N is for the National Endowment for the Arts

1965 - 2025

(President Richard Nixon and Chair of the NEA Nancy Hanks, September 14, 1973, UPI. I wrote about Mr. Nixon and the arts here).

When a school asks me to write a letter evaluating one of their faculty’s application for promotion and tenure, I am always asked if I have any relationships with the candidate. And so, as a preliminary: I have worked with staff members of the NEA on various research projects of mine, and I’ve served as a peer reviewer on panels for grants they give for research into the arts, and we worked together on a conference co-sponsored by the Brookings Institution that led to a book. I count people who work there as staff members as friends. And so, with that out of the way…

Here are three things, one old, two very recent:

Here is President Johnson’s statement on March 10, 1965 (the Act was approved on September 29 of that year):

AT THE REQUEST of the subcommittee chairmen, I have today transmitted the administration's recommendations for a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities to the Special Subcommittee on Labor of the House of Representatives, and the Special Subcommittee on Arts and Humanities of the Senate.

In the State of the Union address I said, "We must also recognize and encourage those who can be pathfinders for the Nation's imagination and understanding."

These recommendations are designed to secure such recognition and encouragement for those who extend the frontiers of understanding in the arts and in humanistic studies.

The humanities are an effort to explore the nature of man's culture and to deepen understanding of the sources and goals of human activity. Our recommendations recognize this effort as a central part of the American national purpose, and provide modest support to those whose work offers promise of extending the boundaries of understanding.

Pursuit of artistic achievement, and making the fruits of that achievement available to all its people, is also among the hallmarks of a Great Society.

We fully recognize that no government can call artistic excellence into existence. It must flow from the quality of the society and the good fortune of the Nation. Nor should any government seek to restrict the freedom of the artist to pursue his calling in his own way. Freedom is an essential condition for the artist, and in proportion as freedom is diminished so is the prospect of artistic achievement.

But government can seek to create conditions under which the arts can flourish; through recognition of achievements, through helping those who seek to enlarge creative understanding, through increasing the access of our people to the works of our artists, and through recognizing the arts as part of the pursuit of American greatness. That is the goal of this legislation.

In so doing we follow the example of many other nations where government sympathy and support have helped to shape great and influential artistic traditions.

This Congress will consider many programs which will leave an enduring mark on American life. But it may well be that passage of this legislation, modest as it is, will help secure for this Congress a sure and honored place in the story of the advance of our civilization.

From January 17, 2025, here is an excerpt from the parting Chair of the NEA, Maria Rosario Jackson:

January 20th marks my last day as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. It has been the honor of my lifetime to serve as Chair of the NEA and to contribute to and build upon the NEA’s rich history and many accomplishments in serving the American people.

I believe deeply in the NEA’s mission to ensure that all people in the United States have access to and benefit from the arts and arts education. The arts animate the soul of our nation. Participation in the arts provides opportunities to make sense of the world, ask important questions, and imagine new possibilities. The arts help us heal, bridge, connect, and thrive. They fuel our democracy and our economy. In my travels, from Caguas, Puerto Rico to Bethel, Alaska, and across countless conversations with local leaders, I have witnessed this firsthand. To my core, I continue to believe that we cannot live up to our promise as a nation of opportunity and justice without the full and intentional integration of the arts into all aspects of our lives, all areas of policy and practice, and the systems we rely on to care for each other.

And finally, from the Washington Post, February 6, 2025:

The National Endowment for the Arts said Thursday that it will alter its 2026 grant guidelines, eliminating a fund for underserved communities and prioritizing projects that honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The moves come as the Trump administration’s directives to shut down diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are forcing changes in Washington’s federally funded cultural institutions and as the executive branch seeks to put its mark on a patriotic celebration planned for next year.

The Challenge America grant will be canceled for 2026, the NEA said in a news release. That program was reserved for projects that “extend the reach of the arts to underserved groups/communities,” according to the NEA’s website. The agency encouraged Challenge America applicants instead to apply with the Grants for Arts Projects program.

Now, however, Grants for Arts Projects will “encourage projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America,” its release said.

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I can’t write a sixty-year history of the institution. I did write about the NEA v Finley Supreme Court case from 1998 - here is a clip:

For arts funding to be based purely upon considerations of artistic excellence, as determined by panels of experts in the field, and not upon other considerations, is something that must be the outcome of political agreement. I would advocate for it, but it is obviously not a consensus position.

And here is the bind (I once heard Geoffrey Stone say something like this in a talk): if Karen Finley had been successful at the Supreme Court (as I continue to believe she deserved to), it is not far-fetched to believe that the calls for closing the agency would actually have met with success. For there is no constitutional right to having an arts council in the first place.

And that is the bind. There is the arts funding framework that artists and supporters would like to have, and what is politically feasible. And the politics matters: we could try to persuade people of the value of the avant-garde in the arts, of exploration and experimentation, but we cannot say “You think “Piss Christ” is offensive? Tough.”

My point was that what we want an NEA to do is a political question, one that requires democratic deliberation. We can have the most excellent peer review panels evaluate proposals, but the panels cannot themselves set the criteria - when I am asked to review things, as I am frequently, I need to be told the basis upon which I am supposed to make a judgment.

So while I might think funding on grounds of artistic excellence is the best, that has to be something that our legislative bodies believe to be the appropriate criterion. I’ve never been a fan of the claim “all art is political.” But government funding of the arts most definitely is political - it has to be. That doesn’t mean we don’t give the funding body arm’s length independence (and, has been pointed out to me, there are varying lengths of arms) to administer the system. But the funding body’s mandate must come from above.

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And that is where I think the real story of the NEA lies: not in the agency itself, but in what we as a country think it really ought to be doing.

The NEA’s position has always been tenuous - there were criticisms of its allocation decisions right from the beginning - because there isn’t really much of a national consensus about what arts funding is for. Its struggles over the following decades were baked in from the start. In 1965 there was an idea in Washington that the US was not living up to its potential as a truly great nation, and that the Endowments would be at least something to try to change that.¹ But the initial legislation was clearly aimed at artistic excellence, with a heavy emphasis on the artist having freedom to pursue her vision.

But this is not a country that was going to tolerate that for very long, and so we had the battles of the late 80s / early 90s, leading to a new mission of, well, doing good deeds: “Participation in the arts provides opportunities to make sense of the world, ask important questions, and imagine new possibilities. The arts help us heal, bridge, connect, and thrive” and all that.

With the new administration, the NEA is now to fund works that honor the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That’s the thing with putting on the backburner the criterion of artistic excellence: one set of “instrumental” goals of art can easily be replaced by another.

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I’m surprised, honestly, that the NEA, so long a target of the right, remains in place (as I write … obviously this might change) - an easier target, I would have thought, than USAID or the CFPB, which have in these past few weeks have been escorted to the gallows. They make a point of ensuring at least some grant money goes to every legislative district in the country, which seems savvy politically, but it is salient for only a tiny number of voters. The Heritage Foundation - the author of the Project 2025 document that is having so much influence in the new administration - called for the NEA’s elimination just a couple of years ago but it has not yet come to pass (and I cannot find a reference to the NEA in Project 2025, though I might well have missed it).

And if after this grant cycle it is all wound down? State government arts councils give out more funding per capita than the NEA, but I would predict they would begin to be shuttered, at least in red states, fairly soon after. That would leave local arts councils, which, in a country as widely diverse in its cultural interests as the US, is not necessarily the worst place to locate public support for the arts - some places would give artists funds to be as freaky as they like, others would look to something more akin to community social services, and others still might like lots of investment in bricks and mortar, in the quixotic search for coolness. Better than funding odes to the “Founding Fathers”, I reckon.

1. In his announcement of his becoming the new chair of the Kennedy Center, our current President announced that he had a vision for a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture”, though the details have yet to be released.