Leaders in Oregon’s art world were not surprised when the Trump administration in March became the first in U.S. history to propose eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“I was a combination of not surprised and horrified,” said Shannon McNerney, the executive director of Fishtrap, a writers center in Enterprise. “I thought, here we ago again.”
Eliminating the three agencies, which make up less than 1 percent of the federal government’s $4 trillion budget, has been proposed before, at a Congressional level, by Republican lawmakers during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
In July, the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that would continue funding these institutions. Their future is far from guaranteed, however, as budget negotiations remain stagnant and the Senate is yet to weigh in.
To artists and art leaders throughout Oregon, any mention of eliminating the endowments is cause for concern. Although the amount of money organizations receive from them is relatively small, eliminating it would alter, if not eliminate altogether, arts and humanities projects that are indelible to Oregon’s culture and have helped define entire communities.
Benefits across the state
The National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA, funds projects in every congressional district in every state. More than 30 organizations in Oregon received $1.5 million from the NEA, including the Portland Art Museum, the Oregon Symphony, Portland Center Stage, the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), Caldera, an arts center in Sisters, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
In addition, the NEA gives the Oregon Arts Commission $750,000, which the commission grants to arts organizations throughout the state.
The NEA’s grants nearly always fund projects consisting of events or activities, rather than individual works of art. Many organizations receive relatively small amounts of money from the NEA compared to their overall budgets.
RACC receives $30,000 from the NEA. The grant helps fund the Right Brain Initiative to integrate the arts and creative thinking into the core curriculum of K-8 classrooms.
Literary Arts, whose programs include the Wordstock festival and Portland Arts & Lectures, receives $45,000 from the NEA, along with additional indirect funding from the Oregon Arts Commission.
The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art has received $35,000 to $50,000 from the NEA for the past decade. The grant helps fund the institute’s Time-Based Art Festival, which heralds the beginning of Portland’s fall arts season. Victoria Frey, the institute’s executive director, said the festival alone costs $700,000 to $800,000 to produce each year.
Literary Arts’ total budget is close to $2.5 million. RACC’s annual budget is $10 million.
None of those organizations would shutter due to the NEA’s elimination, but Frey and many others said that their NEA funding is integral to the health of their operations and would be difficult to make up elsewhere.
“Every piece of funding in chunks that large are really important,” Frey said. The money ensures financial stability and less time that staff spends fundraising, she said.
“There are few that give you a $45,000 corporate gift,” said Andrew Proctor, the executive director of Literary Arts. “There aren’t many individuals who can do that in Oregon.”
There is some inherent stability to arts funding in Oregon. Oregon, like every other state with an arts commission, is required by federal law to match the NEA’s grant to the Oregon Arts Commission each year.
But where NEA dollars have a much bigger impact is farther away from the spotlight. The bulk of NEA’s dollars go to small organizations in rural communities, such as Fishtrap, the writers organization in Northeast Oregon’s Wallowa County with a population of 7,000.
Fishtrap has received $10,000 from the NEA each year for much of the past decade to support the Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers, an annual weeklong festival that brings writers from around the country to teach workshops and seminars and give readings.
Fishtrap also hosts one of the NEA’s flagship programs, Big Read, a monthlong community reading program. Each year, the NEA selects one book title – this year, it was Tim O’Brien’s classic Vietnam War novel “The Things They Carried” – and provides grants and assistance to 75 programs around the country to host book discussions, author readings and panel discussions.
Fishtrap has hosted the Big Read since the program’s inception in 2006. The organization gives 400 copies of the selected book to local schools and public libraries and hosts guest authors and other speakers at the public schools.
“We’re getting kids exposed to literature and writing and being creative thinkers,” said Shannon McNerney, the executive director.
McNerney said the money Fishtrap gets from the NEA, and indirect NEA dollars from the Oregon Arts Commission, for Summer Fishtrap and the Big Read constitutes 10 to 20 percent of the organization’s yearly budget.
“It’s significant,” McNerney said. “Were this money to go away, it would be hard to say exactly what that would mean.” It could translate into cutting programs, staff or benefits, she said.
“We won’t be able to reach the same number of people in the same way. It’s the difference between doing an OK job and a great job.”
Mary Swanson, who owns The Bookloft, a bookstore in Enterprise, said the Big Read generates a huge amount of business during her slowest months.
“I sell hundreds of copies of whatever the Big Read book is to the community,” she said. “It’s something that brings people into my store.”
The event also provides an opportunity for residents of the county, which has always been a ranching and agriculture community, to gather.
Adam Davis, the executive director of Oregon Humanities, which provides programs and grants statewide, said organizations like Fishtrap and the Joseph Center for the Arts and Culture “are essential to those towns.” The Joseph, Ore., center supports artists throughout Eastern Oregon.
The arts have defined the identity of other Oregon communities, as well. Ashland is synonymous with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Thousands of people attend the festival’s plays each year. Field trips to attend plays are a common experience for many Oregon middle and high school students.
The festival was unavailable for comment for this article because of disruptions caused by wildfires in the area. But Debbie Small, the festival’s director of institutional giving, said its NEA grant, which ranges between $100,000 to $125,000 each year, helps produce “brand-new work that needs extra support to get to the stage, and artistically risky work that is not always attractive to corporate funders.” The money also ensures that tickets remain affordable for students.
In Joseph, bronze statues line the town’s main street, portraying cattlemen, frontiers people, Native Americans, homesteading families and other depictions of Eastern Oregon’s history and heritage.
“Community fabric is sustained by those kinds of institutions,” Davis said.
Decades of federal support
The NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities were formed in 1965 to fund and support the arts and cultural institutions, including museums, libraries, colleges and universities, as well as individual scholars and intellectuals.
The federal government set a precedent for the NEA with the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal program that created federal jobs during the Great Depression. It created five artists programs to keep writers, actors, musicians and all manner of other artists employed during the Depression, and gave the public access to concerts, plays and other performances for free.
The Portland Works Progress Administration Orchestra, for instance, employed musicians who played for the Portland Symphony during the off-season, performing free concerts throughout Portland. While the musicians played for the orchestra, they were not paid by the Portland Symphony, reducing the Symphony’s costs.
Many credit the program for the continued existence of the Portland Symphony, now called the Oregon Symphony.
The hiring of famed songwriter Woody Guthrie in 1941 by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs about the Columbia River and the construction of hydroelectric dams – including “Roll on Columbia” and “Pastures of Plenty” – is one of the better-known examples of federal funding of arts projects in the Pacific Northwest.
Since its inception, funding for the NEA grew substantially in each federal budget for years, with the exception of a cut by two-thirds during the 1976 recession. Starting in the 1980s, outright elimination of the NEA and NEH were proposed by Republican lawmakers, most notably Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. It was a time when a wave of political art provoked outcry – part of the culture wars between traditional conservatives and advocates of women’s reproductive rights, gay rights and the separation of church and state.
Those efforts to eliminate the program were unsuccessful, but the endowment’s budget was slashed significantly, from $162 million to $99 million, in the mid-1990s. The budget began rebounding in 2001 and has remained relatively stable over the years, around $150 million, not counting for inflation.
Calls for the endowments’ elimination persist in conservative circles. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center, has long advocated for eliminating the NEA and NEH, arguing that there are no programs “more worthy of outright elimination.”
“There is no need for the federal government to be spending your money on these programs,” the Heritage Foundation stated, adding that NEA and NEH funding could easily be replaced with private philanthropy.
When the Trump administration released a more detailed budget in May, budget documents justified the NEA and NEH’s elimination as “part of the administration’s plan to move the nation toward fiscal responsibility and to redefine the proper role of the federal government.”
“I don’t think the culture war ever ended,” McNerney said. “It views the arts and creativity and education and expanding your mind as frivolous. It’s very cynical.”
Neither the NEA or NEH responded to requests for a comment. The Trump administration has ordered the agencies not to comment on funding matters.
Proctor, of Literary Arts, argues that there is no sense in President Trump’s desire to eliminate the agencies. The argument isn’t one of the intrinsic value of the arts, but economic impact.
The NEA and U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis collaborated for the first time this year to release the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account, which provides a breakdown of the economic impact of arts and culture. According to the report, released in April, the arts and culture sector contributed $729.6 billion, or 4.2 percent of the country’s economy, in 2014. In Oregon, 64,712 people are employed in jobs related to arts and culture – 3.6 percent of the state’s workforce.
According to the most recent Arts & Economic Prosperity study produced by Americans for the Arts, a national advocacy organization, Oregon’s arts and culture sector contributed $687 million to the state economy in 2015.
“If you look at the business case for supporting the NEA, it’s a no-brainer,” Proctor said.
The Oregon Cultural Trust and the Oregon Arts Commission became a part of Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, more than 10 years ago given the economic impact of arts in the state.
“If it’s good business sense, then what is going on here? It’s philosophical on what government shouldn’t do, or purely ideological, or it’s that people don’t want artists to be able to speak up and be empowered,” Proctor said. “The number of explanations begin to get smaller and make less logical sense.”
Ultimately, arts leaders argue there is value to art beyond a pretty painting, a reading group, or a statue that lights up a concrete sidewalk and asphalt street. They argue the arts are essential to ensuring that American society is a democratic one, one where its citizens are capable of free expression and critical inquiry.
“Artists are advocating for a highly individual approach to humanity,” Proctor said. “Artists, by definition, are anti-authoritarian. That’s why we don’t know about art in North Korea.
“What you do as a participant in reading is to imagine,” Proctor said. “It creates empathy. We talk about the idea that if you can be truly empathetic to something foreign to you, that is uplifting and empowering.”
Davis’ organization, Oregon Humanities, co-organizes Conversation Projects, designed to encourage people who disagree with one another to talk and listen.
The ultimate question, Davis said, is “how can we think more expansively about who we are, rather than reductively?”
As Guthrie wrote on his guitar decades ago, “This machine kills fascists.”