to do it more effectively.”
When the House took up the appropriations bill on July 11, Congressman Phil
Crane (R-IL) raised the point of order against the NEA and it was automatically
accepted, leaving the agency with zero funding. Congressman Vern Ehlers (R-MI)
offered the block grant amendment giving $80 million to state arts agencies, as well
as local school boards to subsidize arts education. The Ehlers amendment was
defeated by a vote of 191 to 238, leaving zero funding for the NEA.
As the bill moved to the Senate, President Clinton came to the Arts Endowment’s
defense, promising to veto the appropriations bill if it did not contain at least $99.5
million for the Arts Endowment. But the fight had just shifted to a different chamber. Champions of the NEA appeared on both sides of the aisle in the Senate,including the Chairman of the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, Slade
Gorton (R-WA). Senator Gorton kept his pledge to defend the agency and restored$100 million for the NEA in the Interior bill.
More attempts were made in the Senate to abolish the NEA. One attack focused on
sexual content in artistic expression led by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and by a newproponent of eliminating the agency, Senator John Ashcroft (R-MO). Senator
Spencer Abraham (R-MI) put forth a plan to privatize both the National Endowment
for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities over a five-year period
declaring the Endowments were “out of touch with the public.” Other Senators registered objections to the non-democratic distribution of federal funding. Senator
Tim Hutchinson (R-AR) assailed what he perceived as the centralization of federalarts grants in six cities to the exclusion of the rest of America, and Senator Kay Bailey
Hutchison (R-TX) attempted to redirect more funds to the states.
Finally on October 18, the Senate passed by a vote of 93 to 3 an appropriations billcontaining $100 million for the NEA and a new provision for the agency to solicit
and accept private funds. When the bill moved to conference, Interior Appropriations Chairmen Senator Gorton and Representative Ralph Regula (R-OH) brokered
a compromise that successfully assuaged Congressional critics. For FY 1998, theNational Endowment for the Arts would receive $98 million and instructions from
Congress that permanently altered the agency’s mission and operations well into thenext decade.

w h a t i s t o b e d o n e ? 123

The Alexander Legacy
The number of total grants awarded by the NEA dropped from 4,000 in 1995 to
1,100 in 1997. Yet the Arts Endowment had survived, despite strong Congressional
opposition. Alexander had completed four years in the chairmanship, and she
remained a strong advocate for federal funding of the arts. Soon after her swearingin, she began touring the country, reintroducing the Arts Endowment and its
mission to communities large and small. No previous chair had traveled so extensively across America. Alexander became a nationally visible spokesperson for
public support of the arts—something none of her predecessors had ever attempted.
In House testimony in 1997, she had declared, “We are the engine that drives otherpublic and private investment in the arts, and we are not a drain on the economy by
any standard of measurement.”
During Alexander’s chairmanship, the NEA suffered severe budget cuts as well as
reductions in staff, programs, and resources. Interest groups and political leaders ofdiverse ideologies continued to target the Arts Endowment for elimination. According to the Washington Post, Alexander had “regained solid support from a broad
swath of political moderates.” She announced that she would leave the chairmanship at the end of her four-year term in October 1997. She called the respite “a chance
to breathe,” and the Post concluded that she also had “won that for the Arts Endowment.” In her final judgment she said, “It is a testament to the citizens of America
who love the arts in their community that the Endowment is alive. . . . These citizens
are a pure force in an impure world and our society needs more of them.”

124 n e a : a h i s t o r yBill Ivey, NEA Chairman 1998–2001. (Photo by Marion Ettinger)chapter 8

Broadening the Agency’s ReachIn his search for a successor to Jane Alexander in December 1997,
President Clinton turned to the director of the Country Music Foundation in
Nashville, Bill Ivey, as the seventh chairman of the Arts Endowment. Ivey was bornin Detroit in 1944 and grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He received his
education at the University of Michigan and Indiana University, earning history,
folklore, and ethnomusicology degrees. In 1994, Ivey had been named to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. He also served two terms aspresident of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, as a seniorresearch fellow at the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College,
and as a faculty member of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University.
Ivey was known primarily as an advocate for the preservation of country, folk, andpopular music. The Country Music Foundation operated with an annual budget of$4 million, and through it, Ivey administered the Country Music Hall of Fame from1971 to 1998, while publishing a journal and directing a record label.
After being unanimously confirmed by the Senate, Ivey was sworn in as chairman
in 1998. A populist, Ivey represented a new sort of federal arts leader. While public
and political support for the agency remained low, and the agency’s budget had been
cut by 40 percent, his profile was helpful in reassuring Congressional critics whobelieved that the Arts Endowment’s programs catered to cultural elites.
The Washington Post quoted Ivey on the announcement of his pending appointment, affirming that the Arts Endowment was “a very important agency, particularly
in its role of nurturing excellence in all the arts . . . it would be an ultimate job for127

me.” The same newspaper cited praise of Ivey as “an amazing generalist” by MichaelGreene, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Greene
endorsed Ivey as one who knew “a tremendous amount about the visual arts andfolklore,” and who “in terms of arts advocacy . . . had always gone down the center.
He hasn’t jumped into any camp.”
Ivey’s first annual message as chairman was short. He noted that since its creationin 1965, the Arts Endowment had awarded 110,000 grants, supported museum
shows and theater companies of varying size, established arts classes for youth, televised concerts and folk festivals, and developed innovative public-private
partnerships. With the budget at $98 million, grants in 1998 emphasized diversity,
including support to a theater group for a play about African-American performer
Paul Robeson, a Hispanic performing arts series, a country music program in
Nashville, folk art instruction in Nevada, and Alaskan native authors and storytellers.
Less than a month after Ivey’s confirmation, the Arts Endowment claimed a major
victory when the Supreme Court affirmed on June 25, 1998, by a vote of eight to one,the constitutionality of the statutory provision requiring the agency to consider “standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public”
in its application review process. The sole dissenting Justice was David H. Souter. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing
for the majority, held that the Congress had the right to be vague insetting criteria for spending money,
and the decency clause did not, on its
face, discriminate on the basis of
viewpoint. In a separate opinion, but
one that joined the majority, JusticeAntonin Scalia declared, “It is thevery business of government to favorand disfavor points of view on innumerable subjects, which is the main
reason we have decided to elect those
who run the government, rather
NEA Chairman Bill Ivey was a champion of folk
than save money on making theirartists, such as bluegrass guitarist/singer Doc
posts hereditary.”

Watson, seen here receiving the National Medal ofArts from President Bill Clinton. (Official WhiteHouse Photo)

128 n e a : a h i s t o r yTheatreworks/USA’s production of Paul Robeson, All-American was supported by a 1998 NEA
grant. (Photo by Jean-Marie Guyaux)

Broadening Local Appeal
Chairman Ivey demonstrated a deep understanding of the infrastructure and public
policy needs of American cultural enterprises. Furthermore, Ivey built on Alexander’s reorganization with further reforms—for example, engaging program
directors more in the grant-making process, specifically, in determining grantamounts. Ivey, having previously served on NEA panels, believed that some panelists had too narrow a focus, and welcomed the discipline directors’ expertise andbroad perspective.
With the NEA budget remaining essentially flat for two more years, Ivey nevertheless introduced strategies for enhancing American cultural life, including thedevelopment of a broad initiative called Continental Harmony. Administered by the
St. Paul, Minnesota-based American Composers Forum, the program placed composers-in-residence with local chamber music ensembles to develop new musicalb r o a d e n i n g t h e a g e n c y ’ s r e a c h 129

During her residency in David City, Nebraska, composer Deborah Fischer Teason learns about thecommunity’s Czech heritage from local accordionists as part of an NEA ArtsREACH project.
(Photo by Ruth Nichols)

works reflecting the sensibilities and traditions of local communities. Many of thecompositions premiered on July 4, 2000. Continental Harmony exemplified a
new approach in Arts Endowment programming that also included ArtsREACH, a
program launched in 1998 that funded arts projects in states identified as “underrepresented” in the agency’s grant count. ArtsREACH answered Congressional
demands that NEA funding reach underserved areas. States that received special
attention and grants workshops under ArtsREACH included Alabama, Indiana,
Iowa, South Carolina, and South Dakota. In 1999, ArtsREACH increased theagency’s grantmaking in 20 targeted states by more than 350 percent. It served as aprototype for another program, Challenge America, which also emphasized outreach and arts education for previously underserved areas.
That year, in his Annual Report message, Chairman Ivey outlined his vision. Conforming to the requirements of Congress, Ivey developed a strategic plan for theyears 1999–2004, and named it “An Investment in America’s Living Cultural Heritage.” The plan included a revised mission statement: “The National Endowment
for the Arts, an investment in America’s living cultural heritage, serves the public
good by nurturing the expression of human creativity, supporting the cultivation ofcommunity spirit, and fostering the recognition and appreciation of the excellenceand diversity of our nation’s artistic accomplishments” (emphasis original). The
goals of the five-year strategic plan reinforced the sense that the NEA under Ivey
would broaden participation and local appeal in Arts Endowment activities.

130 n e a : a h i s t o r ySave America’s Treasures Program
In 1998, the White House Millennium
Council partnered with the National Trustfor Historic Preservation to establish Save
America’s Treasures, an effort to protect“America’s threatened cultural treasures,
including historic structures, collections,works of art, maps, and journals that document and illuminate the history andculture of the United States.” Each year,
Congress appropriates funds for the program. Since its inception, more than $216
million has been appropriated; the awards
are distributed through a direct designation by Congress or through competitive
grants.
The National Park Service partneredwith three federal agencies—the National
Endowment for the Arts, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and theInstitute of Museum and Library Services— to administer Save America’s

Preservation of acetate negatives of photography
sessions by illustrator and painter Norman
Rockwell, here working on The Art Critic, 1955, is
one of the projects supported by Save America’s
Treasures. (Photo by Bill Scoville, courtesy ofNorman Rockwell Museum)

Treasures funds. The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities
coordinates the process. The NEA awards
these grants for preservation of art works,
artifacts, and collections.
The Save America’s Treasures programis one of the largest and most successful
grant programs for the protection of ournation’s irreplaceable and endangered cultural heritage. It is also the only grant
program that supports both the preservation of historic sites and structures as wellas intellectual and cultural artifacts.
The conservation treatment supported
by Save America’s Treasures frequently
allows previously endangered work to
be exhibited to the public. For example,
Thomas Sully’s massive painting The
Crossing of the Delaware was conserved inpublic view at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, allowing museum visitors a chance
to see a side of collections care that is usually invisible to the public. The museum’s
new American wing was designed with aplace of prominence where the painting,reunited with its original frame, will be on
permanent exhibition.
Performing arts organizations, such as
dance companies, are sometimes unable
to fund documentation of their work. For
instance, the George Balanchine Foundation found itself in danger of losing theworld-renowned choreographer’s ballets
with the passing of his original dancers.
With funding from Save America’s Treasures, the older generation of dancers wasvideotaped teaching the works to young
dancers, thereby ensuring that his work
would survive.

b r o a d e n i n g t h e a g e n c y ’ s r e a c h 131

In his chairman’s statement accompanying the plan, Ivey highlighted his populist
bent: “Today, art is no longer confined to paintings in museums—or dances, plays
and symphonies in concert halls and theaters. . . . It’s in large cities and in the smallest, most remote towns. Besides anchoring communities, growing the economy,
and increasing jobs, the arts give communities a sense of identity, shared pride,sound design that affects how we live, and a way to communicate across cultural
boundaries.” Echoing the agency’s enabling legislation, the introduction stated, “Itis vital to democracy to honor and preserve its multi-cultural artistic heritage as wellas support new ideas; and therefore it is essential to provide financial assistance toits artists and the organizations that support their work.”
The expansion of Arts Endowment grants to more communities remained atouchstone of the Ivey chairmanship. In the area of design, he instituted four Leadership Initiatives to improve design standards across the country. The initiatives
focused on government facilities, obsolete suburban malls, schools, and the stewardship of rural areas. Another NEA program during this period, the YouthARTS
project, brought the Arts Endowment together with the Department of Justice toaddress crime by minors. This partnership helped establish arts programs insidejuvenile justice facilities and in “at-risk” neighborhoods.

Thirty-Fifth Anniversary
The Arts Endowment celebrated its thirty-fifth year in 2000 by organizing “America’s Creative Legacy: An NEA Forum at Harvard,” cosponsored by the Kennedy
School of Government. The conference was held with the participation of Chairman
Ivey and all his living predecessors—Jane Alexander, John Frohnmayer, Frank Hodsoll, and Livingston Biddle. The forum reflected the arrival of the millennium andthe roll-out of millennium projects developed by the Arts Endowment over several
years. The White House Millennium Council’s Final Report on these efforts, which
was issued in January 2001, included a section titled “Imagining America: Artists
and Scholars in Public Life,” which declared, “The arts and the disciplines of thehumanities have a real effect on individuals, institutions, and communities. But too
often, artists and scholars are separated from public involvement, precluding valuable collaboration.”
Chairman Ivey laid out the accomplishments of the Endowment over 35 years byrestating his belief that “the agency strengthens American democracy at its core.”
The Arts Endowment’s support assisted in the growth of local arts agencies from

132 n e a : a h i s t o r yFrom left to right: Chairman Bill Ivey with former chairs Jane Alexander, John Frohnmayer,
Livingston Biddle, and Frank Hodsoll at the NEA Forum on America’s Creative Legacy at Harvard
University in 2000. (Photo by Mark Morelli)

400 to 4,000, nonprofit theaters from 56 to 340, symphony orchestras from 980 to
1,800, opera companies from 27 to 113, and dance companies multiplied by 18 times
since 1965.
In the 2000 Annual Report chairman’s statement, Ivey pointed out that the Arts
Endowment had bipartisan support in Congress, and he proposed a “Cultural Bill of
Rights” for Americans, comprising:
1. Heritage: The right to fully explore America’s artistic traditions that define us asfamilies, communities, ethnicities, and regions.
2. A Creative Life: The right to learn the processes and traditions of art, and theright to create art.
3. Artists and Their Work: The right to engage the work and knowledge of ahealthy community of creative artists.
4. Performances, Exhibitions, and Programs: The right to be able to choose
among a broad range of experiences and services provided by a well-supported community of cultural organizations.
5. Art and Diplomacy: The right to have the rich diversity of our nation’s creative
life made available to people outside of the United States.
6. Understanding Quality: The right to engage and share in art that embodies
overarching values and ideas that have lasted through the centuries.
Finally, Ivey stated, “As we move into a new millennium, the NEA is committed to
citizen service.” Although never adopted in any broader public sense, this “Cultural
Bill of Rights” provided a vivid snapshot of Chairman Ivey’s vision for the Arts
Endowment.

b r o a d e n i n g t h e a g e n c y ’ s r e a c h 133

Challenge America
The agency’s 2000 budget stood at its lowest in a quarter-century, totaling only
$97.6 million. Chairman Ivey gained a $7.4 million increase for the Arts Endowment budget for fiscal year 2001, raising the agency’s annual appropriation to $105
million. After an attempt by the bipartisan House Arts Caucus to increase the NEA’s
budget failed, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) led a successful effort through the Senate to increase the NEA’s budget. The increase was ultimately maintained in the
final version of the bill agreed upon by both the House and Senate in conference.
The new funding was earmarked exclusively for the Challenge America Arts Fundto provide grants for outreach and arts education projects in remote and previously
neglected communities. This important program represents Ivey’s major legislative
triumph. After almost a decade of cuts, it marked the first increase in the Arts
Endowment’s budget since 1992. The following year, Congress raised the Endowment’s budget to $115.2 million, again with the increases going to the Challenge
America program.
Under Ivey, Challenge America began as a short-term mechanism for enhancing
the arts, arts education, and community activities in underrepresented areas. The
program was expanded and under future Chairman Dana Gioia, the NEA achieved
national reach through Challenge America by awarding a direct grant to every U.S.
Congressional district. The program’s popularity with Congress also continued to
grow. In July 2003, Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) stated, “NEA programs
such as Challenge America are using art as a means to bring communities together.
Along with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development andthe National Guild of Community Schools, Challenge America has started a program that offers arts instruction to children living in public housing. When we
deprive the NEA and NEH of the funds it needs, we deprive this entire nation of anactive cultural community.” Support for the program continued throughout theAdministration of President George W. Bush, who requested $17 million for Challenge America for fiscal year 2004.

Arts and Accessibility
The NEA’s Office of AccessAbility, originally named Special Constituencies Office,was created under Chairman Nancy Hanks in 1976 in response to an appeal by
National Council on the Arts member Jamie Wyeth. Wyeth and his wife, who uses a

134 n e a : a h i s t o r ywheelchair, were often unable to attend cultural events as the venues were not accessible. The National Council resolved that “No Citizen, regardless of physical andmental condition and abilities, age or living environment, should be deprived of thebeauty and insights into the human experience that only the arts can impart.”
The NEA became a leader in the field of accessibility, and was the third federal
agency to publish its Section 504 Regulations in the federal register. The AccessAbility Office, in addition to serving as an advocate for those who are older, disabled, or
living in institutions, established a series of initiatives to advance the Arts Endowment’s access goals: Universal Design, Careers in the Arts for People with Disabilities, Arts in Healthcare, and Creativity and Aging.
In a 1998 speech to the National Forum on Careers in the Arts for People with
Disabilities, Chairman Ivey reiterated the importance of the work of the Arts Endowment in the field of accessibility. “Most Americans will experience disability at sometime during their lifespan, either themselves, or, like me, within their families. As
with aging, it is an experience that touches everyone. Thus working towards a fully
accessible and inclusive culture is important to all Americans.”

Ivey Moves On
The end of 2000 brought a presidential election and the victory of Republican
George W. Bush. The new First Lady, Laura Bush, made her vigorous support for culture and the arts clear from the beginning of her residence in the White House. Bill
Ivey remained in charge of the Arts Endowment, and—like Nancy Hanks two
decades earlier—wondered whether the NEA chairmanship could become a nonpartisan appointment.
Bill Ivey served nine months under the new Republican Administration. In April
2001 he announced that he would resign in September of that year, six months before
the expiration of his term. Before his departure, he championed the NEA’s FY 2002
budget request before Congress and expressed his hope that “the new Administration
will be able to move efficiently to choose new leadership for the Arts Endowment.”
But the controversies that had plagued the agency remained vivid, and the public
image of the Arts Endowment continued to be dictated largely by its critics.

b r o a d e n i n g t h e a g e n c y ’ s r e a c h 135

Michael Hammond, NEA Chairman 2002. (NEA File Photo)chapter 9

In Dark Hours

B

efore a successor to Chairman Bill Ivey could be appointed,
America underwent the frightful experience of September 11, 2001, stunned by thehorror of the attacks on New York and Washington, DC. Federal employees close to
the Capitol, and in tall buildings such as the Old Post Office, were especiallyalarmed. On the day of the attacks, panelists reviewing fellowship applications forliterature projects gazed out the windows as smoke rose from the Pentagon acrossthe river. Evacuated from the building, they decided to assemble in a nearby hotel
and continue to work.
Because New York City, the main target of the terrorists, is the nation’s arts center,
the impact of September 11 on artists and cultural institutions was felt nationwide.
Immediate action was taken by the Heritage Emergency National Task Force toassess structures and collections in the areas of the 9/11 attacks. Within hours, theAmerican Association of Museums reported that all New York museum staff were
accounted for and museum collections safe.
However, on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, theCantor Fitzgerald investment firm had suffered the horrific loss of hundreds of
employees. The world’s largest corporate collection of works by sculptor AugusteRodin and numerous works by Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, and Louise
Nevelson were destroyed. Next door in the South Tower, the National Development
and Research Institutes Library was completely wrecked, as were the offices of theLower Manhattan Cultural Council. The Broadway Theater Archive, with 35,000
photographs, that stood a block from the World Trade Center was also lost, and 13137

other historically or architecturally significant structures, including the Federal Hall
National Memorial, were damaged.
In the days and weeks immediately following September 11, Americans turned tothe arts, especially to music and poetry, to express their grief. Media focused on thedark stages of Broadway and paid little attention to the blight of the nonprofit arts
community. Congress debated how to expedite relief to New York City while arts
groups navigated eligibility requirements to secure loans from the Small Business
Administration and aid from the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency.
The economic impact of the terrorist attacks on each of the arts fields wasassessed by the NEA. There was a dramatic downturn in year-end giving to nonprofit
arts organizations as donors directed giving to 9/11 charities. Revenues were lostfrom cancelled performances and low attendance at arts events. The general economic slump, decline in tourism and travel, and reduction in state tax revenues
brought about cuts in state and local arts budgets. New York City announced a 15
percent across-the-board cut in funding for cultural organizations. Insurance costsrose, in part because of increased security needs at public performances.
The Arts Endowment issued a Chairman’s extraordinary action grant through the
New York State Council on the Arts to help artists in Lower Manhattan begin theprocess of cleaning and repairing offices and purchasing equipment. Over the years,
the Endowment had provided similar emergency disaster grants to arts organizations devastated by floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes, and help after the bombingof the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
More substantial help for New York’s cultural organizations came from private
foundations. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation created a special $50 million fundto benefit those museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations most directly affected. Several years later President Bush presented the Mellon Foundation with
the nation’s highest award to artists and arts patrons, the 2004 National Medal ofArts for “civic leadership in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.”

Hammond Appointed
Eight days after September 11, President George W. Bush announced his intention tonominate Michael Hammond, dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston, as chairman of the Arts Endowment.
Hammond was a conductor and composer, but he also brought vast educational
and arts administration experience to the agency. A Wisconsin native, he attended

138 n e a : a h i s t o r yLawrence University and Delhi University,
India, and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to
Oxford University where he received
degrees in philosophy, psychology, andphysiology. Before joining the Shepherd
School in 1986, Hammond directed the
Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee, and then moved to New YorkState to become the founding Dean ofMusic at the State University of New Yorkat Purchase. Subsequently, he served as
Michael Hammond signing papers topresident of the college. While in New
become the new NEA chairman in January
2002. (Photo by Ann Guthrie Hingston)York, he founded the celebrated international arts festival at Purchase, known
as Pepsico Summerfare. The new chairman, at 69, had long been active in orchestraland vocal music, but his biography was so diverse that it also included lecturing inneuroanatomy to medical students in Wisconsin.
In a statement reflecting the somber mood of the country in those days andweeks, Hammond declared, “I am deeply honored by President Bush’s confidence
in me. . . . The arts can help heal our country and be a source of pride and comfort.”
As Hammond prepared for his Senate confirmation, he further articulated his vision
for the Arts Endowment, “Our heritage embodies all the efforts that have gone
before us, what we imbibe, and what we wish we could say but cannot put intowords.” He cited the Guide to Kulchur by Ezra Pound as “a primer for American
poets” that “begins with words and gestures, and finds new metaphors.” Western
civilization is “a conversation,” he said, influenced by new voices and cultures. For
Americans to join that conversation wisely, they must be trained in it, and so he saw
his primary mission to be arts education. “We have never made a serious effort in
the United States to engage our youth with the arts,” he lamented. “We can make thegreatest impact on preschool children, and then move onward with techniquebased, prolonged involvement with the arts. This will help formulate good taste anddeepen understanding.”
Hammond compared the task before him to the moon-landing mission brought
forth by President Kennedy, which took nearly a decade to accomplish. “What use iscreating awareness of the arts,” Hammond asked, “if it is not a long-term, crucial task?”
Hammond anticipated the agency’s Shakespeare in American Communities program,i n d a r k h o u r s 139

proposing that ten Shakespeare touringgroups be selected for funding, “with two or
three of them on the road most of the time.”
He also called for a renewal of interest in
representational painting and for attention
to classical music on radio.
With Chairman Ivey gone and Michael
Hammond not yet in place, Robert S.
Martin was designated acting chairman of
the Arts Endowment on October 1, 2001.
While serving as acting chairman of the
NEA, Martin was also director of theInstitute of Museum and Library Services,a sister agency of the Arts and Humanities
Endowments. Formerly, Martin had been a
Dr. Robert S. Martin was acting chairman for
professor and interim director of thethe National Endowment for the Arts in2001. (Photo courtesy of Institute of
School of Library and Information Studies
Museum and Library Services)at Texas Woman’s University in Denton,
Texas, and Texas State Librarian. He served
until January 23, 2002, when Hammond was sworn in.
On his third day in office, Chairman Hammond called an all-agency staff meetingand spoke eloquently about art and the creative process. Those in attendance weremoved by the promise of his remarks and looked forward to his inspirational tenure,
but Hammond served as chairman for only seven days—from January 23 to January
29. On Tuesday, January 29, he did not report for work.
Hammond had felt ill over the weekend and had gone to the hospital for a seriesof tests on January 28. That night he attended a gala at the Shakespeare Theatre
Company with Michael Kahn, the theater’s artistic director, and Queen Noor of Jordan, followed by a performance of The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. Hammond
left the performance early and returned home in a taxicab. The next morning, when
he did not show up for work, police were called to his home. There they foundMichael Hammond, dead of natural causes at age 69.
“There was great sadness among the staff,” Senior Deputy Chairman Eileen
Mason recalled. “They had waited four months for a new chairman and were excitedabout the breadth of Hammond’s intellect, his passion for the arts, and his lifelong
work in music education. On January 23, they had welcomed him with food and

140 n e a : a h i s t o r ysong at an all-agency reception, and had heard about his love of the arts and his
vision for the agency.” Now the agency needed a new leader, and Mason assumed thepost of acting chairman.

The Mason Interim
Eileen Mason came to the agency with a background in education, publishing, andgovernmental service. A native New Yorker, she began studying the violin in grade
school, and continued her lifelong commitment to symphonic and chamber music
under the tutelage of composer and conductor Karel Husa at Cornell University.
With a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell, where she studied English and music, she
worked as a book editor at Little, Brown in Boston, editing college textbooks in literature and the social sciences. In Washington, DC, she served as a manager at two federal energy agencies, and earned a master’s degree in public administration from
American University. She became vice president for grants on the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Maryland, before joining the Arts Endowment in
2001.
Mason served for 13 months as acting chairman, focusing on honoring Hammond’s memory, strengthening relations with Congress,
supporting arts education, and extending
access to quality arts programs in underserved
communities. In April 2002 she joined members of the Congressional Arts Caucus led byRepresentative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and
Representative Steven Horn (R-CA) to visit 16
New York City arts organizations significantly
affected by the destruction of buildings, closing of performance venues, and decrease intourism after the attacks of 9/11. As the group,
hosted by the New York State Council on theArts, traveled from Times Square theaters to
Senior Deputy Chairman Eileen Mason
the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Brooklyn
became acting chairman of the NEA for 13
Academy of Music to El Museo del Barrio in months between Chairmen Michael
Harlem, it was clear that the arts industry in Hammond and Dana Gioia. (NEA File Photo)i n d a r k h o u r s 141

Grants Workshops
Improving relations with Congress
remained a priority for Acting Chairman
Eileen Mason. In April 2002, SenatorCharles Schumer (D-NY) wrote to the
National Endowment for the Arts to alert
the agency to the funding crisis for arts
organizations in Buffalo, New York.
Schumer cited “the dismal fiscal outlook
facing Buffalo and Western New York. By
increasing the strain on the state budget
and imposing new security needs on theregion, the September 11 terrorist attacks
exacerbated the budget problems facing
Buffalo.” Working with NEA Government
Affairs Director Ann Guthrie Hingston,Mason organized a grants workshop with
Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative
Jack Quinn (R-NY) in Buffalo on July 8 at
the Erie County Historical Society.

Acting NEA Chairman Eileen Mason and
U.S. Representative Jack Quinn at a grants
workshop in Buffalo, New York, on July 8,
2002. (NEA File Photo)

142 n e a : a h i s t o r yMore than 80 representatives of arts
organizations listened to Mason describe
the Arts Endowment’s grant programs
and application process. Applications
increased from the Buffalo area throughout the next year, and many applicants
became grant recipients. For 40 years, theNEA has been doing grants workshops
and participating in federal workshops but
never before had a chairman participatedin one with a member of Congress.
Mason, and later NEA Chairman Dana
Gioia, continued the new grants workshop
model, which became an effective instrument for broadening the agency’s
geographical coverage. Throughout thenext five years more than 60 workshops
were conducted in nearly 30 states.

New York was determined to rebound, butfinancial aid was direly needed.
During their visit to the Dance Theatre ofHarlem, Artistic Director, National Medal ofArts recipient, and former National Council
on the Arts member Arthur Mitchell greeted the group. Mitchell recounted how he
had started with a small company years
before, believing that every child in Harlem
deserved the opportunity to learn how todance. “If it weren’t for the National Endow2001 National Medal of Arts recipient
ment for the Arts,” he declared, “Dance
Rudolfo Anaya with President and Mrs.
Theatre of Harlem would not be here today.”
George W. Bush at the White House
A few days later, Mason represented the
ceremony. (Photo by Neshan Naltchayan)
NEA at a meeting of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, with First Lady Laura Bush in attendance.
Carrying forth the vision of Michael Hammond, Mason stated that the Arts Endowment’s mission “is to acquaint Americans with their rich and diverse artistic
heritage.” Two initiatives she put forward anticipated things to come. First, she called
for an examination of the state of classical music on nonprofit radio, which would
evolve into a full-scale project of the NEA’s Office of Research and Analysis, and, second, she announced a plan to bring professional performances of Shakespeare’s
plays into every corner of the country. This idea would later grow under Chairman
Dana Gioia into the major Shakespeare in American Communities initiative.
When President and Mrs. Bush presented the 2001 National Medal of Arts andthe National Humanities Medals to a distinguished group of artists and scholars,emotions ran high. Only six months after the attack on the World Trade Center, apacked audience sang “The Star Spangled Banner” with reverence and new meaning. Among the Medal of Arts recipients were painter Helen Frankenthaler, film
director Mike Nichols, singer Johnny Cash, novelist Rudolfo Anaya, and cellist Yo-Yo
Ma. The highlight of the ceremony was Yo-Yo Ma’s cello performance, accompaniedon the piano by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the Appalachian Regional Commission, sponsored a regional conference to demonstrate the positive economic impact that the arts can have on local communities. More than 300
artists and arts administrators shared information about model programs and best

i n d a r k h o u r s 143

practices. Two Republican North Carolina legislators, Congressman Charles Taylor,a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Related
Agencies, which has jurisdiction over the Arts Endowment’s budget, and Congressman Cass Ballenger, a nonvoting member of the National Council on the Arts,
attended and endorsed the concept.
In July 2002, the House of Representatives voted for an amendment sponsored byRepresentative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) for a $10 million budget increase for theArts Endowment. Representative Slaughter’s amendment was supported by 191
Democrats, 42 Republicans, and one Independent. The tally indicated that momentum was slowly building in the House, as Republicans were showing signs ofsupport for the agency. The Senate, however, voted for only a modest increase. Whena final omnibus bill was passed in February 2003, with rescissions across the board
for all agencies, the agency received $115.7 million for 2003—a disappointing
increase of only $500,000.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New
York and the Pentagon, arts organizations were facing serious shortages in theavailability of private and public funding. The eighth chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts, Michael Hammond, had begun his long-awaited tenure on
January 23, 2002, laid out his vision for the agency, and passed away a week later.
Despite the upheaval of Chairman Hammond’s death, the NEA began to receive
growing support from a bipartisan coalition in Congress and established a renewed
commitment to extending access to quality arts programs throughout the country.

144 n e a : a h i s t o r yDana Gioia, NEA Chairman 2003–09. (Photo by Vance Jacobs)

chapter 10

Building a New Consensus

T

he ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts,
poet Dana Gioia, was nominated by President George W. Bush to succeed Michael
Hammond on October 23, 2002. The U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed the nomination on January 29, 2003.
Chairman Gioia, 52 at the time of his confirmation, was an intellectual figure ofnational importance. He had published three collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon, which won the 2002 American Book Award. His 1991 essay “Can
Poetry Matter?” stimulated a major debate in the literary world, and a subsequent
book, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, was short-listed for
the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. He co-edited several best-selling
literary textbooks with the poet X. J. Kennedy, and he had attained further distinction
as a translator from Latin, Italian, and German. Also trained in music, Gioia had
worked as a music critic and composed two opera libretti, Nosferatu and Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast.
Born to a working-class family of Italian and Mexican descent in Los Angeles andthe first member of his family to attend college, Gioia graduated from Stanford University and received a master’s degree in comparative literature from Harvard,
where he studied under the poets Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. He
returned to Stanford to attend business school and earned an MBA. Beginning in
the late 1970s, he spent 15 years in New York working for General Foods while writing in the evenings. He eventually became a vice-president before leaving businessin 1992 to write full-time.

147

Gioia’s Vision
Gioia inherited an Arts Endowment that showed some progress in increasing its
budget and devising promising new programs. Still, the impact of the 1990s culture
wars hung heavily over the NEA, and the severe cuts in funding and staffing
remained a burdensome legacy. In spite of more than 100,000 grants given in every
state and U.S. territory, the Arts Endowment remained best known for a few controversial grants given nearly a decade prior. Many members of Congress continued to
criticize the agency, and anti-NEA legislation was regularly introduced. The media
remained alert for potentially contentious grants, artists and arts organizations were
bitter over the cutbacks, and public perception was mixed at best.
Gioia approached his new position with the aim of first changing the national conversation about the rationale for federal funding for the arts. In a speech delivered to
the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on June 30, 2003, he asked, “Can the
National Endowment for the Arts matter?” The speech was a sober statement of philosophy, and a sharp overview of the public standing of the agency. He began byobserving that, “If the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts had spoken to this forum ten years ago, the topic might well have been ‘Should the NEA
Exist?’ At that time a serious cultural and political debate existed in Washington
about whether the agency served a legitimate public function.” Gioia observed that
this question had become moot, at least as a policy matter. Congress had saved theagency. The Arts Endowment had undergone severe budget cuts and a reduction in
staff, but its continuing existence was assured. The question, to Gioia, was notshould the NEA exist, but how could the NEA best serve the nation?
Gioia outlined his goal for the agency succinctly as “bringing the best in the arts
and arts education to the broadest audience possible.” His vision stressed, first, thatthe agency needed to serve all Americans, including tens of millions in rural areas,
inner cities, and military bases who had historically been ignored by the NEA. Second, the agency must enhance culture and enrich community life, especially byconnecting “America with the best of its creative spirit.” To meet those goals, and do
so in a way that would win over critics and change public perception, Gioia realized,
would require more than funding strong applicants. It demanded a radical change
in the still largely negative public perception of the agency, and these changes needed to be embodied in visible, national programs.

148 n e a : a h i s t o r yA New Approach Is Needed
The controversies of the previous decade showed that, inthe media and political spheres, a single questionablegrant could outweigh a thousand meritorious ones. Historically, the Arts Endowment’s successes tended to be
seen merely at a local level. Only when a grant became
controversial did it and the NEA receive national attention. Likewise, most arts organizations mounted programs that had only local impact, even though the larger
issues they faced such as sustainability, funding, media
coverage, and audience development transcended theirlocal reach. Gioia concluded that the American arts
might benefit from a different model than the NEA’s traditional piecemeal approach of awarding single grants toindividual organizations for specific projects. Stronger
national leadership was needed. Properly designed andexecuted, an expanded funding model could link local
arts organizations to broader networks and partnerships Chairman Dana Gioia at the
Shakespeare in Americanin fruitful ways.
Communities celebration on
And so the Arts Endowment developed an ambitious Capitol Hill in 2003. (Photo by
new method of supporting the arts that would have unSteven Purcell)precedented impact. In addition to continuing its numerous direct grants, the Arts Endowment created large initiatives designed to incorporate local organizations into broader national partnerships. These national initiatives improved both the efficiency and effectiveness of arts programs. By creatinglarge national partnerships, these programs could achieve enormous economies ofscale while also gaining publicity no individual organization could generate independently. Arts organizations were invited to apply for the opportunity to deliver a
program to communities around the country, especially those in which opportunities to experience the arts were limited. These national initiatives served both artists’need for employment and arts organizations’ need for funding, educational outreach, and affordable programming. In addition to reaching an unprecedentedly
large and diverse public, the new initiatives provided the public—including themedia and government officials—with tangible examples of the Arts Endowment’s
achievements.

b u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 149

National Initiatives
Shakespeare in American Communities

In April 2003, Chairman Gioia announced the launch of the first national initiative,
Shakespeare in American Communities, a project designed to bring Shakespeare toaudiences and schools all across the U.S. and unite players in the arts and arts education systems. It also focused on reviving theatrical touring of serious drama, a once
thriving practice that had become unaffordable for most companies. In its initial
phase, the program organized regional tours of Shakespeare plays by six distinguished theater companies. First Lady Laura Bush and Motion Picture Associationof America President Jack Valenti served as honorary chairs and Arts Midwest as
partner.
The first phase of the program began in autumn 2003 and ran to November 2004.
In that year, six companies visited 172 communities—mostly small and midsized
towns—and 500 schools across all 50 states. As the initial phase gained momentum,
an unexpected new dimension of the program began as the Department of Defense
supported the NEA to expand the Shakespeare program to visit military bases andneighboring schools. It was the first time the National Endowment for the Arts hadreceived funding from the Defense Department, and the first significant programthat the Arts Endowment had ever offered to the millions of Americans in the military or their families. This surprising partnership signaled to the arts world, thepress, and the general public that something new was happening at the agency.
Over the next four school years, Shakespeare in American Communities grew
into the largest Shakespeare tour in history. Focusing increasingly on providing students with the opportunity to see a professional production of Shakespeare, theprogram eventually sponsored performances and tours by 77 theater companies,
reaching more than 2,300 municipalities in all 50 states. The program also provided
free education materials for teachers, including an audio CD and two award-winning films that featured Tom Hanks, William Shatner, Martin Sheen, Harold Bloom,
Julie Taymor, Mel Gibson, and James Earl Jones, among other talented artists. By late2008, the Shakespeare kits had been distributed to teachers and librarians acrossthe country and reached more than 24 million students. In addition to its vast educational impact, the program gave 2,000 actors paying work performing classic
theater—a great boon to professionals so often underemployed.
Through its vast reach and broad appeal the Shakespeare program soon became
the Arts Endowment’s signature initiative. Widely covered by the press, it signaled a

150 n e a : a h i s t o r yAquila Theatre Company’s production of Othello, starring Lloyd Notice and Kathryn Merry, kicked
off the national tour of the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities initiative in September
2003. (Photo by A. Vincent Scarano)

resolve at the NEA to bring the best of art and arts education to communities that
had previously been overlooked. It also demonstrated a new concern for improving
arts education in U.S. high schools. As more theater companies, actors, presenters,
teachers, and students participated, the program developed a large constituency of
supporters, including many members of Congress, who appreciated major theatercompanies visiting their districts. The Shakespeare program also represented a substantial new investment in American theater since the Arts Endowment was able tocreate this historical tour without cutting existing grant support for the theater field,
continuing to support a huge variety of other projects including approximately 135
new works each year.

b u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 151

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

As the events of 9/11 plunged the United States into a new era of geopolitics, the Arts
Endowment leadership envisioned another, entirely new national initiative. In 2003,
Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson and Chairman Gioia discussed a class on
poetry Nelson had recently taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “Thecadets had really eaten up the experience of writing and reading poetry,” Nelson said.
“Now some of them are e-mailing me from the war. I wish we could do something
more—something tangible—for them.”
The conversation became the seed of Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which began in 2004. Under the direction of NEA Counselor to
the Chairman Jon Parrish Peede, the Arts Endowment sponsored a series of writing
workshops at military installations led by a group of distinguished and diverse writers, including Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down), Tobias Wolff (In Pharaoh’s Army),
Jeff Shaara (Gods and Generals), Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October), Bobbie Ann
Mason (In Country), Stephen Lang (Beyond Glory), and Joe Haldeman (Forever War).
As with the Shakespeare program, the Department of Defense and the military services became valuable partners, and The
Boeing Company agreed to support it.
The response to the program was massive.
Phone calls, letters, faxes, and e-mails poured
into the NEA as military personnel and theirfamilies asked to participate, some calling from
Baghdad and Kabul. Vietnam War veterans also
sent emotional letters of support, stating thatthey wished they had been offered a similar
opportunity decades earlier.
During the next two years, teams of writers
led workshops at 25 military bases in the U.S.
and overseas for 6,000 service members andtheir spouses. Participation was so enthusiastic
that the Arts Endowment decided to compile
their best work in an anthology edited byAndrew Carroll. By the end, more than 12,000
The New Yorker from June 12, 2006, withpages of poems, memoirs, short stories, andexcerpts from the Operation Homecoming
letters were submitted by military personnel
anthology. (Image by Owen Smith/The New
Yorker © 2006 The Condé Nast Publications)and their families and evaluated by an inde-

152 n e a : a h i s t o r yNEA Jazz Master Chico Hamilton performing at the 2005 NEA Jazz Masters awards ceremony andconcert in Long Beach, California. (Photo by Vance Jacobs)

pendent editorial panel of writers. As Gioia assured in the preface to the volume, “TheArts Endowment gave the visiting writers total freedom in conducting their workshops. They were not told what to teach, and they in turn gave the participants complete
freedom on how and what to write.”
Essays written by service members and their families were published in The New
Yorker in June 2006. In September 2006, the release of the anthology, Operation
Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops andTheir Families, published by Random House, was celebrated at the Library of Congress. The project also inspired two documentary films: Muse of Fire, directed by
Lawrence Bridges, and Operation Homecoming, directed by Richard Robbins. Muse ofFire premiered at the National Archives in Washington, DC in March 2007. Operation Homecoming was broadcast on PBS in April 2007, eventually winning two
Emmys in 2008, as well as becoming a finalist for a 2008 Academy Award.
NEA Jazz Masters Initiative

In 2004, Chairman Gioia took a small but venerable NEA program of fellowships tojazz musicians and expanded it to become the largest jazz program in the agency’s
history. Renamed the NEA Jazz Masters Initiative, it stood at the center of an ambitious effort to recognize the distinctive American musical form and expand the audience for jazz in the United States. Gioia increased the number of fellowship winners

b u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 153

and the dollar amount for the award. A category for “jazz advocate”—eventually
named after A. B. Spellman—was added.
All components—including the NEA Jazz Masters on Tour, a series of presentations featuring performances, educational activities, and speaking engagements by
NEA Jazz Masters in all 50 states—were united into the new initiative in partnershipwith Arts Midwest. With the expansion came NEA Jazz in the Schools, an educational program for high school teachers that combined a Web-based curriculum
produced in partnership with Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Verizon Foundation provided early support for the school initiative, and the Verizon Corporation along withThe Doris Duke Charitable Foundation donated funds to support NEA Jazz Masters
on Tour. Meanwhile, the Arts Endowment worked with XM Satellite Radio to feature
the NEA Jazz Masters on a daily radio segment across 13 news, talk, and music stations. Donating their radio time, XM broadcasted these popular jazz features asoften as 120 times a day.
American Masterpieces

Mrs. Laura Bush speaking at
the 2004 event announcing theAmerican Masterpieces initiative.
(Photo by Jim Saah)

154 n e a : a h i s t o r y

In January 2004, First Lady Laura Bush made an historic appearance at the Old Post Office Pavilion. At anews conference there, she announced the Arts Endowment’s new national initiative, American Masterpieces:Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, along with a Presidential request to Congress for an $18 million budget
increase for FY 2005.
American Masterpieces brought exhibitions, concerts, dance performances, and broadcasts of great
American art to large and small communities in all 50
states. Each grant was accompanied by an educational
component that involved seminars, learning projects,
and curricular materials, a feature that led Mrs. Bush tosay, “I’m especially pleased at the program’s focus onarts education, as it is crucial that the knowledge andappreciation of our cultural legacy begins in our
schools. The Endowment would support touring, local
presentations, and arts education in order to acquaintAmericans, especially students with the best of thenation’s artistic achievements.” By the end of 2005,

Congress appropriated $10 million for American Masterpieces, and support was firmly inplace for the Visual Arts Touring, Musical
Theater, Dance, Choral Music, and Literaturecomponents of the program. The art forms
were remixed slightly each year. In 2006
Choral Music was added to the program, andin 2008 the chamber music and presenting
fields received funding.
American Masterpieces has sustained anenormous number of tours, exhibitions, andfestivals. Over 50 dance grants were awarded
The University of Michigan’s University Dancein the first three years of the program enabling
Company
perform Martha Graham’s Primitive
companies like Alvin Ailey, Martha Graham,
Mysteries as part of American Masterpieces.
Luna Negra, Pilobolus, Trisha Brown, and(Photo by Peter Smith Photography, courtesy of
José Limón to tour the nation. Meanwhile,
University Dance Company)over the past four years, 47 visual arts exhibitions from institutions such as the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Phillips Collection,
George Eastman House, American Folk Art Museum, and Olana Partnership toured
200 venues across 39 states.
Research about Reading

Gioia placed great importance on careful research as a means to determine the public agenda for arts and arts education. In the early months of his chairmanship, theArts Endowment’s Office of Research and Analysis began to analyze the results of
the latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. As with previous surveys administered in 1982 and 1992, the Arts Endowment designed the 2002 questionnaire in
consultation with survey experts and arts professionals, then commissioned the
U.S. Bureau of the Census to collect a sample and conduct the survey.
The 1992 Arts Participation survey had offered reasons for optimism, with accessto the arts and audiences on the rise in most art forms. In 2002, however, the trends
reversed, with audience participation in the arts going down. Broken down by age
groups, the findings proved even more troubling. The youngest group (18 to 24-yearolds) showed the steepest declines of all in numerous art forms. The percentage ofyoung adults who listen to jazz on radio dropped by 11 points, while young listeners ofclassical music dropped by nine points. A major problem had clearly emerged in theb u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 155

American arts that would deeply influence NEA planning and programming—thedecline of audiences in almost every art form, a decline steepest among the young.
One art form, however, underwent an especially daunting decline—literature. The
rate of adults who read any fiction, poetry, or drama in the preceding 12 months—any
imaginative writing of any length or quality in any medium—slid from 54 percent in1992 to 46.7 percent in 2002. In addition, during this period, access to books and thearts expanded, with more libraries, museums, historic sites, performing arts spaces,
and after-school programs in the United States every year. For literature, the portionof young adults who engaged in literary reading was 9.5 percentage points lower thanten years before—an astonishing drop in such a fundamental activity.
The reading declines called for further study, and Gioia commissioned an expanded analysis of the literary reading segment of the survey. The result was Reading at
Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which turned out to be one of the most
discussed and debated cultural stories of 2004. Created under then-Research Director Mark Bauerlein, Reading at Risk showed literary reading rates falling precipitously in every demographic group—all ages, incomes, education levels, races, regions,and genders. Librarians, publishers, editors, writers, and educators weighed in on
what Gioia termed “a national crisis,” and more than 600 stories and commentaries
appeared in the first few weeks after its release. A serious national debate about thecauses and extent of the reading decline had begun and would continue for years
with the Arts Endowment taking the lead.
In 2007, the Arts Endowment’s research division, headed by Sunil Iyengar, issued
an influential follow-up study, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence. The report compiled reading data from other government agencies, private
foundations, and university research centers, all of which reached a consistent finding. This comprehensive report reinforced and expanded the earlier conclusions. All
Americans, especially young people, read less and read less well, and these declines
had serious educational, economic, and civic consequences. These reports haveremained the definitive reference point for treatments of the field of literary culture
and publishing in America.
Re-Investing in Reading: The Big Read

Gioia acknowledged that no single program or government agency by itself could
reverse the decline in reading. As the leading arts agency in the United States, however, the Arts Endowment assumed the task of developing a national initiative toencourage literary reading.

156 n e a : a h i s t o r yOn May 9, 2006, the agency unveiled a new program, The Big Read.
Building on ideas from existing “CityReads” programs, the National Endowment for the Arts created a partnershipof public, private, nonprofit, and corporate entities—Arts Midwest, theInstitute for Museum and Library Services, The Boeing Company, and the W.
K. Kellogg Foundation—to support
and administer an ambitious national
reading program. The Big Read offers
citizens the opportunity to read anddiscuss a single book within their communities, as well as provides comprehensive resources for discussing the
The NEA research report Reading at Risk was one
work, including readers guides, teachof the most discussed and debated cultural
ers
guides, CDs, and publicity material
stories of 2004.
as well as a national public service campaign and an extensive Web site with comprehensive information on authors andtheir works.
For a pilot program, the Arts Endowment selected ten municipalities from acrossthe country to receive grants to conduct and promote four- to six-week communitybased programs aimed at both teens and adults. From January through June 2006,
these diverse communities—ranging from rural Enterprise, Oregon (population
1,895) to metropolitan Miami-Dade, Florida (population 3,900,000)—took part in
the pilot phase. Each community created unique events, activities, and literary programs around one of four classic novels: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
To introduce public officials to the program, the NEA held a celebration of The Big
Read on July 20, 2006, at the Library of Congress. Ray Bradbury participated vivaciously, greeting the capacity audience via a video recording. Members of Congress,
including Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY),and Representative Charles Taylor (R-NC) read passages from their favorite books.
Mrs. Laura Bush, who enthusiastically joined The Big Read as its Honorary Chair,b u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 157

remarked, “In ten cities and towns across the United States, thousands of Americans are being introduced—or reintroduced—to the joys of reading literature.
They’re learning how characters in our favorite stories become close friends that we
can visit, just by reopening dog-eared volumes. They’re discovering how we canescape to another world by losing ourselves in a good book—only to find truths
about humanity that lead us right back to our own lives.”
In its third year, The Big Read reached all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico and theDistrict of Columbia. By 2009, more than 400 towns and cities will have hosted a
Big Read program, with over 21,000 local and national organizations supporting theinitiative. Indeed, The Big Read has become the largest federal literature program
since the World War II Armed Services Editions project. Organizers choose from 27
books, ranging from classic novels such as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and MarkTwain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to contemporary works such as Tobias Wolff’s
Old School and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The Arts Endowment also
helped produce a weekday show on XM Satellite Radio focusing on The Big Readbooks. Broadcast three times daily, each book was read in half-hour segments. (All of

Fresno City College President Ned Doffoney with Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, at a Big
Read book discussion in the Fresno, California. (Photo by Roberta Barton/Fresno County Public
Library)

158 n e a : a h i s t o r ythe broadcast time was donated by XM Radio.)
Among the many celebrated figures who volunteered their time and talents were Robert
Duvall, Ed Harris, Robert Redford, Ray Bradbury, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Albee, Alice
Walker, and Sandra Day O’Connor. The Arts
Endowment, with Lawrence Bridges, also developed special introductory films presenting
interviews and commentary by the living
authors of The Big Read.
In late 2007, the Arts Endowment added aninternational component to The Big Read that
included exchange programs with Egypt, Russia, and Mexico. In Egypt, partnerships werecreated in Cairo and Alexandria to bring American novels to readers (including the first Arabic translation of Fahrenheit 451). Meanwhile,
American audiences read The Thief and the
The Big Read Reader’s Guide for Ray
Dogs by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mah- Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
fouz. Russia featured To Kill a Mockingbird in
the Ivanovo and Saratov regions while selected American cities read Leo Tolstoy’s
The Death of Ivan Ilyich. For the U.S./Mexico Big Read the NEA and the Fondo deCultura Económica jointly produced an anthology of classic Mexican short stories,Sun, Stone, and Shadows, published in both Spanish and English editions to be readin both U.S. and Mexican cities. Each of these international titles became permanent
selections for the U.S. Big Read.

Cleaning up the Old Post Office
Not all of Dana Gioia’s initiatives were national. Some of them were downrighthomey and domestic. When Gioia visited the Old Post Office in November of 2002,
he was surprised and dismayed by the Arts Endowment’s cluttered corridors. The
stately marble hallways had long served as storage for excess files, old books, officefurniture, and an assortment of supplies and materials, for the agency was short on
space. Although Gioia’s own desk sets no high standard for neatness—always piled
high with books, documents, journals, and CDs—he felt a need for the NEA publicb u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 159

spaces to portray the agency’s accomplishments. Laurence Baden, deputy chairman
for Management and Budget, gradually secured more office and storage space in the
Old Post Office. This expansion not only improved working conditions; it also
allowed staff that had been dispersed around the building to enjoy a common working space with their colleagues.
Today the corridors of the Old Post Office are clear of clutter. Those who visit the
NEA enjoy viewing framed portraits of NEA Jazz Masters and stylish caricatures ofAmerican authors featured in The Big Read program. The staff also rescued its 1984
Oscar from storage to display as one more symbol of the agency’s achievements.
Portraits of former chairmen now greet visitors to the chairman’s office, and striking
paintings loaned by living American artists decorate the office walls.

The Conversation Changes
By January 2004, the public conversation about the Arts Endowment had changed
markedly. Discussing the proposed budget increase, Roger Kimball, conservative
intellectual and previous critic of the NEA, now found the Arts Endowment “avibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture.” Indeed, he
added, “the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing
important art to the American people.” Kimball’s summary appeared in National
Review Online, which had taken a different attitude toward the agency only a few
years earlier. Meanwhile, veteran columnist William Safire of The New York Times
likewise commended on the new programs, citing their bipartisan spirit. “The NEA
has raised a banner of education and accessibility to which liberal and conservative
can repair,” he said. The Wall Street Journal joined in the praise, too. In response to
the new NEA Jazz Masters initiative, Nat Hentoff wrote, “No one with government
funds to dispense has done more to bring jazz to American audiences than Dana
Gioia.”In a long piece in The New York Times, Bruce Weber wrote that the NEA under
Chairman Gioia “has won the Congressional approbation that eluded his predecessors. And [Gioia] has done so without alienating artists, who tend to resist all
restraints on their independence.” Michael Slenske’s 2,700-word profile of Operation Homecoming, published in 2005 in The Boston Globe, referred to the program as
an “innovative” model that not only serves an important historical purpose, but“promises to be helpful” in the recovery of war veterans.
Growing public support for Arts Endowment programs extended to Capitol Hill.

160 n e a : a h i s t o r yPoetry Out Loud
One of Chairman Dana Gioia’s national
initiatives was an innovative partnershipwith the state arts agencies to create anational poetry recitation contest. Cosponsored by the Poetry Foundation ofChicago, Poetry Out Loud revived the oldfashioned practice of memorizing andreciting poems combined with contemporary excitement of poetry slams. Students
choose poems from an extensive library of
selections and then compete in a series ofcontests—first in the classroom, then theschool, followed by local, regional, state,
and ultimately national meets. Performances are measured on elements such as
accuracy, projection, interpretation, andunderstanding of the poem. Winners
receive scholarships for college and cash
awards for their school libraries.
Poetry Out Loud launched nationally in2006 with more than 50,000 students
participating. Teachers received materials
including a poetry anthology, lesson plans,
and an audio CD featuring writers andactors including James Earl Jones,
Anthony Hopkins, Alyssa Milano, Richard
Rodriguez, and Kay Ryan. State arts agencies organized the program in the highschools in each state capital area. In 2008,
student enrollment in the program
reached a quarter of a million. The competition garnered unprecedented media
attention, including a front-page story in
USA Today, an in-depth follow-up article in
the Washington Post, and even as a clue in
The New York Times crossword puzzle.
With more than 250,000 participants in

The first Poetry Out Loud National Champion
in 2006, Jackson Hille, from Columbus
Alternative High School in Ohio. (Photo by
James Kegley)

2008, Poetry Out Loud continues to enjoy
immense popularity and its national finals
have been judged by luminaries such as
Writer’s Almanac’s Garrison Keillor, activist
and anthologist Caroline Kennedy, memoirist Azar Nafisi, and poet Luis
Rodriguez. As one teacher commented,“This was easily one of the greatest experiences of my teaching career. It was thelevel of intellectual confidence and enthusiasm that we as teachers usually only
fantasize about.”b u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 161

In September 2004, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who had previously been highly
critical of the NEA, wrote to the Montgomery Advertiser to praise the Shakespeare initiative. “In my view,” he said, “these are the kinds of programs the National Endowment for the Arts should be sponsoring—taking the best of American art and culture and making it available, in this case, to our service men and women and theirfamilies. . . . I’m proud that the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was chosen to participate in the program.” In floor debates in the House of Representatives on May 18,
2006, Rush Holt (D-NJ) argued that an increase in NEA funding “will build programs that use the strength of the arts and our nation’s cultural life to enhance communities in every state and every county around America.” One month later, Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) told his colleagues, “Funding for the arts is one of
the best investments our government makes. In purely economic terms, it generates
a return that would make any Wall Street investor jealous.”

Fortieth Anniversary
On March 10, 2005, when Chairman Gioia appeared before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, hesummarized the situation of the Arts Endowment: “As the National Endowment for
the Arts approaches the fortieth anniversary of its founding legislation, the agency
enjoys a renewed sense of confidence in its public mission, reputation, and record ofservice.” Chairman Gioia also noted that the “Arts Endowment now reaches bothlarge and small communities as well as rural areas, inner cities, and military bases—
successfully combining artistic excellence with public outreach.”
At public events throughout 2005 and 2006, the 40-year history of the Arts
Endowment was noted and celebrated. In September 2005, the Lyndon B. Johnson
Library and Museum at the University of Texas at Austin convened a three-day conference to commemorate the signing of the legislation establishing the National
Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At panel
discussions and receptions, the founding and evolution of the Arts Endowment wereremembered. Among the many notable speakers was former Congressman John
Brademas, who discussed the original legislation creating the Arts Endowment.
In November 2005, President and Mrs. Bush hosted a black-tie dinner at the WhiteHouse to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the NEA and NEH. Artists, scholars,
and patrons attended, as did Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, daughter of President Johnson. President Bush paid tribute to NEA Chairman Gioia and the agency’s “support

162 n e a : a h i s t o r yfor music and dance, theater and the arts across our great country.” The NEA, he said,“has helped improve public access to education in the arts, offered workshops in writing, and brought artistic masterpieces to underserved communities.”
The capstone anniversary event was a symposium on arts and culture held at
American University’s striking, new Katzen Arts Center in May 2006. It was an educational symposium for graduate students and young professionals to learn about
the Arts Endowment and the dramatic growth of the arts during the last 40 years.
Highlights of the two-day conference were the individual sessions convened byevery discipline director to discuss the impact of the Arts Endowment on his or her
field. Other events included a plenary session on international cultural exchange
and a panel discussing public funding and private giving. Finally, graduate students
from colleges and universities throughout the country presented papers on diverse
topics relative to the arts in the public sector. The NEA’s fortieth anniversary celebrations, including this symposium on arts and culture, provided ample opportunities
for gleaning lessons from the past to shape the next 40 years.

Gioia’s Second Term
On December 9, 2006, Dana Gioia was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate
for his second term as NEA chairman. During his second term, Chairman Gioia
expanded the international activities of the NEA. Under the leadership of Pennie
Ojeda, the agency created literary exchanges with Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, Northern
Ireland, and Mexico. The Arts Endowment also streamlined its grants process andsimplified its application categories. In its fortieth year, the NEA staff handled more
applications (a 30 percent increase from Fiscal Year 2000 to 2004) and more grants(a 12 percent increase in the same period) without an increase in staff. While operating on a reduced administrative budget, the Arts Endowment also managed thesubstantial workload of Challenge America grants in order to reach every congressional district consistently each year.
Gioia continued to spend considerable time refining and expanding national initiatives. Believing that consistency of support and excellence of execution were
essential to their success, he urged the NEA staff to look for ways to improve the programs with each new grants cycle. Application procedures were adjusted, teachingmaterials updated, Web sites revised and redesigned, and partnerships expanded.
Gioia also observed that arts organizations benefitted from being able to repeat
programs. A theater company whose first tour was challenging gained the necessaryb u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 163

experience to make subsequent tours go more smoothly. A school district modestly
involved in one year’s jazz, poetry, or Shakespeare programs would greatly expand
its participation the next time around. In a second Big Read program, a municipality
coordinated its many partners more easily than in its first effort. Consistent NEA
investment not only sustained the specific initiatives; it also helped build the expertise, confidence, and credibility of all the organizations involved. As the number ofpartners involved in these initiatives reached into the thousands, the widespread
impact of this long-term planning and support became visible.

Historic Budget Increase
Congress noted the NEA’s progress with growing enthusiasm. In December of
2007, the NEA received a $20.1 million budget increase—the Arts Endowment’s
largest increase in 29 years. The NEA’s $144.7 million budget for 2008 marked a 16
percent increase over 2007. This dramatic budget increase was not only a testament
to Congress’s confidence in Gioia’s leadership, but a concrete example of the impactof the work of the NEA staff, including Senior Deputy Chairman Eileen Mason, Government Affairs Director Ann Guthrie Hingston, Communications Director Felicia
Knight, and Congressional Liaison Shana Chase, in rebuilding the agency’s relationship with Capitol Hill and the media.
The NEA also helped secure historical legislative changes in the Arts and Artifacts
Indemnity Program of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The
new legislation authorized a substantial increase, with the international indemnity
ceiling reaching $10 billion along with an additional $5 billion to support the creation of a domestic component to the program. In a period of skyrocketing art values
and high insurance rates, it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this legislation, which made major museum shows financially possible across the nation. As
John E. Buchanan, Jr., director of museums with Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco noted, “It is one of the greatest things that the government can do for American
art museums.”
The same legislation also created the NEA Opera Honors, the first new class offederal arts awards in 26 years. Like the Arts Endowment’s Jazz Masters awards, the
NEA Opera Honors are lifetime achievement awards celebrating artists and advocates who have earned the highest distinction and made irreplaceable contributions
to their field. The new program reflected Gioia’s conviction that the U.S. government needed to do more to recognize and celebrate the contributions of its artists.

164 n e a : a h i s t o r yNEA Chairman Gioia (left) with Plácido Domingo, Washington National Opera general director,
at the May 2008 announcement of the inaugural class of NEA Opera Honors, the first new NEA
lifetime achievement award in 26 years. (Photo by Fadi Kheir)

The first NEA Opera Honors recipients were soprano Leontyne Price, conductor
James Levine, composer Carlisle Floyd, and director Richard Gaddes. Administeredby OPERA America, the awards were greeted with enormous enthusiasm by theAmerican classical music world.

Serving All Americans
In September 2008, Gioia announced his intention to resign the following January—
two years before the end of his term—to return to writing. “I have given up six yearsof my creative life,” he remarked. “I want to return to poetry while I have the stamina
and spirit to pursue the art seriously.” This announcement caused regret on bothsides of the aisle. Congressman Patrick Tiberi (R-OH) wrote that Gioia “had successfully worked across party lines to bring broad support and enthusiasm to the arts andarts education.” Meanwhile Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) praised Gioia’s
democratization of the Arts Endowment, which “brought the arts to many new communities and demonstrated to Congress how the NEA’s work touches every corner ofthe country.”b u i l d i n g a n e w c o n s e n s u s 165

As he prepared to leave office in late 2008, Gioia received what he termed “thebest farewell gift imaginable.” American literary reading had risen for the first timein 26 years. After the universal declines charted in earlier NEA surveys, reading
trends reversed among virtually every group measured. Best of all, young adults (age18–24), who had shown the most drastic declines over the previous decades, now
registered the largest increase of any group (+21 percent). Although the survey did
not establish cause and effect, it seemed no coincidence that these young adults had
been in high school when the NEA launched the national literary initiatives (Shakespeare in American Communities, Poetry Out Loud, and The Big Read) that hadreached millions of teenagers during the previous six years. Likewise the NEA’s
influential reading surveys had helped ignite national concern about the decline ofreading and its effects. While these new positive trends reflected the work of countless teachers, librarians, writers, and parents, the NEA had played a catalytic role—demonstrating that well-focused federal investment could make a difference inAmerican society.

166 n e a : a h i s t o r yepilogue

A Great Nation Deserves Great Art

Over the past four decades, the National Endowment for
the Arts has established itself as a unique institution in American culture. As theofficial arts agency of the U.S. government, supported by yearly appropriations from
Congress, the NEA has not only become the nation’s largest supporter of arts andarts education, but also, by its special position as the nexus between the public andprivate sectors, an irreplaceable institution. In addition to distributing thousands ofgrants each year, including critical funding to the state arts agencies, the Endowment also convenes panels that set standards of artistic quality, publishes research
reports that guide informed discussions of cultural trends and policies, and creates
institutional partnerships that now reach every community in the nation. The NEA’s
direct financial influence has been enormous. To date, it has awarded more than
126,000 grants totaling over four billion dollars, a sum that has generated matchingfunds many times larger than the initial investment. As a result, American culture
has been enlivened, enlarged, and democratized.
Such impressive results were surely in the minds of the legislators who first called
the agency into existence in 1965 at a moment of cultural optimism in which thegovernment’s vision of a great nation included a commensurably great artistic culture. Although these legislators might have been surprised by some of thesubsequent debates involving the agency, they understood that the NEA represented
a bold innovation in federal policy. How could such great innovation occur without
incident? In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the growth of federal arts policy
would involve debate, challenge, and change as the nation defined the new agency’s
proper role. Guided by nine chairmen with diverse outlooks and leadership styles,

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the Arts Endowment has lived through an often turbulent period of cultural transformation. The agency has not merely survived these challenges; its work has beenstrengthened and clarified by them.
Today, the National Endowment for the Arts enjoys high regard for its commitment to bring the best of arts and arts education to all Americans. Supporting excellence in the arts—both new and traditional—across all of the disciplines, it fosters
the nation’s creativity and brings the transformative power of the imagination into
millions of lives, reaching many who would have no easy access to the arts without
government funding. Having created a new national consensus for federal supportof the arts, with strong bipartisan support from Congress and wide public approval,
the agency has moved decisively into a positive new era. As a new Administration
arrives in Washington, led by President-elect Barack Obama, who has voiced his
belief in the federal cultural agencies, the Arts Endowment seems poised for continued growth. Under future chairmen, the agency will surely pursue new ideas andopportunities, but one thing will remain constant, the Endowment’s commitment toserve all Americans by bringing the arts into their lives, schools, and communities.

168 n e a : a h i s t o r ypart ii

The impact of the nea

Dancer Fanny Elssler performing in La Volière, drawn on stone by M. Gauci from a drawing by J.
Deffett Francis, printed by P. Gauci. (Lithograph courtesy of New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division)

Dancedouglas c. sonntag
Dance Director

Introduction
The story of American dance and the federal government begins, appropriately
enough, with a tale set in Washington. In 1840, at the same time that Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others were complaining about the lack of anational culture in the United States, one of the great ballerinas of the Romantic Era,
Fanny Elssler, embarked upon a multi-city tour of the young republic. “I am about tocross the Atlantic and proceed to America!” she had written in her diary. “I cannot
look upon this strange intention as other than a mad freak that has seized my fancy
in a thoughtless moment. . . . My sober judgment could never have brought me tosuch a resolution.”
Her fears proved unfounded. The performances she gave in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond created a sensation. Crowds of fans packed thetheaters every night to watch her dance, and lithographs showing her costumed forexotic solos sold in the thousands. In Washington, President Martin van Buren andhis cabinet gave her an official audience. At a formal banquet in the Capitol, thenation’s highest legislators toasted her health by drinking champagne from a satin
dance slipper. What was to have been a three-month stay extended into two years of
performances and travel. Fanny Elssler returned to Europe more celebrated thanever, dancing for several more years before retiring at age 41, still beautiful and quite
wealthy.
Elssler’s success, however, had no lasting impact on dance in America, and foranother century the art and business of professional dance struggled to survive.
There were no academies for training dancers and no state-supported companies to
employ them. There were few professional choreographers and only tiny urban

171audiences accustomed to the theatrical conventions of the elite European art form.
In the decades following Elssler’s visit, concert dance was slow to develop. It was
not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the first stirrings of an artistic
awakening were detectable. Early pioneers of modern dance, including Loïe Fuller,
Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn, planted the seeds that would bear
fruit in subsequent decades. The second generation of modern dance choreographers included Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Helen Tamiris, Charles
Weidman, Katherine Dunham, and Pearl Primus. These artists laid a foundationthat would support a national dance movement.
Ballet was also beginning to evolve. Early tours by such companies as the Ballet
Russe de Monte Carlo began the arduous task of building and educating audiences
across the nation. In 1933, George Balanchine, a rising choreographic star who had
left the Soviet Union to work in Europe, arrived in New York and expertly mined theconsiderable resources that would sustain American ballet through the century.

The NEA Enters the Field
When President Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the
Humanities Act of 1965, a small and important collection of dance companies,
artists, and presenting organizations comprised the American concert dance field.
These included the Martha Graham Dance Company, Merce Cunningham Dance
Company, the San Francisco Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the American Dance
Festival, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Not one of them was more than 40 years
old, and the audiences they attracted were passionate but drawn from only a few
large cities. Nationally, the dance field itself seemed confined.
Nobody foresaw how much the field of dance would prosper in the coming four
decades, or the catalytic role the Arts Endowment would play. The American dance
field was artistically rich but lacked the resources to expand basic activities, such asincreasing the number of performances, the number of dancers on contract, andtheir weeks of rehearsal and performance time. Arts Endowment support began tomake it possible for dancers, choreographers, and administrators to work full-timeon their craft.
From the start, the Arts Endowment fostered an intimate relationship with thedance field in all its elements. The NEA gave critical assistance to choreographersacross the range of dance expression and helped build networks facilitating regionaland national tours so that newly created work could reach audiences in all parts of the

172 n e a : a h i s t o r yStudio portrait of dancer/choreographer Martha Graham. (Photo by Chris Alexander)

country. The NEA also supported the development of regional ballet companies anddance-related educational tools for school children. Later, the NEA sponsoredresearch studies on the state of the field. The Arts Endowment’s national perspective
allowed it to address the needs of the entire discipline and to respond broadly tochanging conditions in the dance world. The agency’s financial support helped ignite
what many termed the “dance boom,” a period of unequalled growth in American
concert dance that lasted from the mid-1960s through the late-1980s.

Early Endowment Support for Dance
The first panel convened by the Arts Endowment, in January 1966, was the dance
panel. The first-ever NEA grant went to the American Ballet Theatre in December
1965, presented by Vice President Hubert Humphrey and amounting to $100,000,

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an enormous sum at the time. In 1966, the Endowment awarded its first-everindividual fellowships, totaling $93,000, to choreographers Alvin Ailey, Merce
Cunningham, Martha Graham, José Limón, Alwin Nikolais, Anna Sokolow, andPaul Taylor.
In the Arts Endowment’s first two years, with the dance and theater disciplines
under the supervision of Ruth Mayleas, dance grants totaled more than $750,000.
These grants fostered the following accomplishments:• American Ballet Theatre and the Martha Graham Dance Company went on
national tours. For the Graham Company, and for choreography recipient Martha
Graham, these grants were decisive not only in keeping the company in the UnitedStates (several other countries were inviting them to move out of the U.S. to more
hospitable financial climes), but also in enabling thousands of Americans across thecountry to experience the work of this artistic genius.
• The Joffrey Ballet mounted new work and conducted a seven-week residency in
the Pacific Northwest with Arts Endowment, Washington State Arts Commission,and local private funds.
• With a $5,000 technical assistance grant, the Association of American Dance
Companies, predecessor to today’s Dance/USA, was formed to serve and represent
the entire field of American dance.
The Arts Endowment, in 1968, began a groundbreaking effort to support dance
touring under then-Dance Program Director June Arey. With $25,000 of Arts Endowment money, matched many times over by state and local funds, the Illinois Arts
Council sponsored four modern dance companies for residencies in six Illinois
cities. In addition to performances, the companies conducted lecture demonstrations, seminars, master classes, and teacher institutes for several thousand people
within a 50-mile radius of the host cities.
Following evaluation of this pilot effort, interstate circuits were developed in 1968
to support nine dance companies for residencies in Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana,
Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode
Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The program reached new audiences in communities of all sizes, identified new performance space for dance, and, importantly,
provided employment for dance artists.
This Coordinated Residency Touring Program, as it was originally titled, grew
year after year, adjusting to meet changing circumstances. The program embraced
many more dance companies and communities coast to coast throughout the 1970s
and into the early 1980s. New choreographers and dance companies sprang up, new

174 n e a : a h i s t o r ypresenters welcomed them into their communities, and an art form heretofore
enjoyed by relatively small numbers of people in few cities was finally available
nationwide.
Concurrent with the Choreographer Fellowships and the Dance Touring Programs, which spurred creation of exciting new dance works and unprecedented
growth in dance companies and audiences nationwide, the Dance Program panels
began to focus on two additional areas of need and potential. One was the organizational development of the dance companies that were emerging in numerous
communities. The other focus was the preservation of this most ephemeral of art
forms, and about expanding its availability ever more broadly—both areas in which
the innovative use of film, video, and television promised major advances.
Beginning in 1970 with a pilot program enabling three companies to securedevelopment directors, NEA grants helped dance companies to employ professional
managements, develop boards of directors, and engage in fundraising—all of thesestrategies aimed to place the companies on firmer footing in their communities.

Dance Journalism
Also in 1970 the Arts Endowment supported its first dance critics’ workshop, an
intensive three-week training program for journalists from across the country, heldat the American Dance Festival (then at Connecticut College). The NEA understoodthat healthy dance companies would require informed criticism, and few journalists
were familiar with dance in the agency’s earliest years.
Since 2004, the Arts Endowment has revived its support for arts journalism andcriticism. The NEA Arts Journalism Institutes bring together journalists and critics
from across the country to hone their skills in classical music and opera at Columbia
University, theater and musical theater at the University of Southern California, anddance at the American Dance Festival, now at Duke University in Durham, North
Carolina.

Dance and Media Arts
In follow-up to a study commissioned by the Arts Endowment in 1968, theDance/Video Program supported projects that captured dance on film or videotape
to document and preserve dance performances. Around the same time, seizing theopportunities presented by television to reach millions of Americans with its superb

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dance companies and artists, the Dance Program joined with the Media Arts Programin 1972 to create the Programming in the Arts category. The NEA invested in projects to improve the quality of arts programming on film, television, and radio.
Choreographer Meredith Monk and filmmakers Amram Nowak and Robert Rosen
received a grant for a work fusing film and dance. Grants to the Educational Broadcasting Corporation (WNET-TV) helped to support the series Dance in America.
KCET-TV in Los Angeles produced a television special, Conversations about theDance, featuring choreographer Agnes de Mille and the Joffrey Ballet.

Research and Analysis
The Arts Endowment understood that to help dance assume a prominent place inAmerican life required more than distributing money to existing organizations anddance professionals. The field needed to collect and analyze information in order tofind better ways of understanding the obstacles to success. Prior to 1965, dance existed with almost no sense of itself as a recognized cultural force, and participants had
no venue in which to elevate their local concerns into a national conversation. Thevery existence of the Arts Endowment marked a significant step forward in the field’s
consolidation. It was, in effect, a de facto national service organization, a central
source of communication for all interested parties.
The agency convened panels made up of dance professionals from large and smallorganizations across the country to review applications and discuss challenges andpriorities within the discipline. The ensuing discussions made the panels into veritable think tanks that identified areas of concern and formulated ideas and policies
to address them.
The Arts Endowment extended its data collection with several research reports
starting in 1984 that supplied dance practitioners with crucial data about the discipline and its needs. These included the following studies:• Space for Dance (1984), a collaboration between the Arts Endowment’s Dance and
Design Arts Programs, developed under Dance Program Director Nigel Redden. The
study provided a detailed description of what architects need to consider in designingtheaters and stages to accommodate the needs of dancers.
• Dancemakers (1993) summarized the results of the Arts Endowment’s study of thegeneral working conditions, financial status, performance opportunities, funding, andwork practices of choreographers in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, andWashington, DC. The study provided benchmark statistics on a sample of the nation-

176 n e a : a h i s t o r yal choreographer population and documented the often difficult circumstances in which these artists work.
• Raising the Barre: The Geographic,
Financial, and Economic Trends ofNonprofit Dance Companies (2003)
was commissioned as part of theagency’s ongoing efforts to conduct
and disseminate research findings.
The study drew on three databases:
The Unified Database of Arts Organizations (UDAO), a newly available
database produced jointly by the
NEA, the National Center for Charitable Statistics as part of the Urban
Institute, and the National Assemblyof State Arts Agencies; the economic
census, the census of business establishments conducted every five years by the U.S.
Census Bureau; and a database of dance company applicants, produced and maintained by the NEA Dance Program staff.
These projects were among the first comprehensive and statistically valid studies
to look at the lives, working conditions, and finances of individual dance professionals and of the American nonprofit dance world.

Across the Nation
From its many applications and requests for support as well as scores of panels convened annually, the Arts Endowment quickly identified the difficulty dance faced intrying to extend beyond a few major cities in the United States. Outside of the largest
metropolitan areas, there were very few resident dance companies and few theatersthat were appropriate for concert dance presentations.
The problem was reflected in the fact that during its first five years of grantmaking, the Arts Endowment awarded direct funding to dance organizations andprofessionals in only 13 states and the District of Columbia: California, Connecticut,
Georgia, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, and Washington. Other dance grants were awarded to

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state arts agencies to support dance activity, but not directly to dance companies,
choreographers, and presenters.
With touring crucial to the health of the dance field, both artistically and financially, as well as essential to the distribution of dance outside New York and othercenters, the NEA focused much of its efforts on traveling dance productions. As time
passed and dance touring grew more sophisticated, the Arts Endowment created an
elegant system of support for dance companies to bring that work to audiences, andgrants to emerging choreographers to hone their craft.
Forty years later, in 2004–2005, Arts Endowment dance grants reached 47 states
as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The
spread of dance beyond the traditional cultural centers of the United States is one of
the most important legacies of the agency, and to accomplish it, the Arts Endowment
engaged in some creative forms of support.

Outreach
The Endowment supports all arts fields, including dance, in a comprehensive way,
as shown by the following examples of past and current activity:• The Challenge Grants program, started in 1976, gave dance companies the ability to retire debt, create cash reserves, and build endowments. Early Challenge Grants
aimed at ensuring financial stability were awarded to Ballet West in Salt Lake City,
the Houston Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, theAlvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and the New York City Ballet. Later Challenge
Grants also supported artistic projects including the Kennedy Center’s commissioning project for new ballets, which resulted in the Houston Ballet’s world premiere ofPaul Taylor’s Company B set to the music of the Andrews Sisters. Challenge Grants
have also been awarded to document and preserve choreography for the Paul Taylor
Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre.
• Folk Arts grants as well as NEA National Heritage Fellowships support traditional and ethnically based dance organizations and recognize important artists working
in social and vernacular dance styles such as Lindy Hop dancer extraordinaireFrankie Manning and tap dance great Jimmy Slyde.
• During the first decades, NEA’s Expansion Arts Program grants supported artists
and organizations working in culturally specific traditions and helped underserved
communities and populations gain access to the arts. Ballet Hispanico and Dance
Theatre of Harlem in New York City and the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company

178 n e a : a h i s t o r y

in Denver, Colorado, were early recipients of grants
from this program, enabling them to grow artisticallyand administratively.
• Arts Education grants sent dance specialists anddance companies into schools for direct interaction
with students.
• Media Arts grants gave national exposure to thearts through support to Dance in America and specials
such as Twyla Tharp’s Making Television Dance andAlvin Ailey: Memories and Visions.
Another key component to the success of dance isfound in the consumer side: audience development.
The Arts Endowment has acted determinedly to create literate and informed patrons by making dance
visible and engaging. One of the most effective methods has been national broadcasts of dance performances through support of such renowned series as
Great Performances: Dance in America, Live from Lincoln Center, Alive from Off Center, and Alive TV. Grants
also supported the production of Dancing, a ten-partseries that explores the artistic, social, religious, andcultural history of the form, for which former NEA
Dance Program Director Rhoda Grauer served as
executive producer.

Preservation

1999 NEA National Heritage Fellow
James “Jimmy Slyde” Godbolt received
the award for his tap-dancing prowess.
(Photo courtesy of International Tap
Association Archives)

Celebrating its thirtieth season in 2006, Dance in America has become an invaluable
archival record of our nation’s greatest choreographers and performers, documenting an ephemeral art for a field that has in the past had little access to its own history.
The preservation of dance heritage has, in fact, been an ongoing concern of theagency from its earliest days. As noted above, from the 1960s to the 1980s, America
experienced a “dance boom” that brought the classical traditions of Europe together
with the mix of races and ethnicities to forge new and exciting expressions. The choreography of George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet, the Americana ballets
of Jerome Robbins and Agnes de Mille, the piercing psychological dramas of Martha

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Choreographer George Balanchine (left) with Stephanie Saland rehearsing Apollo. (Photo by Paul
Kolnik, courtesy of New York City Ballet)

Graham, as well as the performance experimentation of Merce Cunningham andTrisha Brown—all enacted an American century in dance, and the Arts Endowment
was honored to be one of its stewards.
In the late 1980s, however, the boom began to wane, and the dances of earlier
artists became ever more remote and faint. Audiences no longer had ready access tothe pioneering dances of Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Helen Tamiris, Ted
Shawn, and Ruth St. Denis. Moreover, dozens of other choreographers who had
assembled companies in the early years of the dance boom saw their works fadefrom active performance as they disbanded those companies. It was impossible toignore the obvious. Our dance heritage was fading at an alarming rate.
In 1990, the Arts Endowment took a proactive stance under the leadership ofDance Program Director Sali Ann Kriegsman. Partnering with the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, the NEA commissioned Images of American Dance, a study of dance
documentation and archival resources in six American cities (Los Angeles, Min-

180 n e a : a h i s t o r yneapolis, New York City, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC). The
conclusions of the study were stark and depressing. Little thought and few resourceswere being devoted to record and preserve existing dance.
Images of American Dance was directly responsible for the creation of the Dance
Heritage Coalition, whose original members included the Library of Congress, the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dance Collection, the Harvard Theater Collection, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, and the San Francisco Performing
Arts Library and Museum. The Dance Heritage Coalition’s first task was to develop
standards for cataloguing dance materials in libraries to ensure that dance-related
collections were accessible to scholars, students, and the public. In addition, thecoalition has published reports on the magnetic media crisis, which directly affects
dance companies with extensive videotape libraries. The coalition also produced
pamphlets that provide guidance on how to approach preserving and transferring
deteriorating tapes, as well as establishing a working archive.
The Arts Endowment complements the work of the Dance Heritage Coalition
with two more preservation programs, Save America’s Treasures and American
Masterpieces. Since 1999, through Save America’s Treasures, the NEA has provided
grants to notate dances by Agnes de Mille, Martha Graham, and Jerome Robbins,
and has helped support critical work in the company archives of the New York City
Ballet. It also enabled the Dance Heritage Coalition to provide technical assistance todance archives in Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, and New York.
American Masterpieces, an initiative inaugurated in 2005, allows the Arts Endowment to continue its support for the reconstruction, performance, and preservationof the endangered dance heritage. For instance, as the American dance field has
matured since the heady days of the dance boom, and many of those early companies led by a single choreographer ceased operations, the phenomenon ofchoreography with no home (a so-called “orphan repertory”) has become a pressing
issue. The dance component of American Masterpieces is designed to help orphaned
dances find homes and remain on the stage, introducing dancers and new audiences to outstanding choreography they might not otherwise see performed.

Partnerships
As a national leader of the dance field, from its earliest years the NEA assumed as
one of its primary functions the forming of critical partnerships to enhance thedevelopment and distribution of dance nationally. Dance/USA has been one of the

dance

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most important partners since its creation in 1982. Over the years, the Arts Endowment and Dance/USA, currently led by Executive Director Andrea Snyder, haveworked together on numerous projects of major importance to the field. Dance/
USA has administered the National College Choreography Initiative, which has
made awards to college and university dance programs in all 50 states for the creation of new works and restaging of masterworks from the past. Dance/USA is alsoa partner with the Arts Endowment and the New England Foundation for the Arts on
the development and administration of the college and university component ofAmerican Masterpieces, though 2008 marks the transition to an entirely NEAadministered university program.
The National Dance Project, administered by the New England Foundation for theArts under former Executive Director Sam Miller and now helmed by Rebecca
Blunk, supports the creation of dance and its delivery, through touring, to audiences
across the country. As of 2006, the Arts Endowment’s initial investment of $1 million in 1995 has yielded more than $20 million in matching funds to support dance
touring.

Conclusion
One of the major artistic accomplishments of the United States in the twentieth century was the development of dance, especially modern dance. Many of the world’s
great choreographers—either native born or immigrant—transformed dance inAmerica and worldwide.
The cumulative impact of NEA awards in dance was both immediate and long
lasting, and they transformed the place of dance in American culture. Solely interms of financial support, the funding is unparalleled. For more than 40 years, theArts Endowment awarded more than $300 million directly to dance companies,
choreographers, presenters, festivals, historians, critics, workshops, and service
organizations. Grants supported the commission of new works, restaging of ballets,
home seasons, touring, dance presenting series, dance film and video projects, andfellowships. By the time the Choreographer’s Fellowship category concluded by
Congressional mandate in 1996, the Arts Endowment had given $13.6 million in
1,500 grants.
Professional dance companies, as counted by the NEA, grew from 37 in 1965 to
157 in 1975. By 1990, this figure stood above 400, and in 2008, the number of American dance companies exceeds 600. What were once fledgling dance companies

182 n e a : a h i s t o r yhave grown into flagship cultural institutions. Dance artists, companies, and presenters are now part of the landscape in all 50 states, and the resources and leadership of
the Arts Endowment have played no small role in their advance.

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John Steinbeck and Ralph Ellison at one of the first National Council on the Arts meetings in
Tarrytown, New York. (Photo by R. Philip Hanes, Jr.)

Literature
jon parrish peede
Literature Director, Grants Programs

amy stolls
Literature Program Officer, Grants Programs

Introduction
When the first NEA literature grants were awarded in 1967 to 23 writers and nineorganizations, the literary ecosystem was undergoing significant change. Over the
next several decades, authors of commercial bestsellers increasingly displaced theirliterary peers from the bookstore shelves and the public eye. To the good fortune ofwriters, and to the benefit of American literary culture as a whole, the NEA dedicatedresources and funds to poets and fiction writers whose works might not survive inthis new mass media climate despite their long-term contribution to the nation’s literary life. Time and again, the Arts Endowment assisted writers at crucial momentsin their careers, as well as nonprofit publishers, by building supportive networks
that proved essential.

NEA Fellowships
The NEA Literature Fellowships program is arguably the most democratic grant program in its field. The $25,000 fellowships are highly competitive, but unlike mostother literary awards, they are selected through an anonymous screening process inwhich the only criteria for review are artistic excellence and artistic merit. The NEA
assembles a different panel of judges every year, each diverse with regard to geogra-

185phy, ethnicity, gender, age, aesthetics, and life experience.
The Arts Endowment has had an outstanding track record of nurturing talented
writers early in their careers. As of 2008, 52 of the 84 recipients of the National Book
Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and
Fiction since 1990 were previous NEA Fellows. Furthermore, all but three received
NEA Fellowships before any other major national award, usually at least a decade
earlier. If one scans the list of 2,876 writers and translators who have received NEA
Literature Fellowships, a full and varied landscape of the best contemporary American literature comes into view.
NEA Literature awards began in May 1966, after the NEA and its advisoryboard—the National Council on the Arts—were established. Council members
Ralph Ellison and Paul Engle proposed the development of a program to provide
grants to creative writers. While the Arts Endowment awarded individual grants toall types of artists in 1966—Donald Justice, X. J. Kennedy, Leonie Adams, and W.
D. Snodgrass among them—a formal program to support creative writers did not
begin until 1967 with grants to such writers as William Gaddis, Tillie Olsen, Gracy
Paley, May Sarton, Richard Yates, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. With his grant money,
Singer was able to focus on completing his novel The Manor; 11 years later, he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Similarly, numerous poets well-known
today—Hayden Carruth, Maxine Kumin, and Robert Duncan—were awarded NEA
grants that year at a time when their national literary reputations were stilldeveloping.
To facilitate the new program, the Arts Endowment appointed poet Carolyn Kizer
in 1968 as the first NEA Literature director. From that time to today, the Literature
Program has been committed to supporting the individual writer. For the first six
years of the program, there were several variations of such support. One importantfocus was supporting emerging writers. Another one gave grants to help writers andother artists teaching in institutions of higher learning take one-year sabbaticals to
pursue their creative work. And the agency awarded grants for travel, research, or
finishing a work-in-progress.
The issue of whether to fund established writers for their accomplishments orhelp younger writers find time and resources to write was at the forefront of internaland external debates in the early days of the program. For several decades, the Arts
Endowment gave lifetime achievement awards designed to attract national attention
to writers of significant accomplishment, writers such as John Berryman, Denise
Levertov, Wallace Stegner, and Gwendolyn Brooks. In the late 1960s, these awards

186 n e a : a h i s t o r ywere called Distinguished Service Awards, worth $10,000; in the 1980s, they werecalled Senior Fellowships, worth $15,000 at the start, climbing to $40,000 in 1986.
These awards were eliminated in 1992 due to shifting priorities and lack of funds.
They never garnered enthusiastic support from Congress, and even in the arts community one could hear rumblings about “aesthetic partisanship.”In tandem with its support of established writers, the Arts Endowment initiallydecided to offer Discovery Awards to emerging writers. The agency hired “talent
scouts” to find gifted, financially needy, little-known writers. Grants were awarded
according to need: $1,000 to the single writer without dependents; $1,500 to thewriter with one dependent; and $2,000 to the writer with two or more dependents.
Among these recipients were the 25-year-old Alexander Theroux and the 26-year-old
Nikki Giovanni. But the Discovery Awards didn’t last long. The original advisory
panel on literature, consisting mostly of editors and publishers, held its first meeting in September 1970 and recommended these awards be terminated. Members
voted almost unanimously in opposition to the addition of economic need as a determining factor in making grant selections. In 1972, the Arts Endowment began the
precursor to the current system—a competitive fellowships program based on artistic merit.
To receive a fellowship in the early 1970s, a writer had to be nominated by anestablished writer. An oversight committee composed of a broad spectrum of publishers, editors, agents, critics, and other experts in the field from around thecountry selected the nominators—among them James Dickey, Eudora Welty, Kenneth Koch, Adrienne Rich, and William Stafford. The nominators recommended
potential grantees who had published a book; published short stories, poems, oressays in magazines; or had a play staged. The first year, the NEA Literature Fellowship program announced 27 awards.
Soon after, though, the system of nominations was replaced with an open application policy. In 1974, under Literature Director Len Randolph, the NEA Literature officereceived a whopping 1,500-plus applications, of which 120 were awarded grants at$5,000 each. The number of submissions escalated to nearly 2,500 the next year.
Reflective of the time, most applications were from men, and more than half werefrom poets. By the mid-1980s, applicants would come to represent American writers
living in all 50 states and Washington, DC, and women would make up a significant
portion of grantees. Numerous American literary classics—such as Bobbie Ann
Mason’s first novel, In Country, and Sandra Cisneros’s first novel, The House on Mango
Street—were written under NEA Fellowships, as was Erica Jong’s then-controversial

l i t e r a t u r e 187

Fear of Flying. In more recent years, fellowships have been awarded to novelists
such as Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster
Wallace, and Lorrie Moore; and to poets
such as Mary Karr, Li-Young Lee, Kay
Ryan, and Natasha Trethewey. Whathasn’t changed significantly over the
decades is the percentage of applicants
who are chosen to receive grants. On
average, it remains less than 5 percent.
The Arts Endowment periodically has
tweaked the fellowships process to meetthe demands of the times and the everincreasing workload. To adjust for costof living, the amount of the grant has
incrementally risen over the years. Filmand television scriptwriters were transferred to the Arts Endowment’s Media Bobbie Ann Mason’s first novel, In Country,
Arts Program, and playwrights were
written with assistance from an NEA Literature
Fellowship. (Cover courtesy of Viking Penguin)sent to the Theater Program. The NEA
amended guidelines to accept manuscripts in languages other than English if they came with an English translation.
Eligibility requirements became more stringent to address the growing number ofapplications. “Belles-lettres” was added as a genre eligible for funding and thenchanged to “creative nonfiction.” And when Congress significantly reduced the budget in fiscal year 1996, the Arts Endowment moved to judging genres in alternate
years (prose one year, poetry another).
Perhaps the most successful outgrowth of the 1980s was the development of aprocess to review fellowships in translation, which flourished under the leadershipof then Literature Director Frank Conroy. Inaugurated in 1981, Translation Fellowships in poetry and prose are currently offered to published literary translators for
specific translation projects from other languages into English. Unlike other NEA
Literature Fellowships, the Translation Fellowships are not reviewed anonymously,
and they can be for either $12,500 or $25,000, depending on the scope and merit of
the project. To date, the Arts Endowment has awarded 274 Translation Fellowships,
bringing to the American public more than 225 foreign works in 50 languages from

188 n e a : a h i s t o r y

63 countries. Among them one can find FY 1999 Fellow Khaled Mattawa’s translation of Without an Alphabet, Without a Face by Saadi Youssef, one of the Arab world’s
foremost contemporary poets and an astute observer of modern Iraqi culture; andFY 1992 Fellow Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Red Sorghum by Chinese author
Mo Yan, which received publicity through the critically acclaimed 1989 film by thesame name.
Throughout the life of the Creative Writing and Translation Fellowships programs, however, critics have questioned their worth or, in some cases, lobbied fortheir demise. A larger threat to the program, and to the agency as a whole, came in1995 when measures were introduced in the U.S. Congress to phase out the Arts
Endowment or, at the very least, slash the budget and abolish all grants to individual
artists. The literature field, in pure grassroots fashion, rose up in protest to the cuts.
“People all across America came together to prioritize the fellowships,” said Gigi
Bradford, NEA Literature director from 1992 to 1997. Hundreds of writers published opinion pieces and wrote letters. Literary organization leaders held meetings
every month and brought writers such as E. L. Doctorow, Wendy Wasserstein, Bobbie
Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressmen and Senators. Ultimately, Congress voted to eliminate individual grants awarded byapplication in all disciplines, except for Literature Fellowships in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translation.
The Congressional decision to continue the Literature Fellowships affirmed theintegrity of the anonymous panel review process and the undeniable excellence ofthe fellowship recipients. “The committee recognizes that a great many of the grants
to individuals have been for projects of superior merit and worth,” states a 1995
majority report on the Arts, Humanities, and Museums Amendments from the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

Grants to Literary Orgranizations
The Literature Fellowships have always been the cornerstone of the NEA’s support
for literature, with more than a third of Literature’s funds allocated toward helping
writers find the time and resources to write. But from the beginning, an equally
essential goal for the NEA—a goal that continues today—is to help build an infrastructure that can support American writers, connect writers with communities
nationwide, and preserve excellent writing for future generations. Put simply, tobuild a nation of discriminating readers.

l i t e r a t u r e 189

Author Toni Morrison (left) served the NEA both as a Literature Program panelist and as amember of the National Council on the Arts (1980–87). (NEA File Photo)

Under the guidance of early advisory panels, which were then consciously composed of such luminaries as Edward Albee, Toni Morrison, William Stafford, andWilliam Styron, the NEA set out to achieve this goal. The Arts Endowment began byreaching out to small literary journals and presses; boosting the number of readings
and residencies in schools, prisons, hospitals, and other venues nationwide, including book festivals in rural and inner-city pockets of the country; and supportingorganizations that provide professional services to creative writers. This long-standing commitment to audience development has been particularly important inensuring that a national literary culture thrives.

Journals and Presses
It is in the small literary magazines and presses that the writing of those whom we havecome to regard as masters often first appears—writers such as Ernest Hemingway,
William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Historically,
however, these small presses have had difficulties competing with their commercial
counterparts, particularly in the areas of marketing, promotion, and distribution. In

190 n e a : a h i s t o r ythe 1970s, the NEA began giving direct grants to select publishers and journals such as
AGNI, Alice James Books, BOA Editions, Callaloo, Copper Canyon Press, Curbstone
Press, Feminist Press, and Ploughshares. At the same time, the NEA launched several
projects to help distribute journals—“book buses,” for example, and a special sales
effort aimed at university and college bookstores.
The NEA also provided indirect support to journals through a founding grant to
the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM), the precursor to the current-day Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). Established as an NEA
initiative in 1966, the CCLM provided funds for author payments, design, production, and marketing; support originally went to such publications as The Hudson
Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly.
The NEA has continued funding of CLMP, with support such as a 1998 grant toimplement the Literary Journal Institute, a national program designed to increase
income for small- to mid-size literary magazines.
The resulting success stories from these grants are numerous. In 1980, for example, the NEA awarded a $3,500 grant to the Louisiana State University Press (LSU
Press) to publish John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The novel had been
rejected by dozens of commercial publishers as a bad risk because the deceased
author could not publicize the book or write another. In the first year, LSU Press soldmore than 50,000 copies, and Toole was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
posthumously.
In 1992, Arte Público Press in Houston, the premier publisher of Hispanic literature in North America, acquired rights to Victor Villasenor’s Rain of Gold, after amajor commercial publisher wanted to excise content deemed too ethnic for American readers. In Arte Público’s hands, the acclaimed saga of the Villasenor family soldnearly 20,000 hardcover copies, was picked up by the Literary Guild Book Club, had
paperback rights awarded in the U.S. and in several foreign countries, and garnerednumerous awards.
Other publishing projects supported by the NEA Literature Program include theSyndicated Fiction Project (1983–93), in which a panel of distinguished writers selected previously unpublished short stories to be printed in newspapers throughout thecountry, and the Favorite Poem Project. Established in 1998 with support from the
NEA and the Library of Congress, the Favorite Poem Project was the brainchild of
U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and resulted in more than 1,000 community readings of favorite poems across the country, including a reading at the White House by
President and Mrs. Clinton, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, and Pinsky.

l i t e r a t u r e 191

Readings and Residencies
As important as publishers are in getting writing into the hands of readers, NEA literature panels have always understood that contact with the writers themselves can
expand audiences even further by enhancing a reader’s appreciation of a writer’swork. Likewise, public readings and workshops provide another way active writers
can receive financial help.
In addition to providing direct grants to organizations for readings and residencies, the NEA sent poets into predominantly black colleges in the South in the 1970s;
launched Literature of the States in 1991 to stimulate the discovery and preservationof every city’s literary heritage; and sponsored the National Writers Voice Project of
the YMCA in 1995, which promoted literary programming for children at Ys
throughout rural and inner-city America.
Particularly important to the NEA Literature Program over the years has been its
ability to reach children. Two of the most successful programs the NEA funded inthis category are Poets in the Schools, through the Academy of American Poets, andWritersCorp. Established in 1966 and continuing for more than a decade, Poetry in
the Schools placed well-known poets in elementary and secondary school classrooms
to discuss their poetry with students and instruct teachers on how to incorporate
poetry into their curricula. Piloted in New York City, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, the firstprogram featured Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, Allen Tate, andRobert Penn Warren, among others. President Nixon recognized the program’s
worth in 1969 when he called upon Congress to double the appropriations for theArts and Humanities Endowments. WritersCorp, a community-oriented complement to Poets in the Schools, evolved many years later. Founded in 1994 with NEA
funding, WritersCorp was born out of conversations between former NEA Chairman
Jane Alexander and Eli Siegel, director of AmeriCorps. They wanted a program thatenabled writers to help underserved youth improve their literacy and communication skills and offer creative expression as an alternative to violence, alcohol, and drug
abuse. WritersCorp, now separate from the NEA, continues to reach thousands of atrisk youth in San Francisco, the Bronx, and Washington, DC.

Services to the Field
In 1966, the NEA gave a grant to enable the American chapter of PEN International
to host the 34th International PEN Congress in New York City. It was the first time

192 n e a : a h i s t o r y

U.S. Poet Laureate (and two-time NEA Literature Fellow) Charles Simic interviewed by NEA
Chairman Gioia at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, 2007. (Photo by Tom Roster)that the congress was held in the U.S.; more than 800 writers from all around theworld discussed, debated, and exchanged ideas on writing. By 1968, NEA funds
enabled the American chapter to establish a permanent headquarters and provide
advisory services to translators.
Other grants to service organizations followed in the early 1970s to such organizations as Poets and Writers, Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and AssociatedWriting Programs (AWP), known today as the Association of Writers and Writing
Programs. Founded in 1967 to serve a handful of Master of Fine Arts programs increative writing, AWP now serves more than 28,000 writers at more than 400 colleges and universities.
“What motivates us is a commitment to literature,” wrote former Literature Director David Wilk in 1980. “What excites us is the sheer quantity and breadth of current
work. What challenges us is the complexity of the scene, the fact of change, and the
difficulty of assessing the variety of new voices. What encourages us is our vision ofwhat literature has always meant, and continues to mean, to human beings individually and to society as a whole.”l i t e r a t u r e 193

Poet Marilyn Nelson discussing writing with a participant of the Operation Homecoming
workshop at Norfolk Naval Station, Virginia, in 2004. (NEA File Photo)

The Program in 2008
Celebrating the discipline from which he emerged, Chairman Dana Gioia has
increased the allocation for support to writers, raising the amount of fellowshipawards from $20,000 to $25,000. Gioia also supported a policy shift in FY 2005,
initiated by Literature Director Cliff Becker, to separate the review process for fellowships in translation from those in creative writing in order to highlight the importance of translation as its own art form. “The American arts are most vibrant when
they include the best works of art from other nations,” stated Gioia. “Through ourcommitment to funding translation, the NEA has been an essential catalyst for bringing the world’s literature to our country.” In addition to direct support to translatorsand translation publishers, in 2004 the agency committed to funding the publicationof contemporary poetry or fiction anthologies—usually in a bilingual format—withnumerous countries, including Mexico, Russia, Northern Ireland, and Pakistan, as
well as literary publishing initiatives with Egypt, Spain, and Greece.
The same year that the NEA launched this series of international literary anthologies, the agency also created a program to give voice to another often forgotten
population: those at war. The NEA created Operation Homecoming to help U.S.

194 n e a : a h i s t o r ytroops and their families write about their wartime experiences. Through this program, some of America’s most distinguished writers—such as Tobias Wolff,
Richard Bausch, Jeff Shaara, and Marilyn Nelson—conducted workshops at military
installations in nine nations and contributed to writing educational resources tohelp the troops and their families share their stories. The 57 workshops resulted inan acclaimed 2006 anthology, Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and theHome Front in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, edited by Andrew Carroll.
Drawn from 12,000 submitted pages, the anthology includes nearly 100 personal
letters, private journals, poems, stories, and memoirs of service and sacrifice on thefront lines and at home. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker and named oneof the best nonfiction books of the year by the Washington Post. The project also
resulted in two documentary films, Muse of Fire, directed by Lawrence Bridges, and
the Academy Award-nominated Operation Homecoming, directed by Richard Robbins.
To further cultivate an audience for literature, Chairman Gioia announced in
December 2005 the creation of The Big Read, headed by Literature Director David
Kipen. Modeled after successful “city reads” programs, The Big Read is a national
initiative to encourage literary reading by asking communities to come together toread and discuss one book. In partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA has brought
the program to more than 400 cities and towns nationwide with engaging reader’sguides; educational CDs; radio and film documentaries; school materials; a Web
site; and funding to support activities and partnerships with libraries, schools, arts
organizations, and local government. “The NEA’s landmark 2004 study, Reading at
Risk, showed that literary reading in the U.S. is in steep decline,” said Gioia. “No single program can entirely reverse this trend. But if cities nationally unite to adopt The
Big Read, together we can restore reading to its essential place in American culture.”
This populist approach to building a larger audience for contemporary literature
resulted in the creation of Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest forhigh school students, which includes an educational Web site, teaching guides, andother resources. Beginning in 2003, the NEA initiated and sponsored a poetry pavilion at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington, DC, to bring distinguished poets to the attention of an annual festival audience of 100,000.
Across some five decades, the NEA has nurtured literary writers and organizations, supported publishers and journals, and invested in the creation of literaryaudiences across the nation. While the method of achieving these goals has constantly evolved, the core objectives—and the agency’s deep commitment to them—
have remained steadfast and unwavering.

l i t e r a t u r e 195

The American Film Institute (AFI), with NEA support, has been at the forefront of preserving
America’s rich film heritage, including The Kid (1921), starring Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan.
(Photo courtesy of AFI Stills Collection)

Media Arts
ted libbey
Media Arts Director

Introduction
To understand the role the Arts Endowment played in the broadcast arena during
the early years of its history, it is important to remember that for many decades prior
to the NEA’s creation both radio and television had delivered superb fine arts programs to audiences across the nation. In fact, the 1930s through the 1950s were a halcyon period for the arts in the broadcast media. During those decades, serious theaterand music flourished on some of the most listened to and watched shows on the air.
The power of radio was thrillingly demonstrated on October 30, 1938, when theyoung Orson Welles produced a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novella The War of
the Worlds and delivered it in the style of a live news report. Thousands of Americans
who tuned in while the show was in progress panicked, believing that Martians wereactually attacking America.
The nation’s radio networks maintained a strong commitment to classical musicprogramming throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In 1931, the Metropolitan Opera
inaugurated live coast-to-coast broadcasts of its Saturday matinee performances. In
1937, after the celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini stepped down as music director of the New York Philharmonic, NBC created an orchestra especially for him tolead, and began a series of regular broadcasts from Studio 8H in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center. For 17 years, until the maestro retired, these broadcast concerts wereamong the most respected programs on American radio.
Television arrived following World War II and, as with radio, its early engagementwith the arts seemed promising. During the 1950s, live drama was featured regularly on series such as Playhouse 90, Kraft Theatre, and Studio One. Music, too, was well
represented. Symphonic music and selections from opera and Broadway shows197were the main offerings on The Bell Telephone Hour, a radio series that made thejump to television in 1959. Already in 1948, the NBC Opera Theatre, under the direction of Peter Herman Adler, had begun to broadcast live studio productions oforiginal and standard repertory works. And in 1954, NBC staged a coup when it commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to write the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors for a
Christmastime broadcast on The Hallmark Hall of Fame.
But by 1960, as television increased its market penetration and radio fought toattract a mass audience that would keep it competitive, arts programming on American media began to diminish. Radio, once synonymous with variety, started shifting
toward more mainstream programming. Classical music, folk music, and theater
became increasingly hard to find, while stations blaring the Top 40 proliferated fromone end of the dial to the other. For its part, network television quickly cast off programming that honored the arts. With the introduction of videotape and filmed
drama, live drama all but vanished from the small screen, while situation comedies,game shows, and serial westerns such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza flourished. Dance,classical music, and opera appeared sporadically, if at all, on variety programs suchas The Ed Sullivan Show, sandwiched between other acts. Only a handful of series—
The Bell Telephone Hour, Omnibus, and Camera Three all on CBS—still provided
regular offerings of the performing arts. By 1962, Omnibus was gone, and Camera
Three winked out in 1965. After that, televised specials such as the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts with Leonard Bernstein represented but theoccasional fine arts oasis on the small screen.

Public Broadcasting Act
The separation between commercial broadcasters and the arts was finalized in 1967
with the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, which established the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in order to direct Congressionally appropriated funds
to the nation’s nonprofit television and radio community. “While we work every day
to produce new goods and to create new wealth, we want most of all to enrich man’s
spirit,” President Johnson declared when he signed the bill. His hope was to give a“stronger voice to educational radio and television.” One unintended effect of thelegislation was to relieve commercial media of any obligation to present arts programming. In the nation’s biggest cities, a few well entrenched commercial radio
stations continued to broadcast jazz and classical music, but their number would fallsteadily. Commercial television instantly became a wasteland.

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By 1969, the nation’s public television stations had come together to create the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a nonprofit corporation chartered for the purpose of acquiring and distributing programming to its owners, the member stations.
National Public Radio (NPR), founded in 1970, quickly took a leading role as a content provider for public radio stations. (Over the years, organizations such as PublicRadio International (PRI), Pacifica, American Public Media, and the WFMT Radio
Network have also provided much valuable arts programming to public stations.)
Into this brave new media world strode the National Endowment for the Arts, at atime when leadership was desperately needed.

The NEA and the Arts on Radio and Television
In 1972, the NEA created the funding category Programming in the Arts (PITA)
within the Public Media Program (since 1999, this grant category has been known
as the Arts on Radio and Television). For the first two years, PITA funded a handfulof radio projects and television specials. Then, in 1974, the Arts Endowment started
to direct resources toward establishing major performing arts series on public television. That decision proved to be remarkably prescient. In years to come these series,
with Arts Endowment support, would produce an extraordinary body of programming of inestimable artistic and archival value for broadcast into homes acrossAmerica.

Television and the Endowment
The search for a mechanism to provide major arts programming on PBS was led by
Nancy Hanks, the Arts Endowment’s second chairman, and Chloe Aaron, the Public
Media Program’s founding director. Hanks realized that the NEA’s pilot media funding had not had as big an impact as it should, and she sought advice from Jac Venza,a veteran producer at New York public television station Thirteen/WNET, who recommended generous Endowment funding for television programming that would
showcase leading American companies and exemplary works of dance, music, andtheater.
Important projects soon followed. For instance, in partnership with the Ford
Foundation, the NEA directed significant research and development funding to Lincoln Center and television producer John Goberman for the purpose of adapting
low-light cameras for theatrical use. These cameras could record a live performancem e d i a a r t s 199

without disturbing the audience or the performers. The development of this technology paved the way for a series that would later become one of the centerpieces of arts
programming on public television, Live from Lincoln Center. Simultaneously, theEndowment joined with Exxon and CPB to award a $3 million grant to Thirteen/
WNET for the development of a new public television series focusing on dance
called Dance in America. Both Dance in America and Live from Lincoln Center entered
the PBS schedule in January of 1976.
Great Performances and Dance in America

Dance in America debuted January 21, 1976. Among the highlights: the Paul Taylor
Dance Company in Esplanade, Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, Alvin Ailey’sCry, Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free, and the New York City Ballet’s production ofGeorge Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov. These programs thrilled audiences and their archival value grows with every year that passes.
Soon after its launch, Dance in America was absorbed under the umbrella of Thirteen/WNET’s flagship series Great Performances,which had been in production since 1972 as ashowcase for music, musical theater, and drama.
Thirty-seven years later, Great Performances remains the gold standard among performing arts
programs on television. Those whose work it hasbrought to the viewing public include Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Renée
Fleming, the San Francisco Opera, the Houston
Grand Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In
recent years, airings of Great Performances haveattracted cumulative audiences of 3.2 million
viewers.
Live from Lincoln CenterLive from Lincoln Center launched on January 30,
1976, with a broadcast from Avery Fisher Hall.
Under the baton of André Previn, the New York
Philharmonic presented Grieg’s Piano Concertoin A minor, with Van Cliburn as soloist, andRichard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Subsequent

200 n e a : a h i s t o r yYuriko Kimura and Tim Wengerd
star in Martha Graham’s classic
work Appalachian Spring in a 90minute special on Graham as partof PBS series Dance in America.
(Photo courtesy of Thirteen/WNET)

Paul McCartney (from left) with Sun Records artists D. J. Fontana and Scotty Moore from theAmerican Masters program “Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records.” (Photo by
Dan Griffin)

broadcasts during the show’s first season featured the New York City Opera performing Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe and American Ballet Theatre’s
production of Swan Lake.
The show, now in its fourth decade, produces six programs a year that reach fivemillion viewers per program.
American Masters

In the late 1970s, the Arts Endowment expanded its media initiative to support
media arts that were not performance-based. One result was American Masters, aseries of film documentaries on leading American artists. The goal of the series wasto engage top filmmakers to tell the stories of these artists and to mine the archive—
interviews, still images, documentary footage, and performance video—in ways thatwould make its treasures more readily accessible to students of the arts and theAmerican public.
With Susan Lacy as producer, American Masters made its PBS debut in 1986. As of2006, its twentieth-anniversary season, it had aired more than 130 documentaries,m e d i a a r t s 201

reaching 4.2 million viewers per hour. Among the outstanding filmmakers who
have contributed material to the series were Martin Scorsese, whose two-part film on
singer Bob Dylan won a 2006 Peabody Award, and Sidney Pollack, who produced aprofile of Frank Gehry. The impact of Endowment funding for the series was exemplified with the 2003 airing of Robert Capa: In Love and War, a documentary by Anne
Makepeace. This biography of the noted war photographer secured his place in thehistory of the twentieth century and underscored his extraordinary capacity to capture the impact of major crises through his images. Like many American Masters
profiles, it is permanently available on DVD.

Radio and the Endowment
Through the Arts on Radio and Television initiative, the Endowment has funded thefinest music and performing arts programs on American radio. A celebrated early
success was A Prairie Home Companion, starring Garrison Keillor, which remains
one of the nation’s most listened-to weekly shows. Another early hit was the radio
drama series Earplay, heard on NPR from 1972 into the 1990s.
Music programming on public radio
has received particularly strong support
from the Arts Endowment’s Media Arts
Program. Listeners with a passion forjazz have been able to tune to JazzSetwith Dee Dee Bridgewater and Marian
McPartland’s Piano Jazz. Those witheclectic tastes have enjoyed American
Routes, hosted by Nick Spitzer. Syndicated concert series of the New York
Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra are among the many
classical music offerings the Endowment has supported on radio. Bestknown of all is Performance Today, whichairs on more than 250 stations nationNEA Jazz Master Marian McPartland plays awide. Produced and distributed by NPR
duet with Chicago jazz musician Jodie Christian
from 1987 to 2006, and by American
during a taping of her weekly National Public
Public Media since 2006, Performance Radio series, Piano Jazz. (Photo by Melissa Goh)

202 n e a : a h i s t o r yToday is the nation’s most widely heard daily classical music program, and the Endowment has funded it since its inception.

Radio and Television in the Twenty-First Century
The Media Arts Program’s advisory panels have been quick to recognize innovationin the field, which has allowed the Arts Endowment to provide crucial early support
to ventures that are now reshaping the broadcast landscape. Two classical music productions stand out. Keeping Score, a public television offering featuring the San
Francisco Symphony Orchestra and its charismatic music director, Michael Tilson
Thomas, made its series debut in 2006 with three programs looking at revolutions
in music. The PBS series blends documentary segments with performance video
and maintains a robust Web site that delivers in-depth analyses of musical structure
and material on the background, history, and influences that shaped composers andtheir works. The radio series Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin, produced anddistributed by the WFMT Radio Network in Chicago, debuted in 2003. Hosted by
one of America’s most knowledgeable classical-music commentators, this daily,
hour-long show has a unique format. Each week’s programming is thematic—usuallyfocusing on a broad musical topic or the life and works of a single composer—whichallows McGlaughlin room to guide listeners in a deep exploration all too rare inmass media today.
Independent Voices

Among its media arts goals, the Endowment aims to build a wider audience for independent radio and television producers. On radio, the agency has funded Lost &Found Sound, by the California-based production team known as The Kitchen Sisters; (((Hearing Voices))), a Montana-based collective that has produced more than
250 radio pieces since 2001; and StoryCorps, Dave Isay’s project in personal storytelling. What these producers have in common is their interest in using the mediumof radio as an art form. Similar thinking motivates the Endowment’s regular funding of P.O.V. and Independent Lens, both of which are distributed by PBS. These
highly successful television series bring the leading-edge work of contemporary
independent filmmakers and video artists to a very wide public, and uphold thenotion that story-telling through the medium of television is an art.

m e d i a a r t s 203

Film Preservation
Movies had been around for three-quarters of a century when the Endowment
appeared on the scene. For most of that time, they had been processed using nitratebased film stock, easy to work with but chemically unstable. As a result, by 1965,
many groundbreaking creations from the early years of American cinema were turning to dust—their images oxidizing right on the reel, in a slow-burning fire ofself-extinction. Roughly half of the more than 21,000 feature-length films producedin the United States prior to 1951 had been irretrievably lost. The survival rate fornewsreel and documentary footage was less than 50 percent.
Recognizing that the loss of any more of America’s film heritage would be a cultural calamity, the Endowment acted quickly. By the summer of 1967 it had
successfully partnered with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Ford
Foundation to bring the American Film Institute (AFI) into being. An initial grant of$1.3 million from the Endowment, for fiscal years 1968–70, made it possible for AFI
to begin collecting nitrate films for preservation and placement in a special archiveat the Library of Congress. By 1971, more than 4,500 films, including many long
believed lost, had been secured. Among these were significant works of early cinema, films like Broken Blossoms (1919), starring Lillian Gish, and The Kid (1921),
starring Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan.
In 1971 the Endowment established the AFI/NEA Film Preservation Program toaward sub-grants through the AFI to more than 40 archives, historical societies,
libraries, and universities engaged in film preservation. Among the recipients were
the Museum of Modern Art; the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; theNational Center for Jewish Film in Waltham, Massachusetts; and University of California, Los Angeles. From 1971 to 1995, more than $12.7 million was awarded
through this initiative.
In 1983, the Endowment and the AFI established the National Center for Film andVideo Preservation. From 1983 to 1996, the Arts Endowment awarded $3 million to
the center to support activities in three areas: development of a moving image database; research for and publication of the decade-by-decade AFI Catalog of American
Feature Film; and national coordination of film and video preservation activities. The
Arts Endowment’s annual support for AFI activities peaked in 1987 with awards
totaling $3.5 million. The film preservation sub-grant program ended in FY 1994,
and support for the film preservation center terminated in FY 1996.

204 n e a : a h i s t o r yIndependent Film Production
From the mid-1970s until the late-1990s, when Congress eliminated most forms of
direct NEA support for individual artists, the Endowment played a leading role infunding new work by independent filmmakers. NEA grants went to many talented
and innovative figures and facilitated the production of several important films.
Among the best known of these were: Harlan County, USA (1976), a documentary
about striking coal miners, directed by Barbara Kopple; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control(1997), a documentary about four men in different walks of life, directed by Errol
Morris; Slacker (1991), by Richard Linklater; and Chan Is Missing (1982), a Chinatown comedy directed by Wayne Wang. Chan Is Missing was Wang’s first featurelength work, and its success launched him on a major career, of which subsequent
highlights have included The Joy Luck Club (1993) and Because of Winn-Dixie (2005).

Filmmaker Training
In the late 1970s, actor-director Robert Redford approached Brian O’Doherty, who
had succeeded Chloe Aaron as Media Arts director in 1976, with his idea for a nonprofit institute in the American West dedicated to independent filmmaking. The
institute was to be named for the character Redford played opposite Paul
Newman in their 1969 blockbuster
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
A modest grant of $5,000 from theMedia Arts Program in 1980 helped
the Sundance Institute hold its firstFilmmakers Lab in the spring of 1981.
The Arts Endowment has funded various projects at Sundance every year
since. In the early years, NEA support
included funding for the SundanceFilm Festival as well as the Filmmakers
Lab. In recent years, it has been directActor and producer Robert Redford founded theed solely to the lab, now known as the
Sundance Institute, which has received NEA
Sundance Feature Film Program, which
support since its first workshop in 1981. (Photo
by John Schaefer)
offers an array of workshops for screen-m e d i a a r t s 205

The Black Maria Film and Video Festival is a traveling showcase for cutting-edge new film works.
(Image courtesy of Black Maria Film and Video Festival)

writers, composers, producers, and directors, and assists narrative and documentary
filmmakers from the conception of their work to its completion.
One need only look at the roster of Sundance participants to get a sense of the
impact the NEA’s support has had. Some of the best known names are: Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh, Nicole Holofcener, Victor Nunez, Todd Haynes, Errol
Morris, Kimberly Pierce, and Quentin Tarantino. In every case, these directors cantrace their growth as artists and their successful careers in film back to Sundance.

Film Exhibition
Providing access to the arts for all Americans is one of the Arts Endowment’s core
missions. In the realm of film this has led the agency to focus its support on public
exhibition projects, specifically film festivals and curated series, a priority thatemerged naturally in response to the decline of art-house cinema during the 1990s.
Film as an art form can only be served if there are places where it can be experienced
as it was intended to be, projected on a large screen, and can only be appreciated

206 n e a : a h i s t o r yfully if audiences are encouraged to recognize the breadth of the repertory and learn
the fine points of filmmaking. Festivals and curated series are an ideal setting forthis process.
Every year the Arts Endowment typically funds 30 to 40 of these events throughits Media Arts Program. Some focus on a particular genre: documentaries, foreign
films, short films. Others direct their offerings toward a particular cultural or demographic niche: Latino film, Asian/Pacific American film, and children’s films. A number of these entities have traveling components, and some include competitions.
Among the most prominent are Film Forum in New York, the Film Society of Lincoln
Center, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Telluride Festival, and theBlack Maria Film and Video Festival (a traveling showcase, based in New Jersey). In
addition to keeping the art form alive, they reach sizable audiences, averaging
100,000 at Film Forum and more than 80,000 at the San Francisco InternationalFilm Festival.

Conclusion
The National Endowment for the Arts arrived on the media scene at a time whenproblems with film were particularly pressing, and it quickly made those problems a
top priority. By creating the American Film Institute, issuing a mandate to the field
to restore imperiled works on film, and investing millions of dollars in the preservation effort, the Arts Endowment fundamentally altered the “picture” of one ofAmerica’s most important and widely appreciated art forms. The challenge wasmonumental, but by successfully taking on the problems as early as it did, theagency prevented thousands of works from being lost forever. Four decades later,
this is still among the NEA’s most important achievements.
History has also shown the wisdom of the Endowment’s approach to the broadcast media. In addition to guaranteeing excellence and breadth of exposure, theEndowment has consistently supported television and radio programming that provides Americans access to the best of their artistic heritage as well as the opportunity
to experience a particular repertory, genre, or tradition in depth. As the Endowment
enters its fifth decade, grants from its Media Arts Program annually fund approximately 140 hours of television programming that are seen by an estimatedcumulative audience of 300–350 million viewers, along with thousands of hours ofradio that are heard border to border and coast to coast. No other agency programs
come close to serving such a large portion of the American public.

m e d i a a r t s 207

Dorothea Lange’s iconic image from the Great Depression, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California,
1936, toured the country as part of the George Eastman House’s American Masterpieces
exhibition, Seeing Ourselves: Masterpieces of American Photography. (Photo courtesy of George
Eastman House)Museums and Visual Arts
robert frankel
Museums and Visual Arts Director

Introduction
From its inception, the National Endowment for the Arts has supported and facilitated the creation, exhibition, publication, and conservation of the visual arts. Initially,
museum and visual arts projects were administered within one program. The decision of how and what kinds of projects should be funded came from the National
Council on the Arts and policy panels that were appointed by the chairman of the Arts
Endowment. The members of these panels were museum directors, curators, andother visual arts professionals who made recommendations as to the needs of the
field. Programs such as exhibition and collections support, object purchase plans,conservation, Challenge Grants, and funds for endowments and cash reserves
evolved from these panel meetings. However, it became clear that the needs of small
visual arts organizations and larger museums required different approaches, and in1972 an independent museum program was established. From that point, the new
Visual Arts Program focused support primarily on projects that enhance and showcase the life and work of living artists.

Visual Arts
Early on, support from the National Endowment for the Arts gave credibility to small
visual arts organizations allowing them to develop and grow. Direct grants were
given to individual artists, and programs were crafted to address the needs of the
field. By 1981, there were as many as 15 categories of funding, including support for
public art projects, workshops, exhibition programs, fellowships, artists residencies,
publications, and services to the field.

209

Fellowships and Residencies

Sixty artist fellowship awards were made in 1966, the first year the grants were
given. Among the recipients were Sam Gilliam, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, andMark di Suvero. Because the program was new and not yet well known within thefield, for the first two years of awards, the agency relied on nominations from panelists. By 1968 it was no longer necessary to seek nominations for awards.
Eventually, more than 10,000 applications, which were reviewed by panels made up
primarily of working artists, reached the Arts Endowment annually.
Over the years, the panels that determined the recipients of the Visual Artists Fellowship program of the National Endowment for the Arts established an impressiveroster of artists. Although many of the awards were made to early- and mid-career
artists at crucial stages of their careers, a review of the recipients’ names today reads
like a virtual “Who’s Who” of the art world. A sampling includes a wide range of styles
and genres by artists such as painters Jennifer Bartlett, Chuck Close, Sam Gilliam,
Alice Neel, Susan Rothenberg, and Ed Ruscha;sculptors Dan Flavin, Nancy Graves, Donald
Judd, Bruce Nauman, Martin Puryear, and Joel
Shapiro; public artists Scott Burton, Maya Lin,
Mary Miss, and James Turrell; ceramic artists
Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos and glass
artist Dale Chihuly; video artists Gary Hill, Mary
Lucier, Tony Oursler, Nam Jun Paik, and Bill
Viola; performance artist Laurie Anderson; andphotographers Robert Adams, Harry Callahan,
Lee Friedlander, Joel Meyerowitz, Cindy Sherman, and William Wegman.
Referring to panelists who recommended
recipients to the National Council and the chairman, art critic Nancy Princenthal wrote, “Thepanelists looked not for evidence of popularacclaim, but for those who deserved it; without
setting themselves to the goal of predicting success, their decisions were often premonitory.”
Big Self-Portrait, 1967–1968, by Chuck Close,
Between 1966 and 1995, when the Visual Artists
who received a 1973 Visual Arts Fellowship.
Fellowship program was discontinued due to(Image courtesy of Collection Walker Art
Congressional mandates, 6,500 fellowships
Center, Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1969)

210 n e a : a h i s t o r ywere awarded to 5,147 artists in the disciplines of painting, sculpture, crafts, works on
paper, photography, printmaking, video, performance art, installation work, artists
books, and other visual art forms.
Throughout the existence of the Visual Artists Fellowships, visual artists working
in a wide range of styles and genres—from representational to abstract to conceptual, and in various media from paint, paper, and fiber to stone, steel, and wood—wereawarded grants. In the beginning, the category was titled simply Artists Fellowships
and consisted mostly of grants to painters and sculptors. However, as developments
occurred in the visual arts field, panelists recommended expansion of the breadth ofcategory, and over the years, the number and titles of subcategories changed to keep
pace with changes in the field. In 1971, a separate subcategory for photography wasadded; in 1973, one was established for crafts; video followed in 1975; and conceptualand performance in 1976. In this way, the Arts Endowment provided leadership, recognizing the importance of the various areas in which visual artists worked andbestowing credibility to media such as crafts, photography, and video before they
were fully recognized as valid visual art forms by museums and other establishedinstitutions.
As part of the program’s leadership in support of crafts and photography, additional categories were established in the mid-1970s to support exhibitions,publications, and workshops. Support for crafts and photography exhibitions inmuseums was transferred to the Museum Program beginning in FY 1982.
Though the Arts Endowment no longer awards grants to individual visual artists,they benefit from funding the agency provides for exhibitions, commissions, and,increasingly, residencies. A wide range of organizations offer residencies that provide artists with concentrated periods for the creation of new work. Residencies
range in duration from a few weeks to a year, and the location can vary from an artist
community in a rural setting completely removed from the public to an urban setting allowing for interaction with the public. In urban areas, residencies not only
provide an environment in which art can be produced, but provide people living inthe surrounding communities a direct experience with a practicing artist. For many
people in these communities, experiencing the work of the artist resident marks
their first exposure to someone involved directly in the creative process, and forsome of the artists this will be the first time they are able to have direct conversations
with their viewers.
At the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, founded in 1946 bya group of artists, individuals graduating from student to professional artist enjoym u s e u m s a n d v i s u a l a r t s 211

the opportunity of interacting with a faculty of established practitioners. The goal isfor these young people to gain confidence in their work through mentoring fromfaculty, and the NEA has consistently supported Skowhegan’s residency program—aplace run by artists for artists. According to Linda Earle, executive director of the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, “The NEA’s continued support for
Skowhegan both as an idea and as an institution is a powerful expression of theEndowment’s own mission. It acknowledges that creative development and creative
communities have resonance in society beyond that completion of a particular work,or the career of a particular artist. The fact that the NEA’s investment in Skowhegan
is made on behalf of the American public makes it an especially significant affirmation of our goals and our constituency. We are honored by it.”
Visual Arts Organizations

Though the NEA funds projects organized through non-arts groups such as hospitals, social service groups, and religious organizations, the majority of grants that
support the visual arts go to visual arts organizations. The development of thesegroups has been fostered by the NEA since its inception, and they are now at the coreof the visual arts discipline. The organizations that apply in this category are generally small, often artist-run, and in many cases provide the only access to visual art andartists in their communities. The “alternate spaces” movement began in large cities
in the 1960s and has spread throughout the country. They were established byartists as alternatives to museums, university art centers, and commercial galleries
in their communities. In larger urban areas, they often are part of a network ofproviders that offer their constituents materials, programs, and services that would
otherwise be unavailable.
The NEA awarded its first grants to visual arts organizations established in the late1960s and early 1970s, and most of them are still in existence. Early examples
include Artists Space, Franklin Furnace Archive, and P.S. 1/The Clocktower in New
York City; 80 Langton Street/New Langton Arts in San Francisco; and the Visual
Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. In the next decade, artists would establish organizations in other cities, and grants were awarded to Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions, Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, DiverseWorks in
Houston, Nexus in Atlanta, and the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans.
Space One Eleven, a later example, received its first Arts Endowment award in1991. NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer publicly presented the grant to the organization in Birmingham, Alabama. According to Space One Eleven founders Peter

212 n e a : a h i s t o r yWith the help of NEA seed money, Project Row Houses transformed a Houston neighborhood byturning rundown housing into artists’ studios and exhibition spaces. (Photo courtesy of Project
Row Houses)

Prinze and Anne Arrasmith, “This award catapulted SOE into the national arts andfunding arena. It provided recognition of SOE and affirmed to Birmingham artists
that their work is of quality. Further, it provided the seed for subsequent grants. . . .
This support and guidance of the NEA allowed the artists of SOE to present morethan 60 exhibitions, and paid artists fees to more than 300 professional visual
artists. NEA funds have supported more than 2,500 low-income youth and local
artist/teachers in SOE’s free after-school and summer arts education program, theacclaimed City Center Art.”
For these groups, even a modest grant can mean the difference between providing
and not providing a program. One example is Project Row Houses, a neighborhoodbased art and culture organization located in Houston’s Third Ward that was established in 1993 by artist Rick Lowe. With the goal of bringing the work of artists into
the neighborhood to foster revitalization efforts in the community, Project Row
Houses has successfully developed programs that combine arts and cultural education, historic preservation, and community development. With the financial andmaterial resources of Houston’s corporations, foundations, and art organizations,
volunteers have renovated 22 abandoned shotgun houses dating from the 1930s.
With support from the NEA, ten of these renovated houses are dedicated to art, photography, and literary projects, which are installed on a rotating six-month basis. Them u s e u m s a n d v i s u a l a r t s 213

commissioned artists are assigned a house to transform in ways that reflect the history and culture of African-American life in the city. In addition, seven houses adjacent to those dedicated to art are used for the Youth Mothers Residential Program,which provides transitional housing and services to young mothers and their children through 13 units of low-income housing.
The Arts Endowment not only supports current art projects but also actively helps
visual arts organizations build their archives to make their collections accessible tothe public. These archives provide a crucial source of information about the recent
history of new or experimental art in America, including remarkable documents andartifacts such as original drawings, proposals, and correspondence. In many
instances, the archived materials address early periods in artists’ careers, before they
became well known. These initial collaborations reveal important information about
the genesis and development of the artists’ work. By digitizing records and producing Web-based material, broad public access to a major corpus of artwork andrecords is now possible. Artist directories, digital archives of past activity, and programs to provide access to information for artists and arts organizations are now
funded regularly by the NEA.
Art in Public Places

Initiated in 1967, the NEA’s Art in Public Places program contributed to a period of
substantial growth in public art projects throughout the country. The Arts Endowment was at the forefront of this movement, funding more than 700 works from
1967–1995. The first of these was Alexander Calder’s monumental stabile, La
Grande Vitesse, commissioned for the Vandenberg Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The catalytic NEA grant of $45,000 was matched by individuals and organizations in Grand Rapids to meet the $127,000 purchase price. It became a symbol of
the city’s revitalization and was applauded by President Gerald Ford in one of his few
speeches on arts funding.
The agency’s Art in Public Places grants were one of its most important efforts toensure that high-quality art reached a broad public audience. From the beginning of
the program, a wide range of projects were supported in both abstract and representational styles, in all kinds of visual arts media including murals and earthworks,
and in communities large and small across the country at sites ranging from city
plazas to waterfront parks to subways. Other examples of projects funded in theearly years of the Art in Public Places include commissions by artists Claes Oldenburg in Des Moines, Richard Hunt in Memphis, Roy Lichtenstein in Miami Beach,

214 n e a : a h i s t o r yNancy Holt’s Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings, 1977–78, at Western Washington University in
Bellingham, Washington, was part of the NEA’s Art in Public Places program. (Photo courtesy of
the artist)

Isamu Noguchi in Seattle, James Rosenquist for the Florida state capitol, Dan Flavinfor New York’s Grand Central Station, Tony Smith for the University of Hawaii, andRichard Serra for Western Washington University in Bellingham.
As the program evolved, so did the definition of what was considered public art. In
addition to free-standing sculptural objects, public art included site-specific works
that take into account the complete environment and temporary works that directly
engage the public. One of the more innovative aspects of the program was an initiative titled Design Arts/Visual Arts Collaborations. It was a three-year partnership(1986–88) between the agency’s Design Arts and Visual Arts Programs to respond to
the newest development in the public art field—collaborations among visual artists,architects, urban designers, and landscape architects to integrate the public art
aspects of new design projects into the original planning phase to ensure the equal
involvement of artists and design professionals. Examples of projects funded include
the involvement of artists, architects, and engineers on the design team for a light railsystem in St. Louis; a collaboration between artists and designers for the develop-m u s e u m s a n d v i s u a l a r t s 215

ment of a new civic center complex for Seattle; and a collaborative effort between anarchitect and a sculptor to transform Hunters Point in New York into a public park.
Because of their locations, works of public art invite comment and debate in theircommunities long after the process is complete. The Arts Endowment exerted considerable national leadership in the public art field. Most projects were expensive
and the processes complex, and some were controversial. The guidelines for the category specified substantial community involvement in the project’s planning
process, and required plans for maintaining the completed works. In 1988, a workbook was published with NEA support that outlined some of the most successful
public art projects around the country. It became a much sought-after guide by communities wanting to establish or improve their public art programs. Although aseparate public art program no longer exists, numerous public art projects still
receive funding from the NEA.
Publications

Many young or mid-career artists have exhibitions for which there is no publication,
brochure, or catalogue of their work. Often the only record is a review or notice in a
magazine or newspaper. Documenting exhibitions of the work of living artists continues
to be funded through visual arts grants tononprofit publications. Because of risingcosts, these publishing organizations are
increasingly in jeopardy. The material they
cover may be encyclopedic or more specificto a single discipline such as photography,
sculpture, or glass. Some are national, someregional, but all are important to the field andare read both here and abroad. Examples ofnationally distributed publications that havebeen consistently supported include Art
Papers, based in Atlanta; ARTLIES—The
Texas Art Journal, based in Houston; Nueva
Luz, a photography journal based in New
York; Public Art Review, based in St. Paul;
Sculpture magazine, which covers contemporary
Sculpture, based in New Jersey; Camerawork:
visual arts, has been consistently supported by
the NEA. (Cover image courtesy of Sculpture)
A Journal of Photographic Arts, based in San

216 n e a : a h i s t o r yFrancisco; Metalsmith magazine, based in Oregon; and Afterimage, published anddistributed by the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.

Museums
Museums collect, care for, document, exhibit, and interpret their collections. All ofthese functions have been and continue to be supported by the NEA’s Museums discipline grants. Institutions of all sizes—ranging from those with small or volunteer
staff to the largest organizations in the country—receive funding. To serve the complex needs of the field, each aspect of the operation of a museum, as well as its
programming, is a priority to the NEA.
In 2007, the exhibitions, collections, and materials of the NEA’s museum award
recipients will reach approximately 13 million people. According to Jay Gates, former
director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, “As a direct result of the funding patterns and leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts, art museums in
America not only look different but function differently, function better and serve a
broader, deeper public than at any other time in our history. The NEA is a federal
program that worked.”
Exhibitions

The experience of a museum visitor is enhanced by the presentation of an exhibit.
Temporary exhibitions can add to scholarly knowledge, shed new light on a subject,expand viewer awareness, and sometimes simply provide pleasure by bringing
works to a community that otherwise would not have the opportunity to see them.
Since the creation of the Museums Program as a separate discipline in 1972, approximately 50 percent of the grants have gone to exhibition projects. The nature of these
exhibitions has ranged from large-scale international shows such as Gilded Splendor:
Treasures of China’s Liao Empire (907–1125), organized by the Asia Society in New
York, and Cezanne organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to those which are
more intimate, such as Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue organized by the Museum ofContemporary Art San Diego. While the exhibitions supported by the Arts Endowment are diverse, there is one constant that remains the same—artistic quality andscholarship.
The NEA has continually supported museums to help ensure that the visitor will
have the best experience possible. Often visitors are drawn to temporary exhibitions
and forget that at the core of any collecting institution is its permanent collection—m u s e u m s a n d v i s u a l a r t s 217

the objects it holds in trust for the public. The way that constituents perceive an exhibition is influenced by many factors including the juxtaposition of works, theprogression of spaces through which the viewer moves, the lighting and even thecolor of the wall on which the work is displayed. It is necessary to examine on a regular basis best practices in exhibition design and consider how collections arearranged, and what should be done to enhance and facilitate the experience of thevisitor. The NEA, through the funding of collection research and the reinstallation of
institutional holdings, continues to work to enhance the participation of the public.
As the director of the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold Lehman, explains, “The National
Endowment for the Arts’ partnership has been critical to the Brooklyn Museum inadvancing our mission of inclusiveness and accessibility. Beyond funding support
alone, the NEA has been a major catalyst for private support in the museum’s largescale and strategic permanent collection reinstallations. The NEA’s collaboration in
the past and into the future is an essential element of Brooklyn’s success in engaging visitors at every level of prior experiences.”
Collection Information and Conservation

Museums have always looked to technology to document their collections properly
and to enhance the experience of their users. From the beginning, the Endowment
has funded projects that take advantage of innovations in record-keeping and communicating with users. As the technology has changed, so have the requests to the
NEA for support, starting with film and advancing to tape to DVD to Internet access.
It is now possible to provide broad public access to collections through the use of
new technology, and this is an important area of funding for museums as it is withvisual arts organizations. Digital or Web-based programs reach out to local communities and individuals far from the site—people unable to take advantage of theresources of the institution inside its bricks-and-mortar space.
In order for a museum’s art and resources to be available for future audiences,
their condition must regularly be surveyed and appropriate conservation must be
done as needed. The Arts Endowment has, from its first years, partnered with museums to protect these collections which are part of our nation’s patrimony and history.
Too often, if there are limited resources available for the operation of a museum, thefunds for the care of the collection are reduced during the budgeting process. It is notuncommon for conservation to be deferred. In a situation such as this, a grant fromthe Arts Endowment for the preservation of a collection may be the only way to getessential work done before critical damage occurs. These grants help fund crucial

218 n e a : a h i s t o r ypreservation steps such as the creation of proper storage facilities with appropriate
temperature and humidity control, a survey of the condition of the collection, repairof existing damage, and preventive measures which will avoid future loss.
Museum Professionals Fellowships

Though fewer were given, fellowships for museum professionals were the equivalent of individual artist grants. The fellowships, which were awarded from 1972 to
1992, addressed the need for professional study, travel, research, and project development for which funding was and continues to be scarce in America’s museums.
Applicants were able to take time for concentrated work in order to enhance theircontributions to the organization for which they worked. These periods could lead tonew exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions. During the course of the museum
fellowship program, 368 grants were awarded, providing funds for research, travel,
and individual projects.
American Masterpieces

American Masterpieces, a major initiative established by Chairman Dana Gioia,
presents the best of America’s cultural and artistic legacy to the people of the UnitedStates. Through the visual arts component, theNational Endowment for the Arts celebrates
the extraordinary and rich evolution of the arts
in the country over the last three centuries.
The program supports tours of major exhibitions to audiences of all sizes, with some exhibitions scaled down in order to be shown insmall and mid-sized museums in rural andunderserved areas. The organizing institutions
provide related educational and interpretative
materials to accompany each exhibition andrelate it to national, state, and local arts education standards. During the first three years of
the program, 34 exhibitions covering a wide
The exhibition American Chronicles: The Art ofrange of subjects were funded. These range
Norman Rockwell by the Norman Rockwellfrom the history of photography in this country,
Museum toured the country through the NEA’s
to surveys of styles such as American Impres- American Masterpieces initiative. (Image
sionism and Modernism, to monographic exhi- courtesy of Norman Rockwell Museum)m u s e u m s a n d v i s u a l a r t s 219

bitions of artists as diverse as Georgia O’Keeffe,
Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Rockwell.
Federal Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program

The Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program wasestablished in 1975 by Congress to help minimize the costs of insuring international exhibitions, thereby making cultural treasures fromoutside of the country accessible to the American people by helping to bring great works to
the United States from overseas. The programis administered by the Arts Endowment onbehalf of the Federal Council on the Arts and the
Humanities, which is composed of the heads of
19 federal agencies.
In FY 1976, the first annual report on the program lists ten exhibitions totaling $101,509,524,
yielding savings of $724,278 in premiums. In Raphael’s Two Women with Children
was part of the indemnified exhibition
FY 2006, certificates of indemnity were issued Italian Drawings, 1350–1800: Masterfor 44 exhibitions traveling to 48 museums in Works from the Albertina. (Photo
20 states, the District of Columbia, and Beijing, courtesy of the Albertina)
China—the largest number ever in a single year.
Coverage was requested for 4,796 objects totaling $13,793,746,599 in value. Given
figures supplied by the applicants, they would have paid $21,355,154 if they had
insured these projects commercially. Without the indemnity program, it simply
would not be possible to cover these exhibitions.
By 2007, 856 exhibitions had been indemnified, saving participating museums
more than $200 million in insurance premiums. Because of the program, theAmerican people have been able to see large-scale exhibitions such as Mongolia: The
Legacy of Chinggis Khan at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Diego Rivera: Art
and Revolution at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Ancient Americas: Art From
Sacred Landscapes at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as small but important
shows like Magna Carta and Four Foundations of Freedom at the Contemporary Art
Center of Virginia. Claims against the program total $104,000—the result of paying
for the loss of two paintings in 1982. The works were subsequently recovered, andthe payout costs were reimbursed to the federal government leaving a zero-loss ratio.

220 n e a : a h i s t o r yThe reason for this sterling record is the rigorous review of applications by theIndemnity Advisory Panel and the Federal Council, along with the high level of carepracticed by the museum professionals who come into contact with these works.
“The indemnity program,” according to Nancy Netzer, director of the McMullen
Museum of Art at Boston College, “allows smaller institutions like ours to mountexhibitions that we could only dream about otherwise. It allows us to access superb
examples of artists’ works in foreign collections, many of which have never been on
public display in America.”
The council is currently authorized to commit the U.S. Treasury to up to $10 billion at any one time (the original limit was $250 million). A single exhibition may becovered up to $1.2 billion (initial cap was $50 million). The program remains a priority in the agency, and continues to make coverage available to all eligible institutionsorganizing international exhibitions. In 2007, more than six million visitors viewed
shows indemnified by the program.
In 2008, Congress authorized the expansion of the program to include domestic
indemnity. In doing so, it made possible increased cooperation among American
museums. Chairman Gioia noted, “The new legislation is enormously important
both to American museums and to the millions of people who visit them each year.
It allows American museums to share their collections with one another in anaffordable way. The skyrocketing cost of insuring art exhibitions is a major issue.
The domestic program will do immeasurable good in increasing access to great visual art across the country.”

Conclusion
From its earliest days, the National Endowment for the Arts has sought to aid museums and visual arts organizations for their work in reaching new audiences; discover
the most effective ways to involve communities with low participation rates; defineroles that technology plays in providing access to the visual arts; and determine bestpractices in exhibition and care of art objects. The last few decades demonstrate an
evolution of communities served by visual arts institutions. Through its support ofexhibitions, infrastructure, and programming, the National Endowment for the Arts
has been partnering with organizations across the nation, both large and small, tohelp them meet their needs and to find the means to best serve the American public.

m u s e u m s a n d v i s u a l a r t s 221

NEA Opera Honors recipient Leontyne Price in the title role of Verdi’s Aida in a Metropolitan
Opera 1976 production. (Photo by J. Heffernan, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Association)

Music and Opera
wayne s. brown
Music and Opera Director

Introduction
The cultural climate of music in the United States leading up to the creation of theArts Endowment in 1965 was rich and diverse. In 1956, “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis
Presley helped to establish him as a rock star worldwide. One year later, composerand conductor Leonard Bernstein completed the musical West Side Story. In 1959, the
The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences sponsored the first Grammy
Awards, and the legendary vocalist Frank Sinatra won best album for Come Dancewith Me. John Coltrane, in 1960, formed his own quartet and became the voice of
jazz’s New Wave era. Three years later, Beatlemania swept the U.S. as the Beatles
exploded into pop music. And in 1965, tenor Plácido Domingo joined the New York
City Opera in the roles of Don José in Carmen and Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly. The
same year, pianist Vladimir Horowitz returned to the stage (following a 12-year
absence) in a Carnegie Hall triumph, and Luciano Pavarotti made his American
debut in the Greater Miami Opera production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.
By 1965, when the Arts Endowment was created, television had become the primary medium of culture for most Americans. At the time, instead of driving people
away from great musicians and musical traditions, as we might assume, televisionoffered viewers many chances to see brilliant performers they had never before
encountered. Less than a decade had passed since the young pianist Van Cliburn
had been saluted on the Ed Sullivan Show upon his triumphant return from the FirstInternational Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. Likewise, every night theJohnny Carson Show introduced mass audiences to many young talents such as violinist Itzhak Perlman, opera singer Beverly Sills, and the rising cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
In a similar fashion, film and radio presented equally compelling opportunities to223

introduce American audiences to classical music. The great conductor Leopold
Stokowski, leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, would become known for his familiar profile in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia. The Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday
afternoon broadcasts had become a gathering point in homes nationwide—a tradition that began in 1930 and continues to date.
Most of the viewers and listeners interested in this genre of music could explore
their tastes further in their own communities. By 1965 there were 1,365 symphonyorchestras performing in large urban centers and in smaller communities. In large
urban centers, the symphony orchestra served as the centerpiece of the performing
arts. By the mid-twentieth century, this design was emulated in smaller communities from northern industrial areas to cities in the South, East, and West. In the caseof larger communities, the musicians were paid professionals. In smaller urban
areas, the orchestras were comprised of musicians who also served as teachers,
insurance salesmen, and other professions apart from music.
In 1965, the United States boasted 27 opera companies. The Metropolitan Opera
was in its 82nd season and approaching the thirty-fifth anniversary of its popular
weekly broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. In addition, the Met toured various cities
following the conclusion of its regular New York season, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington. This tour was an annual tradition that
continued through the 1970s, with occasional breaks during economically challenging years.
As a precursor to federal support for the arts, one of the most significant early
acknowledgments of the role of orchestras and American music performances inconcert halls, on the radio, and through recordings was reflected through two grantsof immense proportion. These grants were designed to document and promote new
American orchestral works, and also to provide sustainable financial bases toorchestras to build capacity and offset growing operational costs.
• The Rockefeller Fund provided grant support totaling $500,000 between 1953
and 1955 to the Louisville Orchestra and its music director Robert Whitney to underwrite a series of recordings devoted to orchestral works. These funds represented an
unprecedented level of support by a private foundation to a symphony orchestra forprogramming new American works.
• The Ford Foundation made an unprecedented investment in 1966 of slightly
more than $80 million in matching grants to 61 symphony orchestras. Once
matched, the participating organizations stood in a stronger position to increase
their educational and community-based services.

224 n e a : a h i s t o r yThe tremendous presence of music and opera signified an increasing consciousness of cultural values across the United States during the mid-twentieth century.
More and more, cities began to consider cultural identity to be as critical to theircommunity as economic prosperity or educational institutions. The creation of the
National Endowment for the Arts brought the federal government into the cultural
crescendo, and the NEA quickly took its place at the forefront.

Music, Opera, and the National Council on the Arts
The first Presidentially appointed arts advisory body, the National Council on the Arts,
boasted some of the leading musical giants in the country. Founding members included contralto Marian Anderson, conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, violinist
Isaac Stern, pianist Rudolph Serkin, and jazz great Duke Ellington. In the twenty-first
century, the council continues to have august
representation from the music and opera fields
with University of Michigan School of Music former dean Karen Lias Wolff, opera singer Mary
Costa, art critic Terry Teachout, and champion ofAmerican orchestral works and Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz.
Throughout the history of the Arts Endowment, the council has weighed in on the major
policy issues that have defined the agency. These
artist citizens—individuals who continue to be
deeply immersed in their respective art forms—
have forged an agency that reflects American
culture at its best. This diverse body of informed,
respected individuals frequently has faced thedilemma of reconciling perspectives that would
be used to shape and define various programs.
On one such occasion, the council was stymied
as to whether the agency should confine its support to professional choruses (meaning only
those that paid their singers) or extend it to Robert Shaw conducting the Atlanta
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in thethose of amateur status. Council member Robert early 1960s. (Photo by Joseph Reshower
Shaw, one of the most highly regarded choral deCasseres)m u s i c a n d o p e r a 225

conductors of the twentieth century, led the discussion with a passionate plea for theagency to support not only professional choruses, but also choruses comprising
unpaid singers. He maintained that funding should be determined based on the
excellence of choral singing, and not based on whether choristers were being financially compensated.
In subsequent years, the position that Shaw espoused was validated throughcountless examples of how artistic standards were achieved with non-paid singers.
In one case, the Washington Chorus (non-paid singers) received a Grammy Awardin 2000 for its recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. This message underscores one other essential point: The expertise demonstrated by members of thecouncil continues to be an invaluable ingredient in the agency’s success.

Agency Support for Music and Opera Programs
Since the Arts Endowment was created, more than 11,000 music projects have been
supported with an investment in excess of $375 million. During a 40-year period, theArts Endowment has supported more than 4,000 opera projects with an investmentof more than $160 million. As a result, newly commissioned operas and symphonic,
chamber, and choral works have been created and performed; numerous tours andresidencies have taken place; and thousands of concert halls, schools, outdoor venues, and recordings have showcased musical works and opera productions in the
United States and, in certain instances, around the world.
From the earliest days, grant support from the Arts Endowment enabled musicorganizations to support the creation and performance of musical works, increaseorganizational capacity, and document and disseminate artistic works throughrecordings. It has served as a form of risk capital, enabling organizations to leverage
support locally, and as an imprimatur to demonstrate an asset worthy of private
investment.
Among recipients of significant music grants awarded during the first decade of
the Arts Endowment were:1966• American Symphony Orchestra League—$33,531 to establish workshops onorchestra management and related issues, and provide technical assistance toorchestras.
• Boston Opera Company—$50,000 as a matching grant to assist the company inproducing the U.S. premiere of Moses and Aaron by Arnold Schoenberg.

226 n e a : a h i s t o r y1967• American Choral Foundation—$50,000 to support a summer institute at
SUNY-Binghamton and University of Wisconsin-Madison to provide choral conductors with practical experience working with professional choruses and orchestras.
• Metropolitan Opera National Company—$150,000 for audience development,
which enabled additional performances for labor groups and students in manystates throughout the country.
• San Francisco Opera—$115,000 for audience development and formation of theWestern Opera Theatre to perform condensed and full-length versions of operas forschools and community organizations in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Oregon.
• Douglas Beaton—$35,000 to study existing opera facilities in the Southeast andsubmit a comprehensive report to the National Council on the Arts for evaluation
and recommendations.
1975• Boston Symphony Orchestra—$7,500 to support the recording of Elliott Carter’s
Piano Concerto for distribution to music schools in the United States and abroad, as
well as to United States Information Service centers.
In 1965, orchestras, opera companies, and chamber ensembles devoted modest
attention to works by American composers. Today, due to an emphasis on Americanmusic by the Arts Endowment, a typical season reflects both a concerted commitment to American works as well as to the standard repertoire. Given the number ofgrants supported by the NEA and dedicated to the creation, performance, andrecording of new works, this cultural shift is not surprising. Music and opera organizations are increasingly taking meaningful steps to understand and participate incommunity-based discussions about what defines a healthy and vibrant society. The
resulting programs reflect a continuing growth in community partnerships that promotes music creation and enjoyment across the U.S.
The Arts Endowment’s disciplines of music and opera support activities and programs nationwide in the following areas:• Orchestras (including symphonic, chamber, and youth)• Opera (opera and musical theater between 1978 and 1995)• Jazz• Chamber music (Western classical, contemporary, and jazz)• Choruses (professional, amateur, and children’s choirs)• Professional training• Music presenters, music festivals

m u s i c a n d o p e r a 227

The Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra performing Joan Tower’s Made in America. (Photo by
Michael Mason, courtesy of Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra)

Orchestras
During its existence, the Arts Endowment has supported orchestras of all kinds—
including symphonic, chamber, and youth. Since 1965, the number of operating
orchestras in the United States has increased from barely over 100 to 1,800 in 2008.
Considering the number of musicians, volunteers, trustees, and administrative staff
connected to an orchestra, this amounts to an estimated 636,500 people. According
to the latest statistical report by the League of American Orchestras (formerly
American Symphony Orchestra League), in the 2003–2004 season alone, orchestras engaged more than 76,000 musicians to perform for 28 million people. As of
2008, the financial investment by the Arts Endowment to orchestras exceeded $250
million.
One of the NEA’s most significant orchestra projects in the past several decades
was the Bicentennial Commissioning Grants. Three grants to three orchestras totaling $140,000 supported commissioning projects that celebrated the U.S.

228 n e a : a h i s t o r yBicentennial. A total of 34 orchestras of all sizes from across the country commissioned 16 composers. Every orchestra performed each work multiple times. For
instance, the Boston Symphony Orchestra received $70,000 from 1974 to 1977. It
commissioned composers John Cage, Elliott Carter, David del Tredici, Jacob Druckman, Leslie Bassett, and Morton Subotnick, and the orchestras that performed the
new works included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic,
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and
Los Angeles Philharmonic. Jacksonville received $40,000 from 1975 to 1977 andcommissioned composers Norman Dello Joio and Ulysses Kay. Their work was performed by orchestras from Birmingham, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Florida Gulf
Coast, Jackson, Jacksonville, Knoxville, Memphis, Miami Beach, Nashville, Norfolk,
Richmond, Shreveport, Savannah, and Winston-Salem.
From 2005 to 2007, the NEA awarded $74,500 to the Glens Falls SymphonyOrchestra. This grant supported Made in America, a collaborative commissioning,
performance, and outreach project. A new work composed by Joan Tower was commissioned and performed by 60 small-budget orchestras in all 50 states. Subsequently the program was renamed Ford Made in America. The program addressed
the need for orchestras with annual operating budgets of $500,000 or less to havethe ability and resources to commission and program new music.
The Meet the Composer Orchestra Residencies program was launched in 1985 asa partnership between the Arts Endowment, Exxon Corporation, and the Rockefeller
Foundation. From 1985 to 1996, when Congressional reforms made funding the
program no longer possible, the NEA contributed $963,200 to the program. Morethan 21 major American orchestras placed 33 composers in residence during aseven-year period. The program produced more than 500 commissions, thousandsof performances of new American works, and 25 recordings of works composed inresidence. In 1992, Meet the Composer initiated a New Orchestra Residencies Program, a community-based program for orchestras and choruses, as well as opera,
dance, and theater companies, working in partnership with local civic organizations.
To encourage the appreciation and understanding of contemporary music, theArts Endowment created the Composer-in-Residence program, which allowed composers to work directly with orchestras (and other ensembles) for an extended
period. To ensure presentation of works past their premiere, the NEA created theConsortium Commissioning Program which funded two to three ensembles collaborating with two to three composers, each ensemble performing the new works atleast three times.

m u s i c a n d o p e r a 229

The Arts Endowment has fostered support for the creation and performance of
new American works through several genres in music and opera. Over the years,
this has resulted in the commissioning, performance, and recording of repertoire
reflective of unique American experiences. The agency has continued to reflect priorities of the times and has included support for composer fellowships, recording
projects, professional training, and media projects, along with honorific fellowships
for jazz. Through support of various Arts Endowment programs designed to encourage the performance of new American works, the NEA has served as a leading
catalyst for the programming of American works in music and opera.
According to Henry Fogel, president of the League of American Orchestras, “Theagency has encouraged projects that support music of contemporary American composers, and is acknowledged by the League as a significant influence on the balanceof the repertoire performed by U.S. orchestras. . . . The NEA serves as a beacon for
excellence.” Today, approximately one in four compositions performed by Americanorchestras is written by an American composer. These orchestras present more than
100 world premieres every year, and across the country they perform more than
36,000 concerts.

Opera
Over a 40-year period, the Arts Endowment has supported hundreds of commissions, premieres, performances, and broadcasts of opera productions. Programs to
support opera and opera organizations have resulted in more than 4,000 grants representing an investment of $160 million.
Early landmarks in NEA’s support for opera include:1967• Metropolitan Opera—$63,000 to increase the number of performances in theSoutheast, thus developing an audience for opera on a local scale.
• New York City Opera—$40,000 to expand its young artist program of training
and on-the-job experience for young singers and conductors.
1968• Goldovsky Opera Institute—$30,000 to bring opera to communities where it israrely offered and to improve quality of touring productions.
• Center Opera Company of the Walker Art Center—$20,000 for seasonal support of a company presenting contemporary and lesser-known works.

230 n e a : a h i s t o r y1971• Grants emphasizing artistic and administrative development of opera companies as well as a means by which companies could serve broader audiences wereawarded to:• St. Paul Opera Association, $50,000;• Santa Fe Opera (Opera Association of New Mexico) (three grants), $200,000;• Seattle Opera Association, $100,000;• Western Opera Theatre/San Francisco Opera, $200,000.
Over time, as the field expanded and companies matured, the agency adapted its
programs and policies. In 1980, the Arts Endowment inaugurated the New American Works category in the opera field. The program aimed to encourage “thebroadening of both the concept and canon of opera-musical theater—through thecreation, development, and production of new and/or seldom-seen American
works.” The grant category lasted for 15 years, during which the agency invested
more than $9.5 million for such projects as:• Emmeline, by composer Tobias Picker with libretto by J.D. McClatchy, commissioned and premiered by Santa Fe Opera in 1996.
• Akhnaten by composer Philip Glass, American premiere by Houston Grand
Opera in 1984.
• A Streetcar Named Desire by composer Andre Previn and libretto by Philip Littell,commissioned and premiered by San Francisco Opera in 1998.
Such grants have enhanced the canon of American opera, and the field continues
to grow at an exceptional rate.
Great American Voices

The number of collaborations taking place among opera companies is occurring at an
unprecedented pace. Great American Voices, a noteworthy collaboration between theArts Endowment and the opera field, was a national initiative sponsored by The Boeing Company. Its mission was to send vocal ensembles from opera companies toperform memorable melodies from operas and musical theater for members of themilitary and their families at military installations. The program was highly successful with 24 opera companies performing at 41 military bases nationwide. The
program served as a catalyst for opera companies and military communities to work
together and discover the mutual benefits of opera that could be shared with militaryfamilies in defined communities. The end result has brought continuing relationships beyond the terms and duration of the grant period.

m u s i c a n d o p e r a 231

Singers from Pensacola Opera performing at Tyndall Air Force Base as part of NEA’s Great
American Voices initiative. (Photo courtesy of Pensacola Opera and Tyndall Air Force Base)

Marc Scorca, President of OPERA America, affirms the value of the Arts Endowment to the opera field in grateful testimony: “The establishment of the NEA and its
continued vitality are inextricably linked with the growth and health of opera in
America. More than half the opera companies performing in the United States today
were established after 1970—after the formation of the NEA and the creative energy
it unleashed across the country.”
Opera Honors

For the first time in more than 25 years, the Arts Endowment initiated a new lifetime
achievement award, this time to honor individuals in the opera field through the
NEA Opera Honors. Announced on January 9, 2008, these awards recognize andacknowledge performers, creators, advocates, and critics in the American opera
community who have made significant contributions to advancing the opera art
form in the United States. As with the NEA’s other lifetime achievement awards, theAmerican public nominates the honorees. The awards serve as the nation’s highest
honor in opera and add to the meaningful legacy of opera in this country. The NEA
Opera Honors was made possible by a new provision in the agency’s legislation
passed by Congress in 2007. In 2008, the first Opera Honors recipients were com-

232 n e a : a h i s t o r yposer Carlisle Floyd, advocate Richard Gaddes, conductor James Levine, and singer
Leontyne Price.

Jazz
Support for jazz by the Arts Endowment goes back to the very first grants given in
1966, and to the formation of a jazz program in 1970. It is not surprising that jazz, an
American musical phenomenon, would attract support in the early days of the Arts
Endowment. At that time, one of the world’s most influential jazz musicians, Duke
Ellington, was a member of the National Council on the Arts. Along with Ellington,
panelists such as legendary trumpet virtuoso John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie, composer
and author Gunther Schuller, jazz historian Dan Morgenstern, and Willis Conover(jazz producer and broadcaster for Voice of America, credited with keeping interest injazz alive in Eastern Europe through his nightly broadcasts during the Cold War) were
helping to shape policies and programs during those formative years. The NEA Music
Program director at the time, Dr. Walter F. Anderson, was a classical concert pianist
and accomplished jazz performer. In 1969, the first award in jazz was awarded toGeorge Russell, who later received an NEA Jazz Masters award in 1990. In 1970, theArts Endowment offered support to individual jazz composers and arrangers forcommissioning new works, as well as $500 grants to students who studied jazz.
There were $1,000 matching grants to colleges and schools of music to present jazz
workshops and clinics, and matching grants to public and private elementary and secondary schools to present jazz concerts.
From the NEA’s initial jazz grants totaling $20,000, to today’s investment in jazzprogramming in excess of $1 million annually, the field of jazz has experienced
tremendous growth. Yet jazz had no major institutions, and most of its creative
activity was taking place in a variety of small venues throughout the country. Under
the leadership of then-Chairman Livingston Biddle and NEA Music Program Director and composer Ezra Laderman, a jazz policy panel began to think seriously about
the next steps for the jazz category. The panel included a formidable list of jazz musicians and writers, several of whom would later become NEA Jazz Masters (e.g.,
Donald Byrd, Frank Foster, and Cecil Taylor). Priorities that surfaced from the report
included a need for more statistical studies, education and training of developing
artists, increased touring activities, an expanded oral history program, a comprehensive public relations/education campaign, establishment of a permanent repository,
and a “masters” award to acknowledge significant lifetime accomplishment in jazz.

m u s i c a n d o p e r a 233

Twenty-three NEA Jazz Masters, with Chairman Gioia (right), were captured in this historic photofrom the 2004 NEA Jazz Masters events in New York City. (Photo by Tom Pich)

In collaboration with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the NEA supported
JazzNet, a five-year initiative to fund commissions of new music and performances
around the country in partnership with local presenters. The NEA also sponsored
Jazz Sports, developed by the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which provided
students with instrument training and performance opportunities at basketballgames in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. The NEA also has taken the lead indeveloping research about the jazz field. In 2003, an important report was releasedon the current state of jazz musicians, Changing the Beat: A Study of the Worklife of
Jazz Musicians. This report provided a detailed examination of working jazz musi-

234 n e a : a h i s t o r ycians in four major metropolitan areas: New York, Detroit, San Francisco, and New
Orleans. Many of these pioneers of the field were aging (some dying before theircontributions were recognized), and many were living on very modest incomes.
NEA Jazz Masters

Perhaps the NEA’s most enduring contribution to jazz music, the NEA Jazz Masters
Fellowship was established in 1982 to acknowledge the efforts of the genre’s best,
most innovative, and most supportive constituents, The NEA Jazz Masters award
has since become the nation’s highest honor in jazz. Over the course of nearly 30
years, the commendation has been bestowed upon numerous leaders in the fieldsuch as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Tony Bennett.
In 2004, the NEA’s support for jazz expanded exponentially. The number ofannual recipients of awards increased from three to six, and the monetary award
increased to $25,000. NEA Jazz Masters on Tour commenced, and a curriculum forhigh school teachers, NEA Jazz in the Schools, celebrated the story of jazz in a classroom-friendly format not only for music classes but also for civics, social studies,and U.S. history classes. In 2004, the Arts Endowment and Verve Music Group produced a special commemorative recording of the music of 27 NEA Jazz Masters, andin 2005, a partnership with National Public Radio gave rise to a series of 14 one-hour
documentaries profiling honorees. Finally, in April of 2006, the Legends of Jazz program launched on public television, comprising a series of telecasts of the 2006
NEA Jazz Masters.

Chamber Music“Were it not for the National Endowment for the Arts, there would be no ChamberMusic America,” Margaret Lioi, chief executive officer of the organization, has stated. The service organization started in 1977 with 34 ensembles, primarily string
quartets, as members. Today, the number of members stands at more than 800 andincludes ensembles of all types that perform Western classical, contemporary, jazz,and world genres. “Through its various funding initiatives throughout the years,”
Lioi said, “the NEA has encouraged chamber musicians’ creativity through commissioning, audience education and development through residencies, and capacitybuilding through challenge and matching grants. The result of this support is a
vibrant, imaginative, and expanding field that is making music in thousands of communities nationwide.”m u s i c a n d o p e r a 235

Lioi’s words are apt. Prior to the creation of the Arts Endowment, federal support
for the performance of chamber ensembles was nonexistent, primarily because
most chamber ensembles were not operating as nonprofit organizations. With agrowing public appetite for intimate performance settings, and widespread desire
for small ensembles to join presenters of chamber concerts throughout the country,
a case for supporting this activity was affirmed by the mid-1970s. In 1977, the Arts
Endowment helped to establish a service organization for chamber music, ChamberMusic America. Thereafter, in 1979, the Arts Endowment formalized a chambermusic category. Since that time, the agency has supported more than 1,800 chambermusic projects with an investment exceeding $12 million.
One of the signature music programs for chamber music was the NEA Rural Residencies program, a collaboration with Chamber Music America that began in 1992
as an experiment to bring together young professional chamber musicians and ruralcommunities.
Under the NEA Rural Residencies program, professionally trained musicians inensembles such as the Ying, the Fry Street, and the Chiara Quartets became fully
integrated into the life of each community—offering open rehearsals and live concerts for small audiences. They worked closely with classroom teachers and town
officials to create relationships that would span a lifetime. Ultimately, 40 ensembles
participated in this project and many have continued to retain performance links tothe communities that were supported by the residencies.
In 2006, the Arts Endowment launched a new national initiative known as American Masterpieces: Chamber Music, designed to celebrate significant chamber
works in settings throughout the country. Chamber music joins other disciplines in
the American Masterpieces program, including dance, visual arts, choral music, andpresenting.

Choruses
Choral music is celebrated by more then 28 million people who sing regularly in one
form of chorus or another. Given the scale of choral music performance, it should
not be surprising that the Arts Endowment has supported this art form with major
resources over a 40-year period. Choral organizations that have benefited from that
support include chamber, symphonic, and youth choirs, and festivals throughout
the nation. As mentioned earlier, Robert Shaw, one of the most significant choral
experts of the twentieth century, served as a member of the National Council on the

236 n e a : a h i s t o r yArts and was passionate about the importance of the federal government providing
support to the choral field.
In 1977, the Arts Endowment played a critical role in the field of American choruses by helping to establish a service organization for choral music, now known as
Chorus America. According to Ann Meier Baker, president and CEO of Chorus
America, “From the very start, the National Endowment for the Arts has been an
important partner with us in helping to strengthen the choral field so that more people are enriched by the beauty and power of its music.”
In 2006, the choral field was among the initial disciplines to benefit from American Masterpieces: Choral Music, recognizing 300 years of artistic genius by awarding eight choral organizations with performance, workshop, and recording grants
totaling nearly half a million dollars. This exceptionally high level of investment supported regional choral music festivals, including the Providence Singers and Seattle
Pro Musica Society. The festivals were designed to draw upon choral ensembles
within a 200-mile radius, and featured residencies by prominent composers andworkshops for participating choral ensembles to become better acquainted withchoral literature. Featured composers included National Medal of Arts recipient
Morten Lauridsen, Libby Larsen, and Alice Parker. As of 2008, the project hasreached more than 70,000 individuals who have continued to celebrate American
stories through choral music.

Fellowships
While no longer a grant category at the Arts Endowment, NEA Music Fellowships toindividuals were an important source of support for composers, solo recitalists, jazzmusicians, and opera-musical theater producers. One of the earliest fellowshiprecipients from the Arts Endowment was composer John Adams, who has publicly
stated that the honor served as an early indication of his recognition as a serious
composer. Although the grant was modest, it served as a tipping point at a significant time in his development. Within the past 40 years, more than 11,000 individual
grants were made to artists at various stages of their careers. In several instances, fellows also received recognition for their accomplishments as recipients of MacArthur
Fellowships, Grammy Awards, and Pulitzer Prizes.
Among the numerous recipients in music and opera are composers William Bolcom, Donald Grantham, John Harbison, and Gunther Schuller. Bolcom received an
NEA Composer-Librettist Fellowship in 1975, enabling him to begin composing am u s i c a n d o p e r a 237

Composer William Bolcom received an NEA Composer-Librettist Fellowship in 1975. (Photo by
Kate Conlin)

setting of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Classical Music. Another NEA fellowship recipient, composer
Ned Rorem, avowed, “I had six fellowships from the NEA between 1975 and 1986,
and yes, they made a difference; they changed my life.”

Conclusion
The NEA serves as a conduit for and reflection of the innovation, experimentation,and excellence of our shared American culture. For more than 40 years the Arts
Endowment has awarded thousands of grants for projects that celebrate artistic
excellence in communities nationwide. The agency’s investment in orchestras,
opera companies, chamber music, jazz, choruses, and music presenters continues
to play a catalytic role in the transformation of arts organizations, these art forms,
and our communities.

238 n e a : a h i s t o r yLaJara Henderson and Charles S. Dutton in Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of Joe Turner’s
Come and Gone by August Wilson. (Photo by Paul J. Penders)Theaterbill o’brien
Theater Director

Introduction
In a speech to regional theater directors, whom she had assembled in 1935, Hallie
Flanagan, theater producer, director, and playwright, insisted that theater in America“. . . must experiment with ideas, with the psychological relationship of men andwomen, with speech and rhythm forms, with dance and movement, with color andlight or it must and should become a museum product.” The group was assembled tohelp launch Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Theatre Project (FTP)—a division of theWorks Progress Administration. Flanagan recognized that the commercial concernsthat had governed the field since the nation was established did not always support
this type of exploration. To ensure artistic advances, and widespread access to themby the general public, federal support would be necessary.
There had been no single national theater in the United States, such as those in
Russia, England, France, and many other developed nations of the world. Apart fromthe brief, but influential tenure of the FTP (from 1935–39), the evolution of American theater progressed without the benefit of coordinated federal planning or
consistent investment. Despite this lack of centralized support, talented artists andleaders began to emerge in the early and mid-twentieth century who were intent on
creating a proud American theatrical tradition that would appropriately reflect thenation’s new position in the world. By the time they were through, a fledgling decentralized national theater movement had emerged, one that rivaled the ongoing
dramatic achievements of any nation in the world.
Nonetheless, American theater still struggles with rising costs, audience loyalty,
and rival entertainments. Theater in America has been marked by a long struggle
between art and commerce, and its evolution from popular entertainment forms

241such as vaudeville and melodrama have, at times, hampered its ability to be perceived as a serious art form. Still, in the twentieth century playwrights have marked
one of our country’s most distinguished artistic traditions. Eugene O’Neill, Arthur
Miller, and Tennessee Williams, among others, have created classics destined toendure as part of our national legacy.
These playwrights’ success lies partly in the fact that by the midpoint of the century amateur and educational theater was flourishing in many locations in the UnitedStates. Professional theater centered in New York and Broadway, the undisputed
capital of the industry. But elsewhere, an active and talented set of artists and leaders
explored new ways to produce theater. Their results were inspirational and helped to
set a course for a more expansive national theater movement than had ever been
seen before. One of them was Margo Jones from Dallas, Texas, who established thefirst nonprofit professional theater company in America in 1947, entitled Theatre’47 (the name changed each year). Jones based her institution on a vision of a “golden age of American theatre.” In her influential 1951 book, Theatre-in-the-Round, she
described her dream of a future in which theater plays a part in everybody’s life, andin which “civilization is constantly being enriched.” Other leaders emerged in communities spread out across the country to join in the effort:• Nina Vance and the Alley Theatre in Houston• Zelda Fichandler and the Arena Stage in Washington, DC• Gordon Davidson and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles• Jon Jory and Harlan Kleiman and the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven,
Connecticut• Richard Block and the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky• William Ball and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco• Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York
These and other pioneering thespians sought to plant the theater in the midst of
American life, to make it as essential to ordinary citizens as any other entertainment
they might enjoy. And they tried to base it in communities and to define it as muchby artistic innovation as by market constraints.
In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation’s W. McNeil Lowry conceived a new strategy tosupport the nascent nonprofit theater. The foundation began to award arts grants,
national in distribution, as leveraged investments in the development of resident
theaters across the country. Support was provided to, among others, an ambitious
new theater in Minneapolis. The Guthrie Theater, established by Sir Tyrone Guthrie,Peter Zeisler, and a group of energetic artists, opened its doors in a sparkling facility

242 n e a : a h i s t o r y

as a repertory ensemble company. Elsewhere, notably in Stratford, Connecticut, andAshland, Oregon, new theater festivals were created. Concurrently, in New York City,
brilliant young playwrights gathered at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club andother little-known spaces to produce exciting pieces “off-off-Broadway.”
In the 1960s, the landscape of theater began to change as a confluence of societal
forces—including improved public education, relative prosperity, increased leisuretime, and advances by women and minorities in public life—sparked more consumer interest in the arts. These same influences helped bring the National
Endowment for the Arts into being.

The Nea Enters The Scene
By 1965, the year the Arts Endowment was established, theater in America had
become a vibrant and vital cultural tradition, though mainly in New York City and thehandful of other communities fortunate enough to have a professional regional theater company. The movement was primed
for growth and the potential of the Endowment’s influence was felt almost immediately in the theater world.
The first National Council on the Arts
contained several noteworthy figures fromthe field, such as Helen Hayes, Charlton
Heston, Gregory Peck, Sidney Poitier, andRichard Rodgers. In May of 1966, the council declared that one of its primary goals wasto support “the development of a larger andmore appreciative audience for the theatre.”
Among its first actions was a decision toundertake studies of several pilot projects inthe field of repertory theater. The council
understood that many of the best theatercompanies already benefited from grants
National Council on the Arts members
from a number of foundations, including
Gregory Peck (left) and Agnes DeMillethe Ford Foundation, which continued toduring a break at one of the first meetingsback regional theaters in the 1960s. While
in Tarrytown, New York. (Photo by R. PhilipHanes, Jr.)the council felt that their ability to win sup-t h e a t e r 243

port elsewhere should not exclude these organizations from receiving federal awards,
it also reasoned that it would be imperative to broaden Arts Endowment support in a
way that would appropriately reflect the national reach and responsibility of the newagency. Hence, the council also set about encouraging “grants to professional groups
to be formed with strong local and regional support,” and “grants, research, and liaison work with the idea of sending the best repertory companies on tour to play inuniversity theaters.”
Another early action by the National Council on the Arts generated an experimental program entitled the Laboratory Theatre Project. Formed in cooperation with the
U.S. Department of Education and state and local school boards, the program aimed
to provide American cities with professional theater companies that would present
outstanding performances at no charge to secondary school children during weekday afternoons and to adult audiences during weekend performances.
In 1966, the first two Laboratory Theatre Project grants were awarded to Trinity
Square Repertory Company in Rhode Island and Repertory Theatre of New Orleans.
Under the direction of Adrian Hall and John McQuiggan, Trinity Square used theaward to produce Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Shakespeare’s A MidsummerNight’s Dream, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! The Repertory Theatre of New Orleans, under the direction of Stuart Vaughn,
received funds to present Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt, Shakespeare’s Romeoand Juliet, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals. Theater
critics responded quickly to the productions. William Glover of Associated Press
wrote, “The biggest theatrical angel this season isn’t on Broadway—but in Washington. He is Uncle Sam, backing a multipurpose test of drama in education. . . . Taking
part, in a rare display of agency togetherness, are the National Endowment for theArts, the United States Office of Education and state and local boards of Education. . . .
It is the first time that two Federal units have meshed efforts and cash in the cause ofculture.”Other grants awarded that year went to the New York Shakespeare Festival for its
mobile theater units, to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater for its training and educational programs, to the Experimental Playwrights’ Theater to produce
outstanding new American plays, and to the National Repertory Theatre to support
touring classical productions throughout the country.
Almost from its inception the Arts Endowment relied on the peer-panel review
system to identify the strongest applications and ensure informed decision-making
in the agency. The significance of the panels in the early years is vividly illustrated by

244 n e a : a h i s t o r yThe Actors Theatre of Louisville started its Humana Festival of New Plays in 1976, with NEA
support, which introduced audiences to emerging playwrights such as Theresa Rebeck andAlexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, whose play Omnium Gatherum was performed at the 2002 festival.
(Photo by John Fitzgerald)

the roster of theater professionals who served on them. In 1972, for instance, themembers included Harold Prince, Joseph Papp, Lloyd Richards, Zelda Fichandler,Peter Zeisler, Robert Brustein, Gordon Davidson, John Lahr, Jean-Claude van Itallie,
Donald Seawell, and Earle Gister.

A Separate Program
In 1967, the Arts Endowment established theater as an independent program.
Under the leadership of Ruth Mayleas, the agency’s first Theater director, the recommendations of the panels and decisions by the National Council on the Arts had asignificant impact on the future of theater in America. Through both the Theater
Program and the Expansion Arts Program, support extended to a rapidly growing
national network of theaters. The program’s commitment to new work was reflected
in its support for new play festivals such as Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana
Festival of New American Plays, and for playwriting workshops including the
Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. A Playwritingt h e a t e r 245

The Guthrie Theater toured A Midsummer Night’s Dream to nine Midwestern communities inseven states as part of the Regional Theater Touring program. (Photo by Michal Daniel)

Fellowship category was offered in the Literature Program through the 1970s, until
it was transferred to the Theater Program in 1980. Support for playwrights throughinstitutions and fellowships was integral to the explosion of new theaters and newwork throughout the decade.
The agency also worked on behind-the-scenes issues such as the payment of reasonable fees and salaries to artists. The Arts Endowment offered Challenge orAdvancement Grants to help companies acquire new facilities, hire new management, and build institutional capacity. A professional theater training program wasestablished as well as a program to help young directors through the transition fromtraining to professional career. Earmarked support was also directed to presenting
companies, touring projects, theater for youth, mimes, translators, and designers.
During its first year, the NEA Theater Program invited resident theaters to apply
for matching grants of between $10,000 and $25,000 to “be used for general artistic
and organizational development, and to include any special programs or projects inline with this development.” The category targeted geographically diverse groups of
performing arts organizations, and was intended to assist the growth and develop-

246 n e a : a h i s t o r yment of a decentralized American professional theater by helping to strengthen
existing companies. By 1971, grants totaling $559,000 were awarded to 26 theaters
across the country. Recipients included:• Front Street Theater, Memphis, Tennessee• Cleveland Play House• Dallas Theatre Center• Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park
• Milwaukee Repertory Theater• Seattle Repertory Theatre• Olney Theatre, Maryland
The Arts Endowment continued to focus on strengthening the burgeoning,
decentralized nonprofit professional theater movement. Support for services to thefield, such as publications, management programs, artists services, and meetings
administered by the Theatre Communications Group—a national service organization dedicated to strengthening, nurturing, and promoting nonprofit theater—
ensured field-wide support to shore up administrative and organizational capacity
for nonprofit theaters throughout the nation. The NEA awarded funding to new playproducing groups in order to ensure a reinvigorated corpus of new works that could
be made available to producing organizations and their audiences across the nation.
Support also continued for the Theatre Development Fund and its visionary ticket
subsidy programs. This program was dedicated to creating affordable admission foraudience members from underserved and disadvantaged populations and helped toensure broader public participation in the art form.
In 1973, the Theater Program initiated a pilot project for Regional Theater Touring.
While agency support of the regional theater movement had already expanded thegeographic reach of live theater in numerous metropolitan areas across the nation,
this program would work to create opportunities for participation in areas that weremore geographically isolated. The touring program awarded five grants totaling$209,243 to recipients including Center Stage of Baltimore for its production ofRobert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest and The Guthrie Theater for its production ofJohn Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

New Growth—New Challenges
In 1976, 45 nonprofit professional theater companies received grants from the Arts
Endowment. One-third of the main stage productions mounted that season weret h e a t e r 247

Peter Coyote and Jim Haynie in Sam Shepard’s True West at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre,
supported by an NEA grant. The 1980 world premiere production was directed by Robert
Woodruff. (Photo courtesy of Magic Theatre)

new plays (124 out of 378). The proportion is an indication of how the Arts Endowment influenced the field in its first decade. In 1966, nearly all new plays thatreached a wide audience originated on the commercial stage and then filtered down
to other, non-commercial levels of the theater. Ten years later, the situation had nearly reversed, with most new work being generated by nonprofit theater institutions.
Perhaps the most compelling transformation was how the movement had succeeded in becoming effectively decentralized. That year, Peter Donnelly, managing
director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre, wrote, “What has been accomplished in thelast decade with the assistance of the Endowment has been quite phenomenal. A
theatre which for all practical purposes did not exist except in New York has been created nationally.”
Many institutions from many regions received agency support under the Professional Theater Companies category, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Alley
Theatre in Houston, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Circle in the Square in
New York, the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, The
Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, and the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo. Additional funding was also made available in other248 n e a : a h i s t o r ycategories, such as Professional Theater Companies with Short Seasons; Theater for
Youth; and Developmental Theater, New Plays, New Playwrights, New Forms.
After roughly one decade of agency support, it appeared as though Margo Jones’s
dream of an American civilization being enriched by theater—in every region of thenation—was beginning to come true.
The institutional growth was encouraging, but it also introduced new perils forthe art form that it supported. Growing dependence on larger box office receipts,
subscriptions, and other sources of income—coupled with the demands andexpenses incurred from larger venues and their necessary support staff—threatened
to eat away at the adventurous spirit that had launched the movement in the firstplace. The pressure to install cautious programming that would not put an institution at risk was always present. Arthur Ballet, Theater Program director, recognized
this concern and how the agency could respond to it when he wrote in the Arts
Endowment’s 1979 Annual Report:“The Endowment’s Theater Program stands at a crossroads. On one hand, theProgram can choose safety, staying just behind the field, behind inflation, behindthe sure warhorses of production and plays. Or the Program can begin to shift priorities, to try new ideas, new directions. We are taking the latter path.”
This latter path resulted in establishing new funding programs designed toencourage and support young artists with fresh concepts and new ideas:• Director Fellowships to assist the career development of directors who havedemonstrated an ability and commitment to work in professional theater• Artistic Advancement/Ongoing Ensembles to help existing theater companies
create or strengthen relationships with their resident artists• Professional Theater Presenters to reach underserved audiences by supporting
performances by nonprofit professional touring companies in places where suchwork is not usually available to audiences• Designer Fellowships to provide individual stage designers of exceptional talent,
who work in the American nonprofit professional theaters, with financial support
and creative opportunities
The structure of the Theater Program continued to evolve. By 1984, the Arts Endowment was providing funding via ten separate theater categories, including those
focused on touring, training, direction, playwriting, translation, and other special projects, but by 1986 these had been consolidated into four major core categories: Support
to Individuals, National Resources, Professional Theater Companies, and Artistic
Advancement.

t h e a t e r 249

During this time, various economic and cultural shifts and pressures in the country fed a burgeoning solo performance scene whose artists reflected a wide variety of
tastes and influences. These artists had minimal production costs and demands,
and were able to create unconventional, highly individualistic pieces that could be
performed practically anywhere. The flexible nature of this new arena provided aplatform for a wide variety of artists to present—or confront—an audience with allmanner of ideas, performance styles, and individual perspectives. The influence thatthese artists carried with them was as broad as any that had been exhibited from theAmerican stage and included not only classical and modern theater, but popular
dance and downtown art scenes as well.
In May of 1990, Chairman John Frohnmayer, acting on recommendation of the
National Council on the Arts, rejected grants to performance artists Karen Finley,
Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes (who collectively became known as The
NEA Four). The four artists sued the agency for the amounts of the grants resulting
in a public controversy that led to pressure from Congress to eventually discontinue
NEA support for individual artists and to make drastic cuts in its budget and staffing.
As the NEA’s grant process shifted away from discipline-based applications toward
four new agency-wide categories—Creation and Presentation, Education andAccess, Heritage and Preservation, Planning and Stabilization—the agency waspressed to demonstrate more directly the public benefits of its grants. The Theater
Program turned directly toward its service organizations to sustain the infrastructure of the field, with the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) being the mostprominent. Since then, the NEA has collaborated with TCG in a number of ways. For
instance, the NEA/TCG Theater Residency Program for Playwrights was created in
1996 at the initiation of Chairman Jane Alexander and Theater Director Gigi Bolt,
and support for early-career directors and designers was reshaped into the NEA/TCG Career Development Programs for Directors and Designers.

Shakespeare On Military Bases
In 2004, in an effort to make good on its commitment to bring the arts to all Americans, the Arts Endowment created the first program in its history dedicated toreaching military personnel and their families. As part of the agency’s Shakespeare in
American Communities program, professional Shakespeare productions were presented at bases in 14 states. Supported by $1 million from the Department of Defense(DOD), the military tour was an unprecedented partnership at the time.

250 n e a : a h i s t o r yThrough this initiative, Alabama Shakespeare Festival brought its production ofMacbeth to 13 military installations, withadditional bases visited by the Aquila Theatre Company, The Acting Company, andArtists Repertory Theatre. Performanceswere accompanied by educational workshops for base youth whenever possible.
Most bases did not have a conventional
theater, therefore performances were presented in movie theaters, auditoriums,
and in one case, an airplane hangar sharedwith fighter jets.

Conclusion
From its inception, the Arts Endowment’s
Theater Program focused on solidifying
the artistic gains that had taken root in the
Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s production
field. The NEA was uniquely suited to enterof Macbeth was taken to 13 military installations in 2004. (Photo by Phil Scarsbrook)
into this struggling but potentially fertile
environment, and to enable the best theater artists to pursue their best art and to broaden their exposure and impact.
The Arts Endowment is the largest funder of nonprofit theater in the UnitedStates, and can lay claim to playing a primary role in the expansion of nonprofit professional theater over the last 40 years. In 1965 there were a limited number ofprofessional theater companies operating outside of New York. Since the Arts
Endowment’s creation, American theater has grown exponentially. According to IRS
records, by 1990, there were 991 nonprofit theaters throughout the country thatreported annual budgets of $75,000 or more. Today there are more than 2,000.
The quality of theater that has been produced through the Arts Endowment’s support is remarkable. Of the 35 Pulitzer Prizes awarded in drama since 1965, 30 havegone to works that originated in an NEA-supported nonprofit theater, including
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, developed at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago;Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, developed by Florida’s New Theater and New Jersey’s
McCarter Theatre; Suzan-Lori Parks’s Top Dog/Underdog, developed at the Publict h e a t e r 251

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, was developedwith NEA support by the nonprofit company Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by
Michael Brosilow)

Theater in New York; and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, developed throughworkshops at Chicago’s About Face Theatre and California’s La Jolla Playhouse.
The economic and cultural impact that American theater now has on the nation issubstantial. According to TCG’s “Theatre Facts 2005,” the 1,490 documented professional theaters in America during that year alone contributed $1.53 billion to the U.S.
economy in the form of payments for goods, services, and salaries (not including
related induced spending for eating out, parking, babysitters, artists’ living expenses,
and other goods and services). The positive impact that these activities have had on
the cultural health of the nation is no less compelling, if harder to quantify.
These numbers indicate a strong level of interest and participation among theAmerican public in live theater. The field continues to face new challenges, however,in ensuring its ongoing health and vitality. Production costs and ticket prices continue
to rise. As we move into the twenty-first century, entertainment and cultural programming available to the public via cable and satellite programming as well as throughthe on-demand convenience of TiVo, Netflix, and pay-per-view, provide the publicwith a wealth of cheap and convenient choices for their limited time and dollars.

252 n e a : a h i s t o r yThe challenges facing the field of American theater today are substantial, but history has shown us that our greatest theatrical achievements of our past transpired in
response to its greatest challenges. As Hallie Flanagan asserted in 1935 and Margo
Jones and her many influential colleagues understood in the decades that followed,
in order to thrive, the future of our American theater must be guided by deeply committed and authentic artistic ambitions. It must continue to engage our public inmeaningful and transformative experiences that inform our understanding of ourselves and each other. Throughout its existence, the National Endowment for theArts has sought out, celebrated, and supported the best of those efforts and hashelped spur an enormous growth in the number of nonprofit theaters across thenation. Their combined civic impact, via the production of excellent plays, alongwith the delivery of arts education, outreach, and other civic-minded programs, hasbeen one of the most encouraging cultural evolutions of our time.

t h e a t e r 253

Appendices
National Endowment for the Arts Chairs
Roger Stevens
1965–69

Jane Alexander
1993–97

Nancy Hanks
1969–77

Bill Ivey
1998–2001

Livingston Biddle
1977–81

Michael Hammond
2002

Frank Hodsoll
1981–89

Dana Gioia
2003–09

John Frohnmayer
1989–92

254 n e a : a h i s t o r yPresident George W. Bush meets with members of the National Council on the Arts in the Oval
Office in July 2006; from left: Teresa Lozano Long, Don V. Cogman, Mary D. Costa, Jerry Pinkney,
Chairman Dana Gioia, President Bush, Karen Lias Wolff, Maribeth Walton McGinley, Gerard
Schwarz, and Mark Hofflund. (White House Photo by Eric Draper)

National Council on the Arts Members 1964–2008
Maurice Abravanel
1970–76

Thomas Bergin
1979–84

Nina Brock
1987–94

Kurt Herbert Adler
1980–87

Robert Berks
1969–70

Richard F. Brown
1972–78

Margo Albert
1980–85

Phyllis P. Berney
1986–91

Trisha Brown
1994–97

Marian Anderson
1966–72

Leonard Bernstein
1965–68

Albert Bush-Brown
1965–70

Martina Arroyo
1976–82

Theodore Bikel
1978–82

Philip Brunelle
1992–96

Elizabeth Ashley
1965–66

Anthony A. Bliss
1965–68

Miguel Campaneria
2007–12William Bailey
1992–97

Sally Brayley Bliss
1987–94

Henry J. Cauthen
1972–78

David Baker
1987–94

Angus Bowmer
1974–79

Norman B. Champ, Jr.
1979–86

James Ballinger
2004–10

Willard Boyd
1976–82

Van Cliburn
1974–80

James Barnett
1980

David Brinkley
1965

Don Cogman
2002–06

a p p e n d i c e s 255

Mary D. Costa
2002–06

Ralph Ellison
1965–66

Barbara Grossman
1994–99

Phyllis Curtin
1988–91

Paul Engle
1965–70

Sandra Hale
1980

Jean Dalrymple
1968–74

Joseph Epstein
1985–94

Donald Hall
1991–97

Gordon Davidson
1999–2004

Terry Evans
1996–2002

Lawrence Halprin
1966–72

Patrick Davidson
1996–2002

JoAnn Falletta
2008–12Chico Hamilton
2006–2007

Hal C. Davis
1976–78

Leonard L. Farber
1980

Marvin Hamlisch1989

Kenneth Dayton
1970–76

Ronald Feldman
1994–99

R. Philip Hanes, Jr.
1965–70

Agnes de Mille
1965–66

O’Neil Ford
1968–74

Hugh Hardy
1992–97

Katharine Cramer DeWitt
2002–06

William P. Foster
1996–98

Joy Harjo
1998–2003

René d’Harnoncourt
1965–68

Helen Frankenthaler
1985–92

Mel Harris
1988–91

J. C. Dickinson, Jr.
1976–82

Martin Friedman
1979–84

Huntington Hartford
1969–72

Richard C. Diebenkorn
1966–69

Makoto Fujimura
2003–08

Rev. Gilbert Hartke, O.P.
1965–66

Ben Donenberg
2006–12Hsin-Ming Fung
2001–02

Helen Hayes
1966–69; 1971–72

C. Douglas Dillon
1982–89

Robert Garfias
1987–96

Peter deCourcy Hero
1991–96

Allen Drury
1982–88

David H. Gelernter
2002–06

Charlton Heston
1966–72

Charles Eames
1970–76

Virginia B. Gerity
1970–72

Ronnie Heyman
1996–2002

Clint Eastwood
1972–78

Roy M. Goodman
1989–96

Margaret Hillis
1985–91

William Eells
1976–82

Martha Graham
1985–87

Mark Hofflund
2005–08

Duke Ellington
1968–74

Lee Greenwood
2008–14

Celeste Holm
1982–88

256 n e a : a h i s t o r yRichard Hunt
1968–74

N. Harper Lee
1966–72

Arthur Mitchell
1987–94

Joan Israelite
2006–12Erich Leinsdorf
1980–84

Toni Morrison
1980–87

Marta Istomin
1991–97

Nathan Leventhal
1997–2004

Carlos Moseley
1985–91

Arthur I. Jacobs
1981–87

Harvey Lichtenstein
1987–94

Jacob Neusner
1985–90

Judith Jamison
1972–77

Samuel Lipman
1982–88

Rev. Leo J. O’Donovan, S. J.
1994–98

Kenneth M. Jarin
1994–98

Teresa Lozano Long
2002–06

Gregory Peck
1965–66; 1968–74

Colleen JenningsRoggensack
1994–97

Bernard Lopez
1979–84

I.M. Pei
1980–87

Bret Lott2006–12William L. Pereira
1965–68

Wendy Luers
1988–96

Jorge M. Perez
1994–98

Talbot MacCarthy
1985–91

Roberta Peters
1991–97

Roger Mandle
1989–96

Jerry Pinkney
2003–08

Jimilu Mason
1966–72

Sidney Poitier
1966–70

Marsha Mason
1997–2003

Stephen Porter
2007–12James McBride
2004–05

Earl A. Powell, iii
2003

Louise McClure
1991–97

Barbara Ernst Prey
2008–14

Maribeth McGinley
2002–06Frank Price
2006–12Wallace D. McRae
1996–98

Harold Prince
1976–82

Charles McWhorter
1970–76

Lloyd Richards
1985–92

Robert Merrill
1968–74

Jerome Robbins
1974–79

Speight Jenkins
1996–2000
Robert Joffrey
1980–87
Bob Johnson
1987–94
James Earl Jones
1970–76
Herman David Kenin
1965–68
Charlotte Kessler
2006–12
M. Ray Kingston
1985–92
Ardis Krainik
1987–94
Eleanor Lambert
1965–66
Jacob Lawrence
1978–84
Warner Lawson
1965–68
Raymond J. Learsy
1982–88

a p p e n d i c e s 257

Cleo Parker Robinson
1999–2004

David Smith
1965

Harry Weese
1974–80

James D. Robertson
1972–78

Oliver Smith
1965–70

Donald Weismann
1966–72

Kevin Roche
1989

Joan Specter
1998–2003

Eudora Welty
1972–78

Richard Rodgers
1965–68

Robert Stack
1982–88

Dolores Wharton
1974–80

Lida Rogers
1980–87

John Steinbeck
1966–68

George White
1992–97

Maureene Rogers
1978–84

Isaac Stern
1965–70

Nancy White
1966–72

Deedie Potter Rose
2002–06

Richard Stern
1996–2002

Anne Porter Wilson
1972–78

James Rosenquist
1978–84

George Stevens, Sr.
1965–70

Robert Wise
1970–76

Judith Rubin
1994–2002

Ruth Carter Stevenson
1969–70

Otto Wittmann
1965–66

Rosalind Russell
1972–76

Jocelyn Levi Straus
1988–96

Catherine Yi-yu Cho Woo
1991–96

George Schaefer
1982–88

William E. Strickland, Jr.
1991–97

Townsend D. Wolfe, iii
1996–2002

Franklin Schaffner
1976–82

Geraldine Stutz
1976–82

Karen Lias Wolff
2003–08

Thomas Schippers
1974–76

James Johnson Sweeney
1965–68

James Wood
1985–94

Gunther Schuller
1974–80

Billy Taylor
1972–78

Jessie Woods
1979–85

Gerard Schwarz
2004–06

Terry Teachout
2004–10

Rachael Worby
1994–98

Rudolf Serkin
1968–74

Luis Valdez
1996–2003

James Wyeth
1972–78

George Seybolt
1974–80

William Van Allen
1982–88

Rosalind W. Wyman
1979–85

Robert Shaw
1979–84

Edward Villella
1968–74

Minoru Yamasaki
1965–69

Beverly Sills
1970–76

E. Leland Webber
1970–76

Stanley Young
1965–66

258 n e a : a h i s t o r yEx Officio
Congressional
Members
Rep. Cass Ballenger
1998–2004
Sen. Robert Bennett
2003–08
Sen. Susan M. Collins
1998
Sen. Mike DeWine
1999–2006
Rep. John T. Doolittle
1998–2000
Sen. Richard Durbin
1998–2002

National Medal of Arts Recipients
2008
Olivia de Havilland
actress
Fisk University Jubilee
Singers
choral ensemble
Ford’s Theatre Society
theater and museum
Hank Jones
jazz musician
Stan Lee
comic book writer

George Tooker
painterAndrew WyethpainterU. of Idaho
Lionel Hampton
International Jazz Festival
music competition and festival

2006
William Bolcom
composer
Cyd Charisse
dancerSen. Patrick Leahy
2005–06

José Limón Dance
Foundation
modern dance company andinstitute

Rep. Nita M. Lowey
1998–99

Jesús Moroles
sculptor

Rep. Betty McCollum
2002–08

The Presser Foundation
music patronInterlochen Centerfor the Arts
school of fine arts

Rep. Howard McKeon
2001–06

The Sherman Brothers
songwriting teamGregory Rabassa
literary translator

Sen. Harry Reid
2003–042007

Sen. Jeff Sessions
1998–2002

Morten Lauridsen
composerErich Kunzel
conductor

Rep. Patrick Tiberi
2005–08

N. Scott MomadayauthorSen. Sheldon Whitehouse
2007–08

Craig Noeltheater director
Roy R. Neuberger
arts patron

Roy DeCarava
photographer
Wilhelmina Cole Holladayarts patron

Preservation Hall Jazz Band
jazz ensemble
Viktor Schreckengost
industrial designer, sculptor
Ralph Stanley
bluegrass musician

2005

Les Paulguitarist, inventor

Louis Auchincloss
authorHenry Steinway
piano manufacturer

James DePreist
conductor

a p p e n d i c e s 259

Paquito D’Rivera
jazz musician, composer
Robert Duvallactor
Leonard Garment
arts patron
Ollie Johnston
film animator
Wynton Marsalis
jazz musician, arts advocate

2003
Beverly Cleary
writerRafe Esquitharts educator
Suzanne Farrell
dancer
Buddy Guyblues musician

Dolly Parton
singer, songwriter

Ron Howard
actor, director, writer,
producer

Tina Ramirez
choreographer, artistic director

Mormon Tabernacle Choirchoral group

Pennsylvania Academy of
the Fine Arts
school of fine arts andmuseumLeonard Slatkin
conductor

2004
Ray Bradbury
authorCarlisle Floyd
opera composer
Frederick Hart
sculptor
Anthony Hecht
poet
John Ruthvenwildlife artist
Vincent Scullyarchitectural historian andeducator
Twyla Tharp
choreographer
Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation
philanthropic foundation

260 n e a : a h i s t o r yGeorge Strait
country singer, songwriter
Tommy Tune
dancer, actor, choreographer,
director
Austin City Limits
PBS television program

2002
Florence Knoll Bassettarchitect
Trisha Brown
artistic director,
choreographer, dancer
Philippe de Montebello
museum director
Uta Hagenactress, drama teacher
Lawrence Halprin
landscape architect
Al Hirschfeld
artistGeorge Jones
country music composer,
performer
Ming Cho Lee
theater designer
William “Smokey”
Robinsonsinger songwriter

2001
Rudolfo Anaya
authorJohnny Cashsinger, songwriter
Kirk Douglas
actorHelen Frankenthaler
painter
Judith Jamison
choreographer, dancer
Yo-Yo Ma
cellistMike Nichols
director
Alvin Ailey Dance
Foundation
modern dance company andschool2000
Maya Angelou
poet
Eddy Arnold
country singer
Mikhail Baryshnikov
dancerBenny Carterjazz musician

Chuck Close
painter

Maria TallchiefdancerAgnes Gundarts patron

Horton Footeplaywright, screenwriter

The Juilliard School
performing arts school

Daniel Urban Kiley
landscape architect

Lewis Manilow
arts patron

1998

Angela Lansbury
actor

Claes Oldenburg
sculptor

Jacques d’Amboise
dancer, choreographer,educator

James Levine
conductor

Itzhak Perlman
violinist
Harold Prince
theater director, producer
Barbra Streisandentertainer
National Public Radio,
Cultural Programming
Divisionbroadcaster

1999
Irene Diamondarts patron
Aretha Franklin
singerMichael Graves
architect, designer
Odettasinger, music historian
Norman Lear
producer, writer, director
Rosetta LeNoire
actress, producer
Harvey Lichtensteinarts administrator
Lydia Mendoza
singerGeorge Segal
sculptor

Antoine “Fats” Domino
rock ‘n’ roll pianist, singer
Ramblin’ Jack Elliottfolk singer, songwriterFrank Gehry
architect
Barbara Handmanarts advocate
Agnes Martin
visual artist
Gregory Peck
actor
Roberta Peters
opera singer
Philip RothwriterGwen Verdon
actress, dancer
Sara Lee Corporation
corporate arts patron
Steppenwolf Theatre
Company
arts organization

1997
Louise Bourgeois
sculptor
Betty Carterjazz vocalist

Tito Puente
Latin jazz musician
Jason Robards
actor
Edward Villelladancer, choreographer
Doc Watson
bluegrass guitarist, vocalist
MacDowell Colony
artist colony

1996
Edward Albee
playwright
Sarah Caldwell
opera conductor
Harry Callahan
photographer
Zelda Fichandler
theater director, founder
Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero
composer, musician
Lionel Hampton
jazz musician
Bella Lewitzky
dancer, choreographer, teacher
Vera List
arts patron
Robert Redford
actor, director, producer

a p p e n d i c e s 261

Maurice Sendak
writer, illustrator

Dorothy DeLay
violin teacher

Lloyd Richards
theatrical director

Stephen Sondheim
composer, lyricist

Julie Harris
actress

William Styron
writerBoys Choir of Harlem
performing arts youth group

Erick Hawkins
choreographer

Paul Taylor
dancer, choreographer

1995

Gene Kelly
dancer, singer, actor

Billy Wilder
movie director, writer,
producer

Licia Albanese
opera singer
Gwendolyn Brooks
poet
B. Gerald and Iris Cantor
arts patrons
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee
actorsDavid DiamondcomposerJames Ingo Freedarchitect
Bob Hope
entertainer
Roy Lichtenstein
painter, sculptor
Arthur Mitchelldancer, choreographer
William S. Monroe
bluegrass musician
Urban Gateways
arts education organization

Pete Seeger
composer, lyricist, vocalist,
banjo player
Catherine Filene Shousearts patron
Wayne Thiebaud
artist, teacher
Richard Wilbur
poet
Young Audiences
arts presenter

1993
Walter and Leonore
Annenberg
arts patrons
Cabell “Cab” Calloway
jazz musician
Ray Charles
singerBess Lomax Hawes
folklorist

1994

Stanley Kunitz
poet

Harry Belafonte
singerRobert Merrill
baritone

Dave Brubeck
jazz musician, composer

Arthur Miller
playwright

Celia Cruz
singerRobert Rauschenberg
artist262 n e a : a h i s t o r y

1992
Marilyn Horne
opera singer
James Earl Jones
actor
Allan Houser
sculptor
Minnie Pearl
Grand Ole Opry performer
Robert Saudek
television producer,
Museum of Broadcasting
founding director
Earl Scruggs
banjo player
Robert Shaw
conductor, choral director
Billy Taylor
jazz musician
Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott Brown
architects
Robert Wise
film producer, director
AT&T
corporate arts patron
Lila Wallace-Reader’sDigest Fundfoundation arts patron

1991
Maurice Abravanel
conductor
Roy Acuff
country singer, bandleader
Pietro Belluschi
architect
J. Carter Brown
museum director
Charles “Honi” Coles
tap dancer
John O. Crosby
opera director, administrator
Richard Diebenkorn
painter

Jasper Johns
painter, sculptor

Robert Motherwell
painter

Jacob Lawrence
painterJohn Updike
authorRiley “B.B.” King
blues musician, singer

Dayton Hudson
Corporation
corporate arts patronDavid Lloyd Kreeger
arts patron
Harris & Carroll Sterling
Mastersonarts patrons
Ian McHarg
landscape architect
Beverly Sills
opera singer, director

R. Philip Hanes, Jr.
arts patronSoutheastern Bell
Corporation
corporate arts patron

Kitty Carlisle Hart
actress, singer, arts
administrator

1989

Pearl Primus
choreographer, anthropologist
Isaac Sternviolinist
Texaco Inc.
corporate arts patron

1990
George Francis Abbott
actor, playwright, producer,
director
Hume Cronyn
actor, director
Jessica Tandy
actress
Merce Cunningham
choreographer, dancecompany director

Leopold Adler
preservationist, civic leader
Katherine Dunham
dancer, choreographer
Alfred Eisenstaedt
photographer
Martin Friedman
museum director
Leigh Gerdine
arts patron, civic leader
John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie
jazz musician
Walker Kirtland Hancock
sculptor
Vladimir Horowitz
pianistCzeslaw Milosz
poet

1988
Saul Bellow
authorHelen Hayes
actress
Gordon Parks
photographer, film director
I.M. Pei
architect
Jerome Robbins
dancer, choreographer
Rudolf SerkinpianistVirgil Thomson
composer, music critic
Sydney J. Freedberg
art historian, curator
Roger L. Stevens
arts administrator(Mrs. Vincent) Brooke Astorarts patronFrancis Goelet
music patron
Obert C. Tannerarts patron

1987
Romare Bearden
painter
Ella Fitzgerald
singera p p e n d i c e s 263

Howard Nemerov
poet

Seymour H. Knox
arts patron

Alwin Nikolais
dancer, choreographer

Exxon Corporation
corporate arts patron

Isamu Noguchi
sculptor

1985

William Schuman
composer
Robert Penn Warren
authorJ. W. Fisher
arts patron
Dr. Armand Hammer
arts patron
Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Lewis
arts patrons

Elliott Carter, Jr.
composer
Ralph Ellison
authorJosé Ferrer
actor
Martha Graham
dancer, choreographer
Louise Nevelson
sculptress

1986

Georgia O’Keeffe
painter

Marian Anderson
opera singer

Leontyne PricesopranoFrank Capra
film director

Dorothy Buffum Chandler
arts patron

Aaron Coplandcomposer

Lincoln Kirsteinarts patron

Willem de Kooning
painterPaul Mellon
arts patron

Agnes de Mille
choreographer

Alice Tully
arts patron

Eva Le Gallienne
actress, author

Hallmark Cards, Inc.
corporate arts patron

Alan Lomax
folklorist, scholar
Lewis Mumford
philosopher, literary critic
Eudora Welty
authorDominique de Menilarts patron

264 n e a : a h i s t o r ynote: In 1983, prior to theofficial establishment of
the National Medal of Arts,
the following artists andpatrons received a medalfrom President Reagan ata White House luncheonarranged by the President’s
Committee on the Arts andthe Humanities. They were:(artists) Pinchas Zukerman,
Frederica Von Stade, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank Stella,Philip Johnson and Luis
Valdez; (patrons) The
Texaco Philanthropic Foundation, James Michener,*
Philip Morris, Inc., The
Cleveland Foundation,
Elma Lewis, and The Dayton Hudson Foundation.
* who was considered a patron

NEA Jazz Masters
2009

2005

1999

George Benson
Jimmy Cobb
Lee Konitz
Toots Thielemans
Rudy Van Gelder
Snooky Young

Kenny Burrell
Paquito D’Rivera
Slide Hampton
Shirley Horn
Artie Shaw
Jimmy Smith
George Wein

Dave Brubeck
Art Farmer
Joe Henderson

2008
Candido Camero
Andrew Hill
Quincy Jones
Tom McIntosh
Gunther Schuller
Joe Wilder

2006
Ray Barretto
Tony Bennett
Bob Brookmeyer
Chick Corea
Buddy DeFranco
Freddie Hubbard
John Levy

Ron CarterJames Moody
Wayne Shorter

2004
Jim Hall
Chico Hamilton
Herbie Hancock
Luther Henderson
Nancy Wilson
Nat Hentoff

2007
Toshiko Akiyoshi
Curtis Fuller
Ramsey Lewis
Dan Morgenstern
Jimmy Scott
Frank Wess
Phil Woods

1998

2003
Jimmy Heath
Elvin Jones
Abbey Lincoln

2002Frank Foster
Percy Heath
McCoy Tyner

2001
John Lewis
Jackie McLean
Randy Weston

2000
David Baker
Donald Byrd
Marian McPartland

1997
Billy Higgins
Milt Jackson
Anita O’Day

1996
Tommy Flanagan
J. J. Johnson
Benny Golson

1995
Ray Brown
Roy Haynes
Horace Silver

1994
Louie Bellson
Ahmad Jamal
Carmen McRae

1993
Milt Hinton
Jon Hendricks
Joe Williams

1992
Betty Carter
Dorothy Donegan
Harry “Sweets” Edisona p p e n d i c e s 265

1991

1984

Danny Barker
Buck Clayton
Andy Kirk
Clark Terry

Ornette Coleman
Miles Davis
Max Roach1990
George Russell
Cecil Taylor
Gerald Wilson

1983

2008

Count Basie
Kenneth Clarke
Sonny Rollins

Carlisle Floyd
Richard Gaddes
James Levine
Leontyne Price

1982
1989
Barry Harris
Hank Jones
Sarah Vaughan

1988
Art Blakey
Lionel Hampton
Billy Taylor

1987
Cleo Patra Brown
Melba Liston
Jay McShann

1986
Benny Carter
Dexter Gordon
Teddy Wilson

1985
Gil Evans
Ella Fitzgerald
Jonathan “Jo” Jones

266 n e a : a h i s t o r y

NEA Opera
HonorsRecipients

Roy Eldridge
Dizzy Gillespie
Sun RaNEA National Heritage Fellows
2008
Horace P. Axtell
Nez Perce drum maker, singer,
tradition-bearer
Walter Murray Chiesa
traditional arts specialist andadvocate
Dale Harwood
saddlemakerBettye Kimbrellquilter
Jeronimo E. Lozano
Peruvian retablo maker
Oneida Hymn Singers of
Wisconsin
hymn singers
Sue Yeon Park
Korean dancer and musician
Moges Seyoum
Ethiopian liturgical musician
and scholar
Jelon Vieira
capoeira masterDr. Michael White
traditional jazz musician andbandleader
Mac Wiseman
bluegrass musician

2007
Nicholas Bensonstone letter cutter andcalligrapher

Sidiki Conde
Guinean dancer andmusician
Violet de Cristoforo
haiku poet and historian
Agustin Lira
Chicano singer, musician,and composer
Julia Parker
Kashia Pomo basketmaker
Mary Jane Queen
Appalachian musician
Roland Freeman
photo documentarian, author,
exhibit curator
Pat Courtney Gold
Wasco sally bag weaver
Eddie Kamae
Hawaiian musician,composer, and filmmakerJoe Thompson
African-American string bandmusician
Irvin J. Trujillo
Rio Grande weaver
Elaine Hoffman Watts
klezmer musician

2006
Charles M. Carrillo
SanteroDelores Elizabeth Churchill
Haida cedar bark weaver

Henry Grayblues piano player, singer
George Na’ope
Kumu hula (hula master)
Wilho Saari
Finnish kantelle player
Mavis Staples
gospel, rhythm and blues
singerDoyle Lawson
Gospel and bluegrass singer,
arranger, bandleader
Esther Martinez
American Indian storyteller
Diomedes Matos
Puerto Rican luthier
Nancy Sweezy
folklorist
Treme Brass BandNew Orleans brass band

2005
Eldrid Skjold Arntzen
Norwegian Americanrosemaler
Earl Barthé
Creole building artisan
Chuck Brown
African-American musicalinnovator
Janette Carter
Appalachian musician,advocatea p p e n d i c e s 267

Michael Doucet
Cajun fiddler, composer, andband leader

Chum Ngek
Cambodian musician andteacher

Jerry Grcevich
Tamburitza musician, prim
playerMilan Opacich
tamburitza instrument makerGrace Henderson Nez
Navajo weaver
Wanda Jacksonearly country, rockabilly, andgospel singer
Herminia Albarrán Romero
paper-cutting artist

Eliseo and Paula Rodriguez
straw appliqué artists
Koko Taylor
blues musician
Yuqin Wang and Zhengli
Xu
Chinese rod puppeteers

Manoochehr Sadeghi
Persian santur player
Nicholas Tothdiving helmet designer andbuilder
Jesus Arriada
Johnny Curutchet
Martin Goicoechea
Jesus Goni
Basque (Bertsolari) poets

2002
Ralph Blizard
old-time fiddler

2003
Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman
Yiddish singer, poet,
songwriter
Albertina Walker
gospel singer
James Ka’upena Wong
Hawaiian chanter

2004
Anjani Ambegaokar
North Indian Kathak dancer
Charles “Chuck” T.
Campbellsacred steel guitar player
Joe Derrane
Irish-American button
accordionist
Jerry Douglas
dobro player
Gerald “Subiyay” Miller
Skokomish oral tradition
bearer, carver, basketmaker

268 n e a : a h i s t o r yRosa Elena Egipciaco
Puerto Rican mundillo(bobbin lace) makerAgnes “Oshanee” Kenmille
Salish beadworker and regalia
maker
Norman Kennedy
weaver, singer, storyteller
Roberto and Lorenzo
Martinez
Hispanic musicians
Norma Miller
African-American dancer,
choreographer
Carmencristina Moreno
Mexican-American singer,
composer, teacher
Ron Poast
Hardanger fiddle maker
Felipe and Joseph Ruak
Carolinian stick dance leaders

Loren Bommelyn
Tolowa tradition bearer
Kevin Burke
Irish fiddler
Rose Cree and Francis CreeOjibwe basketmakers andstorytellers
Luderin Darbone andEdwin Duhon
Cajun fiddler andaccordionist
Nadim Dlaikan
Lebanese nye (reed flute)
playerDavid “Honeyboy” Edwards
blues guitarist and singer
Flory Jagoda
Sephardic musician andcomposerClara Neptune Keezer
Passamaquoddy basketmakerBob McQuillen
contra dance musician andcomposer
Domingo “Mingo” Saldivar
Conjunto accordionist
Losang Samten
Tibetan sand mandala
painter

Dorothy Trumpold
rug weaver
Fred Tsoodle
Kiowa sacred song leader
Joseph Wilson
folklorist, advocate andpresenter

Chris Strachwitz
record producer and labelfounder
Dorothy Thompson
weaverDon Walser
western singer and guitarist

2000

1999

Bounxou Chanthraphone
Laotian weaver

Frisner Augustin
Haitian drummer

The Dixie Hummingbirds
African-American gospel
quartetLila Greengrass Blackdeer
Ho-Chunk black ash basketmaker and needleworker

Mozell Benson
African-American quilter

Felipe García VillamilAfro-Cuban drummer andsanteroShirley Caesar
African-American gospel
singerWilson “Boozoo” Chavis
Creole zydeco accordionist

José González
hammock weaver

Alfredo Campos
horse-hair hitcher

Hazel Dickens
Appalachian singer-songwriter

Nettie Jackson
Klickitat basketmakerJoão Oliveira dos Santos
Capoeira Angola master

Santiago Jiménez, Jr.
Tejano accordionist and singer

Mary Louise DefenderWilsonDakotah-Hidatsa
traditionalist and storyteller

Evalena Henry
Apache basketweaver

Genoa Keawe
native Hawaiian singer andukulele player

Jean Ritchie
Appalachian musician andsongwriter

2001
Celestino Avilés
santeroPeter Kyvelos
oud maker
Eddie Pennington
thumbpicking-style guitarist
Qi Shu Fang
Beijing opera performer
Seiichi Tanaka
Taiko drummer and dojo
founderFrankie Manning
Lindy hop dancer,
choreographer, and teacher
Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins
blues piano player
Konstantinos Pilarinos
orthodox Byzantine icon
woodcarver

Jimmy “Slyde” Godbolt
tap dancer
Ulysses Goode
Western Mono basketmaker
Bob Holt
Ozark fiddler
Zakir Hussain
North Indian master tabla
drummer
Elliott “Ellie” Mannette
steelpan builder, tuner, andplayera p p e n d i c e s 269

Mick Moloney
Irish musician
Eudokia Sorochaniuk
Ukrainian weaver and textile
artistRalph W. Stanleymaster boatbuilder

1998
Apsara Dancers
Cambodian traditional
dancers and musicians
Eddie Blazonczyk
Polish-American musician
and bandleader
Dale Calhoun
Anglo-American boat builder
Bruce Caesar
Sac and Fox-Pawnee German
silversmith
Antonio De La Rosa
Tejano conjunto accordionist
Epstein Brothers
Jewish klezmer musicians
Sophia George
Yakama-Colville beadworker
Nadjeschda Overgaard
Danish-American Hardanger
needleworker

Roebuck “Pops” Staples
African-American gospel andblues musician

1997
Edward Babb
shout band leader
Charles Brown
blues pianist and composer
Gladys Clark
Cajun spinner and weaver
Hua Wenyi
Chinese Kunqu opera singer
Ali Akbar Khan
North Indian sarod player
and raga composer
Ramón José López
Santero and metalsmith
Jim and Jesse McReynolds
bluegrass musicians
Phong Nguyen
Vietnamese musician andscholar
Hystercine Rankin
African-American quilter
Francis Whitaker
blacksmith and ornamental
ironworker

1996
Harilaos Papapostolou
Greek Byzantine chanter
Claude “The Fiddler”
Williams
African-American jazz andswing fiddler

Obbo Addy
Ghanian-American drummer
Betty Pisio Christenson
Ukranian-American egg
decorator
Paul Dahlin
Swedish-American fiddler

270 n e a : a h i s t o r yJuan Gutiérrez
Puerto Rican drummer
Solomon and Richard
Ho’opi’i
Hawaiian singers
Will Keys
Appalachian banjo player
Joaquin Flores Lujan
Chamorro blacksmith
Eva McAdams
Shoshone regalia makerJohn Mealing and Cornelius
Wright, Jr.
African-American railroad
worksong singers
Vernon Owens
stoneware potter
Dolly Spencer
Inupiat dollmaker

1995
Bao Mo-Li
Chinese-American jing erhu
playerMary Holiday Black
Navajo basketweaver
Lyman Enloe
old-time fiddler
Donny Golden
Irish-American stepdancer
Wayne Henderson
luthier
Bea Ellis Hensley
blacksmithNathan Jackson
Tlingit Alaska native
woodcarver, metalsmith, anddancerDanongan Kalanduyan
Filipino-American kulintang
musician
Robert Jr. Lockwood
African-American delta blues
guitarist
Israel “Cachao” Lopez
Afro-Cuban bassist, composer,
and bandleader
Nellie Star Boy Menard
Lakota Sioux quiltmaker

Sosei Shizuye Matsumoto
Japanese chado tea ceremony
master

McIntosh County Shouters
African-American
spiritual/shout performers

D.L. Menard
Cajun musician andsongwriter

Elmer Miller
bit and spur maker/
silversmith

Simon Shaheen
Arab-American oud player

Jack Owens
blues singer and guitarist

Lily Vorperian
Armenian marash-styleembroiderer

Mone and Vanxay
Saenphimmachak
Lao weavers, needleworkers,
and loommakers

Elder Roma Wilson
African-American harmonica
playerLiang-xing Tang
Chinese-American pipa (lute)
player

1993
Buck Ramsey
cowboy poet and singer

1992

1994

Santiago Almeida
Texas-Mexican conjuntomusician

Liz Carroll
Irish-American fiddler

Kenny Baker
bluegrass fiddler

Clarence Fountain and theBlind Boys
African-American gospel
singers

Inez Catalon
French Creole singer

Jerry Brown
southern stoneware tradition
potterMary Mitchell Gabriel
Passamaquoddy Native
American basketmakerJohnny Gimble
Anglo western swing fiddler
Frances Varos Graves
Hispanic-American colcha
embroiderer
Violet Hilbert
Skagit Native American
storyteller

Nicholas and Elena Charles
Yupik woodcarver,
maskmaker, and skinsewer
Charles Hankins
Boatbuilder
Nalani Kanaka’ole andPualani Kanaka’ole
Kanahelehula masters
Everett Kapayou
Mesquakie Native American
singerFrancisco Aguabella
Afro-Cuban drummer

Walker Calhoun
Cherokee musician, dancer,
and teacher
Clyde Davenport
Appalachian fiddler
Belle Deacon
Athabascan basketmaker
Nora Ezell
African-American quilter
Gerald R. Hawpetoss
Menominee/Potawatomi
regalia maker
Fatima Kuinova
Bukharan Jewish singer

a p p e n d i c e s 271

John Naka
bonsai sculptor
Ng Sheung-Chi
Chinese Toissan muk’yu folk
singerSeisho “Harry” Nakasone
Okinawan-Americanmusician
Irván Perez
Isleno (Canary Island) singer

Marie McDonald
Hawaiian lei maker
Wallace McRae
cowboy poet
Art Moilanen
Finnish accordionist

Marc Savoy
Cajun accordion maker andmusicianMorgan Sexton
Appalachian banjo player andsingerOthar Turner
African-American fife player

Nikitas Tsimouris
Greek-American bagpipe
playerRobert Spicer
flatfoot dancer

Gussie Wells
African-American quilter

Douglas Wallin
Appalachian ballad singer

Arbie Williams
African-American quilter

1989

T. Viswanathan
South Indian flute master

Emilio Rosado
woodcarver

1991
Etta Baker
African-American guitarist
George Blake
Hupa-Yurok Native
American craftsman
Jack Coen
Irish-American flutist
Rose Frank
Native American cornhusk
weaver
Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero
Mexican-American singer,
guitarist, and composer
Khamvong Insixiengmai
Lao southeast Asian singer
Don King
western saddlemaker
Riley “B.B.” King
African-American bluesman
Esther Littlefield
Tlingit regalia maker

272 n e a : a h i s t o r yMelvin Wine
Appalachian fiddler

1990
Howard Armstrong
African-American string bandmusician
Em BunCambodian silk weaver
Natividad Cano
Mexican mariachi musician
Giuseppe and Raffaela
DeFrancoSouthern Italian musicians
and dancers

John Cephas
Piedmont blues guitarist andsinger
The Fairfield Four
African-American a capellagospel singers
Jose Gutierrez
Mexican jarocho musician
and singer
Richard Avedis Hagopian
Armenian oud player
Christy Hengel
German-American concertina
maker
Ilias Kementzides
Pontic Greek lyra player

Maude Kegg
Ojibwe storyteller andcraftsman

Ethel Kvalheim
Norwegian rosemaler

Kevin Locke
Lakota flute player, singer,
dancer, and storyteller

Vanessa Paukeigope
MorganKiowa regalia makerMabel E. Murphy
Anglo-American quilter

Kenny Sidle
Anglo-American fiddler

LaVaughn E. Robinson
African-American tapdancer

Willa Mae Ford Smith
African-American gospel
singer

Earl Scruggs
bluegrass banjo player
Harry V. Shourds
wildlife decoy carver

Clyde “Kindy” Sproat
Hawaiian cowboy singer andukulele player

Sylvester McIntosh
Crucian singer andbandleader
Allison “Tootie” Montana
Mardi Gras chief and costume
maker
Alex Moore, Sr.
African-American blues
pianistChesley Goseyun Wilson
Apache fiddle maker

Arthel “Doc” Watson
Appalachian guitar playerand singer

1988

1987

Emilio and Senaida Romero
Hispanic-American
craftsworkers in tin
embroidery

Pedro Ayala
Mexican-American
accordionist

Juan Alindato
carnival maskmaker

Newton Washburn
Split ash basketmaker

Kepka Belton
Czech-American egg painterLouis Bashell
Slovenian accordionist andpolka master

1986

Amber Densmore
New England quilter andneedleworker

Genoveva Castellanoz
Mexican-American corona
makerMichael Flatley
Irish-American stepdancer

Thomas Edison “Brownie”
Ford
Anglo-Comanche cowboy
singer and storyteller

Sister Rosalia Haberl
German-American bobbin
lace maker

Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin
African-American Creoleaccordionist
Earnest Bennett
Anglo-American whittler
Helen Cordero
Pueblo potter

Kansuma Fujima
Japanese-American dancer

Sonia Domsch
Czech-American bobbin lacemaker
Canray Fontenot
African-American Creole
fiddler

Albert “Sunnyland Slim”
Luandrew
African-American blues
pianist and singer

Claude Joseph Johnson
African-American religious
singer and orator
Raymond Kane
Hawaiian slack key guitarist
and singer

John Jackson
African-American songster
and guitarist

Yang Fang Nhu
Hmong weaver andembroiderer

Wade Mainer
Appalachian banjo picker andsingerPeou Khatna
Cambodian court dancer andchoreographer

John Dee Holeman
African-American dancer,
musician, and singer

a p p e n d i c e s 273

Alice New Holy Blue Legs
Lakota Sioux quill artist

Martin Mulvihill
Irish-American fiddler

Joyce Doc Tate Nevaquaya
Comanche flutist

Glenn Ohrlin
Cowboy singer, storyteller, andillustrator

Howard “Sandman” Sims
African-American tap dancer

Luis Ortega
Hispanic-American rawhide
workerHenry Townsend
blues musician andsongwriter

Ola Belle Reed
Appalachian banjo picker andsingerHorace “Spoons” Williams
spoons player and poet

Valerio Longoria
Mexican-American
accordionist

1984
Jennie Thlunaut
Tlingit Chilkat blanket
weaverNimrod Workman
Appalachian ballad singer

1985
Eppie Archuleta
Hispanic weaver
Periklis Halkias
Greek clarinetist
Jimmy Jausoro
Basque accordionist

Clifton Chenier
Creole accordionist
Bertha Cookknotted bedspread maker
Joseph Cormier
Cape Breton violinist
Elizabeth Cotten
African-American songstressand songwriter
Burlon Craig
potterMeali’i Kalama
Hawaiian quilter

Albert Fahlbusch
hammered dulcimer makerand player

Lily May Ledford
Appalachian musician andsingerJanie Hunter
African-American singer andstoryteller

Leif Melgaard
Norwegian woodcarver

Mary Jane Manigault
African-American seagrassbasketmaker

Bua Xou Mua
Hmong musician
Julio Negrón-Rivera
Puerto Rican instrumentmaker

274 n e a : a h i s t o r y

Genevieve Mougin
Lebanese-American lacemaker

Ralph Stanley
Appalachian banjo player andsingerMargaret Tafoya
Santa Clara pueblo potter
Dave Tarras
klezmer clarinetist
Paul Tiulana
Eskimo maskmaker, dancer,
and singer
Cleofes Vigil
Hispanic storyteller and singer
Emily Kau’i Zuttermeister
hula master

1983
Sister Mildred Barker
Shaker singer
Rafael Cepeda
bomba musician and dancer
Ray Hicks
Appalachian storyteller
Stanley Hicks
Appalachian musician,storyteller, and instrument
maker
John Lee Hooker
blues guitarist and singer
Mike Manteo
Sicilian marionettist

Narciso Martínez
Texas-Mexican accordionist
and composer
Lanier Meaders
potterAlmeda Riddle
ballad singer
Simon St. Pierre
French-American fiddler
Joe Shannon
Irish piperAlex Stewart
cooper and woodworker
Ada Thomas
Chitimacha basketmaker
Lucinda Toomer
African-American quilter
Lem Ward
decoy carver and painterHugh McGraw
shape note singer
Lydia Mendoza
Mexican-American singer
Bill Monroe
bluegrass musician
Elijah Pierce
carver and painterAdam Popovich
Tamburitza musician
Georgeann Robinson
Osage ribbonworker
Duff Severe
western saddlemakerPhilip Simmons
ornamental ironworker
Sanders “Sonny” Terry
blues musician

Dewey Williams
shape note singer

1982
Dewey Balfa
Cajun fiddler
Joe Heaney
Irish singer
Tommy Jarrell
Appalachian fiddler
Bessie Jones
Georgia Sea Island singer
George López
Santos woodcarver
Brownie McGhee
blues guitarista p p e n d i c e s 275

Chairman’s Medal
Created in 2003, this medal
recognizes individuals who
have provided sustainedand distinguished service to
the NEA and the organizations it supports.

2008
Susan T. Chandler
Arts Midwest
Assistant Director

Dan Harpole
Idaho Commission on theArts Executive Director

Maribeth McGinley
National Council on the Arts
former member

Bill McFarland
International Association for
Jazz Education President

Alejandro Negrin
Minister for Cultural Affairsof the Embassy of Mexico

Stephen Lang
Writer and Actor, Beyond
Glory

Deedie Potter Rose
National Council on the Arts
former member

2006

2005

Richard J. Deasy
Arts Education Partnership
Director

Edward H. Able Jr.
American Association ofMuseums

Lawrence Bridges
Red Car Productions

David J. Fraher
Arts Midwest
Executive Director

Don Cogman
National Council on the Arts
former member

Makoto Fujimura
National Council on the Arts
former member

Mary D. Costa
National Council on the Arts
former member

Chico Hamilton
National Council on the Arts
former member

Carlos de Icaza
Ambassador of Mexico
to the US

Mark Hofflund
National Council on the Arts
former member
Felicia Knight
Former NEA Director
Anne-Imelda Radice
Institute of Museum andLibrary Services Director

Katharine Cramer DeWitt
National Council on the Arts
former member

Gordon Davidson
Mark Taper Forum/Center
Theatre Group
Rebecca Turner Gonzales
Former NEA Director
R. Philip Hanes, Jr.
National Council on the Arts
former member
Frank Hodsoll
Former NEA Chairman
Louise McClure
National Council on the Arts
former member

Anne Heiligenstein
Director of Projects, Office of
Mrs. Bush

Suraya Mohamed
National Public Radio

Hernán Lara Zavala
Writer and educator

Molly Murphy
National Public Radio

Teresa Lozano Long
National Council on the Arts
former member

Benjamin K. Roe
National Public Radio

2007
Andrew Carroll
Editor, Operation
Homecoming anthology

276 n e a : a h i s t o r y

A. B. Spellman
Former NEA DeputyChairman

NEA Discipline Directors

2004

Arts Education

DesignDavid Chu
United States Department of
DefenseJohn Kerr
1969–84

Paul Spreiregen
1966–70

Joe Prince
1981–86

Bill Lacy
1970–77

Warren Newman
1987–89

Michael Pittas
1978–84

David O’Fallon
1991–92

Adele Chatfield-Taylor
1984–88

Doug Herbert
1992–2004

Randolph McAusland
1989–91

David Steiner
2004–05

Mina Berryman
1991–93

Sarah Bainter Cunningham
2005–present

Samina Quraeshi
1994–97

William Gleason
United States Department of
DefenseMichael Pachuta
United States Department of
DefenseCleo Parker Robinson
National Council on the Arts
former member
Catherine Stevens
Former NEA General Counsel

Dance
June Arey
1967–73
Don Anderson
1972–74

Mark Robbins
1999–2002
Jeff Speck
2003–07
Maurice Cox
2007–present

Joseph Krakora
1975

Expansion Arts

Suzanne Weil
1976–77

Vantile Whitfield
1971–77

Rhoda Grauer
1978–81A. B. Spellman
1978–91

Nigel Redden
1982–85

Patrice Walker Powell
1991–95

Sali Ann Kriegsman
1986–95
Douglas C. Sonntag
1997–present

a p p e n d i c e s 277

Folk andTraditional Arts

Literature

Museums

Carolyn Kizer
1967–69

Thomas Leavitt
1970–73

Len Randolph
1970–78

John Spencer
1973–77

David Wilk
1979–81

Tom Freudenheim
1979–82Frank Conroy
1982–87

Andrew Oliver
1983–94

Stephen Goodwin
1988–90Jennifer Dowley
1994–99

Inter-Arts/
Presenting

Joe David Bellamy
1990–92

Museums, Visual Arts

Esther Novak
1980–81

Gigi Bradford
1992–97

Renee Levine
1982–85

Cliff Becker
1998–2005

Peter Pennekamp
1987–89

David Kipen
2005–present
National Reading
Initiatives

Alan Jabbour
1974–76
Bess Lomax Hawes
1977–92
Daniel Sheehy
1992–2000
Barry Bergey
2001–present

Lenwood Sloan
1990–94
Omus Hirshbein
1995–97
Music, Opera, Presenting
Patrice Walker Powell
1997–99
Vanessa Whang
1999–2003
Mario Garcia Durham
2004–present

Jon Parrish Peede
2007–present
Grants Programs

Local Arts
Agencies
Robert Cannon
1983–87
Richard Huff
1988–91
Diane Mataraza
1992–95
Patrice Walker Powell
1995–present

Saralyn Reece Hardy
1999–2002
Museums, Visual Arts
Robert H. Frankel
2002–present
Museums, Visual Arts

Music
Frances Taylor
1966–68
Walter Anderson
1968–77
Ezra Laderman
1978–81
Adrian Gnam
1982–84
Edward Birdwell
1984–86
William Vickery
1988–90
D. Antoinette Handy
1990–93
Omus Hirshbein
1993–97
Music, Opera, and Presenting

278 n e a : a h i s t o r yWayne S. Brown
1997–present
Music, Opera

State andRegional
Partnerships

Visual Arts
Henry Geldzahler
1966–69

Charles Mark
1967–68

Brian O’Doherty
1969–76

Clark Mitze
1968–74

James Melchert
1977–81

Henry Putsch
1976–79

Benny Andrews
1982–84

Anthony Turney
1980–82

Richard Andrews
1985–87

Ed Dickey
1988–2004

Susan Lubowsky
1989–92

John E. Ostrout
2004–present

Rosalyn Alter
1992–94

Omus Hirshbein
1994–97
Music, Opera, and Presenting

Theater

Jennifer Dowley
1994–99
Museums, Visual Arts

Wayne S. Brown
1997–present
Music, Opera

Arthur Ballet
1978–81

Opera/Musical Theater
James Ireland
1979
Edward Corn
1980–81
Ann Francis Darling
1982–83
Patrick J. Smith
1985–89
Tomas C. Hernandez
1991–94

Gigi Bolt
1996–2006
Theater, Musical Theater

Ruth Mayleas
1965–77

Edward Martenson
1982–86
Robert Marx
1987–89

Bill O’Brien
2006–present
Theater, Musical Theater

Jessica Andrews
1989–90

Public Media/
Media Arts

Keryl McCord
1992–95

Chloe Aaron
1970–76

Gigi Bolt
1995–2006
Theater, Musical Theater

Brian O’Doherty
1976–96
Ted Libbey
2002–present

Saralyn Reece Hardey
1999–2002
Museums, Visual Arts
Robert H. Frankel
2002–present
Museums, Visual Arts

Ben Cameron
1990–92

Bill O’Brien
2006–present
Theater, Musical Theatera p p e n d i c e s 279

IndexPage numbers in italics indicate
photographs.

A
Aaron, Chloe, 199, 205, 279
Abbott, George Francis, 263
Able, Edward H., Jr., 276
About Face Theatre, Chicago,
252
Abraham, Spencer, 123
Abrams, Floyd, 106
Abravanel, Maurice, 255, 263
ACA (Arts Councils of America,
now Associated Councils of
the Arts), 17, 31
Academy Awards (Oscars), 46,
75, 113, 153, 160, 195
Academy of American Poets,
192
Academy of Television Arts andSciences (Emmies), 75, 112,
153
AccessAbility Office, 134–35
The Acting Company, 251
Actors’ Equity, 106
Actors Theatre of Louisville, KY,
21, 242, 245, 248
Acuff, Roy, 263
Adams, John, 237
Adams, Leonie, 186
Adams, Robert, 210
Adderley, Cannonball, 29
Addy, Obbo, 270
Adler, Kurt Herbert, 255
Adler, Leopold, 263
Adler, Peter Herman, 198
Advancement Program, 49,
246
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(novel; Twain), 158
Advisory Council on HistoricPreservation, 53

280 n e a : a h i s t o r yadvisory panels
choice of panelists, 64
cronyism, accusations of, 81,
104establishment of, 28–29
under Hanks, 41–42
Hodsoll’s review of, 76
Independent Commission toreview awards of, 94, 104–8
Ivey on, 129
literary grants, 187, 190
obscenity clause, withdrawalof panelists due to, 97
AEP (Arts Education Partnership), 122
AFI (American Film Institute),
16, 23, 24, 66, 83, 197, 204,
207
AFI Catalogue of American
Feature Film, 24, 204
Afterimage (journal), 217
AGNI (publisher), 191
Aguabella, Francisco, 271
Ah,Wilderness! (play; O’Neill),
244
Aida (opera; Verdi), 222
Ailey, Alvin, 19, 22, 40, 46, 49,
155, 174, 179, 200
Akhnaten (opera; Glass), 231
Akiyoshi, Toshiko, 265
Alabama Shakespeare Festival,
162, 251
Albanese, Licia, 262
Albee, Edward, 159, 190, 261
Albert, Margo, 255
Albertina, 220
Alexander, Jane, 111–24, 254
controversies over NEA
awards, response to, 112–14
funding cuts, reforms, andthreats of elimination, 112,
116–23in The Great White Hope, 25,
26, 111–12
Ivey building on reforms of,129
legacy of, 112, 123–24
NEA/TCG Theater Residency
Program for Playwrights,
251
photographs of, 26, 110, 113,
117, 133
positive achievements during
chairmanship of, 114,
118–19, 120–21, 122role of arts in American life,
public discussion of, 115–16
as spokesperson for NEA andpublic support for the arts,
112, 124
at 35th anniversary forum,
132, 133
WritersCorp, 192
Alice James Books, 191
Alindato, Juan, 273
Alive from Off Center (television),
179
Alive TV (television), 179
Alley Theatre, Houston, TX,
242, 248
Almeida, Santiago, 271
Alter, Rosalyn, 279
Alvin Ailey American Dance
Theater and Foundation,
49, 155, 178, 260
Alvin Ailey: Memories andVisions (television), 46, 179
Amahl and the Night Visitors(opera; Menotti), 198
Ambegaokar, Anjani, 268
American Academy of Arts andLetters, 21
American Architectural
Foundation, 80

American Association ofMuseums, 137
American Ballet Theatre, 19,
20, 40, 47, 173, 174, 201
American Ballet Theatre: A Close
Up in Time (television), 46
American Book Award, 147
American Canvas project,
120–21, 121
American Choral Foundation,
21, 226–27
American Chronicles: The Art ofNorman Rockwell (exhibit),219
American Cinema (television),
118
American Composers Forum,
129
American Conservatory
Theater, San Francisco,45–46, 242, 244
American Dance Festival, 172,
175
American Family Association,
91
American Federation of Musicians, 6, 17
American Film Institute (AFI),
16, 23, 24, 66, 83, 197, 204,
207
American Folk Art Museum,
155
American Heritage Center and
Art Museum, University of
Wyoming at Laramie, 114
American Jazz Master
Fellowship (now NEA Jazz
Masters). See NEA Jazz
Masters
American Literary Anthology, 35
American Masterpieces, 40,
96, 154, 154–55, 155, 181, 182,
208, 219, 236
American Masters (television),
83, 201, 201–2
American Music Center, 27
American National Theater andAcademy, 17
American Public Media, 199,
202
American Routes (radio), 202
American Symphony Orchestra
League (now League ofAmerican Orchestras), 27,
226, 228, 230

American University, Katzen
Arts Center, 163“America’s Creative Legacy: An
NEA Forum at Harvard,”
132–33
AmeriCorps, 192
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX, 20
Anaya, Rudolfo, 143, 143, 260
The Ancient Americas: Art From
Sacred Landscapes (exhibit),220
Anderson, Don, 277
Anderson, Laurie, 210
Anderson, Marian, 225, 255,
264
Anderson, Walter F., 233, 278
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
138, 180, 260
Andrews, Benny, 279
Andrews, Jessica, 279
Andrews, Richard, 279
Andrews Sisters, 178
Angelou, Maya, 260
Anna in the Tropics (play; Cruz),
252
Annenberg, Walter andLeonore, 262
anthologies published by NEA,
35, 153, 159, 194–95
Apollo (ballet), 180
Appalachian Regional Commission, 143–44
Appalachian Spring (dance;
Graham), 200, 200
Appalshop, 49
Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine,
43
Apsara Dancers, 270
Aquila Theater Company, 151,
251
architecture, planning, anddesignDesign Arts/Visual Arts
Collaborations, 215
directors of design program,list of, 277
first NEA grants for, 19–20,
22
Governors’ Institute on
Community Design, 80
under Hanks, 41
Mayor’s Institute on City
Design, 80

archives. See preservation anddocumentation
Archuleta, Eppie, 274
Ardoin, Alphonse “Bois Sec,”
273
Ardolino, Emile, 47
Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.,
35, 112, 242
Arey, June, 174, 277
Arizona Repertory Theatre, 21
armed forces. See military
installations, programs forArmey, Dick, 79–81
Armstrong, Howard, 272
Armstrong, Louis, 10, 72
Arneson, Robert, 210
Arnold, Eddy, 260
Arntzen, Eldrid Skjold, 267
Arrasmith, Anne, 213
Arriada, Jesus, 268
Arroyo, Martina, 255“Art-21: Art Reaches into theTwenty-first Century”(conference), 115
The Art Critic (painting; Rockwell), 131
Art in America, 37
Art in Architecture Program, 91
Art in Public Places Program,
42, 99–101, 100, 214–16, 215
Art Institute of Chicago, 220
Art Papers (journal), 216
Arte Público Press, 49, 191
artist residency programs
Chamber Music Rural Residencies, 114, 236
Composer in Residence
Program, 229
dance companies, Coordinated Residency Touring
Program for, 174–75
literature grants, 65, 192
Meet the Composer Orchestra
Residencies Program, 229
NEA/TCG Theater Residency
Program for Playwrights,
251
New Orchestra Residencies
Program, 229
Residencies for Writers Program, 65
United States/Canada/Mexico
Creative Artists’ Residencies,
114

i n d e x 281

Virginia artist residency initiative, 96
visual arts grants, 99, 211–12
Artistic Advancement/Ongoing
Ensembles program, 249
artistic freedom, issues of. Seecontroversial NEA awards
Artists-in-Schools Program, 36,
40, 41
Artists Repertory Theatre, 251
Artists Space, 98, 212
ARTLIES - The Texas Art Journal, 216
Arts and Artifacts Indemnity
Act (1975), 44, 164, 220–21
Arts and Humanities Act(1965), 18
Arts Councils of America (ACA;
later Associated Councils of
the Arts), 17, 31
arts education
AEP, 122
American Masterpieces, 154
Artists-in-Schools Program,
36, 40, 41
audience development indance, 179
Clinton reforms and, 115
in dance, 173, 179
directors, list of, 277
filmmaker training, 114,
205–6
first NEA grants for, 19, 20,
23–25
under Hanks, 40–41
Laboratory Theater Project,
25, 244
literature, 192
National Standards for Education in the Arts, 85, 115
NEA Jazz in the Schools, 73,
154, 235
Poets in the Schools Program,
19, 41, 192
Professional Theater Training
program, 246, 250
under Reagan administration, 84–85
state arts education, block
grants for, 121–23
Arts Education Partnership(AEP), 122Arts in America reports (NEA),
85, 102–4

282 n e a : a h i s t o r yArts in Crisis (nonfiction;
Zeigler), 36, 38, 97–98
Arts in Rural Towns (Idaho), 96
Arts Midwest, 150, 157, 195
Arts on Radio and Television(formerly Programming in
the Arts or PITA), 46–47,
176, 199, 202
ArtsLink, 114
ArtsREACH, 130
Artrain USA, 39–40, 39
Ashbery, John, 76
Ashbrook, John M., 27
Ashcroft, John, 123Ashley, Elizabeth, 16, 255
Asia Society of New York, 217
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 220
Associated Councils of the Arts
(ACA; formerly Arts Councils of America), 17, 31
Associated Writing Programs(AWP; now Association ofWriters and Writing Programs), 193
Association of American Dance
Companies (nowDance/USA), 23, 104, 174,
181–82
Association of Performing Arts
Presenters, 85
Association of Writers andWriting Programs, formerly
Associated Writing Programs (AWP), 193
Astor, Brooke (Mrs. Vincent),
263
AT&T, 262
Auchincloss, Louis, 259
audience development
in dance, 179
in film, 206–7
in literature, 190, 192, 195
in museums, 217–18
in music, 227
August: Osage County (play;
Letts), 251, 252
Augustin, Frisner, 269
Auster, Paul, 65
Austin City Limits (television),
260
AVA-7 (Awards in the VisualArts) Exhibition, 89, 91
Avery, Milton, 34

Avilés, Celestino, 269
Award of Merit Medal in Painting, American Academy ofArts and Letters, 21Awards in the Visual Arts (AVA7) Exhibition, 89, 91
AWP (Associated Writing
Programs, now Associationof Writers and Writing
Programs), 193
Axtell, Horace P., 267
Ayala, Pedro, 273

B
Babb, Edward, 270
Bach Society of Minnetonka,
MN, 40Baden, Laurence, 160
Bailey, William, 255
Baker, Ann Meier, 237
Baker, David, 50, 255, 265
Baker, Etta, 272
Baker, James A., III, 69
Baker, Kenny, 271
Baker, Phil, 96
Balanchine, George, 46, 131,
172, 179, 180, 200
Baldwin, Alec, 121
Balfa, Dewey, 275
Ball, William, 242
The Ballad of Baby Doe (opera),47, 201
Ballenger, Cass, 144, 259
Ballet, Arthur, 249, 279
Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo,
172
Ballet West, 40, 178
Ballinger, James, 255
Barber, Samuel, 61
Barker, Danny, 73, 266
Barker, Mildred, 274
Barnes, Anne Marie, 82
Barnes, Clive, 19
Barnett, James, 255
Barretto, Ray, 265
Barthé, Earl, 267
Barthelme, Donald, 29
Bartlett, Jennifer, 210
Bartlett, Steve, 81
Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 200, 260
Bashell, Louis, 273
Basic State Grants, 39
Basie, Count, 73, 266
Bassett, Florence Knoll, 260

Bassett, Leslie, 229
Bates, David, 99
Bausch, Richard, 195
Bearden, Romare, 74, 75, 263
the Beatles, 223
Beaton, Douglas, 227
Because of Winn-Dixie (film),
205
Becker, Cliff, 194, 278
Belafonte, Harry, 262
Bell, Richard, 45
The Bell Telephone Hour (television), 198
Bella Lewitzky, 261
Bella Lewitzky Dance Foundation, 97
Bellamy, Joe David, 278
Bellow, Saul, 75, 263
Bellson, Louie, 265
Belluschi, Pietro, 263
Belton, Kepka, 273
Bengston, Billy Al, 21
Bennett, Earnest, 273
Bennett, Robert, 259
Bennett, Tony, 73, 235, 265
Benson, George, 265
Benson, Mozell, 269
Benson, Nicholas, 267
Benton Foundation, 121
Benton, Thomas Hart, 2, 52
Berenson, Ruth, 76
Bergey, Barry, 278
Bergin, Thomas, 255
Berks, Robert, 255
Berman, Wallace, 21
Berney, Phyllis P, 255
Bernstein, Leonard, 16, 16, 97,
198, 200, 223, 225, 255
Berry, Leon “Chu,” 72Berryman, John, 76, 186
Berryman, Mina, 277
Bess Lomax Hawes Award, 59
Bessie, Simon Michael, 35
Beyond Glory (play; Lang), 152
Biaggi, Mario, 79
Bicentennial Commissioning
Grants, 228–29
Biddle, Livingston L., Jr., 55–67,
254
Challenge Grants, 44–46
dance under, 64
defense of Arts Endowment
to Reagan administration,
70

Folk Arts Program andNational Heritage Fellowships, 57–60
at Hodsoll’s swearing-in, 71
legacy of, 67
literature under, 65
media arts under, 65–66
music under, 60–62, 233
philosophy of, 55–57, 62–63
photographs of, 54, 133regional representatives,
66–67
structure of NEA, revision of,
63–66
at 35th anniversary forum,
132, 133
visual arts under, 66
The Big Read, 156–60, 158, 159,
164, 195
Big Self-Portrait (photograph;
Close), 210
Big Sky Press, 81
Bikel, Theodore, 56, 106, 255
Birdwell, Edward, 278
Bishop, Elizabeth, 147
Black, Baxter, 77Black Culture on Tour in America,
114
Black Hawk Down (novel;
Bowden), 152
Black Maria Film and Video
Festival, 206, 207
Black, Mary Holiday, 270
Blackdeer, Lila Greengrass, 269
Blake, George, 272
Blake, William, 238
Blakey, Art, 266
Blazonczyk, Eddie, 270
Bliss, Anthony A., 16, 17, 255
Bliss, Sally Brayley, 255
Blizard, Ralph, 268
Block, Richard, 242
Bloom, Harold, 150
Blount, Herman “Sonny” (SunRa), 72, 266
Blunk, Rebecca, 182
BOA Editions, 191
The Boeing Company, 152, 157,
231
Bogan, Louise, 76
Bolcom, William, 60, 237–38,
238, 259
The Bolero (film), 46
Bolt, Gigi, 251, 278, 279

Bommelyn, Loren, 268
Bonanza (television), 198
Bond Street Theatre, 114
Boston College, McMullen
Museum of Art, 221
Boston Opera Company, 226
Boston Symphony Orchestra,
21, 40, 227, 229
Bourgeois, Louise, 261
Bow, Frank, 28
Bowden, Mark, 152
Bowers, Faubion, 21
Bowles, Paul, 76
Bowmer, Angus, 255
Boyd, Willard, 255
Boyle, T. C., 65
Boys Choir of Harlem, 262
Bradbury, Ray, 157, 159, 159,
260
Brademas, John, 44, 104, 105,
162
Bradford, Gigi, 189, 278
Brandywine River School
artists, WPA mural by, 2
Brenson, Michael, 37
Breton, André, 37
Bridges, Lawrence, 153, 159,
195, 276
Bridgewater, Dee Dee, 202
Brinkley, David, 17, 255
Britten, Benjamin, 226
Broadway Theater Archive, 137
Brock, Nina, 255
Brockway, Merrill, 46, 200
Broken Blossoms (film), 24, 204
Brooklyn Museum, 218
Brookmeyer, Bob, 265
Brooks, Cleanth, 82
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 186, 262
Brown, Charles, 270
Brown, Chuck, 267
Brown, Cleo Patra, 266
Brown, Denise Scott, 262
Brown, J. Carter, 263
Brown, Jerry, 271
Brown, Joan Myers, 103
Brown, Ray, 72, 265
Brown, Richard F., 255
Brown, Trisha, 40, 155, 180, 255,
260
Brown, Wayne S., 223, 279
Brubeck, Dave, 73, 235, 262,
265
Brunelle, Philip, 255

i n d e x 283

Brustein, Robert, 106, 245
Buchanan, John E., 164
Buchanan, Patrick, 92, 108
budget for NEA. See funding for
NEA
Bun, Em, 272
Burger, Warren E., 71
Burke, Kevin, 268
Burrell, Kenny, 265
Burton, Scott, 210
Bush-Brown, Albert, 17, 255
Bush, George H. W., 90, 92,
94–95, 95, 111Bush, George W., 106, 134, 135,
138, 139, 143, 145, 147,
162–63, 255
Bush, Laura, 135, 143, 143, 150,
154, 157–58, 162
Business Committee for theArts, 17
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid (film), 205
Buying Time (ed. Walker), 75–76
Byrd, Donald, 233, 265

C
Caesar, Bruce, 270
Caesar, Shirley, 269
Cage, John, 229
Calder, Alexander, 23, 42, 137,
214
Caldwell, Sarah, 261
Calhoun, Dale, 270
Calhoun, Walker, 271
Calla Lily (photograph;
Mapplethorpe), 93
Callahan, Harry, 210, 261
Callaloo (publisher), 191
Calloway, Cabel “Cab,” 262
Camera Three (television), 198
Camerawork: A Journal of
Photographic Arts, 216
Camero, Candido, 265
Cameron, Ben, 279
Campana, Dino, 26
Campaneria, Miguel, 255
Campbell, Charles “Chuck” T.,
268
Campos, Alfredo, 269
Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on
Poetry and American Culture(Gioia), 147
Cannon, Hal, 77
Cannon, Robert, 278

284 n e a : a h i s t o r y

Cano, Natividad, 272
Cantor, B. Gerald and Iris, 262
Cantor Fitzgerald, 137
Capra, Frank, 24, 75, 264
Card, Andrew, 99
Carrillo, Charles M., 267
Carmen (opera), 223
Carnegie Hall, NYC, 27, 223
Carnegie-Mellon University Art
Gallery, 89
Carroll, Andrew, 152, 195
Carroll, Liz, 271
Carruth, Hayden, 26, 186
Carter, Benny, 260, 266
Carter, Betty, 261, 265
Carter, Elliott, Jr., 74, 227, 229,
264
Carter G.Woodson Foundation,
114
Carter, Janette, 267
Carter, Jimmy, 52, 53, 55, 57
Carter, Ron, 265
Carver, Raymond, 76
Casals, Pablo, 4, 5, 9
Cash, Johnny, 143, 260
Castellanoz, Genoveva, 273
Castle of Chillon (painting;
Courbet), 101
Castro, Fidel, 92
Catalon, Inez, 271
Cather, Willa, 158
Catholic University of America
Speech and Drama Department, 17
Cauthen, Henry J., 255
CCLM (Coordinating Councilof Literary Magazines),
now Council of Literary
Magazines and Presses(CLMP), 25, 65, 191
ceiling on grants, removal of,62
censorship issues. See controversial NEA awards
Census Bureau, 101, 116, 177
Center for Contemporary
Music, Mills College, 60Center Opera Company of theWalker Arts Center, 230
Center Stage of Baltimore, 247
Central City Opera, Denver,
CO, 40
Cepeda, Rafael, 274
Cephas, John, 272

Cezanne (exhibit), 217
Chairman’s Medal, 276
Challenge America, 130, 134,
163, 165
Challenge Grants Program,
44–46, 103, 114, 178, 209,
246
Chamber Music America, 236
Chamber Music Rural Residencies, 114, 235
Champ, Norman B., Jr., 255
Chan Is Missing (film), 205
Chandler, Dorothy Buffum, 75,
264
Chandler, Susan T., 276
Changing the Beat: A Study of theWorklife of Jazz Musicians(NEA), 234–35
Chanthraphone, Bounxou, 269
Chaplin, Charlie, 83, 196, 204
Chapman, Aida, 72
Charisse, Cyd, 259
Charles, Nicholas and Elena,
271
Charles, Ray, 262
Charley’s Aunt (play; Thomas),244
Charlin Jazz Society, 73
Chase, Lucia, 19
Chase, Shana, 164
Chatfield-Taylor, Adele, 80, 277
Chavis, Wilson “Boozoo,” 269
Chekhov, Anton, 25, 244
Chenier, Clifton, 58, 274
Chevron (USA), 72
Chiara Quartet, 236
Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
40, 202, 229
Chiesa, Walter Murray, 267
Chihuly, Dale, 210
Chin, Mel, 108
choral music, 61, 225–27,
236–37. See also music
Choreographer Fellowships,
174, 175, 182
choreography. See dance
Chorus America, 237
Christenson, Betty Pisio, 270
Christian, Jodie, 202
Chu, David, 277
Churchill, Delores Elizabeth,
267
Cincinnati Playhouse in thePark, 247, 248

cinema. See film
Circle in the Square, NYC, 248
Cisneros, Henry, 115
Cisneros, Sandra, 187
City Center Art, 213
Clancy, Tom, 152
Clarence Fountain and theBlind Boys, 271
Clark, Gladys, 270
Clark, Joseph, 7
Clarke, Kenneth, 72, 266
Clayton, Buck, 73, 266
Cleary, Beverly, 260
Cleo Parker Robinson Dance
Company, Denver, CO, 103
Cleveland Foundation, 264
Cleveland Museum of Art, 220
Cleveland Orchestra, 229
Cleveland Play House, 21, 247
Cliburn, Van, 47, 201, 223, 255
Clifton, Lucille, 76
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 118,
119, 191
Clinton, William Jefferson, 111,
114–16, 123, 127, 128, 191
CLMP (Council of Literary
Magazines and Presses),
formerly Coordinating
Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM), 25, 65, 191
The Clocktower/P.S. 1, NYC,
212
Close, Chuck, 210, 210, 261
Coates, Joseph, 50–51
Cobb, Jimmy, 265
Coen brothers, 58
Coen, Jack, 272
Cogman, Don V., 255, 255, 276
Coleman, Norm, 157
Coleman, Ornette, 266
Coles, Charles “Honi,” 263
Collins, Susan M., 259
Coltrane, John, 72, 223
Come Dance with Me (album;
Sinatra), 223
Comédie-Française, Paris, 15
The Comedy of Errors (play;
Shakespeare), 78
Command Performance (nonfiction; Alexander), 112
Community Foundation Initiative, 49Company B (ballet), 178
composers. See also music

American Composers Forum,
129
Composer Assistance
Program, 20, 27
Composer in Residence
Program, 229
Composer/Librettist
Program, 60
Meet the Composer Orchestra
Residencies Program, 229
Conde, Sidiki, 267
A Confederacy of Dunces (novel;
Toole), 65, 191
Congress and the NEA
Alexander’s confirmation
hearings, 112–13
annual hearings and reports,
63–64
Arts and Artifacts Indemnity
Act (1975), 44
The Big Read, participation ofCongressional members in,157
budget cuts, reforms, andthreats of elimination under
Clinton administration,
116–23
continued criticism and antiNEA legislation, 148on controversial NEA awards.
See controversial NEA
awardsestablishment of NEA, debate
and passage of legislation
for, 13–15
first Congressional review
and debate of NEA activities,
27–28
funding. See funding for NEA
Gioia’s programs revitalizing
support of, 151, 157, 160–62,
165–66
grants workshops, 142
Hanks, under, 35–36
literature awards, 187, 189
NCA, ex officio members of,259
Congressional Arts Caucus, 141
Connecticut College American
Dance Festival, 20
Conover, Willis, 233
Conroy, Frank, 278
conservation. See preservationand documentation

The Conservation of Culture:
Folklorists and the Public
Sector (Feintuch), 57
Contemporary Art Center ofVirginia, 220Contemporary Arts Center,
New Orleans, 212Contemporary Music Performance Program, 60
Continental Harmony, 129–30
Contract with America, 116
controversial NEA awards,
89–108Alexander’s response to,112–14
artists and art administrators,
conflicts with, 97–98
continued sensitivity regarding, 148, 149
first Congressional review
and debate over, 27–28
first NEA grants, 21, 22
Hanks, under, 34–36, 39
Independent Commission toreview, 94, 104–8
Mapplethorpe and Serrano
controversies, 89–94, 90,
93, 95“the NEA four,” 98–99, 104,
108, 113–14, 250
obscenity clause, 93–94, 97,
107, 113–14, 128
Presidential campaign of1992, involvement in, 108
publicly funded art, standards
for, 104–5
in Reagan years, 79–82
Serra’s Tilted Arc, 90, 91
traditional art, concerns aboutlack of NEA support for, 27,
34
Conversations About the Dance(television), 176
Coogan, Jackie, 196, 204
Cook, Bertha, 274
Cooper, John Sherman, 7
Coordinated Residency Touring
Program for dance companies, 174–75
Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM),
now Council of Literary
Magazines and Presses(CLMP), 25, 65, 191

i n d e x 285

Copland, Aaron, 29, 75, 83,
200, 264
Copper Canyon Press, 191
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 90, 93
Cordero, Helen, 273
Corea, Chick, 265
Cormier, Joseph, 274
Corn, Edward, 279
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), 116, 198, 200
Cortege of Eagles (dance;
Graham), 22
Costa, Mary D., 225, 255, 256,
276
Cotten, Elizabeth, 274
Council of Chief State School
Officers, 122
Council of Fashion Designersof America, 17
Council of Literary Magazines
and Presses (CLMP), formerly Coordinating Councilof Literary Magazines(CCLM), 25, 65, 191
Country Music Foundation andHall of Fame, Nashville, 52,
127
Courbet, Gustave, 101
Cowboy Poetry, 77
Cowen, Tyler, 121
Cox, Maurice, 277
Coyote, Peter, 248
CPB (Corporation for Public
Broadcasting), 116, 198, 200
Craig, Burlon, 274
Crane, Phil, 117, 121–23
Creative Coalition, 121Cree, Rose and Francis, 268
Critical Evidence: How the Arts
Benefit Student Achievement(AEP), 122
Critical Links: Learning in theArts and Student Academic
and Social
Development (AEP), 122criticism and journalism, 175,
190–91cronyism, accusations of, 81,
104
Cronyn, Hume, 263
Crosby, John O., 263
The Crossing of the Delaware(painting; Sully), 131

286 n e a : a h i s t o r y

Cruz, Celia, 262
Cruz, Nilo, 252
Cry (dance; Ailey), 200
Cultural Bill of Rights, 133
culture wars. See controversial
NEA awards
Cunningham, Merce, 19, 22,
29, 29, 172, 174, 180, 263
Cunningham, Randy “Duke,”
117
Cunningham, Sarah Bainter,
277
Curbstone Press, 191
Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, 101
Curtin, Phyllis, 256
Curutchet, Johnny, 268

D
D. C. Preservation League(formerly Don’t Tear It
Down), 43
da Vinci, Leonardo, 6
Dahlin, Paul, 270
Dallas Black Dance Theatre, 103
Dallas Theatre Center, 247
Dalrymple, Jean, 256
D’Amato, Alfonse, 92, 93, 117d’Amboise, Jacques, 261
dance, 171–83. See also individual companies and dancers
arts education in, 173, 179
audience development, 179
under Biddle, 64
Challenge Grants Program,
178
early NEA support for, 19, 20,
21, 23, 172–75
Expansion Arts Program,
178–79Folk Arts Program, 178
under Hanks, 40–41
historical development ofconcert dance in U.S., 170,
171–72
impact of NEA on, 182–83
journalism and criticism, 175
media arts and, 175–76, 179
orphan dance/choreography,
181
partnerships, 181–82
preservation and documentation, 131, 175, 179–81
under Reagan administration,
83–84

research on, 104, 114, 176–77
Save America’s Treasures program, 131, 181
touring programs, 40–41,
174–75Dance Heritage Coalition, 181
Dance in America (television),
46–47, 176, 179, 200
Dance Theater of Harlem, 143
Dance Touring Program,
40–41, 174–75
Dance/USA (formerly Association of American Dance
Companies), 23, 104, 174,
181–82Dance/Video Program, 175
Dancemakers (NEA report), 104,
114, 176–77
Dancing (television), 179
Danish Royal Ballet, 15
Darbone, Luderin, 268
Darling, Ann Francis, 279
Davenport, Clyde, 271
Davidson, Gordon, 242, 245,
256, 276
Davidson, Patrick, 256
Davis, Hal C., 256
Davis, Miles, 235, 266
Davis, Ossie, 262
Daybreak Star Indian Cultural
Center, WA, 49
Dayton Contemporary Dance
Company of Ohio, 103
Dayton Hudson
Corporation/Foundation,
264
Dayton, Kenneth, 256
de Cristoforo, Violet, 267
de Havilland, Olivia, 259
de Icaza, Carlos, 276
de Kooning, Willem, 75, 264
De La Rosa, Antonio, 270
de Menil, Dominique, 264
de Mille, Agnes, 16, 75, 176,
179, 181, 243, 256, 264
de Montebello, Philippe, 260
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 171
Deacon, Belle, 271
Deasy, Richard, J., 122, 276
Death of a Salesman (play;
Miller), 83
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (novel;
Tolstoy), 159
DeCarava, Roy, 259

decency issues. See controversial NEA awards
DeConcini, Dennis, 92
Dee, Ruby, 262
Defender Wilson, Mary Louise,
269
Defense Department, 150, 152,
251
DeFranco, Buddy, 265
DeFranco, Giuseppe andRaffaela, 272
del Tredici, David, 229
DeLay, Dorothy, 262
DeLay, Tom, 79, 81
Dello Joio, Norman, 229
Dempsey, David, 38–39
Densmore, Amber, 273
Denver Symphony Orchestra,
20
Department of Defense, 150,
152, 251
Department of Education, 85,
122, 244
DePreist, James, 259
Derrane, Joe, 268
design. See architecture,planning, and design
Design Arts/Visual Arts
Collaborations, 215
Designer Fellowships (theater),
249
Detroit Institute of Arts, 20, 101
development directors fordance companies, 175
Developmental Theater, New
Playwrights, New Forms
program, 249
DeWine, Mike, 259
DeWitt, Katharine Cramer, 256,
276
d’Harnoncourt, René, 17, 256
di Suvero, Mark, 22, 210
Diamond, David, 262
Diamond, Irene, 261
Dickens, Hazel, 269
Dickey, Ed, 279
Dickey, James, 187
Dickinson, J. C. , Jr., 256
Dicks, Norm, 46
Diebenkorn, Richard, 17, 256,
263
Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution(exhibit), 220
Dillon, C. Douglas, 17, 256

Director Fellowships, 249
disabled arts patrons, Office ofAccessAbility serving,
134–35
Discovery Awards, 187
Distinguished Service Awards,
187
DiverseWorks, Houston, 212
The Dixie Hummingbirds, 269
Dlaikan, Nadim, 268
Doctorow, E. L., 189
documentation. See preservation and documentation
Dodd, Christopher, 117
Doffoney, Ned, 158
Domingo, Plácido, 165, 223
Domino, Antoine “Fats,” 261
Domsch, Sonia, 273
Donegan, Dorothy, 265
Donenberg, Ben, 256
Donizetti, Gaetano, 223
Donnelly, Peter, 51, 248
Don’t Tear It Down (now D. C.
Preservation League), 43
Doolittle, John T., 259
Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, 154, 234
dos Santos, João Oliveira, 269
Doucet, Michael, 59, 268
Douglas, Jerry, 268
Douglas, Kirk, 44, 260
Dove, Rita, 191
Dowley, Jennifer, 278, 279
D’Rivera, Paquito, 260, 265
Druckman, Jacob, 229
Drury, Allen, 256
Duchamp, Marcel, 37
The Duchess of Malfi (play;
Webster), 140
Duhon, Edwin, 268
Duke University, 99, 175
Duncan, Isadora, 172
Duncan, Robert, 26, 76, 186
Dunham, Katherine, 172, 263
Dunn, Stephen, 48
Durbin, Richard, 259
Durham, Mario Garcia, 278
Dutton, Charles S., 240
Duvall, Robert, 160, 260
Dylan, Bob, 202

E
Eakins, Thomas, 83
Eames, Charles, 256

Earle, Linda, 212
Earplay (radio), 202
Eastwood, Clint, 256
economic impact of art oncommunities, conference
on, 143–44
economics of working artists in
U.S., 103–4, 177, 234–35
The Ed Sullivan Show (television), 198, 223
Edbrooke, W. J., 43
Edison, Harry “Sweets,” 265
Education, Department of, 36,
85, 122, 244
educational programs. See arts
education
Edwards, David “Honeyboy,”268
Eells, William, 256
Egipciaco, Rosa Elena, 268
Ehlers, Vern, 123
80 Langton Street/New Langton
Arts, San Francisco, 212
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 5, 8, 17,31
Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 263
El Paso, TX, Orchestra of, 40
Eldridge, Roy, 72, 266
elimination of NEA, threats ofliterary world’s resistance to,189
under Reagan administration, 69–71
Republicans under Clinton
administration, 116–23
Eliot, T. S., 190
Elkin, Stanley, 41
Ellington, Duke, 225, 233, 256
Elliott, Ramblin’ Jack, 261
Ellison, Ralph, 16, 74, 184, 186,
256, 264
Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue
(exhibit), 217
Elssler, Fanny, 170, 171–72
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 171
Emmeline (opera; Picker/
McClatchey), 231
Emmies, 75, 112, 153
Engle, Paul, 16, 186, 256
English, literature awards fortexts not in, 188
Enloe, Lyman, 270
Epstein Brothers, 270
Epstein, Joseph, 256

i n d e x 287

Equitable Foundation, 89
Erdrich, Louise, 76
Esplanade (dance; Taylor), 200
Esquith, Rafe, 260
Eugene O’Neill Memorial
Theatre Center, Waterford,
CT, 245
Eugenides, Jeffrey, 188
Evans, Gil, 266
Evans, Rowland, 98–99
Evans, Terry, 256
Evans, Walker, 2Evergood, Philip, 34
Expansion Arts Program,
48–50, 96, 178–79, 245, 277
Experimental Playwrights’
Theater, 25, 244
Exploring Music (radio), 203
Exxon Corporation, 200, 229,
264
Ezell, Nora, 271

F
Fahlbusch, Albert, 274
Fahrenheit 451 (novel; Bradbury),
157, 159
The Fairfield Four, 272
Falletta, JoAnn, 256
Fancy Free (dance; Robbins),
200
Fang, Qi Shu, 269
Fantasia (film), 224
Farber, Leonard L., 256
Farm Security Administration,
1
Farmer, Art, 265
Farrell, Suzanne, 260
Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control(film), 205
Faubion, Michael, 118
Favorite Poem Project, 191
Fear of Flying (novel; Jong),
35–36, 187–88
Federal Arts and Artifacts
Indemnity Program, 44,
164, 220–21
Federal Arts Project, 1Federal Council on the Arts andthe Humanities, 41, 44, 220Federal Design Improvement
Program, 41
Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency, 138

288 n e a : a h i s t o r yFederal Hall National Memorial,
138
Federal Theatre Project (FTP),
241
Federal Writers’ Project, 1
Feintuch, Burt, 57
Feldman, Ronald, 256
fellowships of NEA
Choreographer Fellowships,
174, 175, 182
Museum Professional Fellowships, 219
Music Fellowships, 237–38
National Heritage Fellowships, 57–60, 99, 118, 119,
178, 267–75
NEA Jazz Masters (formerly
American Jazz Master Fellowship). See NEA Jazz
Masters
NEA Literature Fellowships
Program, 185–89
theater fellowships, 245–46,
249
Translation Fellowships,
188–89, 194
Visual Arts Fellowships, 100
Feminist Press, 191
Ferrer, José, 74, 264
Festival Latino, 97
Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto,
Italy, 22, 61
Fichandler, Zelda, 242, 245, 261
film, 204–7. See also specificfilms, film festivals, andartists
AFI, 16, 23, 24, 66, 83, 204,
207
exhibition of, 206–7
independent film production,
205
preservation, 24, 204
training for filmmakers, 114,
205–6
Film Forum, NYC, 207
Film Society of Lincoln Center,
207
Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, 164
Finley, Karen, 98–99, 108, 113,
250
Fisher, J. W., 264
Fisk University Jubilee Singers,
259

Fitzgerald, Ella, 73, 263, 266
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 157
Fitzgerald, Robert, 147
Flanagan, Hallie, 241, 253
Flanagan, Tommy, 265
Flatley, Michael, 273
Flavin, Dan, 22, 210, 215
Fleck, John, 98, 113, 250
Fleming, Renée, 200
Floyd, Carlisle, 60–62, 62, 164,
233, 260, 266
Fogel, Henry, 230
folk and traditional arts, 57–60
American Folk Art Museum,
155
The Conservation of Culture:
Folklorists and the Public
Sector (Feintuch), 57
dance, 178
directors, list of, 277
National Heritage Fellowships,
57–60, 99, 118, 119, 178,
267–75Western Folklife Center, 77
Fondo de Cultura Económica,
Mexico, 159
Fontana, D. J., 201
Fontenot, Canray, 273
A Fool and His Money (film), 24
Foote, Horton, 261
Ford Foundation, 24, 199, 204,
224, 242, 243
Ford, Gerald R., 42, 44, 52, 214
Ford, O’Neil, 256
Ford’s Theatre Society, 259
Ford, Thomas Edison“Brownie,” 273
Fordham University, 23
Forever War (novel; Haldeman),
152
Fornes, Maria Irene, 76
Foss, Lukas, 60
Foster, Frank, 233, 265
Foster, William P., 256
Fraher, David J., 276
Francis, J. Deffett, 170
Franco, Francisco, 5Frank, Rose, 272
Frankel, Robert H., 209, 278,
279Frankenthaler, Helen, 143, 256,260
Franklin, Aretha, 261
Franklin Furnace Archive, 212

Freed, James Inigo, 262
Freedberg, Sydney J., 263
freedom, artistic, issues of. Seecontroversial NEA awards
Freeman, Roland, 267
Freudenheim, Tom, 278
Friedlander, Lee, 210
Friedman, Martin, 256, 263
Frohnmayer, John E., 111, 254
controversial NEA awards
and, 94–99, 107, 108“the NEA four” and, 98–99,
108, 113, 250
photographs of, 88, 95, 133
Space One Eleven, grant to,212
at 35th anniversary forum,
132, 133
Front Street Theater,Memphis,
TN, 247
Frost, Robert, 5, 81
Fry Street Quartet, 236
FTP (Federal Theatre Project),241
Fujima, Kansuma, 273
Fujimura, Makoto, 256, 276
Fuller, Curtis, 265
Fuller, Loïe, 172
Fuller, R. Buckminster, 22
funding for NEA
American Masterpieces, 154,
155
under Biddle, 56–57, 63, 71
Clinton administration cuts,
112, 116–23
in early years, 27, 28, 39, 40
at end of Bush (George H. W.)
administration, 111
under Gioia, 154, 155, 162–65
under Hanks, 39, 40, 51
under Ivey, 129, 134, 135
Mapplethorpe/Serrano
controversies and, 93–94
9/11, renewed commitment
after, 144
under Reagan administration, 69, 71, 75
Save America’s Treasures, 131
Fung, Hsin-Ming, 256

G
Gabriel, Mary Mitchell, 271
Gaddes, Richard, 165, 233, 266
Gaddis, William, 22, 186

García Villamil, Felipe, 269
Gardner, John, 76
Garfias, Robert, 256
Garment, Leonard, 31, 32, 33,
37–38, 104, 260
Gates, Jay, 217
Gauci, M. and P., 170
Gehry, Frank, 202, 261
Geldzahler, Henry, 21, 279
Gelernter, David H., 256
General Services Administration (GSA), 90, 91
geographic distribution of NEA
grants and programs. See
distribution of NEA grants
and programs
George Balanchine Foundation,
131
George Eastman House,
Rochester, NY, 155, 204, 208
George, Sophia, 270
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 155Georgia Review, 81
Gerdine, Leigh, 263
Gerity, Virginia B., 256
Gersten-Vassilaros, Alexandra,
245
Gibson, Mel, 150“The Gift Outright” (poem;
Frost), 5
Gilded Splendor: Treasures ofChina’s Liao Empire (exhibit),
217
Gillespie, John Birks “Dizzy,”72, 73, 200, 233, 235, 263,
266
Gilliam, Sam, 210
Gimble, Johnny, 271
Gingrich, Newt, 116, 121
Ginsberg, Allen, 76
Gioia, Dana, 147–66, 254
American Masterpieces,
154–55, 219
The Big Read, 156–59, 164,
195
budget increase, 164
Challenge America, 134, 163,
165
40th anniversary of NEA and,
162–63funding for NEA under, 154,
155, 162–65
grants workshops, 142
on indemnity program, 221

legacy of, 165–66
literature program under,
194–95
national initiatives, conceptof, 149, 165
NEA Jazz Masters initiative,
73, 153–54
NEA Opera Honors, 164–65,
165
Old Post Office renovation,
159–60Operation Homecoming,
152–53, 194–95
photographs of, 145, 149, 165,
255
Poetry Out Loud, 161
research activities under,
155–56
revitalized public support for
NEA under, 160–62,
165–66second term of, 163–64
Shakespeare in American
Communities initiative, 25,
149, 150–51, 160–62
vision for NEA, 148
Giovanni, Nikki, 187
Gish, Lilian, 24, 204
Gister, Earle, 245
Giuliani, Rudolph, 79
Glass, Philip, 231
Gleason, William, 277
Glens Falls SymphonyOrchestra, 228, 229
Glover, William, 244
Glück, Louise, 48, 76
Gnam, Adrian, 72, 278
Goberman, John, 199
Godbolt, James “Jimmy Slyde,”
178, 179, 268
Gods and Generals (Shaara), 152
Goelet, Francis, 263
Goicoechea, Martin, 268
Gold, Pat Courtney, 267
Goldberg, Arthur J., 6
Goldblatt, Howard, 189
Golden, Donny, 270
Goldovsky Opera Institute, 230
Golijov, Osvaldo, 61
Golson, Benny, 265
Goni, Jesus, 268
Gonzales, Rebecca Turner, 276
González, José, 269

i n d e x 289

Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacyof Sun Records(television), 201
Goode, Ulysses, 269
Goodling, William, 117
Goodman, Roy M., 256
Goodwin, Stephen, 278
Gordimer, Nadine, 159
Gordon, Dexter, 266
Gorton, Slade, 93, 123, 134
Gottlieb, Adolph, 34
Governors’ Institute on
Community Design, 80
Graham, Martha
Appalachian Spring, 200
Cortege of Eagles, 22
Dance in America (television),
involvement in, 47
fellowship award to, 172, 174,
179–80, 181, 256, 264
Martha Graham Dance
Company, 19, 67, 172, 174,
178, 200
as National Medal of Arts
recipient, 74, 264
as NCA member, 256
photograph of, 173
as pioneer of American
dance, 10, 172, 179–80
preservation and documentation of work, 181
Primitive Mysteries, 155
Graham, Robert, 74
Grammies, 223, 226, 237
Grand Rapids, MI, public
sculpture program, 21, 23,
42, 214, 215
La Grande Vitesse (sculpture;
Calder), 23, 42, 214
Granger, Kay, 80
Grantham, Donald, 237
grants workshops, 142
Grauer, Rhoda, 64, 179, 277
Graves, Frances Varos, 271
Graves, Michael, 261
Graves, Nancy, 210
Gray, Hannah H., 71
Gray, Henry, 267
Grcevich, Jerry, 268
Great American Voices, 231–32,
232
Great Depression, 1–2, 9, 208
The Great Gatsby (novel;
Fitzgerald), 157

290 n e a : a h i s t o r yGreat Performances (television),
179, 200“Great Society” tradition, 13
The Great White Hope (play;
Sackler), 25, 26, 111
Greater Miami Opera, 223
Greece, exchange programs
with, 194
Greene, Michael, 128
Greenspan, Alan, 32
Greenwood, Lee, 256
Grieg, Edvard, 201
Gropper, William, 34
Grossman, Barbara, 256
GSA (General Services
Administration), 90, 91
Guerrero, Eduardo “Lalo,” 261,
272
Guide to Kulchur (nonfiction;
Pound), 139
Gund, Agnes, 261
Gunsmoke (television), 198
Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis,
242–43, 246, 247
Guthrie, Tyrone, 242
Gutierrez, Jose, 272
Gutiérrez, Juan, 270
Guy, Alice, 24
Guy, Buddy, 260

H
Haberl, Rosalia, 273
Hagen, Uta, 260
Hagopian, Richard Avedis, 272
Haldeman, Joe, 152
Hale, Sandra, 256
Halkias, Periklis, 274
Hall, Adrian, 244
Hall, Donald, 256
Hall, Jim, 265
Hallmark Cards, Inc., 75, 264
The Hallmark Hall of Fame
(television), 198
Halprin, Lawrence, 256, 260
Hamilton, Chico, 153, 256, 265,
276
Hamlisch, Marvin, 256
Hammer, Armand, 264
Hammond, Michael, 136,
138–41, 139, 143, 144, 147,
254
Hampton, Lionel, 261, 259,
266
Hampton, Slide, 265

Hancock, Herbie, 265
Hancock, Walker Kirtland, 263
Handman, Barbara, 261
Handy, D. Antoinette, 72, 278
Hanes, R. Philip, Jr., 17, 29, 53,
256, 263, 276
Hankins, Charles, 271
Hanks, Nancy, 31–53, 254
ACA and, 17, 31
AccessAbility Office, 134
anniversary programs, 42–44
architecture, planning, anddesign under, 41“art for all Americans”
approach of, 36–38
Arts and Artifacts Indemnity
Act (1975), 44
arts education under, 40–41
associates of, 32–34
AVA, 89
avant-garde, support for,34–36, 39
Biddle and, 55
Challenge Grants Program,
45–46
dance under, 40–41
death of, 53
evolution and expansion of
NEA under, 38–42
Expansion Arts Program,
48–50
at Hodsoll’s swearing-in, 71
legacy of, 51–53
literature under, 41, 48
Management Task Force, 63
media arts under, 41, 46–48,
199–200
music under, 40
Old Post Office Building,
Washington, D.C. (Nancy
Hanks Center), 43, 53, 137,
159–60photos of, 30, 33, 53
regional representatives, 66
research agenda of NEA
under, 50–51
at Rockefeller Brothers Fund,15, 31, 34
second term, appointment to,42
Hanks, Tom, 150
Harbison, John, 237
Hardy, Saralyn Reece, 278, 279
Hardy, Hugh, 256

Harjo, Joy, 256
Harkin, Tom, 92
Harlan County, USA (film), 205
Harpole, Dan, 276
Harris, Barry, 266
Harris, Ed, 159
Harris, Julie, 262
Harris, Mel, 256
Hart, Frederick, 260
Hart, Kitty Carlisle, 263
Hartford, Huntingdon, 256
Hartke, Gilbert, 17, 256
Harvard Theater Collection, 181
Harwood, Dale, 267
Hass, Robert, 191
Hawaii State Foundation on
Culture and the Arts, 19
Hawes, Bess Lomax, 57, 59, 59,
262, 278
Hawkes, John, 76
Hawkins, Erick, 262
Hawpetoss, Gerald R., 271
Hayes, Helen, 243, 256, 263
Haynes, Roy, 265
Haynes, Todd, 206
Haynie, Jim, 248
Heaney, Joe, 275“Heartbreak Hotel” (song;
Presley), 223
Heath, Jimmy, 265
Heath, Percy, 265
Hecht, Anthony, 260
Heckscher, August, 6–9, 7, 36,
39
Heckscher Museum,
Huntingdon, NY, 6
Heiligenstein, Anne, 276
Helms, Jesse, 92, 92–94, 97,
98, 123
Hemingway, Ernest, 190
Henderson, Joe, 265
Henderson, LaJara, 240
Henderson, Luther, 265
Henderson, Wayne, 270
Hendricks, Jon, 265
Hengel, Christy, 272
Henry, Evalena, 269
Hensley, Bea Ellis, 270
Hentoff, Nat, 73, 160, 265
Herbert, Doug, 277
Heritage Emergency National
Task Force, 137
Heritage Foundation, 70
Hernandez, Tomas C., 279

Hero, Peter deCourcy, 256
Hess, Thomas, 22
Heston, Charlton, 70, 70–71,
75, 243, 256
Heyman, Ronnie, 256
Hicks, Ray, 274
Hicks, Stanley, 274
Higgins, Billy, 265
Higley, Brewster, 77
Hilbert, Violet, 271
Hill, Andrew, 265
Hill, Gary, 210
Hille, Jackson, 161
Hillis, Margaret, 256
Hingston, Ann Guthrie, 42,
142, 164
Hinton, Milt, 265
Hirschfeld, Al, 260
Hirshbein, Omus, 278, 279
Hispanic art and artists, NEA
concern with, 57
Hodsoll, Frank, 254
arts education, commitment
to, 84–85
Chairman’s Medal recipient,276
initial defense of NEA under
Reagan, 69–71
legacy of, 85–86
photographs of, 68, 75, 133
policies for NEA set by, 75–79,
82–83
at 35th anniversary forum,
132, 133
Hodson, Millicent, 83
Hofflund, Mark, 79, 255, 256,
276
Hofstra University, 27
Holeman, John Dee, 273
Holiday, Billie, 83
Holladay, Wilhelmina Cole, 259
Holm, Celeste, 256
Holofcener, Nicole, 206
Holt, Bob, 269
Holt, Nancy, 215
Holt, Rush, 162
Honolulu, orchestra of, 40
Hooker, John Lee, 58, 274
Ho’opi’i, Solomon and Richard,270
Hope, Bob, 262
Hopkins, Anthony, 161
Hopkins, Harry, 1
Hopper, Edward, 10

Horn, Shirley, 265
Horn, Steven, 141
Horne, Marilyn, 262
Horowitz, Harold, 50
Horowitz, Vladimir, 223, 263
House Arts Caucus, 134
The House on Mango Street(novel; Cisneros), 187
Houser, Allan, 262
Houston Ballet, 178
Houston Grand Opera, 40,
200, 231
Houston Museum of Fine Arts,
17
Houston, public sculpture
program in, 20
Howard, Ron, 260
Howard University, College ofFine Arts, 17
Hubbard, Freddie, 265
The Hudson Review, 25, 191
Huff, Richard, 278
Hughes, Holly, 98, 108, 113, 250
Humana Festival of New
American Plays, 245, 245
Humphrey, Doris, 172, 180
Humphrey, Hubert, 7, 14–15,
19, 42, 173
The Hunt for Red October (novel;
Clancy), 152
Hunt, Richard, 214, 257
Hunter, Janie, 274
Hunters Point, NY, 216
Hurston, Zora Neale, 157
Husa, Karel, 141
Hussain, Zakir, 269
Hutchison, Kay Bailey, 123
Hutchinson, Tim, 123

I
I Am My Own Wife (play;
Wright), 252
IAJE (International Associationof Jazz Educators), 73
ICA (Institute of ContemporaryArt), University of Pennsylvania, 89, 94
Idaho Shakespeare Festival(ISF), 78, 79
Illinois Arts Council, 174
Illo, John, 82
Images of American Dance (NEA
study), 180–81

i n d e x 291

In Country (novel; Mason), 152,
187, 188
In Pharaoh’s Army (novel;
Wolff), 152
indemnity program, 44, 164,
220–21
Independent Commission toreview NEA awards, 94,
104–8
independent film production,
205
Independent Lens (television),203
independent radio and television producers, 203
individual artists, grants to. See
also fellowships of NEA
beginning of, 28
elimination of, 119, 189, 205,
210–11
Insixiengmai, Khamvong, 272
Institute for Museum andLibrary Services, 53, 110, 131,
157
Institute of Alaska Native Arts,
49
Institute of Contemporary Art(ICA), University of Pennsylvania, 89, 94
Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston, 21, 90
inter-arts/presenting directors,
277
Interlochen Center for the Arts,
259
International Association of
Jazz Educators (IAJE), 73
international exchange
programs, 159, 163, 194
International Society for Music
Education Conference, 27Internet programs, 121
Interrogations at Noon (poetry;
Gioia), 147
Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 16
Ireland, James, 279
Ironers (painting; Lawrence), 34
Isay, Dave, 203
ISF (Idaho Shakespeare
Festival), 78, 79
Israelite, Joan, 257
Istomin, Eugene, 6
Istomin, Marta, 257

292 n e a : a h i s t o r y

Italian-Americans, productionof Rigoletto judged
demeaning to, 79
Italian Drawings, 1350–1800:
Master Works from theAlbertina (exhibit), 220
Ivey, Bill, 127–35, 254
broadening participation inand local appeal of NEA
programming, 129–32
Challenge America, 130, 134
at Country Music Foundation,
52, 126
Cultural Bill of Rights
proposed by, 133
funding for NEA under, 129,
134, 135
Office of AccessAbility, 134–35
photographs of, 126, 133
35th anniversary of NEA,
accomplishments laid out
on occasion of, 132–34, 133
Iyengar, Sunil, 156

J
Jabbour, Alan, 278
Jackson, John, 273
Jackson, Milt, 72, 265
Jackson, Nathan, 271
Jackson, Nettie, 269
Jackson, Wanda, 268
Jacksonville, FL, orchestra of,40, 229
Jacobs, Arthur I., 257
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival,
172, 181
Jagoda, Flory, 268
Jamal, Ahmad, 73, 265
Jamison, Judith, 257, 260
Japan, National Treasures in, 57
Japanese Community andCultural Center, CA, 49
Jarin, Kenneth M., 257
Jarmusch, Jim, 206
Jarrell, Tommy, 275
Jausoro, Jimmy, 274
Javits, Jacob, 7, 14, 15, 42
jazz, 233–35. See also music, andspecific jazz artists, groups,
and compositions
expansion of music program
to include, 36, 40, 50, 233
Legends of Jazz (television),
235

NEA Jazz in the Schools, 73,
154, 235
NEA Jazz Masters (formerly
American Jazz Master
Fellowship). See NEA Jazz
Masters
radio programs, 202
research activities at NEA on,
234–35
Jazz Sports, 234
JazzNet, 234
JazzSet (radio), 202
Jeffords, James, 117
Jenkins, Speight, 257
Jennings-Roggensack, Colleen,
257
Jeunesses Musicales (CarnegieHall youth program), 27
Jiménez, Luis, 100, 100
Jiménez, Santiago, Jr., 269
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
(play; Wilson), 240
Joffrey Ballet, 23, 40, 45, 46,
83–84, 84, 174, 176, 178
Joffrey, Robert, 46, 257
John Bassett Moore School,
Smyrna, DE, WPA muralin, 2Johnny Carson Show (television), 223
Johns, Jasper, 263
Johnson, Bob, 257
Johnson, Claude Joseph, 273
Johnson, J.J., 265
Johnson, Lady Bird, 42
Johnson, Lyndon B., 1, 9, 13, 15,
16, 18, 18, 29, 42, 162, 172,
198
Johnson, Philip, 83, 264
Johnston, Ollie, 260
Jones, Bessie, 275
Jones, Elvin, 265
Jones, George, 260
Jones, Hank, 259, 266
Jones, James Earl, 25, 26, 150,
161, 257, 262
Jones, Jonathan “Jo,” 266
Jones, Margo, 242, 249, 253
Jones, Quincy, 265
Jong, Erica, 35–36, 187–88
Jory, Jon, 242
José Limón Dance Foundation,259

journalism and criticism, 175,
190–91
journals, 190–91, 216
The Joy Luck Club (film), 205
The Joy Luck Club (novel; Tan),
158
Judd, Donald, 22, 210
The Juilliard School, 261
Justice, Donald, 48, 186

K
Kahn, Michael, 140
Kalanduyan, Danongan, 271
Kamae, Eddie, 267
Kanahele, Pualani Kanaka’ole,
271
Kanaka’ole, Nalani, 271
Kane, Raymond, 273
Kapayou, Everett, 271
Karr, Mary, 188
Kassebaum, Nancy Landon,
117–18Katzen Arts Center, American
University, 163
Kay, Ulysses, 229
KCET, 176
Keawe, Genoa, 269
Keeping Score (television), 203
Keezer, Clara Neptune, 268
Kegg, Maude, 272
Keillor, Garrison, 47, 47–48,
161, 202
Kellogg [W. K.] Foundation, 157
Kelly, Gene, 262
Kementzides, Ilias, 272
Kenin, Herman David, 17, 257
Kenmille, Agnes “Oshanee,”268
Kennedy, Caroline, 161
Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts, 8, 8–9, 13,
14, 178
Kennedy, Edward, 117
Kennedy, Jacqueline, 4, 6
Kennedy, John F., 4, 5–10, 7, 8,
13, 14, 36, 39, 139
Kennedy, Norman, 268
Kennedy, X. J., 147, 186
Kenyon Review, 25, 191
Kerr, John, 277
Kerrey, Bob, 92
Kessler, Charlotte, 257
Keys, Will, 270
Khan, Ali Akbar, 270

Khatna, Peou, 273
The Kid (film), 196, 204
Kieffer, Jarold A., 8
Kiley, Daniel Urban, 261
Kimball, Roger, 160
Kimbrell, Bettye, 267
Kimura, Yuriko, 200
King, Don, 272
King, Riley “B. B.”, 263, 272
Kingston, M. Ray, 257
Kingston, Maxine Hong, 76
Kinnell, Galway, 76
Kipen, David, 195, 278
Kirk, Andy, 73, 266
Kirov Ballet, 84
Kirstein, Lincoln, 74, 264
The Kitchen Sisters, 203
Kizer, Carolyn, 186, 278
Kleiman, Harlan, 242
Kline, Franz, 5Knight, Etheridge, 41, 76
Knight, Felicia, 113, 164, 276
Knox, Seymour H., 264
Koch, Kenneth, 187
Konitz, Lee, 32, 265
Kooser, Ted, 48, 48
Kopple, Barbara, 205
Kosovo, production of Romeoand Juliet for, 114
Kraft Theatre (television), 197
Krainik, Ardis, 257
Krakora, Joseph, 277
Kramer, Hilton, 22
Kreeger, David Lloyd, 263
Kriegsman, Sali Ann, 180, 277
Kuinova, Fatima, 271
Kumin, Maxine, 22, 26, 186
Kunin, Madeleine, 111
Kunitz, Stanley, 76, 262
Kunzel, Erich, 259
Kuralt, Charles, 40
Kvalheim, Ethel, 272
Kyvelos, Peter, 269

L
La Farge, John, 101
La Jolla Playhouse, CA, 252
La MaMa Experimental Theatre
Club, NYC, 242
La Volière (ballet), 170
Laboratory Theatre Project, 25,
244
Lacy, Susan, 201
Lacy, William, 43, 277

Laderman, Ezra, 60, 233, 278
Lahr, John, 245
Lambert, Eleanor, 17, 257
Lang, Stephen, 152
Lange, Dorothea, 2, 208
80 Langton Street/New Langton
Arts, San Francisco, 212
Lansbury, Angela, 261
Lara Zavala, Hernán, 276
Larsen, Libby, 237
Las Vegas City Hall, 99
The Last Temptation of Christ(film), 92
Lateef, Yusef, 72
Lauridsen, Morten, 237, 259
Lawrence, Jacob, 34, 34, 220,
257, 263
Lawson, Doyle, 267
Lawson, Warner, 17, 257
Le Gallienne, Eva, 264
League of American Orchestras(formerly American
Symphony Orchestra
League), 27, 226, 228, 230
Leahy, Patrick, 259
Lear, Norman, 261
Learsy, Raymond J., 257
Leaving Town Alive (nonfiction;
Frohnmayer), 94–95
Leavitt, Thomas, 278
Ledford, Lily May, 274
Lee, N. Harper, 17, 157, 257
Lee, Li-Young, 188
Lee, Ming Cho, 260
Lee, Stan, 259
Legends of Jazz (television), 235
Lehman, Arnold, 218
Leinsdorf, Erich, 257
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 92
LeNoire, Rosetta, 261
Leslie, Alfred, 21
Letts, Tracy, 251, 252
Leventhal, Nathan, 257
Levertov, Denise, 186, 192
Levine, James, 83, 165, 233, 261,
266
Levine, Philip, 48, 76
Levine, Renee, 278
Levy, John, 265
Lewis, Elma, 264
Lewis, John, 72, 265
Lewis, Ramsey, 265
Lewis, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney,264

i n d e x 293

Lewitsky, Bella, 261
Libbey, Ted, 197, 279
Library of Congress, 24, 59, 83,
153, 157, 181, 204
Lichtenstein, Harvey, 257, 261
Lichtenstein, Roy, 41, 137, 214,
262
Life Achievement Award, AFI,
24
The Life of General Villa (film),
24
Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest
Fund, 262
Lime Kiln Arts, VA, 49
Limón, José, 19, 22, 155, 174
Lin, Maya, 210
Lincoln, Abbey, 265
Lincoln, Abraham, 5Lincoln Center, NYC, 47, 62,
73, 154, 179, 199–200, 201,
207
Linklater, Richard, 205
Lioi, Margaret, 235
Lionel Hampton International
Jazz Festival, University of
Idaho, 259
Lipman, Samuel, 50, 106, 257
Lira, Agustin, 267
List, Vera, 261
Liston, Melba, 266
Literary Guild Book Club, 191
Literary Journal Institute, 191
literature, 185–95. See also
specific writers, programs,
and organizations
anthologies published by
NEA, 35, 153, 159, 194–95
audience development, 190,
192, 195
under Biddle, 65
The Big Read, 156–59, 158,
159, 164, 195
Cowboy Poetry Gathering, 77
creative nonfiction (“belleslettres”), 188
decline in reading, researchshowing, 156
directors, list of, 278
Favorite Poem Project, 191
first NEA grants for, 19, 21,
25–26
under Gioia, 194–95
under Hanks, 41, 48
journals, publishers, andpresses, 190–91

294 n e a : a h i s t o r y

NEA Literature Fellowships
Program, 185–89
new and established writers,
grants for, 186–88
Operation Homecoming
program, 152, 152–53, 160,
194, 194–95
organizations, grants to,
189–93
Poetry Out Loud, 161, 195
public readings, 192
reading. See reading
residencies, 65, 192
service organizations, grants
to, 192–93
threats of NEA elimination,
literary world’s response to,
189
Translation Fellowships,
188–89, 194
Literature of the States, 192
Littell, Philip, 231
Little Italy, production of
Rigoletto set in, 79
Littlefield, Esther, 272
Live from Lincoln Center(television), 47, 179, 200,
201
Living Stage, 35
Local Arts Agencies, 49, 278
Locke, Kevin, 272
Lockwood, Robert Jr., 271
Lomax, Alan, 75, 264
Long, Russell B., 7
Long, Teresa Lozano, 255, 257,
276
Long Wharf Theatre, New
Haven, CT, 242, 248
Longoria, Valerio, 274
Lopez, Bernard, 257
López, George, 275
Lopez, Israel “Cachao,” 271
López, Ramón José, 270
Los Angeles, CA, Laboratory
Theatre Project, 25, 244
Los Angeles Contemporary
Exhibitions, 212
Los Angeles County Museumof Art, 89
Los Angeles Philharmonic, 46,229
Lost & Found Sound (radio), 203
Lott, Bret, 257
Louisiana State University(LSU) Press, 65, 191

Louisville Orchestra, 224
Lowe, Rick, 213
Lowell, Robert, 25, 192
Lower Manhattan Cultural
Council, 137
Lowey, Nita M., 259
Lowry, W. McNeil, 242
Lozano, Jeromino E., 267
LSU (Louisiana State University)
Press, 65, 191
Luandrew, Albert “Sunnyland
Slim,” 273
Lubowsky, Susan, 279
Lucia di Lammermoor (opera;
Donizetti), 223
Lucier, Mary, 210
Luers, Wendy, 257
Lujan, Joaquin Flores, 270
Luna Negra, 155
Lyndon Baines Johnson Libraryand Museum, University ofTexas at Austin, 42, 162

M
Ma, Yo-Yo, 143, 223, 260
MacAgy, Douglas, 31, 37
MacArthur Fellowships, 237
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 251
MacCarthy, Talbot, 257
MacDowell Colony, 261
Madame Butterfly (opera), 223
Made In America (orchestral
work; Tower), 228, 229
Mafiosi, production of Rigoletto
portraying, 79
Magic Theatre, San Francisco,248
Magna Carta and Four Foundations of Freedom (exhibit),220
Mahfouz, Naguib, 159
Mainer, Wade, 273
Makepeace, Anne, 202
Making Television Dance(television), 179
Malraux, André, 6Management Task Force, 63Mandate for Leadership (Heritage Foundation report), 70
Mandle, Roger, 257
Manigault, Mary Jane, 274
Manilow, Lewis, 261
Mannette, Elliott “Ellie,” 269
Manning, Frankie, 178, 269

The Manor (novel; Singer), 25,
186
Manteo, Mike, 274
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 89–94,
93, 95
March, Fredric, 5Marín, Luis Muñoz, 4, 5
Mark, Charles, 279
Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles,
242, 276
Marsalis, Wynton, 73, 260
Martenson, Edward, 279
Martha Graham Dance
Company, 19, 172, 174, 178
Martin, Agnes, 210, 261
Martin, Robert S., 140
Martinez, Esther, 267
Martinez, Lorenzo, 268
Martínez, Narciso, 275
Martinez, Roberto, 268
Marx, Robert, 279
Mason, Bobbie Ann, 152, 187,
188, 189
Mason, Eileen, 140–43, 141, 142,
164
Mason, Jimilu, 257
Mason, Marsha, 257
Masters, Edgar Lee, 81
Masters, Hilary, 81
Masterson, Carroll Sterling, 263
Masterson, Harris, 263
Mataraza, Diane, 278
Matos, Diomedes, 267
Matsumoto, Sosei Shizuye, 271
Mattawa, Khaled, 189
Mayleas, Ruth, 174, 245, 279
Mayors’ Institute on City
Design, 80
McAdams, Eva, 270
McAusland, Randolph, 277
McBride, James, 257
McCarter Theatre, NJ, 252
McCartney, Paul, 201
McClatchy, J. D., 231
McClure, Louise, 257, 276
McCollum, Betty, 166, 259
McCord, Keryl, 279
McDonald, Marie, 272
McFarland, Bill, 276
McGhee, Brownie, 58, 58, 275
McGinley, Maribeth Walton,
255, 257, 276
McGlaughlin, Bill, 203
McGraw, Hugh, 275

McHarg, Ian, 263
McHugh, John, 123
McIntosh County Shouters, 271
McIntosh, Sylvester, 273
McIntosh, Tom, 265
McKeon, Howard, 259
McLean, Jackie, 265
McMullen Museum of Art,
Boston College, 221
McPartland, Marian, 202, 265
McQuiggan, John, 244
McQuillen, Bob, 269
McRae, Carmen, 265
McRae, Wallace, D., 77, 257,
272
McReynolds, Jim and Jesse, 119,270
McShann, Jay, 266
McWhorter, Charles, 257
Meaders, Lanier, 275
Mealing, John, 270
media arts, 197–207. See also
specific programs, artists,and organizations
AFI, 16, 23, 24, 83
under Alexander, 114
before the NEA, 197–98
under Biddle, 65–66
dance and, 175–76, 179
directors, list of, 278
film. See film
first NEA grants for, 20, 23,
24, 199
under Hanks, 41, 46–48,
199–200
independent radio andtelevision producers, 203
lighting and cameras, 202–3
PITA (Programming in theArts, later Arts on Radio andTelevision), 46–47, 176, 199
public broadcasting, 198–99
radio, 202–3
under Reagan administration,
83
research project on classicalmusic on nonprofit radio,
143
television, 199–203
Meet the Composer Orchestra
Residencies Program, 229
Mehta, Zubin, 46
Melchert, James, 66, 279
Melgaard, Leif, 274

Mellon [Andrew W.] Foundation,
138, 180, 260
Mellon, Paul, 75, 264
Menard, D. L., 271
Menard, Nellie Star Boy, 271
Mendoza, Lydia, 58, 261, 275
Menotti, Gian Carlo, 29, 61, 198
Merce Cunningham Dance
Company, 172
Meredith, William, 41
Merrill, Robert, 257, 262
Merry, Kathryn, 151
Merwin, W. S., 76
Metalsmith magazine, 217
Metcalf, Lee, 7Metropolitan Museum of Art,
NYC, 6, 17, 20, 45
Metropolitan Opera, NYC, 6,
17, 27, 40, 79, 197, 222, 223,
224, 227, 230“Mexico Today” symposium, 63
Meyerowitz, Joel, 210Michener, James, 264
Michigan Council for the Arts,
39
A Midsummer Night’s Dream(Shakespeare), 244, 246
Migrant Mother, Nipomo,
California (photograph;
Lange), 208
Milano, Alyssa, 161
military installations, programs
forGreat American Voices,
231–32, 232
Operation Homecoming, 152,
152–53, 160, 194, 194–95
Shakespeare in American
Communities initiative, 251
Miller, Allan, 46
Miller, Arthur, 83, 242, 262
Miller, Elmer, 271
Miller, Gerald Bruce, 59Miller, Gerald “Subiyay,” 268
Miller, Judith, 102Miller, Norma, 268
Miller, Sam, 182
Miller, Tim, 98, 113, 250
Milliken, Helen, 39, 40
Mills College, Center forContemporary Music, 60
Milosz, Czeslaw, 263, 264
Milwaukee Repertory
Theater, 247, 248

i n d e x 295

Miss, Mary, 210
Mississippi Opera Association,
40
Mitchell, Arthur, 143, 257, 262
Mitchell, Waddie, 77
Mitze, Clark, 279
Mo-Li, Bao, 270
Mo Yan, 189
Mobile Jazz Festival, 40
Modern Jazz Quartet, 72
Mohamed, Suraya, 276
Moilanen, Art, 272
Molitor, Gary, 21
Moloney, Mick, 270
Momaday, N. Scott, 259
Mona Lisa (painting; da Vinci),
6
Mondale, Joan, 56
Mondale, Walter, 56
Mongolia: The Legacy of Chinggis
Khan (exhibit), 220
Monk, Meredith, 176
Monroe, Bill, 58, 275
Monroe, William S., 262
Montana, Allison “Tootie,” 273
Monte, Elisa, 103
Moody, James, 265
Moore, Alex, Sr., 273
Moore, Douglas, 201
Moore, Lorrie, 188
Moore, Scotty, 201
Moreno, Carmencristina, 268
Morgan, Vanessa Paukeigope,
272
Morgenstern, Dan, 233, 265
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, 260
Los Moros y los Cristianos (play),
57
Moroles, Jesús, 259
Morris, Errol, 205, 206
Morrison, Toni, 41, 190, 190,
257
Moseley, Carlos, 257
Moses and Aaron (opera;
Schoenberg), 226
Mosley, Walter, 189
Motherwell, Robert, 21, 263
Motion Picture Association ofAmerica, 24, 150, 204
motion pictures. See film
Mougin, Genevieve, 274
movies. See film
Mua, Bua Xou, 274
Mulvihill, Martin, 274

296 n e a : a h i s t o r y

Mumford, Lewis, 75, 264
Murphy, Molly, 276
Murphy, Mabel E., 272
Muse of Fire (film), 153, 195
Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, 90
Museum of Contemporary Art,San Diego, 217
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,131
Museum of Modern Art, NYC,
17, 34, 204
museums, 209, 217–21. See alsovisual arts, and individual
museums
American Masterpieces, 219
audience development,
217–18
directors of museum program, list of, 278
exhibitions, 211, 217–18
fellowships for museum professionals, 219
indemnity program, 44, 164,
220–21
preservation and documentation, 218
Museums USA: A Survey Report(NEA), 50
music, 223–38. See also composers; jazz; opera; andspecific artists, companies,
and pieces
under Alexander, 114
audience development, 227
before the NEA, 223–25
under Biddle, 60–62, 233
chamber music, 114, 235–36
choral singing, 61, 225–27,
236–37
directors, list of, 278
fellowships, 237–38
under Hanks, 40
NCA and, 225–26
NEA Opera-Musical Theater
Program, 60–62, 278
orchestras, 228–30
research project on classicalmusic on nonprofit radio,
143
residence programs, 114, 229,
236
significant NEA grants for,20, 26–27, 226–27

musical theater, 60–62, 278
My Antonia (novel; Cather), 158

N
Nadler, Jerrold, 162
Nafisi, Azar, 161
Nagin, Ray, 80
Naka, John, 272
Nakasone, Seisho “Harry,” 272
Nancy Hanks Center (Old
Post Office Building,
Washington, D.C.), 43, 53,
137, 159–60
Na’ope, George, 267
A Nation at Risk (Department of
Education report), 85
National Academy of Recording
Arts and Sciences (Grammies), 127, 128, 223, 226,
237
National Arts and Cultural
Development Act (1964), 15
National Arts Foundation,
legislation establishing, 14
National Assembly of State Arts
Agencies, 17, 122, 177
National Association for
Regional Ballet, 64
National Association of Artists’
Organizations, 114
National Book Award, 186
National Book Critics Circle
Award, 186
National Book Festival, 193, 195
National Center for Charitable
Statistics, 177
National Center for Film andVideo Preservation, 24, 83,
204
National Center for Jewish
Film, Waltham, MA, 204
National College Choreography
Initiative, 182
National Council on the Arts
(NCA)
advisory panels. See advisory
panelsCongressional ex officio
members, 259
establishment and firstmeetings of, 14, 15–16, 184
jazz, attitude towards, 50
members of, 16–17, 41, 120,
225–26, 243, 255–59

“the NEA four” and openingof review process to public,
98–99
National Cultural Center project, 8National Dance Project, 182
National Development andResearch Institutes Library,137
National Endowment for the
Humanities
administrative staff, NEA
sharing of, 63
budget cuts and threats ofelimination under Clinton
administration, 116–23
establishment of, 14
funding of, 28
higher education, on humanities in, 85
joint activities with, 22, 62–63
location of headquarters, 43,
53
Save America’s Treasures, 131
National Forum on Careers in
the Arts for People with
Disabilities, 135
National Foundation on theArts and the Humanities
Act (1965), 18, 18
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., 6, 44
National Heritage Fellowships,
57–60, 86, 99, 118, 119, 178,
267–75National Humanities Medals,
143
national intitiatives, concept of,
149, 165
National Medal of Arts
Bernstein’s refusal of, 97
establishment of, 69, 73–75
9/11 and 2001 awards, 143
recipients of, 34, 60, 74–75,
128, 138, 143, 237, 259–64
Stanley, Ralph, 58
National Music Camp, Interlochen, MI, 27
National Park Service, 131
National Public Radio (NPR),
199, 202, 235, 261, 276
National Review/National
Review Online, 76, 160

National Standards for Educationin the Arts, 85, 115
National Task Force on Presenting and Touring the
Performing Arts, 85–86
National Treasures (Japan), 57
National Trust for HistoricPreservation, 131
National Writers Voice Projectof the YMCA, 192
National Youth Administration,
TX, 13Native Views: Influences ofModern Culture (2006 Arttrain exhibit), 40
Nauman, Bruce, 210
NBC, 197, 198
NBC Opera Theater (television),
198
NCA. See National Council on
the Arts
NEA Arts Journalism Institutes, 175“the NEA four,” 98–99, 104,
108, 113–14, 250
NEA Jazz in the Schools, 73,
154, 235
NEA Jazz Masters (formerly
American Jazz Master
Fellowship), 86, 234, 235
under Hodsoll, 69
under Biddle, 72–73
creation of, 72–73, 235
under Gioia, 153, 153–54, 160,
234
Hanks and, 50
list of, 265–66
photo of 23 awardees, 234
NEA Literature Fellowships
Program, 185–89
NEA Opera Honors, 164–65,
165, 232–33, 266
NEA/TCG Career Development
Programs for Directors andDesigners, 250
Neel, Alice, 210
Negrin, Alejandro, 276
Negrón-Rivera, Julio, 274
Nelson, Marilyn, 152, 194, 195
Nemerov, Howard, 75, 192, 264
Neri, Manuel, 22Netzer, Nancy, 221
Neuberger, Roy R., 259
Neusner, Jacob, 92, 93, 98, 257

Nevaquaya, Joyce Doc Tate, 274
Nevelson, Louise, 34, 74, 137,
264
New Deal arts programs, 1–2, 9,
13, 33–34
New England Foundation for
the Arts, 182
New Holy Blue Legs, Alice, 274
New Langton Arts/80 Langton
Street, San Francisco, 212
New Music Consort of New
York, 60
New Music Performance
Program, 60
New Orchestra Residencies
Program, 229
New Orleans, LA, Laboratory
Theatre Project, 25
New Play Producing Groups,
247
New Theater, FL, 251
New York City arts world, 9/11
damage to, 137–38, 141–44,
152
New York City Ballet, 172, 178,
179, 180, 181, 200
New York City Opera, 21, 47,
200, 230
New York Philharmonic, 47,
197, 198, 201, 202, 229
New York Public Library for
the Performing Arts Dance
Collection, 170, 181
New York Shakespeare Festival,
29, 97, 242, 244
New York State Council on theArts, 15, 36, 138, 141
The New Yorker, 152, 153, 195
Newman, Fred, 47
Newman, Paul, 205
Newman, Warren, 277
Nexus, Atlanta, 212
Nez, Grace Henderson, 268
Ngek, Chum, 268
Nguyen, Phong, 270
Nhu, Yang Fang, 273
Nichols, Mike, 143, 260
Nijinsky, Vaslav, 83
Nikolais, Alwin, 22, 40, 174,264
9/11, 137–38, 141–44
Nixon, Richard M., 31–33, 33,
37–38, 41, 42, 192
Nobel Prize, 25, 159, 186

i n d e x 297

Noel, Craig, 259
Noguchi, Isamu, 22, 215, 264
non-English texts, literature
awards for, 188
Noor, Queen of Jordan, 140
Norman Rockwell Museum,219
North Carolina School of theArts, filmmaking academy
at, 114
Northern Ireland, exchange
programs with, 163, 194
Nosferatu (opera; Gioia), 147
Notice, Lloyd, 151
Novak, Esther, 278
Novak, Robert, 98–99
Nowak, Amram, 176
NPR (National Public Radio),
199, 202, 235, 260
Nueva Luz (journal), 216
Nunez, Victor, 206

O
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(film), 58
Obama, Barack, 168
Oberlin College, 101
O’Brien, Bill, 241, 279
O’Brien, Tim, 158
obscenity clause, 93–94, 97,
107, 113–14, 128. See also
controversial NEA awards
O’Connor, Sandra Day, 111, 128,
159
O’Day, Anita, 265
Odetta, 261
O’Doherty, Brian, 37, 39, 66,
205, 279
O’Donovan, Leo J., 257
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck),
247
O’Fallon, David, 277
Office of AccessAbility, 134–35
Office of Education, 36
Office of Management andBudget (OMB), 69
Office of Minority Concerns, 57
Office of Reseach and Analysis(formerly Research
Division), 50–51, 101–4,
115–16, 143. See also
research activities of NEA
Ohrlin, Glenn, 274
Ojeda, Pennie, 163

298 n e a : a h i s t o r y

O’Keeffe, Georgia, 75, 83, 155,
220, 264
Oklahoma City federal building,bombing of, 119
Olana Partnership, 155
Old Globe Theatre, San Diego,
248
Old Post Office Building,
Washington, D.C. (Nancy
Hanks Center), 43, 43, 53,
137, 154, 159–60
Old School (novel; Wolff), 158
Old Vic Theatre, London, 15
Oldenburg, Claes, 215, 261
Oliver, Andrew, 278
Olney Theatre, MD, 247
Olsen, Tillie, 22, 25, 186
Olson, Gordon, 42
Olson, Theodore B., 106
OMB (Office of Management
and Budget), 69
Omnibus (television), 198
Omnium Gatherum (play;
Gersten-Vassilaros), 245
Oneida Hymn Singers of
Wisconsin, 267
O’Neill, Eugene, 83, 242, 245
Opacich, Milan, 268
Open Studio, 121
opera, 230–33. See also specificopera companies, artists,and operas
before the NEA, 223–25
Great American Voices,
231–32, 232
NCA and, 225–26
NEA Opera Honors, 164–65,
165, 232–33, 266
NEA Opera-Musical Theater
Program, 60–62, 278
significant NEA grants for,226–27, 230–31
support program for, establishment of, 40
OPERA America, 165, 232
Opera Association of New
Mexico, 231
Operation Homecoming (film),
153, 195, 276
Operation Homecoming: Iraq,
Afghanistan, and the Home
Front, in the Words of U.S.
Troops and Their Families(NEA Anthology), 153, 195

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience(NEA program), 152, 152–53,
160, 194, 194–95
orchestras, 228–30. See also
music, and specific orchestras and orchestra pieces
organizations. See also specificorganizations by title
literature grants for, 189–93
visual arts grants for, 212–14
Ormandy, Eugene, 37
orphan dance/choreography,
181
Ortega, Luis, 274
Oscars (Academy Awards), 46,
75, 112, 153
Ostrout, John E., 279
Othello (Shakespeare), 151
Our Town (Wilder), 25, 244
Oursler, Tony, 210
Overgaard, Nadjeschda, 270
Owens, Jack, 271
Owens, Vernon, 270

P
Pachuta, Michael, 277
Pacifica, 199
Paik, Nam Jun, 210
painting. See visual arts
Paley, Grace, 22, 76, 186
panels. See advisory panels
Papapostolou, Harilaos, 270
Papp, Joseph, 29, 97, 242, 245
Park, Sue Yeon, 267
Parker, Alice, 237
Parker, Charlie “Bird,” 72Parker, Julia, 267
Parks, Gordon, 75, 263
Parks, Suzan-Lori, 251participation in the arts
audience development indance, 179
Hodsoll’s concern over, 78, 83
SPPA reports, 101–2, 155–56
partnerships
AEP, 122
Biddle on, 55
in dance, 181–82
Gioia on, 149
under Hanks, 36
Hodsoll on, 76–79
state and regional partnerships directors, 279

TDF, 28, 247
Parton, Dolly, 260
Patchen, Kenneth, 26
Paul, Les, 259
Paul Robeson, All-American(play; Theatreworks/USA),128, 129Paul Taylor Dance Company,
178, 200
Pavarotti, Luciano, 223
PBS (Public Broadcasting
Service), 83, 153, 199, 200,
201, 203
Peabody Awards, 202
Pearl, Minnie, 262
Peck, Gregory, 16, 24, 243, 243,
257, 261
Peede, Jon Parrish, 152, 185, 278
peer review panels. See advisory
panelsPei, I. M., 257, 263
Pell, Claiborne, 7, 13, 14, 39, 44,
55
PEN International, 192–93
Pennekamp, Peter, 278
Pennington, Eddie, 269
Pennsylvania Academy of theFine Arts, 260
Pensacola Opera, 232
The Peony Pavilion (Chinese
opera), 61
Pepsico Summerfare, 139
Percy, Walker, 65
Pereira, William L., 16, 257
Perez, Irván, 272
Perez, Jorge M., 257
The Perfect Moment(photographic exhibition;
Mapplethorpe), 89–90,
92–94, 93
performance art
NEA visual arts program
expanded to include, 211
theater program and, 250
Performance Today (radio), 202
The Performing Arts: Problems
and Prospects (Rockefeller
Brothers Fund report), 15
periodicals, 190–91, 216
Perkins, Joe Willie “Pinetop,”
269
Perlman, Itzhak, 223, 261
Peters, Roberta, 257, 261

The Petrified Forest (play;
Sherwood), 247
Philadanco, 103, 103
Philadelphia Museum of Art,
217
Philadelphia Orchestra, 37,
200, 224, 229
Philadelphia, public sculpture
program, 21
Philip Morris, Inc., 264
Phillips Collection, Washington,
D.C., 155, 217
photography, NEA’s Visual Arts
Program expanded toinclude, 36, 211
Piano Jazz (radio), 202, 202
Piccolo Spoleto, 61
Picker, Tobias, 231
Pierce, Elijah, 275
Pierce, Kimberly, 206
Piercy, Marge, 76
Pilarinos, Konstantinos, 269
Pilobolus, 155
Pinkney, Jerry, 255, 257
Pinsky, Robert, 191
Piss Christ (artwork; Serrano),
89, 91PITA (Programming in theArts; later Arts on Radio andTelevision), 46–47, 176, 199
Pittas, Michael, 277
Plains Distribution Service,
Fargo, ND, 65
planning. See architecture,planning, and design
Playhouse 90 (television), 197
Playing for Time (television
movie), 112
plays and playwrights. Seetheater
Playwriting Fellowship, 245–46
Plimpton, George, 35
Ploughshares (press), 191
Poast, Ron, 268
poetry. See literature
Poetry (journal), 25
Poetry Magazine, 191
Poetry Out Loud, 161, 161, 166,
195
Poets and Writers, 193
Poets in the Schools Program,
19, 41, 192
Poitier, Sidney, 24, 243, 257

politics and the NEA
avant-garde, disputes over. Seecontroversial NEA awards
Biddle on, 55–56
Gioia’s programs revitalizing
public support for arts funding, 151, 157, 160–62,
165–66
Nixon and Vietnam War,
37–38
publicly funded art, standards
for, 104–5
Reagan administration,
NEA originally targeted for
elimination under, 69–71
role of arts in American life,
public discussion of, 115–16
Politics in Art (nonfiction;
Mondale), 56
Pollack, Sidney, 202
Popovich, Adam, 275“pornography,” NEA awards to.
See controversial NEA
awardsPorter, Katherine Anne, 83
Porter, Stephen, 257
Pound, Ezra, 139, 190
P.O.V. (television), 203
Powell, Earl A., III, 44, 257
Powell, Patrice Walker, 278
Powell, Teddy, 32
A Prairie Home Companion(radio), 47, 47–48, 202
Praise House (dance; Urban
Bush Women), 61
Prey, Barbara Ernst, 257
preservation and documentation
under Bush (George H. W.)
administration, 101
dance, 131, 175, 179–81
film, 24, 204
museums, 218
National Center for Film andVideo Preservation, 83
Old Post Office Building,
Washington, D.C. (Nancy
Hanks Center), 43, 53, 137,
159–60Save America’s Treasures, 131
string instrument repair andviolin varnish analysis, 27
visual arts, 214, 216

i n d e x 299

Preservation Hall Jazz Band,
259
President’s Advisory Council
on the Arts, 7
President’s Committee on theArts and the Humanities, 43,
53, 71, 127, 131, 143, 264
Presley, Elvis, 223
The Presser Foundation, 259
presses and publishers. See also
specific institutions
literature grants for, 190–91
visual arts publications, catalogues, and brochures, 216
Previn, André, 47, 200, 231
PRI (Public Radio International), 199
Price, Frank, 257
Price, Leontyne, 75, 165, 222,
233, 264, 266
Price, Ray, 37
Primitive Mysteries (dance; Graham), 155
Primus, Pearl, 172, 263
Prince, Harold, 245, 257, 261
Prince, Joe, 277
Princenthal, Nancy, 210
Prinze, Peter, 212–13
Privacy Act (1974), 113
private organizations, partnerships with. See partnerships
The Prodigal Son (Balanchine),
200
Professional Theater Companies Program, 248–49, 250
Programming in the Arts
(PITA; later Arts on Radioand Television), 46–47, 176,
199
Project Row Houses, Houston,
213, 213–14“Provide, Provide” (poem;
Frost), 81
Providence, RI, Laboratory
Theatre Project, 25
Providence Singers, 237
P.S. 1/The Clocktower, NYC,
212
Public Art Review, 216
Public Broadcasting Act (1967),
198–99Public Broadcasting Service(PBS), 83, 153, 199, 200,
201, 203, 260

300 n e a : a h i s t o r ypublic media. See media arts
public participation in the arts
audience development indance, 179
Hodsoll’s concern over, 78, 83
SPPA reports, 101–2, 155–56
public-private partnerships. See
partnerships
Public Radio International(PRI), 199
public readings, 192
Public Theater, NYC, 251–52
publicly funded art, standards
for, 104–5
publishers and presses. See also
specific institutions
literature grants for, 190–91
visual arts publications, catalogues, and brochures, 216
Puente, Tito, 261
Pulitzer Prize, 35, 48, 65, 103,
186, 191, 237, 238, 252
Purchase, NY international arts
festival (Pepsico Summerfare), 139
Puryear, Martin, 210
Putsch, Henry, 279

Q
Queen, Mary Jane, 267
Quinn, Jack, 142, 142
Quraeshi, Samina, 277

R
Rabassa, Gregory, 259
Radice, Anne-Imelda, 111, 276
radio, 202–3. See also media
arts, and specific programs
and organizations
Rain of Gold (novel; Villasenor),
191
Raising the Barre (NEA report),
177
Rakosi, Carl, 41
Ramirez, Tina, 260
Ramsey, Buck, 271
Randolph, Jennings, 7
Randolph, Len, 187, 278
Randolph Street Gallery,
Chicago, 212
Rankin, Hystercine, 270
Raphael, 220
Rauschenberg, Robert, 262
Ravel, Maurice, 46

reading
The Big Read, 156–59, 158,
159, 164, 195
To Read or Not to Read: A
Question of National
Consequence (NEA), 156
Reading at Risk: A Survey of
Literary Reading in America(NEA), 156, 157, 195
research activities at NEA
showing decline in, 156
readings, public, 192
Reagan, Nancy, 75
Reagan, Ronald, 69–86
Cowboy Poetry Gathering, 77
dance under, 83–84
Hodsoll and. See Hodsoll,Frankon importance of NEA, 86
media arts under, 83
National Heritage Fellowships, 58
National Medal of Arts, establishment of, 69, 73–75, 264
NEA Jazz Masters Program,
72–73
NEA originally targeted for
elimination under, 69–71
photographs of, 74, 75
policy issues for the NEA
under, 76–79, 82–83
twentieth anniversary celebration of NEA, 75–76
Rebeck, Theresa, 245
Red Sorghum (novel; Mo Yan),
189
Redden, Nigel, 277
Redford, Robert, 159, 205, 205,
261
Reed, Ola Belle, 274
regional representatives,
66–67, 279
Regional Theater Touring
Program, 246, 247
Regula, Ralph, 116, 123
Reid, Harry, 92, 259
repeat programs, benefits of,
163–64
Repertory Theatre of New
Orleans, 244
Republican efforts to eliminate
NEA under second Clinton
administration, 116–23

research activities at NEA
AEP, 122
Arts in America reports, 85,
102–4classical music on nonprofit
radio, 143
on dance, 104, 114, 176–77
economics of working artists
in U.S., 103–4, 177, 234–35
Hanks, beginnings under,
50–51
on jazz, 234–35
Office of Research andAnalysis (formerly Research
Division), 50–51, 101–4,
115–16, 143reading reports, 156, 157, 195
SPPA reports, 101–2, 155–56
television lighting andcameras, 202–3
Trends in Artist Occupations:1970 to 1990 (NEA), 115–16
Residencies for Writers
Program, 65
residency programs. See artist
residency programs
review panels. See advisory
panelsRexroth, Kenneth, 76
Rhode Island School of Design,
17
Ribicoff, Abraham, 7
Rice, Condoleezza, 143
Rich, Adrienne, 187
Richards, Lloyd, 245, 257, 262
Riddle, Almeda, 275
Rigoletto (opera; Verdi), 79
Riley, Joseph P. Jr., 61, 61, 80
Ripley, S. Dillon, 17
Ririe-Woodbury Dance
Company, 40
Ritchie, Jean, 269
The Rite of Spring (dance; Joffrey
Ballet), 83–84, 84
The Rivals (play; Sheridan), 25,
244Rivera, Diego, 100, 220
Rivers, Larry, 32
Roach, Max, 266
Robards, Jason, 261
Robb, Lynda Bird Johnson, 162
Robbins, Jerome, 75, 179, 181,
200, 257, 263
Robbins, Mark, 277

Robbins, Richard, 153, 195
Robert Capa: In Love and War(film), 202
Robertson, James D., 258
Robertson, Pat, 92
Robeson, Paul, 128, 129
Robinson, Cleo Parker, 258, 277
Robinson, Georgeann, 275
Robinson, LaVaughn E., 273
Robinson, William “Smokey,”260
Roche, Kevin, 258
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, 15,
31, 34, 224
Rockefeller, David, 17
Rockefeller, Nelson, 31, 34, 42
Rockefeller Foundation, 28, 37,
89, 119, 229
Rockwell, Norman, 131, 219, 220Rodgers, Richard, 243, 258
Rodin, Auguste, 137
Rodriguez, Eliseo, 268
Rodriguez, Luis, 161
Rodriguez, Paula, 268
Rodriguez, Richard, 161
Roe, Benjamin K., 276
Roerich, Nicholas, 84
Roethke, Theodore, 22
Rogers, Lida, 258
Rogers, Maureene, 258
Rollins, Sonny, 266
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare),114, 244
Romero, Emilio, 273
Romero, Herminia Albarrán,
268
Romero, Senaida, 273
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 1, 2, 13,241
Roosevelt, Theodore, 5, 9
Rorem, Ned, 238
Rosado, Emilio, 272
Rose, Barbara, 21Rose, Deedie Potter, 258, 276
Rose, Leonard, 6
Rosen, Robert, 176
Rosenquist, James, 215, 258
Roth, Philip, 261
Rothenberg, Susan, 210
Rothko, Mark, 5
Ruak, Felipe and Joseph, 268
Rubin, Judith, 258
Rukeyser, Muriel, 76
Rural Arts Initiative, 96

rural residencies program forchamber music, 113, 236
Ruscha, Ed, 21, 210
Russell, George, 99, 233, 266
Russell, Rosalind, 258
Russell, Tim, 47
Russia, exchange programs
with, 159, 163, 194
Ruthven, John, 260
Ryan, Kay, 161, 188

S
Saari, Wilho, 267
Sackler, Howard, 25, 26, 111–12
Sadeghi, Manoochehr, 268
Saenphimmachak, Mone andVanxay, 271
Safire, William, 37, 160
Saint Joan (Shaw), 25, 244
Saland, Stephanie, 180
Saldivar, Domingo “Mingo,”
269
Salomon, I. L., 26
San Francisco Ballet, 172
San Francisco InternationalFilm Festival, 207
San Francisco Opera, 27, 200,
227, 231
San Francisco Performing Arts
Library and Museum, 181
San Francisco SymphonyOrchestra, 203
Sandburg, Carl, 5Sanders, Ed, 35
Santa Fe Opera, 40, 231
Sara Lee Corporation, 261
Saroyan, Aram and William, 35
Sarton, May, 76, 186
Saudek, Robert, 262
Save America’s Treasures, 131,
131, 181
Savoy, Marc, 272
Scalia, Antonin, 128
Schaechter-Gottesman, Beyle,268
Schaefer, George, 258
Schaffner, Franklin, 258
Scherle, William, 27–28, 35
Schickel, Richard, 6
Schippers, Thomas, 258
Schlöndorff, Volker, 83
Schneider, Alexander, 27
Schoenberg, Arnold, 226
Schreckengost, Viktor, 259

i n d e x 301

Schulberg, Budd, 25
Schuller, Gunther, 233, 237,
258, 265
Schuman, William, 264
Schumer, Charles, 142
Schuyler, James, 41
Schwarz, Gerard, 225, 255, 258
Scorca, Marc, 232
Scorsese, Martin, 202
Scott, Hugh, 7Scott, Jimmy, 265
Scott, Sue, 47
Screen Actors Guild, 70
Scriabin, Alexander, 22
Scruggs, Earl, 262, 273
Scully, Vincent, 260
sculpture. See visual arts
Sculpture (journal), 216
Seager, Allan, 22
Seattle Art Museum, 46
Seattle Opera, 46
Seattle Pro Musica Society, 237
Seattle Repertory Theatre, 20,
46, 51, 247, 248
Seattle Symphony Orchestra,
40, 46, 225
Seawell, Donald, 245
SECCA (Southeastern Centerfor Contemporary Art),
Winston-Salem, NC, 89,
91–94
Seeger, Pete, 262
Seeing Ourselves: Masterpiecesof American Photography(exhibition), 208
Segal, George, 21, 261
Sendak, Maurice, 262
Senior Fellowships, 187
September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks of, 137–38, 141–44
Serkin, Rudolph, 225, 258, 263
Serra, Richard, 90, 91, 215
Serrano, Andres, 89–94, 95
Sessions, Jeff, 160–62, 259
Severe, Duff, 275
Sexton, Morgan, 272
Seybolt, George, 258
Seyoum, Moges, 267
Shaara, Jeff, 152, 195
Shaheen, Simon, 271
Shakespeare, William
Alabama Shakespeare
Festival, 162, 251

302 n e a : a h i s t o r y

The Comedy of Errors, 78
ISF (Idaho Shakespeare
Festival), 78, 79
Macbeth, 251
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
244, 246
New York Shakespeare
Festival, 29, 97, 242, 244
Othello, 151
Romeo and Juliet, 114, 244
Shakespeare in American
Communities initiative, 25,
139–40, 149, 150–51, 151,
160–62, 251
Shakespeare Theatre
Company, Washington,
D.C., 140
Shanklin-Peterson, Scott, 122
Shannon, Joe, 275
Shapiro, Joel, 210
Shatner, William, 150
Shaw, Artie, 265
Shaw, George Bernard, 25, 244
Shaw, Robert, 225, 225–26,
236–37, 258, 262
Shawn, Ted, 172, 180
Sheehy, Daniel, 278
Sheen, Martin, 150
Shepard, Sam, 248
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 25,
244
The Sherman Brothers, 259
Sherman, Cindy, 210
Sherwood, Robert, 247
Sheung-Chi, Ng, 272
Shorter, Wayne, 265
Shourds, Harry V., 273
Shouse, Catherine Filene, 262
Shreveport, LA, orchestra of, 40
Sidle, Kenny, 273
Siegel, Eli, 192
Sills, Beverly, 42, 223, 258, 263
Silver, Horace, 265
Simic, Charles, 48, 193
Simmons, Philip, 275
Simpson, Al, 117
Sims, Howard “Sandman,” 58,274
Sinatra, Frank, 223Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 25, 76,
186
Skowhegan School of Painting
and Sculpture, ME, 211–12

Slacker (film), 205
Slatkin, Leonard, 260
Slaughter, Louise, 141, 144, 157
Slenske, Michael, 160
Sloan, Lenwood, 278
Small Business Administration,
138
Smiley, Jane, 65
Smith, Alexis, 99
Smith, David, 17, 258
Smith, Jimmy, 265
Smith, Leon Polk, 22
Smith, Oliver, 16, 19, 258
Smith, Patrick J., 279
Smith, Tony, 22, 215
Smith, Willa Mae Ford, 273
Smith, William Jay, 41
Smithsonian American Art
Museum, 100, 100
Smithsonian Institution, 15, 17
Snake Path (art installation;
Smith), 99
Snodgrass, W. D., 186
Snyder, Andrea, 104, 182
sociocultural change in US androle of NEA, 9–10, 38–39
Soderbergh, Steven, 206
SOE (Space One Eleven),
Birmingham, AL, 212–13
Sokolow, Anna, 22, 174
Sondheim, Stephen, 262
Songs of Innocence andExperience (Bolcom’s
musical setting), 238
Sonntag, Douglas C., 171, 277
Sorochaniuk, Eudokia, 270
The Sources of Country Music(mural; Benton), 52, 52
Souter, David, 128
South Coast Repertory, Costa
Mesa, CA, 248
Southeastern Bell Corporation,
263
Southeastern Center forContemporary Art(SECCA), Winston-Salem,
NC, 89, 91–94
Southern, Hugh, 91, 92
Southern Review, 25, 191
Soyer, Isaac, 34
Soyer, Moses, 34
Space for Dance (NEA report),
176

Space One Eleven (SOE),
Birmingham, AL, 212–13
Spain, exchange programs
with, 194
Special Constituencies Office(now Office of AccessAbility), 134–35
Speck, Jeff, 277
Specter, Joan, 258
Spellman, A. B., 48–50, 73, 154,
276, 277
Spencer, Dolly, 270
Spencer, John, 278
Spicer, Robert, 272
Spitzer, Nick, 202“Splendors of Imperial China”
exhibit, 1996, 45
Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds,
Italy, 22, 61
Spoleto Festival USA,Charleston, SC, 61, 61
SPPA. See Survey of Public
Participation in the Arts
Spreiregen, Paul, 277
Sproat, Clyde “Kindy,” 273
St. Denis, Ruth, 172, 180
St. Louis, MO light rail system,
215
St. Paul Opera Association, 231
St. Pierre, Simon, 275
Stack, Robert, 258
Stafford, William, 187, 190
Stanford Research Institute, 24
Stanley, Ralph, 58, 259, 274
Stanley, Ralph W., 270
Staples, Mavis, 267
Staples, Roebuck “Pops,” 270
state and regional partnerships
directors, 66–67, 279
state arts agencies, 17, 51
state arts education, block
grants for, 121–23
Steele, Ana, 111
Stegner, Wallace, 186
Steinbeck, John, 17, 184, 247,
258
Steiner, David, 277
Steinway, Henry, 259
Stella, Frank, 264
Stenholm, Charles, 93
Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago,
251, 252, 261
Stern, Isaac, 6, 16, 17, 225, 258,
263

Stern, Richard, 258
Stevens, Catherine, 277
Stevens, George, Jr., 24
Stevens, George, Sr., 16, 258
Stevens, Roger L.
Biddle and, 55
as chairman of NEA, 13, 17,
21, 29, 31, 254
at Hodsoll’s swearing-in
ceremony, 71
as National Medal of Arts
recipient, 263
photographs of, 8, 12
at tenth anniversary celebrations, 42
Stevens, Wallace, 190
Stevenson, Ruth Carter, 258
Stewart, Alex, 275
Stockman, David, 69–70, 71
Stokowski, Leopold, 224
Stolls, Amy, 185
Stone, Edward Durrell, 8
StoryCorps (radio), 203
Strachwitz, Chris, 269
Straight, George, 260
Straight, Michael, 31, 33, 34, 35,
37, 52Stratford, CT theater festival,
243
Straus, Jocelyn Levi, 258
Strauss, Richard, 201
Stravinsky, Igor, 83
A Streetcar Named Desire (opera
based on Tennessee
Williams’s play), 231
Streisand, Barbra, 261
Strickland, William E., Jr., 258
Studio Arena Theater, Buffalo,NY, 248–49
Studio One (television), 197
Stutz, Geraldine, 258
Styron, William, 190, 262
Subotnick, Morton, 229
Sully, Thomas, 131
Sun Ra (Herman “Sonny”
Blount), 72, 266
Sun Records, 201
Sun, Stone, and Shadows(NEA/Fondo de Cultura
Económica anthology), 159
Sundance Institute, 205–6
Sunny Side of Life (film), 49
SUNY-Binghamton, 227

Supreme Court affirmation of
NEA obscenity clause, 128
Survey of Public Participation in
the Arts (SPPA), NEA
1982 and 1992, 101–2, 1552002, 155–56
Swan Lake (American Ballet
Theatre), 20, 47, 201
Sweeney, James Johnson, 17,258
Sweezy, Nancy, 267
Syndicated Fiction Project, 191

T
Tafoya, Margaret, 274
Tallchief, Maria, 261
Tamiris, Helen, 172, 180
Tan, Amy, 158
Tanaka, Seiichi, 269
Tandy, Jessica, 263
Tang, Liang-xing, 271
Tanner, Obert C., 263
Tarantino, Quentin, 206
Tarras, Dave, 274
Tate, Allen, 192
Taylor, Billy, 41, 50, 258, 262,
266
Taylor, Cecil, 73, 99, 233, 266
Taylor, Charles, 144, 157
Taylor, Elizabeth, 24
Taylor, Frances, 278
Taylor, Koko, 268
Taylor, Paul, 19, 22, 174, 178,
200, 262
Taymor, Julie, 150
TCG (Theatre Communications
Group), 247, 250–51, 253
TDF (Theater Development
Fund), 28, 247
Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 193
Teachout, Terry, 225, 258
Teason, Deborah Fischer, 130
Teddy Hill Band, 72
television, 199–203. See also
media arts, and specificprograms and organizations
Telluride Festival, 207
Tenebrae (chamber music work;
Golijov), 61
Terkel, Studs, 25
Terra, Daniel J., 71

i n d e x 303

terrorist attacks of 9/11, 137–38,
141–44
Terry, Clark, 73, 266
Terry, Sanders “Sonny,” 58, 275
Texaco Inc. and Philanthropic
Foundation, 263, 264
Tharp, Twyla, 47, 179, 200, 260
theater, 241–53. See also individual plays, theaters,companies, and artists
before the NEA, 241–43
directors, list of, 279
first NEA grants for, 20,
25–26, 26, 243–45
independent program,theater established as,
245–47
institutional growth anddevelopment of program,
247–53NCA and, 243, 244
new plays, influence of NEA
on production of, 247–48
performance art, 250
Shakespeare. See Shakespeare, William
significance of NEA program,
251–53structure and categories ofprogram, 249–50
TDF, 28, 247
Theater Development Fund
(TDF), 28, 247
Theater for Youth program, 239
Theatre Communications
Group (TCG), 247, 250–51,
253
Theatre-in-the-Round (nonfiction; Jones), 242
Theatre Tsvete of Sofia,
Bulgaria, 114
Theatreworks/USA, 129
Their Eyes Were Watching God(novel; Hurston), 157
Thelonious Monk Institute of
Jazz, 234
Theroux, Alexander, 187
Thiebaud, Wayne, 262
The Thief and the Dogs (novel;
Mahfouz), 159
Thielemans, Toots, 265
The Things They Carried (novel;
O’Brien), 158

304 n e a : a h i s t o r yThird Space: When LearningMatters (AEP report), 122
Thirteen/WNET, 23, 46, 176,
199, 200
Thlunaut, Jennie, 274
Thomas, Ada, 275
Thomas, Brandon, 244
Thomas, Michael Tilson, 203
Thompson, Dorothy, 269
Thompson, Frank, 13–14
Thompson, Joe, 267
Thomson, Virgil, 75, 263
Thorne Music Fund, 27
Three Sisters (play; Chekhov),25, 244
Tiberi, Patrick, 165–66, 259
Tighe, Mary Ann, 64
Tilted Arc (sculpture; Serra), 90,
91
Tiulana, Paul, 274
To Kill a Mockingbird (novel;
Lee), 157, 159
To Read or Not to Read: A
Question of National
Consequence (NEA report),
156
To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on
the Humanities in Higher
Education (National Endowment for the Humanities),85
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 171
Toelken, Barre, 57
Toledo Museum of Art, 17, 101
Toledo, OH, orchestra of, 40
Tolstoy, Leo, 159
Tony Awards, 111, 118
Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast(opera; Gioia), 147
Tooker, George, 259
Toole, John Kennedy, 65, 191
Toole, Thelma, 65
Toomer, Lucinda, 275
Top Dog/Underdog (play; Parks),
252
Toscanini, Arturo, 197
Toth, Nicholas, 268
Touring Arts Teams, 96
Toward Civilization (NEA
report), 84–85, 85
Tower, Joan, 228, 229
Townsend, Henry, 274

traditional and folk arts. See folk
and traditional arts
traditional art, concerns aboutlack of NEA support for, 27,
34
Translation Fellowships,
188–89, 194
Treme Brass Band, 267
Trends in Artist Occupations:1970 to 1990 (NEA), 115–16
Trethewey, Natasha, 48, 188
Tribal Music Program, Arizona,
96
Trigère, Pauline, 23
Trinity Square Repertory
Company, RI, 244
TriQuarterly, 191
Trisha Brown Dance Company,
155
True West (play; Shepard), 248
Trujillo, Irvin J., 267
Trumpold, Dorothy, 269
Tsimouris, Nikitas, 272
Tsoodle, Fred, 269
Tully, Alice, 75, 264
Tune, Tommy, 260
Turner, Othar, 272
Turney, Anthony, 279
Turrell, James, 210
Twain, Mark, 158
Twentieth Anniversary
Committee of Leading
American Artists, 42
Two Women with Children(drawing; Raphael), 220
Tyner, McCoy, 265
Tyrone Guthrie Theater,
Minneapolis, 20

U
Unified Database of Arts
Organizations (UDAO), 177
United States/Canada/Mexico
Creative Artists’ Residencies, 114
Unity, Quality, Access, 62
University Art Museum, CA,
90
University Dance Company,
University of Michigan, 155
University of California at Los
Angeles, 204
University of California at San
Diego, 99

University of Idaho Lionel
Hampton International Jazz
Festival, 259
University of Michigan, 25, 155
University of Pennsylvania,
Institute of Contemporary
Art (ICA), 89, 94
University of Southern
California, 175
University of Texas at Austin,
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Library and Museum, 42,
44, 162
University of WisconsinMadison, 227
University of Wyoming at
Laramie, American Heritage
Center and Art Museum,
114
Updike, John, 263
Urban Bush Women, 61
Urban Gateways, 49, 262
Urban Institute, 177
U.S. Bureau of the Census, 101,
116, 177
U.S. Conference of Mayors, 80
U.S. Department of Defense,
150, 152, 251
U.S. Department of Education,
85, 122, 244
U.S. Office of Education, 36
U.S. Supreme Court affirmationof NEA obscenity clause, 128

V
Valdez, Luis, 258, 264
Valenti, Jack, 150
Van Allen, William, 258
van Buren, Martin, 171
Van Duyn, Mona, 26
Van Gelder, Rudy, 265
van Itallie, Jean-Claude, 245
Vance, Nina, 242
Vanessa (opera; Barber), 61
Vaquero (sculpture; Jiminez),
100
Vaughan, Sarah, 266
Vaughn, Stuart, 244
Venturi, Robert, 262
Venza, Jac, 46, 199
Verdi, Giuseppe, 79, 222
Verdon, Gwen, 261
Verizon Corporation andFoundation, 73, 154

Verve Music Group, 235
Vickery, William, 278
Vieira, Jelon, 267
Vienna State Opera, 15
Vietnam War, 28, 32, 37, 152
Vigil, Cleofes, 274
Villa, Pancho, 24
Villasenor, Victor, 191
Villella, Edward, 64, 258, 261
Viola, Bill, 210
Violin Finishes, 27
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
Richmond, 89
The Virginia Quarterly, 25
Visionaries and Outcasts (nonfiction; Brenson), 37
visual arts, 209–16, 221. See
also specific artists, art, programs, and organizations
Art in Public Places Program,
99–101, 100, 214–16, 215
Arttrain USA, 39–40, 40
under Biddle, 66
during Bush (George H. W.)
administration, 99–101
Design Arts/Visual Arts
Collaborations, 215
directors, list of, 279
expansion of categories
covered by, 36, 211
fellowships, 210–11
first NEA grants for, 20, 22,210
organizations, grants for,212–14
preservation and documentation, 214, 216
publications, catalogues, andbrochures, 216
residencies, 99, 211–12
traditional art, concerns aboutlack of NEA support for, 27,
34
Visual Arts Fellowships, 100
Visual Studies Workshop,
Rochester, NY, 65, 212, 216
Viswanathan, T., 272
Voice of America, 233
Von Stade, Frederica, 264
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 42
Vorperian, Lily, 271
Voting Rights Act (1965), 13
Voulkos, Peter, 210

W
W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 157
Wade in the Water: African
American Sacred Music
Traditions (radio series), 114
Wadsworth Atheneum,Hartford, CT, 90
Walker, Albertina, 268
Walker, Alice, 65, 159
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
MN, 45, 230
Wallace, David Foster, 188
Wallin, Douglas, 272
Walser, Don, 269
Wang, Wayne, 205
Wang, Yuqin, 268
War of the Worlds (radio broadcast of Wells’s novella), 197
War Requiem (choral work;
Britten), 226
Ward, Lem, 275
Warm Springs (television
movie), 112
Warner, John, 42
Warren, Robert Penn, 75, 192,
264
Washburn, Newton, 273
Washington Chorus, 226
Washington, George, iii
Washington Post, 70, 81, 94,
108, 115, 116, 124, 127, 161,
195
Washington Project for theArts, 93
Washington State Arts
Commission, 20, 174
The Washington Times, 92
Wasserstein, Wendy, 189
Watergate, 42
Watson, Arthel “Doc,” 128, 261,
273
Watts, Elaine Hoffman, 267
Watts Writers’ Workshop, 25
Webber, E. Leland, 41, 258
Weber, Bruce, 160
Webster, John, 140
Weese, Harry, 258
Wegman, William, 210
Weidman, Charles, 172, 180
Weil, Suzanne, 277
Wein, George, 265
Weismann, Donald, 258
Welles, Orson, 197
Wells, Gussie, 272

i n d e x 305

Wells, H. G., 197
Welty, Eudora, 41, 42, 75, 187,
258, 264
Wengerd, Tim, 200
Wenyi, Hua, 270
Werboff, Michael, 27Wess, Frank, 265
West Side Story (musical), 223
Westermann, H. C., 22
Western Folklife Center, 77Western New York State, arts
crisis in, 142
Western Opera Theatre, 27,
227, 231
Weston, Randy, 265
WFMT Radio Network, 199,
203
WGBH Educational Foundation, Boston, 45
Whang, Vanessa, 278
Wharton, Dolores, 258
Whitaker, Francis, 270
White Dragon (dance; Philadanco), 103
White, George, 258
White House Millennium
Council, 131
White, Michael, 267
White, Nancy, 258
Whitehouse, Sheldon, 259
Whitfield, Vantile, 48, 49, 277
Whitman, Walt, 10, 116
Whitney, Robert, 224
Wilbur, Richard, 262
Wilder, Billy, 24, 262
Wilder, Joe, 265
Wilder, Thornton, 25, 244
Wildmon, Donald E., 91
Wilk, David, 65, 81, 193, 278
Will, George, 116–17
Williams, Arbie, 272
Williams, Claude “The Fiddler,”
270
Williams, Dewey, 275
Williams, Horace “Spoons,”
274
Williams, Joe, 265
Williams, Tennessee, 231, 242
Williams, William Carlos, 190
Wilson, Anne Porter, 258
Wilson, August, 240
Wilson, Chesley Goseyun, 273
Wilson, Elder Roma, 271
Wilson, Gerald, 99, 266

306 n e a : a h i s t o r y

Wilson, Joseph, 269
Wilson, Nancy, 265
Wilson, Teddy, 266
Wine, Melvin, 272
Wise, Robert, 258, 262
Wiseman, Mac, 267
Without an Alphabet, Without aFace (poetry; Komunyakaa),
189
Wittmann, Otto, 17, 258
WNET (channel Thirteen), 23,
46, 176, 199, 200
Wojnarowicz, David, 98
Wolfe, Townsend D., III, 258
Wolff, Karen Lias, 225, 255, 258
Wolff, Tobias, 65, 76, 152, 158,
195
Wong, James Ka’upena, 268
Woo, Catherine Yi-yu Cho, 258
Wood, James, 258
Woodbury, Joan, 40–41
Woodruff, Robert, 248
Woods, Jessie, 258
Woods, Phil, 265
Woolsey, Lynn, 134
Worby, Rachel, 258
Workman, Nimrod, 274
Works of Art in Public Places
Program, 42
Works Progress Administration(WPA), 1–2, 2
World Trade Center attacks of
9/11, 137–38, 141–44
WPA (Works Progress Administration), 1–2, 2
Wright, Charles, 48, 76
Wright, Cornelius, Jr., 270
Wright, Doug, 252
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 10, 101
WritersCorp, 192
Wyeth, Andrew, 259
Wyeth, Jamie, 44, 134–35, 258
Wyman, Rosalind W., 258
Wyoming Game and Fish
Department, 101

X
XM Satellite Radio, 154, 158–59
Xu, Zhengli, 268

Y
Yale Repertory Theatre, 240
Yamaha Music Corporation, 73
Yamasaki, Minoru, 16, 258

Yates, Richard, 22, 25, 186
Yates, Sidney R., 63, 116
Ying Quartet, 236
YMCA, National Writers Voice
Project of the, 192
Young Audiences, 46, 262
Young, Snooky, 265
Young, Stanley, 17, 258
Youssef, Sadi, 189
YouthARTS, 132

Z
Zeigler, Joseph Wesley, 36, 38,
97–98
Zeisler, Peter, 242, 245
Zimmerman House (Frank
Lloyd Wright), 101
Zukerman, Pinchas, 264
Zuttermeister, Emily Kau’i, 274

national endowment for the arts
a h i s t o r y : 1965–2008
This new volume provides a concise, comprehensive account of the history of the
National Endowment for the Arts. In documenting the agency’s major activities
over the past 43 years—since its creation by the United States Congressin 1965—this account presents the Arts Endowment’s eventful and sometimes
controversial history with candor, clarity, and balance. The volume also includes
overviews of the agency’s impact on six specific arts disciplines: Dance, Literature,
Media Arts, Museums and Visual Arts, Music and Opera, and Theater.

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20506-0001(202) 682-5400
www.arts.gov

isbn 978-0-615-23248-5