Who will head the NEA? The National Endowment for the Arts has announced more than $60 million in grants, but the agency is without a leader. The Bush team wants to hire a conservative Republican

Insight on the News, May 27, 2002 by Julia Duin

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a sometimes-beleaguered federal arts agency that Congress nearly zeroed out several years ago, still is looking for a leader. Michael P. Hammond, dean of Rice University School of Music in Houston, was nominated for the job last fall but died unexpectedly just after moving to Washington in January. Edward Moy, an associate director in the White House personnel office, is conducting the search to replace Hammond.

Judging from similar appointments -- those of Hammond and Bruce Cole, director of NEA's sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) -- the Bush administration is seeking someone in his 60s, well-connected on the conservative/Republican circuit and with impressive academic credentials. "What we want is somebody who really has broad experience in the arts," says Bob Lynch of Americans for the Arts, a lobbying group for 4,000 local arts councils nationwide. "Ideally, he or she would have multi-arts experience and understand the overall system of support for arts in America, which is a complex ecosystem of public and private arts support. Public support is 10 percent of the puzzle, but the effect of public money in leveraging other support has been huge."

The American Arts Alliance, which represents 2,600 nonprofit arts groups, suggested in a Jan. 31 letter to Moy that the new NEA chairman possess some expertise in the performing arts, be sensitive to the needs of artists and nonprofit arts groups, be an articulate and persuasive political strategist and have a vision as to how the arts can advance American interests around the world. Steve Balch of the National Association of Scholars in Princeton, N.J., says the director should be either an artist or someone who has the administrative knowledge to manage a federal agency, and must be able to defend the NEA budget at congressional hearings.

The appointee also would need good relations with House Republicans, who in July 1997 voted to defund the NEA because of arts grants deemed pornographic, religiously insensitive or just plain offensive. Today, the NEA has a $115.2 million annual budget and appears to have ascended from the basement of congressional opinion.

That move was the work of Bill Ivey, the NEA chairman who took over from Jane Alexander in May 1998. He persuaded Republican skeptics that publicly funded art was in the country's best interest and recruited several members of Congress to sit on the NEA Council, which determines who receives arts grants. Fifty-five percent of all applications to the NEA receive funding, compared with 17 percent of all applications to the NEH.

Among those mentioned to head the NEA are Dean Anderson, a former Smithsonian administrator and recently retired deputy director for planning and management at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Stephanie French, formerly vice president of corporate contributions and cultural programs at Philip Morris Co. in New York. French has a master's degree in business administration from Harvard University and has served on numerous boards for museums and arts and ballet groups. "She's a very, very competent person," Lynch says, "with lots of experience in grant giving and a huge knowledge of arts funding."

Lynne Munson, the new deputy director for the NEH, is another contender because of her wide knowledge of modern American art. Her 2000 book, Exhibitionism: Art in an Age of Intolerance, skewered the NEA for political correctness. Hers was among concerns that led to the federal government's "Challenge America," a program that added $17 million worth of funding for community arts to the NEA's budget to ensure that small cities and rural areas received arts dollars as well.

Another candidate, perhaps the only black Republican considering the job, is Bill Strickland, recently sworn a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. He is a former member of the NEA Council. Strickland oversees the Manchester Craftman's Guild, a community-development center for the arts in northern Pittsburgh.

On April 24, the NEA released names of the recipients of 851 grants worth $60.7 million. The vast majority went to state arts agencies and to the usual line-up of ballet and opera companies, theaters, artists' residencies, symphonies, museums and arts festivals.

Some of the usually contentious recipients of the NEA's largesse were omitted this year. Others, such as the Manhattan Theatre Club, which in 1998 sponsored the play Corpus Christi about a homosexual Messiah, received $40,000, but for a long-distance learning program with 12 to 15 high schools across the country. The Franklin Furnace and The Kitchen, avant-garde New York theaters that have featured sexually explicit acts, received $15,000 and $28,000 respectively for their archive projects.

Organizations in Washington received 34 grants totaling $2 million, including two grants of $150,000 for jazz and classical-music programming on National Public Radio and $25,000 for two patriotic concerts to be performed at the U.S. Capitol. The concerts will be broadcast to 10 million to 12 million viewers over the Public Broadcasting Service.