Rocco Landesman Sends Postcard from Retirement

I’ve been officially retired now for 27 days, which seems like as good a time as any to reflect on my time at the NEA. I felt from the outset that if you were ever going to do public service, if you didn’t do it now in this administration, when you would ever do it? It was by chance, completely out of left field that the opportunity came up. Margo Lion—who was the chairman of the President’s Advisement Committee during the campaign—after the 2008 election came in and said, “Can you think of someone who’d be a really good NEA chair?” I put my hand up and said, “I’ll do it!” It struck me that this would be a real chance to do something different than I had ever done in my life. It would be an opportunity to meet new people and people who are very dedicated to making the country a better place. And that’s exactly what happened.

I’ve met fantastic people doing the NEA Chairman job, especially within the agency itself. I really enjoyed meeting the people that I worked with in the agency and getting to know them. Some of them are going to be lifelong friends. The same thing happened in Washington, in general; I was able to meet people I never would have met otherwise. Every time you go to dinner in this town, there’s substantial discussion. It’s about something that matters. It’s about something real in a way that I wasn’t used to in New York. The good or bad is that people here are serious. They’re engaged. They care. I’m so glad—and my wife Debby is too—that we came down and had this experience. I wouldn’t have traded it for a second!

It probably won’t be surprising that outside of Washington, some of the most rewarding places I visited during my term were places that are very engaged in the arts, that have a great arts infrastructure and commitment to the arts. Providence, Rhode Island, would probably be at the top of the list. Sometimes some of the rural and out-of-the-way places were surprising, like Worm Farm in Wisconsin, and the Red Cloud Indian School in Minnesota, and going to Wounded Knee. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was, I think, an important place to go, and a place that I never would have gone to if I weren’t chair of the NEA. I’ve had an opportunity to do a lot of things that if I hadn’t had this position I wouldn’t have done.