CAA News Today

On July 17, 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives approved an amendment to increase funding by $10 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and $5 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) over President Bush’s fiscal year 2003 budget request. The amendment directs the $10 million increase for the NEA to the agency’s Challenge America program, an initiative designed to extend the reach of arts programs to underserved communities. No specifications were made for the additional NEH funding.

If these increases survive a vote in the Senate and receive the president’s signature, the NEA will begin the fiscal year in October with $127 million (a $12.1 million increase from fiscal year 2002), and the NEH will have $131.9 million (a $7 million increase from last year).

CAA cosponsored Arts Advocacy Day on March 11-12, 2002, hosted by Americans for the Arts, and Jefferson Day on March 21-22, 2002, hosted by the National Humanities Alliance (NHA), in Washington, D.C. Both events 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.

In addition to requesting more funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), CAA representatives Marta Teegen and Paul Skiff focused on two key policy issues on Arts Advocacy Day this year: grants for individual artists and fair-market-value tax deductions for artists.

Concerning grants for individual artists, Teegen and Skiff argued that the NEA has always sought to promote America�s cultural heritage and values both domestically and abroad through these grants. Specifically, NEA grants have supported and encouraged ingenuity, freedom of expression, and risk taking. Since Congress eliminated grants to individual artists in 1995, the NEA has placed the majority of its emphasis on education and access programs. To remove artists from the grants program, however, leaves this national arts-funding initiative without positive examples of individual achievement, which provide high standards upon which to base educational goals. A program for funding the arts that does not have examples of individual professional achievement, much less encourage ingenuity and risk taking, does not allow the U.S. to establish cultural authority or credibility worldwide. Therefore, it is necessary that the NEA recognize individual artists with longstanding achievement, and encourage them to be outspoken with their unique viewpoints and innovative, advanced ideas. After all, it is artists who are recognized by the national and international public for being positive examples of American cultural leadership.

While making several congressional visits during Arts Advocacy Day, Teegen and Skiff met with other arts advocates. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these advocates scoffed at our attempt to reestablish a dialogue with our elected officials about grants to individual artists, more often than not stating that ours is a lost cause. To be sure, if arts advocates from around the country are afraid or unwilling to broach this important subject with members of Congress, then it will, sadly, forever be lost. We therefore strongly urge all CAA members to engage your elected officials in a dialogue about the importance of grants to individual artists and to ask them to sponsor legislation that will fund them.

On the issue of fair-market-value tax deductions for artists, CAA has been an advocate for pending legislation for well over a year now. Sponsored by Amo Houghton (R-Corning, NY) and Ben Cardin (D-Baltimore, MD) in the House and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) in the Senate, the proposed legislation would allow artists to deduct the donation of an artwork at its full market value. This will greatly aid museums and other nonprofit recipients of art gifts by making the donation process easier and more valuable for the donor. In all likelihood, the bill will be amended to a larger tax bill; however, it is unclear whether or not there will be such a tax bill this year.

For Jefferson Day, a humanities advocacy event that focuses on increasing support for the NEH, Teegen and CAA�s executive director, Susan Ball, met with several members of the Senate Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies�the group that oversees funding for federal cultural agencies. We explained that NEA and NEH Challenge Grants have allowed CAA to offer awards to individuals from traditionally underrepresented populations at the professional level in museums and universities through its Professional Development Fellowship Program. CAA director of marketing and communications and a New Jersey resident, Richard Selden, also participated in visits (organized by Princeton University’s Office of Government Affairs) to the offices of several New Jersey members of Congress. Unfortunately, the NEH falls under the radar in most congressional offices. We need to help raise the agency�’s profile-to increase awareness of the work that it makes possible, including support for art-historical research and exhibitions, and to improve the understanding of its mission. CAA will continue to work with the National Humantities Alliance, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington, D.C., of which CAA is a member, to address these issues.

Also during Jefferson Day, CAA and the NHA cosponsored a reception at the Folger Shakespeare Library in honor of the new NEH chair, Bruce Cole, an art historian. It was well attended by congressional staff, humanities advocates, and NEH staff members.

As reported in the March/April issue of CAA News, President George W. Bush’s budget, which was released in February of this year, calls for modest increases in the NEA’s and NEH’s budgets in FY 2003, just enough to cover the costs associated with the proposed legislative change in accounting for retirement and health benefits costs; thus, program budgets for the two agencies are nearly identical with the present fiscal year, at about $117.4 million for the NEA and almost $126.9 million for NEH. The IMLS, on the other hand, is scheduled for an increase of 8.1 percent over last year’s budget. While advocates urged members of Congress to support a funding increase to $155 million each for both the NEA and the NEH during Arts Advocacy Day and Jefferson Day, it is still unclear whether such increases will occur in the coming fiscal year.

-Marta Teegen, CAA manager of governance, advocacy, and special projects, with Paul Skiff, assistant director of annual conference

The White House released its FY 2003 budget proposal on February 4, 2002, in which President George W. Bush calls for dramatic increases in spending for defense (a $48 billion increase), homeland security, and the war on terrorism, and makes dramatic cuts in other programs. In light of this, the nation’s cultural institutions seem to have fared fairly well.

Bush has requested almost $117.4 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (a $2.1 million or a 1.7 percent increase from FY 2002) and about $126.9 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities (a $2 million or a 1.9 percent increase from last year). The increases for these are aimed at funding the full costs associated with the proposed legislative change in accounting for retirement and health-benefits costs; program budgets are identical with the present fiscal year.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services’s projected budget of $210.7 million is an increase of 8.1 percent over last year. The administration’s budget request for the Smithsonian Institution calls for an increase of $9 million; this figure represents a 1.8 percent increase from the previous year. The total $528 million budget proposal for the Smithsonian includes $10 million for the construction of the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as $5.2 million for staffing and exhibition planning for the new museum. Funding has also been proposed for continuing the renovation work on the historic Patent Office Building, which houses the National Portrait Gallery.

Because of successful lobbying by arts advocates, the Fiscal Year 2002 Interior Appropriations bill also includes funds for the Center for Materials Research and Education at the Smithsonian Institution, despite the fact that the Bush administration previously had accepted the Smithsonian leaderships proposal to close the center. It will remain open for at least another year.

Heritage Preservation received a Chairman’s Emergency Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for “A Survey and Report on the Extent of Damage and Loss to Cultural Resources after the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks.” The project will collect information about the impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on 99 museums, libraries, and archives; 67 historic landmarks; and 245 works of outdoor sculpture in lower Manhattan, along with significant art collections and business archives maintained by many nonprofit organizations. A report will document the extent of damage and loss to cultural resources and the responses of museums, libraries, and archives to this unprecedented tragedy.

For more information on this project, please visit Heritage Preservation’s website at www.heritagepreservation.org.

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.