A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 5

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[With the chairmanship of Frank Hodsoll (1938-2016) from 1981 to 1989, recounted here, the Arts Endowment struck some turbulence during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  It was a precursor to the really troubled waters of political controversy that followed.

[As I have suggested since I began this series, I urge readers who are just joining this thread to go back to 5 November and read the first installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” and the following Chapters 2 through 4, posted on 8, 11, and 14 November, before trying to make sense of Chapter 5 below.] 

“NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008”
edited by Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham
(National Endowment for the Arts, 2009) 

p a r t  I

The HISTORY of the NEA

 

 chapter 5

The Reagan Era

The election of President Reagan in 1980 brought a different philosophy to the federal government, and initially, many in the new Administration questioned 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 [$356.8 million in 2023]. 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. [He was deputy to White House Chief of Staff James Baker.] 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 was trying to “zero out”—completely abolish—the NEA.

[Baker (b. 1930) served as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; 40th President of the United States: 1981-89). He later served as Secretary of State under President George H. W. Bush (1924-2018; 41st President of the United States: 1989-93) before returning as Bush’s White House Chief of Staff.

[According to Wikipedia, Baker wasn’t part of Reagan’s 1980 presidential-primary campaign staff; he was Bush’s campaign manager in that race.  Bush became Reagan’s vice-presidential running mate for the successful general-election campaign, and Baker was appointed Reagan’s first chief of staff.

[Stockman (b. 1946), OMB director from 1981 to 1985, was a committed supply-sider (which he said was really the same as “trickle-down” economics with a nicer name) for whose budget strategy “zero out” was the watch word.  Atlantic magazine reported that “it meant closing down a program ‘cold turkey,’ in one budget year,” and it requited that grants for the arts and humanities be cut in half.]

Interviewed almost a quarter-century later, Hodsoll recalled that, at the time, he barely 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 and conservatives that was then emerging in American life. A former U.S. Representative, David Stockman viewed the NEA as one of many examples of the federal government’s excessive influence in public life. Inheriting a sluggish economy and a large 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 and comments about a proposed 50 percent budget cut: “Reductions of this magnitude are premised on the notion that the Administration should completely revamp federal policy for arts and humanities support. For too long, the Endowments have spread federal financing into an ever-wider range of artistic and literary endeavor, promoting the notion that the federal government should be the financial patron and first resort for both individuals and institutions 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 and other 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, the President 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.

In response, the Reagan White House established a presidential task force to study 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 the report 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 and scholarship. Nonetheless, they have served an important role in catalyzing additional private support, assisting excellence in arts and letters, and helping to assure the availability of arts and scholarship.” The task force eventually became the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, established by Executive Order in 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 name him 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 [$510 million today]. The following year Hodsoll had to contend with a cut of 10 percent, to $143.5 million [$413 million] in 1982—the first budget 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 to have 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 this country. This is a tribute to the nation.”

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 and character. 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 for honoring 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 of the 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 issuing and 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 later selected 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 recipients collect their award during a concert ceremony. The first ceremony was held at the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, DC, with support from Chevron (USA) and the Yamaha Music Corporation. The events were 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: Danny Barker, 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 in the 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 [$34,600], and the number of awards given each year has risen from three to six. One of these awards, the A. B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy, named for the veteran agency official and jazz historian, 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 to Dave 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 to make it new.’” For many years, the NEA Jazz Masters award had been presented at a concert 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 destined, like other NEA honors, to become a hallmark of American creative excellence. Drawing from nominations by private citizens, members of Congress, and arts 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
• 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 Agnes de 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 as honorary 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 [$412.9 million].

As another marker of its twentieth anniversary, the Arts Endowment sponsored Buying Time, edited by Scott Walker, an anthology of work by recipients of the NEA Literature Fellowships over the years. Published by Graywolf Press in St. Paul, Minnesota, the volume comprised an anthology of America’s best poets 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 that the applications be rejected. In accordance with the NEA legislation, Chairman Hodsoll made the decisions himself, after considering the recommendations from panels 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 for rejections, 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 the most important component of arts support in a “pluralistic system . . . in which no one sector dominates.” But he also called for new practices needed to address developments such as the acquisition of film companies and publishing houses by business conglomerates, the increasing predominance of “blockbuster” exhibitions at museums, 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 financial pressures 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 their place beside the traditional ideals of artistic excellence and artistic heritage, and they were reflected in several accomplishments during the decade.

A noteworthy instance of two of those goals, long-term assistance and federal-state-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 [$19,400 in 2023, based on 1978 dollars] to $2,500,000 [$3.5 million based on 2008 dollars]—with assets of $5,000,000 [$8.6 based on 1998 dollars (the year the amphitheater was built)] from a campaign to build an amphitheater situated among 12 acres of riverside 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 new programs, 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, and various Italian American advocacy groups. Representative Biaggi called Chairman Hodsoll to testify at a special Congressional hearing. The Rigoletto uproar eventually died 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) and Dick Armey (R-TX) declared that the Arts Endowment had violated its mandate by awarding 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 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 even the 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 of for a long time. Beside the obvious wrong of creating situations where friends make grants to friends, or friends of friends, there is also the patently unhealthy set-up in which 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 a critical 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 of cronyism 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 the South. 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 a pool of 3,750 submissions—evidence to Masters of an interlocking relationship among 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 the literary 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 none of the cited poems were written when any of the authors were NEA grantees, the objections were powerful nonetheless. Congressional staff members even came to 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 literary content. 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 “cure worse 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 column of 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 with Illo’s position, noting, “I make a fine distinction (some would argue too fine) between content standards and administrative common sense that respects the expectation that 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 the Federal 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 the performing 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 lack the drawing capacity of ‘stars’ or ‘blockbusters.’ The tension between marquee value 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 among playwright Arthur Miller, German director Volker Schlöndorff, and the cast of the cinema 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 founding of 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 advance technology 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 the degradation of acetate stock itself, the application of special technologies for the preservation 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 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 repertory of 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 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 accorded with 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 of higher 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 be answered a decade later with the establishment of National Standards for Education in the Arts.

Closing Achievements

The close of Hodsoll’s tenure saw other efforts 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 to strengthen arts presentation and to reinforce the networks of presenting organizations, performers, audiences, and communities—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. They lie 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 is ours 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 for arts 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.

[Chapter 6 of Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham’s report of the history of the National Endowment for the Arts, “Culture Wars,” will be posted on Monday, 20 November.  I hope you’ll return to Rick On Theater to read its coverage of the troubled tenure of John E. Frohnmayer (b. 1942), a lawyer and former chairman of the Oregon Arts Commission, as NEA Chairman (1989-92).]