A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 4

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Welcome back to Rick On Theater and the continuation of “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008.”  Chapter 4 chronicles the administration (1977-81) of NEA chairman Livingston Biddle (1918-2002).  For those who haven’t been reading along with this history, I strongly suggest going back to parts one through three, posted on 5, 8, and 11 November, before getting into “A Long Summer,” 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 4 

A Long Summer

In 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 an ambulance driver in World War II. He wrote popular novels before coming to Washington to be a special assistant to Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI), his roommate in preparatory school and at Princeton, who was a key figure in drafting the legislation that established the Arts and Humanities Endowments. Biddle also had served as NEA deputy chairman under Roger Stevens, and later served as Nancy Hanks’s Congressional 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] been suggestion that the arts may be subject to politicalization . . . mean[ing] . . . subject to 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 to suggest a polarization of the arts,” noting that “elitism can indeed mean quality, can indeed 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 affect the families of artists so heavily. For her efforts, she earned the title “Joan of Art.”

[The Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities is a component sub-agency of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, alongside the Arts Endowment, the Humanities Endowment, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  Joan Mondale (1930-2014) served as honorary chairman of the Federal Council from 1977 to 1981, while she was the Second Lady of the United States. The Federal Council is distinct from the National Council on the Arts, which is the NEA’s advisory committee.]

Under Biddle’s leadership, the Endowment continued to enjoy rising funding, the total reaching $158.8 million in 1981 [$537.7 million today]. 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 the establishment 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 and organizations. Other initiatives included the Office of Minority Concerns to act as a clearinghouse for minority artists and art groups in dealing with the NEA, and the establishment 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, a distinctive 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 custom of designating expert craftsmen and artisans as [Living] 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 [1988], the agency’s Folk Arts Program “legitimized the traditional arts in the eyes—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 the soil 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 [probably referring to 1913, when the 16th amendment to the Constitution was ratified], and this is the first time any of our money ever came back to help us.’”

[The grant referred to above was in 1976 to the tiny town of Chimayo, New Mexico (pop. in 2020: 3,077), where an annual festival takes place on the Feast of Santiago (Saint James, patron saint of Spain), 25 July.  Los Moros y los cristianos (“The Moors and the Christians”) is a reenactment of a symbolic battle between the two forces that resulted in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christian Spaniards after centuries of occupation by the Muslim Moors of North Africa.

[The festival dates back to the 15th century—on different dates in different parts of the Spanish-speaking world.  Several hundred people come to Chimayo every year to view the reenactment, and the 1976 funds paid for new costumes and dressings for the horses, reviving the tradition that had been barely surviving after some three hundred years in the same location.]

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 for and so, in significant ways, profoundly true.” Although the creation of the fellowships was announced in 1980, at the end of Biddle’s chairmanship, the first awards were made in 1982, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Since then, the NEA National Heritage Fellowships have been bestowed upon a diverse selection of individuals who have “made major contributions to the excellence, 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, guitarist Brownie McGhee, as well as the Mexican-American singer Lydia Mendoza, bluegrass musician Bill Monroe, and traditional artists producing Western saddles and ornamental iron.

Since its inception, the NEA National Heritage Fellowship has become the most important 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, the accordion 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” and African-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 genres of 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 and Bosnian Jewish singers, a Ghanaian-American drummer, and such genres as Chinese opera, the north Indian raga, and Basque poetry.

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 gift of 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 and composer, 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 both coasts. 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 traditional arts. To be considered, nominees should be worthy of national recognition and must be actively engaged in preserving the folk and traditional arts.”

The Arts Endowment has also played an essential role in the creation and support of a network of folk arts coordinators based at the state, regional, and local folk arts agencies and other cooperating nonprofit organizations. In addition, statewide folk and traditional arts apprenticeship programs, allowing master traditional artists 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 School of 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 [$1.5 million in 2023] and ranged from $1,500 [$6,360] to $28,000 [$118,707]. The Arts Endowment’s Contemporary Music Performance Program granted $441,500 [$1.9 million] for performances at institutions such as the New Music Consort of New York, while its Composer/Librettist Program gave $525,420 [$2.2 million] to individuals and institutions including the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, which had long been associated with 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 to the 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 of mutual respect and appreciation. . . . The program emphasizes the creation, development, and production of new American works, as well as experimentation with new forms 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 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 more in common with musical theater than with regular classical performance. The association [between the genres] made sense because opera and musical theater alike used costumes and other elements of performance differently from classical music presentations. At the first meetings the opera people were afraid the musical theater people would consider them dull—but 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 chamber music 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 meet thus 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 and to 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 such as 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 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 [$33.5 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, with approval from Congress, the Arts Endowment became self-sufficient and hired its own administrative staff. Until that point, the two agencies had shared staff for budget, finance, and personnel management. 

According to Biddle, the great problem for the arts in America was “the danger of fragmentation.” When special interests come into play, he maintained, “they can diminish the value of the art, for although art does a great many good things in the world 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, free from 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 an effort to steer a difficult course between those two mandates.

Revised Structure

Outside pressures not only broadened access to the Arts Endowment’s funding, they also 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 the agency’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.

As the Arts Endowment’s budget grew, a perception of favoritism and conflicts of interest by individuals serving on grant panels sparked concern in both artistic and governmental circles. Deputy Chairman for Programs Mary Ann Tighe wrote, “How panelists are selected seems to be a subject of particular interest to the arts community. Our process is a subjective one . . . the staff, generally the program director in consultation with individuals in and outside the Endowment, 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 occurred since 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-by-discipline audit of its practices. In 1979, the NEA added two new areas of support to its traditional dance programs—artistic personnel and rehearsal support—which helped companies pay for existing and new artists 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 and performance standards are among the world’s finest. Still, acceptance has not come easily. In 1965, there was only a handful of high quality, fully professional dance companies in the United States, almost all of them in New York.”

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 that brought together and supported small press journals. The NEA “increased substantially its support for innovative and experimental projects attempting to solve the problems 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 [$1.6 million] in federal funds.

Many creative writing fellowships awarded during Chairman Biddle’s term went to fledgling 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 the most noteworthy literary grants of the era supported the work of an author who had taken his own life ten years earlier. In 1979, the Arts Endowment awarded Louisiana State University (LSU) Press $3,500 [$14,203] to defray publishing costs of a comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, by unknown writer John Kennedy Toole. Toole had finished the manuscript in the late 1960s while stationed with the U.S. Army in Puerto Rico, where he had taught English to Spanish-speaking recruits. After several publishers rejected the work, Toole committed suicide in 1969 [aged 31]. But his mother, Thelma Toole, assisted by novelist Walker Percy, managed to place the work with LSU Press. With the Arts Endowment’s help, the work was published in 1980. It was a critical and commercial success, selling 50,000 copies the first year and winning the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has since been translated into 18 languages, and there are nearly two million copies in print.

In 1979, the Endowment funded several projects in the area of new media. With 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 in a 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 relationship with the NEA by noting that in one year 7,000 painters, sculptors, crafts artists, and photographers 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 success-oriented, 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 the artist spent his time testing new ideas, learning which led up blind alleys and which were artistically valid. We do not require our artists to be . . . popular, either, which is sometimes 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 a program 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 their homes (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 the growing 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 their regions, with a history of involvement with arts organizations, they brought the agency leadership into closer contact with local conditions. They reduced the sense of isolation that many actual and potential applicants felt, helped people all over the country learn about the NEA—in particular its grants review process—and enabled those at the Endowment to understand more fully the needs, trends, populations, and regional differences that characterize the arts in the United States. The number of 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 that makes 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 a well-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.

[I’ll resume publishing this history of the NEA with Chapter 5, “The Reagan Era,” which covers the chairmanship (1981-89) of Frank Hodsoll  (1938-2016), a historian with a background in law.  Please come back to ROT on 17 November for the next installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts.”]