The State of the Arts and Humanities Endowments

What will new leaders mean for these federal agencies?

I haven’t written about the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) or the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in a year or so. Both have new leaders. Who are they?

Shelly Lowe is the new NEH chair, nominated by Biden in 2021 and confirmed and sworn into office in February this year. She’s a citizen of the Navajo Nation and grew up on a reservation in Arizona. I’m happy to see Native Americans get marquee jobs, but she’s got a skimpy CV so we have to hope for the best.

The NEH and NEA are the two primary federal grant-makers for, broadly speaking, culture programs. Of course, the Institute of Museum and Library Services does superb work, but I’m on the IMLS board, so I shouldn’t say anything about it aside from “it’s fantastic.” The NEA and NEH each had an annual budget last year of $167 million. After years of frozen budgets and noisy but superficial tries to abolish them, they seem secure in the Washington quag. The NEH mostly supports literature, history, antiquarian studies, and archaeology projects while the NEA deals with art museums, performance arts, and creative writing. The rise of interdisciplinary studies over the last 30 years makes for lots of intellectual overlap. Here’s a good way to delineate them: The NEH (again, with some exceptions) concerns itself with books and research, the NEA, by and large, with ephemeral experiences and audiences. The NEH, to me, is like a research university, the NEA a theater.

Back to Lowe. She was on the National Council for the Humanities, which is the civilian cohort that meets twice a year to rubber-stamp grant awards. That’s a credential. A couple of days listening to presentations isn’t an achievement, other than a profile in endurance.

She was the executive director of Harvard’s Native American Program, which sounds impressive but looks like it’s only a website aggregating courses and programs done by other departments. I don’t think the “program” exists in any form that’s not pixelated. I don’t think it does anything. She might have switched the lights on and off, but the program looks empty.

She was also the director, her CV reads, of the Yale Native American Program. This looks like it’s a living and breathing entity. Its newsletters from 2014 through 2018 are posted online. I read them. They’re nice, almost entirely social, and what I’d call chatty rather than weighty. I assume Lowe was there after 2018. She’s unmentioned in the material online, and there aren’t any events or news after that. Has nothing happened since then, or has no one updated the website? The place currently has a flesh-and-blood director, Matthew Makomenaw, who’s an assistant dean at Yale. I’m not sure whether it’s a hand-holding operation or a traffic cop for courses that actually exist in other departments.

Before this, Lowe spent six years as the graduate-education program facilitator for the Native American Studies Program at the University of Arizona. She’s finished her coursework leading to a Ph.D. in higher education there.

Old people tend to have extra time or, as I call it, schedule flexibility. I enjoyed reading all of this material. While the Native American students profiled here and there seem to thrive, the programs Lowe facilitated, a squishy verb if ever there was one, seem to be symbolic rather than substantive. I wonder how common programs like these are and how much they cost. I think most ethnic- and gender-studies departments in colleges and universities are shams anyway.

In any event, the NEH is a big organization, employing hundreds of people. It distributed $167 million last year as part of its annual budget and $135 million in one-time Covid splurge and stimulus funny money.

Lowe surely checks the Native American box, and these ethnic boxes are part of today’s politics. I have nothing against appointments that have some measure of symbolism like “first Native American,” “first in her family to go to college,” “first to get up in the morning,” or “first to orbit the moon.” That’s nothing new, by the way. When I was in political life we packed the Republican ticket with multiple ethnicities, though candidates had to have shown some expertise and achievement in some aspect of government, however narrow. Dog-catching, even managing the DMV break room’s coffee money, would do if all else were a void. Lowe’s got titles, not accomplishments. She’s gone to a lot of meetings.

Can she develop a creative vision for what I think is an important agency, not to mention run the place? The NEH has had some very good leaders, among them Jim Leach, a veteran congressman, William “Bro” Adams, the longtime president of Colby College, Bruce Cole, a distinguished academic, Bill Bennett, and Lynne Cheney. I thought Lowe’s predecessor, Jon Peede, did an exemplary job. He once worked at the NEH as a program officer, ran an academic journal that actually produced issues, and had a Ph.D. The NEH did some smart, new things during his time there. Lowe’s never run anything, or anything real. She’s never given away money — a science, I’m told. Shouldn’t she start as a deputy director or program officer? As I said, we can only hope for the best.

The new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Maria Rosario Jackson, another Biden nominee who was confirmed late last year, checks not one but two ethnic boxes, the second sentence of her appointment press release says, in that she’s both black and Mexican-American. She’s a “tenured Institute Professor at the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she also holds an appointment at the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions.” I can’t find the names of courses she actually taught. She’s on lots of advisory boards having “equity and inclusion” in their names. She has a Ph.D. in urban planning and worked for the Urban Institute in Washington. I think she’s worked on urban arts-administration issues, though I can’t imagine what these might be.

She seems adept in maneuvering in a bureaucracy, and that’s what the NEA is these days.

I’ve written here and there about the NEA, which I think, philosophically, is a good idea. I think the government, stewarding the general public’s welfare, has an interest in promoting and advancing the arts. Over the years, though, the NEA has focused on survival. While efforts to kill it have been symbolic recently, a few times opponents have managed to drag it up the steps to the guillotine only to hear the words “conference committee” and see, at sunrise the next day, the NEA, bruised and bandaged, still punching a time clock.

During the Trump years, Mary Anne Carter chaired the NEA. She was strictly a political appointment with a long background in Florida election campaigns and an experienced PR and marketing professional. Aside from sending her children to dancing school, she had no arts background. She was a reassuring presence at the NEA and a positive public face for the department. As connected as she was, there was no serious effort by the White House or Congress to abolish her program.

The NEA, as far as I can see, has a great theater section and supports wonderful folk-art programs. Its grant-making program in dance was once as good as the best in Europe, but I don’t follow the dance world enough to know whether this is still true. The NEA had many long-serving specialists who knew their fields, whether dance, poetry, or musical theater, as well as the best impresarios.

The NEA also runs the federal arts indemnity, which helps museums insure expensive art loans. One day I’ll write about this program, which is essential to museums and is, in my humble opinion, having worked on at least a dozen indemnity applications, the best-run and most-effective program in the entire federal government. I don’t, obviously, know the full range of the government’s work. I suspect there are many weapons programs about which I’d say, “Wow, that’s a nifty way to annihilate the enemy,” and I have great respect for law enforcement, not the bent-cop Comey kind but the rank-and-file heroes who protect us.

All of this said, I don’t think the NEA moves the needle on much of anything. Its museum-exhibition funding program is a dud and has been for years. Every grant-making cycle, I look at its awards and cry “booorrring.” I don’t think the program officers know the museum world or know anything about art history. They’re very good at the laws of bureaucracy and speak the inclusion and diversity lingo, but all of that is advanced bean-counting and inside baseball.

I think, for example, that the NEA should support arts organizations that are either needy or trying to do worthy things that are, for lots of reasons, hard to fund. “Can this museum find the money to do this someplace else?” or, more pointedly, “If we don’t fund this good initiative, is it doomed?” are questions that are hardly ever asked, as unwelcome as an unmasked Delta-infected sneezing close-talker at a gathering of the 100-Plus Club.

A few years ago I was on an NEA grant-making panel. Before us was an application from a loaded, Gold Coast, Fairfield County arts group with donors thick on the ground. I raised my hand and kindly asked, “Shouldn’t we be giving money to places that are needy?”

I sounded like Eleanor Roosevelt — a queasy feeling, like incipient ptomaine poisoning, but for an instant her spirit moved through me. Was I channeling the bourgeois socialist dead? Stranger things have happened, the world’s upside down, and it might have been Russian psychic disinformation. “These rich places,” I said, “if they want to do something, they’ll find the money to do it. . . . Why not focus on museums that just don’t have the donor base?” I’d found my bearings, no longer enchanted by limousine-liberal nags from the grave but extolling good, simple common sense. The application on the docket funded yet another low-octane project bringing children to the museum to “make art,” which they can do at school, at home, or on the Queen Mary, as long as they have crayons.

Well, it was as though I’d grabbed a baby panda from the Washington Zoo and stuck him in a deep-fat fryer. “We can’t do that,” the bureaucrats shrieked. “We award our grants solely on merit. . . . That’s the law.”

It’s not the law. The statute creating the NEA provides for grant-making based on merit but doesn’t exclude other criteria. The language is clearly aimed at battling pork-barrel grants. The NEA can and should — and does — consider geography and demographics as well as other criteria that give preference to some grant seekers and exclude others. There are many arts organizations with tiny donor bases. Many very rich museums have big development offices that generate fancy grant applications. They have an enormous advantage over smaller, poorer organizations that, nonetheless, often have the most creative and entrepreneurial people.

They won’t think about who’s needy and who’s not because they don’t know. They don’t know how to find out, either. And it means doing something different. The world’s changed in the last 15 or so years. The arts world’s changed, too. The NEA hasn’t changed with the times.

On many fronts, the NEA is stuck in a rut of obviousness and safety. It fritters its money away on piddly projects forgotten the moment they’re finished. It needs a jolt, some intellectual and creative Geritol, and some experimental dash since it’s got the bones to make a difference.

I’ll write more about the NEA and the NEH in the coming months and look forward to seeing what Shelly Lowe and Maria Jackson accomplish.