Name: Bill Ivey
Occupation: Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
Background: Appointed chairman of the NEA in May 1998, Ivey served as director of the Country Music Foundation (Country Music Hall of Fame) in Nashville, Tennessee from 1971 to 1998.
Education: B.A. in history from the University of Michigan, Master’s in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University.
Age: 55
Family: Single
Residence: Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.
BILL IVEY: “In partnership with business, the arts can attract new business and quality workers to a city.
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PBN: What do you see as the major role for the National Endowment for the Arts?
IVEY: The endowment is charged with bringing arts to the American people. It’s a citizen’s service agency, like every agency of federal government should be. It carries out its mission by convening and conducting research, but mostly by giving grants that are matched to arts organizations, community organizations all over the country. Its current budget is $98 million.
Which is down quite a bit.
Down significantly from its high in the early 1990s, which was a little over $170 million. We give about 1,500 grants a year. They range in size from $5,000 to close to $500,000.
Basically for what are the grants awarded?
Our work is arranged in four grand categories: creation and presentation; access and education; heritage and preservation; planning and stabilization. Probably about 40 percent of our money goes to creation and presentation, which is the core of arts work, helping theater companies produce plays, symphony orchestras perform works. We also fund organizations to reach out into communities, conduct educational programs. We work in access, trying to make sure the arts are all over America, so we have special programs that point toward small towns, parts of communities that are not in contact with the endowment or have not developed arts infrastructures. We help to stabilize those organizations, strengthen them, help build capacity so they can respond to the demands of the community, demands of the arts forms.
Of the $98 million, how much is distributed in grants?
About $40 million is allocated for direct grants that we make through our own application review process. There’s a significant part of our budget, something in the order of $35 to $38 million that goes to the states in what are called partnership grants. Here in Rhode Island, this year, that grant is $524,000. Most of those grants are in the half million dollar a year range.
When you look at what the NEA gives to the arts it is a small percentage?
Yes, and that would be true even if our budget were three times its current size. If you look at the overall funding picture for the non-profit arts in the United States, the endowment is in at about $100 million. State arts’ agencies contribute about $370 million, and then 4,000 or so local arts agencies put in over $700 million. And if you look at that combined total it is about $1.1 billion coming from all the government. Private giving is about 10 times that, meaning the corporate sponsorship, individual giving and foundations — I can’t give you the exact breakdown– What that means is the federal part of the funding picture is a small one and would be a small one even if our budget were significantly larger.
What that indicates is the federal agency, unlike some European style ministries of culture, is not the sole sponsor of the cultural life of the nation, but is rather an agency that provides a sense of permanence, centrality, continuity, and an agency that can invest strategically to nurture the best projects that can be replicated in other settings that don’t fit within the umbrellas of state or local funding.
When we have problems with social security, Medicare, the homeless, why shouldn’t the government money go to those areas, and just let the private sector take care of the arts?
I think there are a couple of answers to that. We’re a wealthy society and don’t have to make the old guns or butter decisions that have been argued about for years. I think we have the capacity to both care for citizens and nurture creativity and cultural heritage. The second point is I think we’re still at an early point in our society’s learning curve regarding the value of cultural heritage and creativity to community and family life. Virtually every month we acquire some new piece of evidence about the way in which engagement in the arts allows young people to enhance their creativity, helps them to perform in other parts of their school work, helps them prepare for their tasks as citizens and workers in an information age. Every month we learn about the way in which arts in partnership with business can attract new business and quality workers to a city or to a state. Every month we learn more about the way in which a downtown arts center, or an investment in an arts district can help revitalize a downtown that’s been abandoned because of the growth of shopping malls. We can both afford as a society to nurture creativity and social heritage while we engage in important social services, and every day we learn more about the value in the investment of arts in the very real, very tangible quality of life by citizens. I think for those two reasons an investment in cultural heritage and creativity is important even in the face of pressing social concerns.
How large an economic generator are the arts?
If you look at the non-profit arts, and that’s the sector that I’m most comfortable talking about because that is the sector we engage in most directly, you’re talking about something close to $40 billion a year nationally. Something on the order of a million and a half jobs in that sector.
If you look at a small state like Rhode Island, you’re probably looking at an economic impact in the $250 million range, with an engaged workforce of around 12,000. That’s a real impact in a direct and tangible way. I think the value of viable arts organizations to a community reaches beyond the size of the workforce or the dollars that flow.
One of the challenges facing the arts, as we establish value, value of investing in the arts, is to conduct the kind of research that demonstrates the real impact of engagement of the arts. We have a lot of research that tells us how many people went where, how young or how old they are, what color their skin was, how big the organizations are, how much was given, but we have less evidence about is how engagement in artistic experiences changes people’s lives, or strengthens communities.
We have worked with the Department of Justice over the last four or five years on a program called youth arts, which looks at after school programming for kids who are viewed as at risk. Three different cities – Portland, San Antonio, and the suburbs of Atlanta – and the Department of Justice in partnering with the NEA not only helped develop this arts program, but invested in an evaluation and actually compared the outcomes for these kids, compared with those young people in non-arts after school programs. The arts kids did better. They had fewer contacts with the criminal justice system, they had demonstrable improvement in their communication skills, and in a number of indictors, six or eight indicators, they did better. That’s just one tiny study, one very small program.
As we build a case of that kind of evidence, not just how much money went where or how many people filled how many seats, but what changed in lives as a result of engagement with artistic experiences for young people, old people, entire communities. Then I think we will be able to move to not only make the economic case for the arts, but move beyond that and make an even bolder argument for the value of an investment in creativity and cultural heritage.
You touched on quality of life and the importance of a good quality of life in attracting good employees to an area. Have there been actual studies that demonstrate that?
I don’t know. That’s a good question. There are certainly many good anecdotes and it is an argument that gets made all the time. It seems to me there is a study – and then it is somewhat anecdotal, but talks about some specific companies talking about coming to specific communities because of the arts environment that existed.
What do you hear from companies that are getting involved in the arts? Why do they get involved?
There are a variety of factors. If you look at a company that is heavily engaged in the arts, you often find a CEO or a chairman who has a personal commitment to the arts and sees this as a value. I also think that you see companies that have a sense of partnership with communities. They are not looking in, they are looking out. That’s just an aspect of corporate culture. I think you see some that can align their corporate goals to specific arts activities and see that if they invest in a specific exhibition, in a museum, or an orchestra it places their name in front of key audiences or potential customers. There is an element of business strategy. Finally it’s a way of providing employee satisfaction and engagement if there is art in the workplace, and if there are opportunities for families that are employed by a company to visit theater and hear music and engage in a rounded community that is nurturing. I think it helps with employer’s recruitment and retention.
Do you think the business community is as involved in the arts as it should be?
I think there’s always more to be done. I would say the quality of engagement is quite high. The quantity is spotty. I think what you see are companies that have developed for a variety of reasons a kind of corporate passion for the arts. It’s not an automatic part of a CEO’s inventory or business or community strategies, so the task for those of us who care passionately for music and dance and drama, is to try and make the arts an automatic part of a business agenda, positioned high on a list of community services that a company might engage in. I think that is still a frontier for us.
In your perception what are the state of the arts today?
I think we’re in a good period that simultaneously exhibits some problems, some areas of weakness. If you look back over the years, since the NEA has been in existence, you can observe a geometric pattern of growth in all of the non-profit arts. You move from like 56 theater companies in 1965 to 340 now. A growth in of an entire regional theater movement that we didn’t even know about in the 60s.
Trinity Repertory Company was part of that movement.
It was one of the first. It’s at the front end of that. I think it was founded in ’64 or ’65. It’s probably one of the few theater companies that pre-dates the endowment, or comes into existence right as the endowment comes into existence. You see a terrific growth in theater. The number of symphony orchestras has nearly doubled, from 980 in ’65 to about 1,800 today. The size of the non-profit arts sector has increased dramatically, larger than its been ever. Giving is very substantial, but shows some signs of weaknesses. Some studies indicate while charitable giving has grown steadily over the last few years, the portion of that giving directed in the arts has flattened in one study and declined in another, which is a slightly disturbing trend, which means we haven’t established that much value to the extent that as these great quantities of charitable dollars become available, the arts haven’t been quite as valued as education and social services.
Another area of some concern is the aging of the leadership of many arts organizations. Many people who manage opera companies or theaters and so on, got involved in that work in the 1960s. It was a time when people were not as calculating about the economic arch of their careers as they might be today. And I think many arts organizations are finding it hard to attract young professionals into careers that don’t offer the promise of great economic return that some career paths might. We have built this large arts structure on the backs of somewhat undercompensated artists and arts management professionals. That’s a sign of concern. We need to look at the careers in the arts and see what can be done to strengthen those careers, to make them sufficiently appealing so we don’t have a great stumble in society as those who came into the field in the ’60s exit into retirement.
A final concern is that even though there are many organizations that are producing more work than ever in our history, arts organizations are notoriously under capitalized. Too many theater companies, dance companies, symphony orchestras are just a few poorly attended performances away from financial ruin. For-profit companies are not structured to be in that kind of situation, but not-for-profits frequently are. That hand to mouth quality of many of our arts organizations I think is an area of concern.
It seems that in the ’60s there was an issue to rally round, the creation of the national endowment, the repertory companies, and some folk heroes probably evolved from that. It appears we don’t have any of those folk heroes leading the charge today.
That’s a good question. A field like regional theater was a tremendous growth industry in the ’60s and ’70s. Now it’s a mature industry and it requires a different style of management and has different problems than the problems that are there in a kind of start-up era. It’s important to find a way to make a transition from a growth stage into a stage of maturity, continuity and stability. The endowment is trying through a program we began in the Spring to study what really works in facing the challenge of strengthening arts organizations. Is it an investment in technology? Is it a series of mentoring internships or residencies that allow young professionals to connect with senior management. We’re trying hard to find some ways where we can invest some a modest amounts of money we have available to have the greatest beneficial effect in things like strengthening the financial structure of arts organizations and ensuring continuity of management. We’re trying to take them on, looking at solutions and we’ve convened a series of about 10 colloquium.
Just as regional theater was a growth industry in the arts in the ’70s and ’80s, I think we’re seeing a tremendous growth in small community based arts organizations. Some are in communities of color or communities that can be defined by ethnicity or nationality. That’s an area we also have to find a way to address. We have ethnic populations in the United States, Vietnamese, Hmong tribesman, Persians, who are numerically large but geographically scattered. I think there’s a special role for the national endowment to try to work with the artistic traditions of those communities that don’t fit comfortably within the geographic boundaries of cities or states, and that yet share a common heritage.
How does Rhode Island’s arts community compare nationally? Is there more concentration here?
The simple answer is yes. Rhode Island, Providence, is a rich arts area, with a deeper understanding of the value of arts and community than many cities around the country. You do have a kind of – I don’t know the details of it – but I know you have a kind of tax free zone for artists in Providence. RISD has a real commitment to connecting graduates to business, which is important and a little unusual among arts schools. The business community seems to have a good understanding of the value of arts in economic development and there seems to be a pretty good understanding of the value of art and economic development and there seems to be pretty healthy per capita presence of working artists in the state. You put all those things together and you put Rhode Island on the front of the wave rather than on the back.
