Is funding for arts essential or wasteful?
THE WIND is up in Wilson, North Carolina. Giant pinwheels and propellers start spinning atop tall and spindly kinetic sculptures called whirligigs, which have been erected on a village green being developed into Whirligig Park. The rotating wheels drive chains, belts and shafts that, in turn, set in motion whimsical characters and shapes. Little bicycle riders and unicyclists pedal and wave, helicopters hover, birds flap their wings, fighter planes change course.
The fantastic contraptions have been fashioned from the discard pile of American civilisation. A freshly painted blue fan, 19 feet in diameter, spins majestically thanks to the graceful repurposing of the rear axle of a truck, while another big pinwheel is adorned with 96 shiny metal milkshake cups. Vollis Simpson, the junkyard artist who built these figures, worked from a palette that also included scrap metal, bicycle wheels, attic ventilators, hubcaps, brake disks, side-view mirrors, light fixtures and highway signs. His day job was moving houses and hauling heavy machinery. He never threw away anything because, as he used to say, “Next week you’ll need it.”
Long before the National Endowment for the Arts, or anybody else, thought his “windmills,” as he called them, were fit for a city park, he erected them on his family’s land out in the country. The effect was so surreal that the grove became a destination that teenage joyriders dubbed Acid Park.
“Back when I started this mess you never heard of this word ‘art,’ “Simpson, who died in 2013 at 94, once said. “I’m just an old country boy.” So he was stunned, and a bit tickled, when his whirligigs were called upon to help save Wilson’s ailing downtown.
Much as a whirligig is a meditation on cause and effect, on the way consequence builds upon consequence, Whirligig Park fits within a larger web of chain reactions rippling through the nation.
As the Trump administration proposes next fiscal year to eliminate four pots of federal funding for culture - the National Endowment for the Arts (US$148 million last year), the National Endowment for the Humanities (US$148 million), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (US$445 million) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US$230 million) - communities across the country are left to ponder what difference that would make.
The total money at stake at the four agencies - about US$970 million (RM437 million) - is a drop in the US$3.9 trillion federal budget.
That’s a data point that can be argued both ways: Arts advocates say the cuts would scarcely reduce the deficit but would cripple US’ cultural life.
Budget hawks say the multibillion-dollar culture industry is so well-endowed by philanthropic elites that the comparatively
The total money at stake at the four agencies - about US$970 million - is a drop in the US$3.9 trillion federal budget. That’s a data point that can be argued both ways: Arts advocates say the cuts would scarcely reduce the deficit but would cripple US’ cultural life.
minuscule federal contribution would not be missed.
After President Donald Trump released his “Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again” in March, the response was studded with dire assertions from defenders of the agencies. Meanwhile, some old Washington hands noted that past threats to hobble these agencies have always failed. (Trump’s detailed budget proposal for fiscal 2018, released in May, would give the four agencies a total of US$124 million to fund an orderly shutdown.) What was lacking in the discussion, it seemed to me, was a closer look at how these federal dollars reverberate in the lives of communities and individuals - if they do at all.
I found myself paging through descriptions of hundreds of federal grants in search of a few projects to go see for myself. Culture agencies are as politically shrewd as the Pentagon at sowing taxpayer dollars in seemingly every congressional district, and I was amazed at the breadth of aspirations.
In the end, I decided to find out what difference it makes to bring pottery- and printmaking to the desert towns of West Texas; why it matters to discuss Sophocles and Upton Sinclair in the basement of a health clinic in Boston; and whether such endeavors would be possible without someone writing checks in Washington.
The whirligigs of Wilson seemed promising as well. They don’t just provide a handy metaphor about the connectedness of things; they’re also an example of one impact of culture funding: The economic development potential of art. Whirligigs, it turns out, can be job creators.
Whirligig Park thrums with a whispery, metallic clatter, and the whirligigs radiate energy outward. It animates the tourists who have discovered Wilson, a city of 50,000 that once claimed to be the largest tobacco market in the world. After the tobacco warehouses closed, Wilson spent decades searching for a new way to generate vitality downtown, but to little effect.
The National Endowment for the Arts was an early believer in the civic power of Simpson’s creations. The project received a little more than US$200,000 in 2010 from individual donors, who would go on to contribute US$800,000 more by 2017. Then, starting in 2011, the NEA gave grants totalling US$469,000 to help with the design of the park and the restoration and installation of the whirligigs. As Wilson officials see it, the federal money helped leverage more than US$7 million from other public and private sources - such as ArtPlace America and the Kohler Foundation - to finish the park. In addition, about US$35 million in private real estate investment has come to downtown Wilson since the whirligig project launched in 2010. City officials credit most of that capitalistic activity to the whirligigs themselves, and to a broader arts-inflected renaissance suffusing Wilson as a result.
With so much money flowing, it’s natural to question whether it all could have happened without the fraction provided by the NEA. But folks in Wilson say it’s hard to conjure now the uncertainty that existed at the beginning of the project, before the NEA provided one of the first grants.
Plenty of residents considered it foolhardy to put so much faith in Simpson’s rusty old windmills. “I thought it was junk,” says Donald Evans, a City Council member who has been converted into a booster of the project.
The NEA provided not just cash, but cachet, and cachet could be redeemed for more cash, making everyone in town a believer. “It put us on the map with the prestigious (private) foundations in the country,” says Henry Walston, president of a family auto-parts business, who championed the project from the beginning.
“Here was this little bitty town in eastern North Carolina that all these people started taking notice of . ... Vollis Simpson’s whirligigs could be Wilson’s Eiffel Tower.”
Landscaped where a tobacco warehouse burned down, the park doesn’t formally open until the fall.
More of the eventual 30 whirligigs are to be installed, a farmers market pavilion is being finished, a performance stage is under construction.
On a Monday evening in April, a small crowd of residents gathers for open-mic night and craft beer in a brewery that recently opened in a formerly derelict historical building across the street from the park.
“Without that Whirligig Park, we certainly would not be there having a brewery,” says Barbara Conklin, who conceived of 217 Brew Works with her husband, Tom Curran.
The brewery expects to expand from six to 10 jobs in the coming months.
Around the corner, in a conservation centre in a former auto-parts building, eight metalworkers and carpenters, led by artist Juan Logan, are employed to restore and preserve Simpson’s whirligigs. — WPBloomberg