Given the abundance of crises and combustible situations we face, one would hardly blame the new administration if it moved slowly on the cultural front. But there’s been something of an arts offensive in the last little while. Last week, the President named a new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and hosted the first spoken word performance at the White House featuring young poet-rappers. Michelle Obama spoke passionately about the importance of the arts and arts education. And I was lucky to be included in a delegation of about sixty-five people from around the country who were briefed by White House staff about the arts and cultural policy. Remarkable.
To be honest, we heard little at the briefing that hadn’t been articulated by Obama’s campaign. The meeting was longer on good intentions than it was on specifics. First meetings generally are that way. Each administration speaker reflected on their personal connections and commitment to the arts. Kareem Dale, the point person for the arts in the White House Office of Public Engagement, set the standard with the story of his youthful involvement with the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago. Joe Reinstein, deputy social secretary, may have been best prepared with particulars: the administration will invest in arts education; make health care for artists integral to health care reform; expand the NEA; reinvigorate cultural diplomacy; events in the White House will raise the profile of the arts and celebrate American diversity. Trooper Sanders, assistant policy director for the First Lady, spoke about bringing the arts into the circle of national service. (She ran off quickly to prepare for the announcement of the Summer of Service initiative.) Every speaker declared that this was the start of a serious conversation about how the administration would support the arts and how the arts could contribute to the change the country needs. Dale best summed up the intentions of the administration as the meeting concluded by exclaiming, “The arts are back!”
Change was the mantra of the Obama campaign, and the delegation was populated by cultural leaders, artists, and activists who work for social and cultural change. They don’t run what are usually considered the nation’s premier arts institutions. Some were grizzled veterans and some youthful. Dancer Liz Lerman has pioneered techniques for building community and illuminating complex moral questions through dance. Robert “Biko” Baker directs the League of Young Voters. Maria Lopez De Leon directs the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. Wendell Pierce, a star of HBO’s The Wire, is redeveloping his New Orleans neighborhood. Dee Davis produced more than fifty documentaries at Appalshop in rural Kentucky and now directs the Center for Rural Strategies. Clyde Valentin directs the Hip Hop Theater Festival in Brooklyn.
It was an eclectic group, to be sure, engaged in enormously diverse cultural practices. Its members were passionately involved in everything from net neutrality to protecting Native American artists, from establishing arts-based strategies for improving public schools to adapting the WPA for the 21st century. It cohered because of a shared commitment to the arts, not for “arts’ sake” (whatever that may mean), but as a strategy for saving the country. It was a group intent on building a cultural democracy in which the arts and artists play multiple and robust roles, where citizens make culture, where the arts are off-limits to no one, and where all our cultural traditions, adaptations, and innovations can prosper. That agenda is far bigger and more complex than restoring the NEA’s budget, though that would certainly be a part of it. It involves serious change in public arts policy and change in how arts themselves are practiced. But it is the kind of agenda, like the Obama campaign itself that can inspire people to imagine a better world, and to think and behave in new ways. It is the kind of agenda that can change the terms of debate about the arts that were defined by the conservative attacks that characterized the long culture wars. Perhaps it will.
Nick Rabkin is the co-author of Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century, and now leads the first national study of teaching artists at NORC at the University of Chicago.
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Arlene Goldbard, whose essays on the WPA at the Community Arts Network website (http://www.communityarts.net/) was one of the organizers of the briefing and invited me. The others were Claudine Brown of the Cummings Foundation, Caron Atlas of State Voices and the Pratt Center for Community Develoment, and Billy Wimsatt from Green for All.
way to go Nick, and so happy we all have such a great voice representing all of us.
thanks for sharing this.
Monika
p.s. our old friend started The Cummings Foundation, small world… she lives in Israel now.
I am delighted to see the arts and humanities being respected in the White House again. It was time!
Thank you Nick for sharing the meeting with us.
Beatriz
What I read sounds amazing. As an art student, so many people sarcastically joke that I will be poor and starving all my life, living in people’s basements. But Art is Where it’s At! I think we can all do something really positive and create a great deal of awareness with our imaginative powers and colors. If there is anything that I can do to further this cause, please let me know. Thanks for having a great voice, Nick.
Art is the current flowing through us all. All people make art, whether considered utilitarian object or “fine art” created to lift the soul of viewer and maker. We all move and dance, choreograph our moves among each other as humans and with our environment, though we may not know it as such. Music is in the bird’s song, for sure, but also in the creak of ice and rustle of paper, and we make it when we walk. What matters so much is that we know this, know how art connects us with the universe and know how art keeps us alive.
This may be a bit late but I wanted to add in a thought to the brilliant overview sharing by Nick Rabkin. It must have been a eclectic yet beautiful gathering at the White House, under the auspicies of art and culture. What made the meeting even more poignant was that it wasn’t composed of the usual major instituion suspects. This attempt was to reach beyond the grasstops to the grassroots. Now is the time, it seems to me, to push for the cause of cultural equity in policy and leadership, and what better place to have this conversation than at the Obama White House.
Nick,
Thanks so much for this summary.
Good news indeed. Having begun a consulting practice in arts education in 1989, (www.colleyconsulting.com) then left it for 7 years to assume a professorship, now transitioning back into it, it is wonderful to have an administration at the helm that’s into creativity, and broadening our very definition of “culture” and “art,” especially in music!!
Long overdue…
Thanks again,
Bernadette Colley, Ed.D.
Founder and Principal, Colley Consulting
Associate Professor of Music Education
Boston University
Terrific summary, Nick, and fine articulation of the larger aspiration we have for the role of arts and culture in our democracy. Thank you.
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