CAA News Today

As a national cosponsor of Arts Advocacy Day and Humanities Advocacy Day, CAA encourages its members to participate in both of these important advocacy events, held annually in Washington, DC.

Arts Advocacy Day, occurring Monday and Tuesday, March 12-13, 2007, brings together a broad cross-section of America’s national cultural organizations to underscore the importance of developing strong public policies and appropriating increased public funding for the arts, the humanities, and arts education, as well as for other programs within the federal government that have an impact on the visual and performing arts.

Humanities Advocacy Day, administered by the National Humanities Alliance, takes place Monday and Tuesday, March 26-27, 2007. This event provides a unique opportunity for concerned citizens to communicate to Congress the vital importance of federal support for research and education in the humanities.

If you are interested in joining other CAA members at either of these events, please e-mail Laurel Peterson.

In contrast to the House version of the Interior Appropriations bill, in which the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities received an increase of $5 million each, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved level funding for both endowments. The Senate did include an increase for the Department of Education’s Arts in Education program and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The House version, on the other hand, followed President George W. Bush’s request for severe cuts to CPB and for zeroing out Arts in Education. Historically the Senate has reversed the president’s recommendation. The full Senate has yet to vote on the bill and, at press time, it seems unlikely it will pass a separate Interior Appropriations bill. Congress is slated to recess through the November elections, which leaves little time for it to complete unfinished legislation, including the Interior Appropriations bills that fund all federal programs. Congress will most likely put off appropriations legislation and pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running at the previous fiscal year’s funding levels through November, when it returns for a lame-duck session to finish the appropriations process. Regardless of whether most spending bills are acted on separately or grouped into a large omnibus package, House and Senate Appropriations Committees need to begin conferencing on fiscal year 2007 spending before the end of the calendar year. Meaningful work on the Interior bill is not expected until after the November election.

In other legislative news, the Senate passed the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which contains a series of provisions designed to stimulate charitable giving and eliminate perceived abuses of charity laws by donors and nonprofit organizations. President Bush signed the measure into law in August. The legislation provides a provision including appraisal reform, increased penalties and fines for excess benefit transactions, and a change to the tax treatment of fractional gifts that greatly restricts donors’ abilities to stretch out gifts of art over several years, which is important for gifts of major artworks. The provision is expected to have a negative effect on museums’ ability to acquire art from private donors. The museum community is working to make recommendations to Congress to eliminate or change the fractional-gift provision as lawmakers consider introducing a bill to revise the measure. Among the charitable incentives included in the legislation is one that would allow donors age 70½ or older to make tax-free distributions of up to $100,000 directly to charitable organizations from either traditional Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA) or a Roth IRA. As enacted, the law is effective only for two years. The legislation does not include the long-sought “artist deduction” that would allow artists to claim a fair-market-value tax deduction when they donate their own works to collecting or educational institutions; nor does it include a charitable-giving provision allowing people who do not itemize deductions on their returns to write off a portion of their charitable donations, something the nonprofit community has repeatedly asked for.

A new RAND report, entitled “The Arts and State Governments: At Arm’s Length or Arm in Arm?”, recommends that state arts agencies seeking increased state government support for the arts should strengthen their relationships with elected officials and raise their organizations’ profile with the public. State arts agencies are government organizations created in the US in the 1960s and after; they support the arts through grants to artists and nonprofit arts organizations.

The report, commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, suggests that strategies that reach out to the public and to government officials can be effective in positioning the arts higher on the list of government priorities. It also shows that state arts agencies have contributed to a nationwide flourishing of professional artists and art organizations and have helped local communities gain control over most public arts funding decisions.

“The Arts and State Governments” can be ordered from RAND’s Distribution Services at 877-584-8642; order@rand.org

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced a new Digital Humanities Initiative that will support projects that use digital technology to transform scholarly research. The NEH is especially interested in projects that use digital technologies and methods to enhance public understanding of a specific topic or issue; study the impact of digital technology on the humanities; and digitize important materials and make them more accessible to the public.

A new RAND report, entitled “The Arts and State Governments: At Arm’s Length or Arm in Arm?”, recommends that state arts agencies seeking increased state government support for the arts should strengthen their relationships with elected officials and raise their organizations’ profile with the public. State arts agencies are government organizations created in the US in the 1960s and after; they support the arts through grants to artists and nonprofit arts organizations.

The report, commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, suggests that strategies that reach out to the public and to government officials can be effective in positioning the arts higher on the list of government priorities. It also shows that state arts agencies have contributed to a nationwide flourishing of professional artists and art organizations and have helped local communities gain control over most public arts funding decisions.

“The Arts and State Governments” can be ordered from RAND’s Distribution Services at 877-584-8642; order@rand.org; www.rand.org.

CAA co-sponsored Arts Advocacy Day (March 14-15, 2005), hosted by Americans for the Arts, and Humanities Advocacy Day (April 6-7, 2005), hosted by the National Humanities Alliance. Both events were held in Washington, D.C., and brought together a broad cross-section of national cultural organizations, academics, and grassroots arts leaders to promote the arts, arts education, and humanities to Congress through increased support for the federal cultural agencies.

At Arts Advocacy Day, CAA President Ellen K. Levy joined CAA staff representatives Rebecca Cederholm and Alexis Light to focus on several important arts policy matters during visits to Capitol Hill. They urged Congress to support a budget of $170 million for the National Endow-ment for the Arts (NEA) in fiscal year (FY) 2006, which is an increase of $49 million over President George W. Bush’s request for level funding. An increase would support the creation, preservation, and presentation of the arts in the United States, including Challenge America, a program that uses the arts to enhance America’s communities through grants for arts education, youth-at-risk programs, cultural preservation, and community arts partnerships, as well as to improve access to the arts for all Americans. An increase would also support the president’s request to continue funding for American Masterpieces, an initiative that combines arts presentations with educational programming to provide Americans with access to their cultural and artistic legacy.

Levy, Cederholm, and Light visited the offices of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), Representative Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY), and Representative Jerrold L. Nadler (D-NY), among others, on Arts Advocacy Day to urge them to continue supporting legislation that would allow artists to take a fair-market-value tax deduction for artists who donate works of art to nonprofit organizations. At present, collectors who give art to museums and cultural institutions are able to claim the full market value of the work, whereas artists can only deduct the cost of the materials used. Together with other arts advocates from across the country, Levy, Cederholm, and Light also called on Congress to require the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to adopt immediate reforms that will ensure timely processing of visa petitions related to nonprofit arts groups. Many nonprofit organizations confront untenable delays and uncertainties while gaining approval of visa requests for international guest artists and scholars.

CAA representatives Cederholm and Light joined CAA Executive Director Susan Ball for Humanities Advocacy Day, an event that focuses on increased support for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Ball visited the offices of key members of both the Senate and House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, which deal directly with funding for the federal cultural agencies, as well as members of the Congressional Humanities Caucus. Cederholm and Light visited the offices of Representative Jos’ Serrano (D-NY), Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY), and Representative Edolphus Towns (D-NY), among others. (Because CAA’s address is in New York, the organizers asked us to visit our state’s representatives.) Ball, Cederholm, and Light joined other humanities advocates in urging Congress to support President Bush’s budget request of $153.1 million for the NEH in FY 2006. This funding will support, among other things, the We the People initiative to enhance understanding of American history and culture; education programs to strengthen teaching and learning in schools, colleges, and universities; preservation and access grants to save unique historical, cultural, and intellectual resources; and challenge grants to strengthen the institutional base of the humanities.

In addition to increased funding for the NEH, CAA representatives encouraged members of Congress to support other humanities-related legislation in the coming year. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grant-making arm of the National Archives and Records Administration, was targeted by President Bush’s FY 2006 budget request for zero funding both for grants and for staff to administer the NHPRC and its programs. Arts advocates asked lawmakers to support a minimum FY 2006 funding level of $10 million: $8 million for grants and $2 million for staffing and other program administration-related costs. Without grant funds, the publishing of papers and other historical materials from America’s founding era to the present will be severely curtailed or terminated, the network of state archives will collapse, and research and development in the field of preserving electronic records will end.

Advocacy alerts related to various arts and humanities issues are regularly posted to CAA’s website; for further information, see www.collegeart.org/advocacy.

The art historian Bruce Cole was sworn in December 11, 2001, as the eighth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Previously, he taught for twenty-eight years at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was distinguished professor of fine arts and chairman of the Department of the History of Art.

Cole has written fourteen books, many of them about the Renaissance. They include The Renaissance Artist at Work; Sienese Painting in the Age of the Renaissance: Italian Art, 1250-1550; The Relation of Art to Life and Society; Titian and Venetian Art, 1450-1590; and Art of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post-Modernism. His most recent book is The Informed Eye: Understanding Masterpieces of Western Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Cole received his BA from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, his MA from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and his Ph.D. in 1969 from Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

Cole’s relationship with the NEH dates from 1971, when he was awarded a fellowship to do research on “The Origins and Development of Early Florentine Painting.” He has served as a panelist in the NEH’s peer-review system, and in 1992 was named by President George H. W. Bush to the National Council on the Humanities, the NEH’s twenty-six-member advisory board, where he served for seven years.