A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series
[Below is Chapter 2 of Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham’s “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008.” It covers the pre-history of the agency and its formation and initiation. Bauerlein and Grantham discuss a great deal of the rationale for the formation of the NEA and the optimism that the Arts Endowment generated at its inception. As you follow along with the narrative as the history unfolds in upcoming chapters, you’ll see where that enthusiasm led and what became of the optimism.]
“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
After President Kennedy’s death in 1963, the mission of 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 the tradition 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 of 1965. 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 [1935-39] in Texas [1935-37], a New Deal agency created to provide education, recreation, counseling, and part-time jobs to high school and college youth. President Johnson carried forward the Rooseveltian tradition in the form of the “Great Society,” and quickly warmed to the task of establishing a federal arts agency. He also clearly sought to maintain the youthful and sophisticated persona of the Kennedy Administration.
[Johnson was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas's 10th district from 1937 to 1949, then Senator from Texas from 1949 to 1961, when he became President Kennedy’s Vice President. As a Democrat in the era of the Jim Crow South, he was expected to support the platform and agenda of the Dixiecrats, the break-away faction of the Democratic Party in the South, who were opposed to integration, civil and voting rights for African Americans, and the repeal of laws prohibiting miscegenation. To get elected to the Senate, LBJ gave lip-service to the Dixiecrats, but once in office, he pivoted to civil rights causes, especially upon assuming the presidency.
[JFK had made civil rights for black Americans a central focus of his administration. He and his brother, Robert Kennedy, who was his Attorney General, pursued this objective assiduously for the three years of the “New Frontier,” but much was left unrealized at JFK’s death. It fell to his successor, who retained Robert Kennedy as AG until September 1964 (when RFK resigned to run for Senator from New York), to try to fulfill President Kennedy’s plans. The Voting Act was one of the administration’s successes that President Johnson shepherded to realization. So was the NEA.]
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 level on 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 the visions 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 two earlier bills. Three weeks later, on January 8, 1964, Representative Frank Thompson (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) were major figures in modern American politics, and all represented the well-established liberal 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 and education. 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: “I believe 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 to advance: a true renaissance—the reawakening, the quickening, and above all, the unstunted 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 to African-American civil rights in the South.
Senator Humphrey’s tone during the 1963 hearings was characteristic of his strong personal commitment, as well as his eloquence. He declared, “This is at best a modest acknowledgement . . . that the arts have a significant place in our lives, and I 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 which cloud man’s mind and his spirit and really pose an atmosphere of hopelessness for millions 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 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 the national importance of developing our cultural resources through support of the arts. It is high time that Congress took a real interest in this very essential part of our national 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 the most 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 of Representatives 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 of 1964 was signed by President Johnson, establishing the council with 24 members to “recommend ways to maintain and increase the cultural resources of the nation and to encourage and develop greater appreciation and enjoyment of the arts by its citizens.” One month later, an appropriation of $50,000 [about $480,254 in 2023] 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 [1969-77], 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 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 and programs in national parks, transfer of surplus property to nonprofit arts institutions, and the recognition of museums and cultural centers as public facilities equal in importance to libraries and schools.
The council established subcommittees for each artistic discipline. These subcommittees came back with proposals to train professional arts administrators, to provide direct support to dance companies and resident professional theaters, to establish 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 made that creative artists be aided financially, to release them from other employment so that they might concentrate on creative work.
A Distinguished Roster
The National Council on the Arts in 1965 counted among its members some of the most distinguished and talented artists, directors, and academics in the United States. 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 painter Richard Diebenkorn.
Museum directors and organization leaders included René d’Harnoncourt, director, the Museum of Modern Art; Albert Bush-Brown, president, Rhode Island School of Design; James Johnson Sweeney, director, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and a leading historian of modern art; Anthony A. Bliss, president, Metropolitan Opera Association; Stanley Young, executive director, American National Theater and Academy; 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 [1965-69].
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, future chairman 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 joined a council to support the arts to improve the state’s national reputation damaged by images 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 and as Secretary of the Treasury in the Kennedy Administration, and later as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the committee aimed to devise strategies to bring the business and arts communities into partnerships and more effective forms of mutual support.
An Agency Is Born
On September 29, 1965, President Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act [Public Law 89-209] establishing the National Endowment for the Arts and the 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 the realm 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 the humanities and the arts, while primarily a matter for private and local initiative, is also an appropriate matter of concern to the Federal Government;
• “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 and cultural 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 dedication and 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 and sustain 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 [$24.4 million in 2023], and fewer than a dozen employees. The first NEA grant was made to the American Ballet Theatre in December, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey presented the organization with $100,000 [$977,108 today]. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes wrote at the time, “History, or at least a tiny footnote to history, was made. . . . At the home of Oliver Smith, co-director of American Ballet Theatre with Lucia Chase, the first 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 a national 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, and Paul Taylor.
The first complete series of grants was made in fiscal year 1967, with a budget of nearly $8 million [$73.7 million today]. These early grants illustrate the great range of projects the Arts Endowment has supported since its inception, as well as its expanding reach across the nation. They included:
• In architecture, planning, and design: 11 grants were awarded, totaling $281,100 [$2.6 million], to the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the Lake Michigan Region Planning Council, among others;
• In dance: seven grants totaling $177,325 [$1.6 million], reaching companies as geographically diverse 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 [$8.2 million], to college graduates of art programs;
• In folk art: one grant for $39,500 [$364,000] to the National Folk Festival Association, later renamed the National Council for the Traditional Arts;
• In literature: the first series of grants to 23 creative writers as well as grants to nine literary organizations, totaling $737,010 [$6.8 million];
• In music: 18 grants totaling $653,858 [$6 million], to the Composer Assistance Program and to 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 [$7.3 million], in support of a range of educational television programs in the arts;
• In theater: 23 grants totaling $1,007,500 [$9.3 million], 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 [$6.8 million]. 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 he was 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, along with 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 and Letters in 1994.
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 had historical 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 dancing that 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 of other styles and genres. The Arts Endowment did not reward only established artists; 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.
. . . .
[As I apprised readers I would, I’ve omitted sections on “Film, Television, and Dance” (p. 23), “Arts Education” (pp. 23, 25), “Literature” (pp. 25-26), and “Music” (pp. 26-27) because . . . well, this is a theater post. It’s worth noting, however, that under the umbrella of arts education, the NEA made several large grants to projects in theater related to education (see my closing comments at the end of this chapter).
[I’ll point out, too, that the Arts Endowment also made literary grants to regional theaters. The report noted: “The Experimental Playwrights’ Theater received a total of $125,000 [$1.2 million] to produce plays by Robert 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” (p. 25).]
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 [$63.7 million], with grants made to 187 individuals and 276 organizations. New NEA programs included a groundbreaking initiative for dance touring and support for museum 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 their rights 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 William 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 feel that it is past time to give thought to the propriety of Government-subsidized arts.”
There was even more Congressional outrage concerning a particular project the Arts Endowment undertook in partnership with private foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation—The Theatre Development Fund (TDF), later known for its discount TKTS booth [for discount tickets on the day of performance] 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; and two, to attract students, teachers, and audiences less likely to attend because of high ticket prices.
The program sparked instant criticism. Some critics cast the program as a way to support 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 [$1.2 billion] (divided evenly between the agencies) over two years, plus administrative funds and funds to match donations to the two Endowments. Congress instead approved a single-year budget for the NEA of only $7.8 million [$69 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 [$67.4 million], and a system of 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 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 [i.e., the New York Shakespeare Festival, now the Public Theater]. By 1977, the advisory panel members and consultants 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 and dedication 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 of Northern charm and Southern efficiency. Not the least of his achievements was changing our nation’s capital from a backwater to a cultural Mecca. And the National Endowment for the Arts could never have happened without him.”
[Though Bauerlein and Grantham reported some important grants to theaters under the rubric of arts education, the main thrust of the NEA support in this field went to other art forms. But because of my separate interest in arts in education (and education in the arts), I’m including the paragraph here:
From the beginning, education in the arts has been an area of significant investment by the Arts Endowment. In 1967, education grants included major financing of a national film study program by [New York City’s] Fordham University to develop film and television training curricula for elementary and secondary schools—an idea that remains revolutionary today. A large grant, especially in 1967 dollars, of $681,000 [equivalent to $790,500 today] was made for a Laboratory Theatre Project to assist in training secondary school students in classical 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 by making high-quality theater presentations integral to high school curricula. The three pilot cities were Providence, Rhode Island; New Orleans; and Los Angeles, and performances included Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, 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 [2003-09] (pp. 23, 25).
[Chapter
3 of Bauerlein and Grantham’s history of the National Endowment for the Arts, “A
Fresh Direction,” covers the term of Nancy Hanks (1927-83), an arts
administrator and art historian, as the second chairman of the NEA from 1969 to
1977. I’ll be posting it on Saturday, 11
November.]
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