Will arts get the ax?
Trump’s budget ax could fall on crucial agencies
With crucial agencies in danger, we look at great works helped by public funding
President Trump’s proposed budget plan has sent shock waves throughout the country’s arts community.
Why? It calls for the elimination of funding for four independent cultural agencies — the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Those agencies are crucial to organizations such as PBS, NPR and big and small museums around the country.
Nothing will change for the endowments or other agencies immediately. And the budget still needs to make its way through Congress for approval.
Meanwhile, we know this much: The following major works and artists would have been left behind without the support of arts foundations.
1 ‘THE COLOR PURPLE’
Since 1967, the Arts Endowment has awarded 3,400 creative-writing fellowships worth $45 million, resulting in many of the most acclaimed novels of contemporary literature, including Alice Walker’s The Col
or Purple, which was later adapted into an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg, and a Tony awardwinning Broadway play.
Other works aided by the Arts Endowment’s fellowships: Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, William Kennedy’s Ironweed and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country.
2‘ SESAME STREET’
Thanks to partial government funding, the beloved children’s show has been broadcast into homes free on PBS for more than 45 years. Sesame
Street no longer receives direct government funding (last year Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that runs the show, signed a deal with HBO, with new episodes continuing to run on PBS after a nine-month window).
“The cost of public broadcasting is small, only $1.35 per citizen per year, and the benefits are tangible: increasing school readiness for kids 2-8, support for teachers and homeschoolers, lifelong learning, public safety communications and civil discourse,” PBS president Paula Kerger said Thursday.
3 THE KING TUT EXHIBIT
The 1976 blockbuster museum exhibit that sent the sarcophagus of King Tutankhamum, the boy pharaoh of ancient Egypt, to the USA on a six-city tour is legend. The exhibit of the contents of King Tut’s tomb, discovered in the early 20th century thousands of years after he was interred, was seen by more than 6 million people, and it was made possible with help from a $300,000 NEH grant.
4 HIT BROADWAY PLAYS LIKE ‘RENT’
Did you know that the NEA has provided early and critical funding for 18 Tony Award-winning plays and 15 Tony award-winning musicals? Those hits include Fences, Annie, A Chorus Line, Angels in America, Rent and LinManuel Miranda’s pre- Hamilton hit, In the Heights.
5‘ DRIVING MISS DAISY’
The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 play was originally funded by a $10,000 grant from the NEA to playwright Alfred Uhry. The 1989 film, starring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy and Dan Aykroyd, won four Oscars in 1990, including best picture.
6 THE VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL
In 1981, a 21-year-old Yale student, Maya Lin, won a NEA-supported design competition for the powerful Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Her stark, V-shaped design remains the second-most-visited memorial in Washington, after the Lincoln Memorial.
7‘ A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES’
John Kennedy Toole’s tragicomic novel A Confederacy of Dunces was still a manuscript a decade after his death, until Toole’s mother, having been turned down by numerous publishers, lobbied a Loyola University New Orleans professor to read it. The professor recommended it for publication to the Louisiana State University Press, which applied to the Arts Endowment for a grant to help with the publishing costs. They received a grant of $3,500, and the novel was finally published in 1980. In 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
8 INDIE FILM HITS LIKE ‘RESERVOIR DOGS’
The NEA — through its longtime grants to the non-profit Sun- dance Institute, which hosts Labs that provide creative support and other resources to independent artists — has supported films including Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Boys Don’t Cry (which won Hilary Swank a bestactress Oscar), Beasts of the
Southern Wild (nominated for four Oscars), Fruitvale Station (which catapulted Creed star Michael B. Jordan to fame) and Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, which preceded his Oscar-winning film, La La Land.
9 BIG DIGS
If you’ve visited Jamestown, you’ve seen remains dug up with help from the NEH. NEH grants helped pay for the 1994 rediscovery of the site of Jamestown, the 2016 discovery of the original Plymouth, Mass., settlement, the 1990s archaeological exploration of Troy, and the 1995 examination of the mummified “Ice Maiden” remains found in the mountains of southern Peru.
Overall the NEH has awarded more than 1,400 grants to archaeological projects worldwide.
10 MAJOR FILM DIRECTORS
Many of today’s biggest names in Hollywood got their start at the American Film Institute, which was founded to train filmmakers and preserve the nation’s vanishing film heritage. Terrence Malick, who graduated in 1969 and went on to create The Thin Red
Line and Tree of Life; Darren Aronofsky, who graduated in 1992 and would go on to direct Black
Swan and The Wrestler; and David Lynch, who wrote and directed The Elephant Man.