Arts leaders worry about fate of arts, humanities agencies
Just a few months before Oklahoma’s 100th birthday, people flocked to Oklahoma City’s Civic Center Music Hall to see one of the state’s favorite daughters star in the state’s namesake musical.
Kelli O’Hara, an Elk City native and now a Tony Award-winning actress, charmed the audience in a Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma production of “Oklahoma!”
It was a production that might never have happened had it not been underwritten by a sizable federal grant.
Now, some in the state’s arts community worry that such grants — and the programs they fund — could be in jeopardy.
Amid reports that President Donald Trump hopes to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities, members of Oklahoma’s arts community are worried about how such a move would affect the state’s cultural opportunities.
A Jan. 19 report in the Washington, D.C.-based political newspaper The Hill suggested Trump may try to eliminate the two agencies, which together have awarded more than $30 million in grants to Oklahoma agencies and institutions since 1998.
Artists and others say those grants are critical to ensuring that the arts continue to exist in places like Oklahoma rather than being concentrated in large, coastal urban areas.
“From our point of
view, it’s a great investment that our federal government has made in this state,” said Ann Thompson, executive director of the Oklahoma Humanities Council.
The report cites unnamed sources from inside Trump’s transition team. Trump administration officials haven’t confirmed the report. But both agencies have been frequent targets of budget hawks over the decades. Last year, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a policy paper titled “Blueprint for Balance: A Federal Budget for 2017” that called for both agencies to be eliminated.
The paper’s authors argue that neither agency is necessary because private donors support arts and humanities programs.
“Taxpayer assistance of the arts is neither necessary nor prudent,” the authors wrote. “Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for plays, paintings, pageants, and scholarly journals, regardless of the works’ attraction or merit.”
Similarly, in a policy paper released last year, the government watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste called the agencies “examples of dabbling in fields that should be entirely free from government intervention.”
“Actors, artists, and academics are no more deserving of subsidies than their counterparts in other fields; the federal government should refrain from funding all of them,” the authors wrote. “Anything else is anathema to taxpayers.”
Since 1998, the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded about $16 million in grants to Oklahoma agencies and institutions. The large majority of that funding — about $12.6 million — went to the Oklahoma Arts Council, which funds arts projects and programming.
Amber Sharples, executive director of the Oklahoma Arts Council, said her agency uses those grants to support arts initiatives in communities across the state. For example, Red Earth, Inc., an Oklahoma Citybased nonprofit, uses grant money from the state arts council to fund the Red Earth Festival, an annual celebration of American Indian arts and culture.
The state arts council makes a priority of supporting arts programs in rural parts of the state, where it may not exist otherwise, Sharples said. The agency has given grants to support community theaters in Hobart and Guymon, tribal powwows in Talihina and Tonkawa and music festivals in Skiatook and Grove.
Likewise, the National Endowment for the Humanities gives grants to support research programs, historical preservation projects and other work. Since 1998, the agency has given about $14.1 million in grants to Oklahoma recipients, including about $8.7 million in state partnership grants awarded to the Oklahoma Humanities Council.
Thompson, director of the state humanities council, said much of the money her organization receives from the federal humanities agency funds programs targeted at low-income areas of the state. For example, the organization funds Let’s Talk About It, Oklahoma, a reading and discussion program that takes place in cities and towns across the state.
Aside from supporting state arts and humanities agencies, both federal agencies also give grants to individual institutions. Last year, the University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art received a $40,000 federal grant to produce “Photo/Synthesis,” an exhibition featuring photos by Navajo artist Will Wilson.
For the exhibition, Wilson photographed Oklahoma tribal community members, including several who were distant relatives of American Indians whose photographs were included in the 1930 portfolio “Indians of Oklahoma” by early 20th century photographer Edward Curtis.
That component of the exhibition — locating and contacting the descendants of the people included in the 1930 portfolio — would have been nearly impossible without federal grant funding, said Mark White, the museum’s director.
“It never would have gotten off the ground,” White said.
Michael Baron, producing artistic director of the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, said funding from the National Endowment for the Arts has allowed the theater company to do productions it never could have managed otherwise.
The theater has received $286,000 in direct grants from the federal agency since 1998. It also receives funding from the state arts council, much of which comes indirectly from federal dollars.
Those federal grants generally go to support productions and programs that aren’t selfsupporting, Baron said. In 2007, the theater used a $55,000 grant to stage the “Oklahoma!” production starring O’Hara in role of Laurey.
In 2015, the theater used a $10,000 grant to produce the debut of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” a musical based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because the musical had never been produced anywhere before, it was risky to produce it at the Lyric, Baron said. Federal grants allow the theater to take those kinds of risks, he said.
“We’re a nonprofit organization,” Baron said. “If we were a commercial venture, we would just do ‘Mary Poppins’ and ‘A Christmas Carol.’”
Because the agency spreads its grant funding around to institutions across the country, it ensures that high-quality theater can exist in places outside of New York and Chicago — places like Oklahoma City, Baron said.
“They’re one of our biggest sponsors,” Baron said. “This is such a small government agency that is doing such great work.”