Advocacy and Public Policy

With the midterm elections two months away and as New York rolled out its primary election on Thursday, September 13, we showcase a story series by ArtPlace that points out to artists who hold leadership roles in their cities.

The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), proposing funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) by $23 million each was defeated on Wednesday by a vote of 114 to 297.

The House Rules Committee green-lighted on Monday an amendment sponsored by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), which would cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) by $23 million each – a 15% cut to each agency, alerted Americans for the Arts.

Jerry Brown, the governor of California, signed on June 27 a $139 billion state budget that includes a $44,080,000 one-time federal Title IV funding for grants enhancing arts education or expanding access to physical and mental health care in schools in fiscal year 2019.

Despite the Trump Administration’s 2019 budget request that proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), among other cultural agencies, federal funding for the arts increased as congressional leaders reached a tentative agreement Wednesday night on a $1.3 trillion federal spending bill.

Do you think that we are living in a zeitgeist of catalytic change? I have heard the word catalytic used so frequently that I find myself accessorizing moments with this adjective as if it holds the weight of tectonic shifts. It seems to promise the kind of change that either redirects historical systems of oppression toward equity — gradually erasing calcified notions of otherness that fuel supremacist behaviors — or catapults us back into a time where Flintstones-like ideals become presidential norms.

This June, while facing a proposed 2018 budget just large enough to sunset the agency, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu began a keynote address at the 2017 Americans for the Arts conference with a simple but timely question, “What if access to the arts was a human right?”

A society’s values are the basis upon which all else is built. These values and the ways they are expressed are a society’s culture. The way a society governs itself cannot be fully democratic without there being clear avenues for the expression of community values, and unless these expressions directly affect the directions society takes. These processes are culture at work.
— Jon Hawkes, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning

There are many arguments for continued federal funding to the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities (NEA and NEH), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) — all agencies that would be eliminated by President Trump’s 2018 budget.

What can you do when times are uncertain, and yet a clear opportunity to advance a collective agenda presents itself? Take action.