Fall 1997, well past midnight: I was sitting with my fellow members of the Theater panel in the National Endowment for the Arts offices at the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. We were reviewing applications submitted to the federal government’s agency that funds the arts nationwide. The heat wasn’t working—or maybe a government shutdown was responsible for the chill that hovered over us. We had been there all week. It seemed we might never leave.
Those of us who had been friends and colleagues developed deeper bonds as we forged meaningful relationships with those we had only met a few days earlier. Frustration and confusion were mixed with dismay at the brilliance of the applicant pool in comparison to the meager dollars available to distribute. Theater Program Director Gigi Bolt and her staff deftly guided us as we attempted to understand the new “Creation and Presentation” category; the structure seemed cumbersome.
Rumor of our struggles had made their way to the chair’s office: Jane Alexander—who had been appointed by President Bill Clinton—appeared after hours for a visit. She offered gratitude for our service and words of encouragement to help us carry on, not only during that panel but to continue the good fight in the theatre communities where we did our daily work. We were all a little starry-eyed and insisted on a photo.
Once upon a time, we supported artists for their potential or where their body of work might next take us. But no longer. Organizations were no longer able to apply for general operating support: they were required to present a project. Artists were now only a component of grants subdivided into category titles such as “Heritage and Preservation” and “Creation and Presentation.” Applications were now submitted by organizations. As panelists, we were instructed to focus on the value of the project before us and the applicant organization’s capacity to fulfill that project. A company unable to articulate fully a specific level of detail on that project might be set aside.
Earlier in the decade, the political far right, the Christian Coalition, the fallout from the NEA Four, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ photograph, and the Mapplethorpe exhibit had taught us about censorship. So, on that fall night in 1997, my fellow panelists and I wondered how many of the grants before us were the result of a different kind of censorship: self-censorship.
Were theatres applying for projects that they felt would not offend? How many of us were unconsciously gravitating toward a safe path to funding? Now we could do it to ourselves, to save ourselves.
To paraphrase David Byrne: Well, how did we get here?
In 1987, a $75,000 NEA grant supported the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC, for the seventh year of AVA (Awards in the Visual Arts). This was a traveling exhibition featuring the work of 10 artists, including Andres Serrano. AVA-7 opened in Los Angeles in the spring of 1988 and included Serrano’s Piss Christ, depicting a urine-submerged crucifix.
Also in 1988, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pennsylvania received $30,000 from the NEA for The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work in black and white captured intimacy, strength, and vulnerability in male and female nudes and invoked classical Greek lines of beauty in still lifes. But his work provoked controversy as well. A group of works that would come to be known as the “X Portfolio” depicted “deviant” behavior, such as gay BDSM and urophagia. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in March 1989, just four months after The Perfect Moment opened in Philadelphia.
By the spring of 1989, a virulent new form of family values was taking hold. The American Family Association, the Christian right, Jesse Helms, Alfonse D’Amato, and 22 senators demanded a review of the NEA’s grants. In July, Senator Helms had inserted language now known as the “decency clause” into the bill reauthorizing the agency. It stated that the NEA could not use funds to support any work that was deemed obscene or indecent. Even so, Piss Christ and Mapplethorpe didn’t appear to be enough to bring down the agency; the Senate reauthorized the NEA with no reduction in funding, although it did allocate $250,000 for an independent commission to study the agency’s grantmaking.
On June 29, 1990, John Frohnmayer—appointed NEA Chair by President George H.W. Bush—announced that he had confirmed consent from the National Council on the Arts to withdraw grants to individual artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. These were performance artists whose work explored sexuality and identity; they were brazen, visceral, naked, and angry, without compromise. They provoked.
These fearless artists would appeal Frohnmayer’s decision, challenging the grant rejections as illegal and claiming the decision was based on political standards rather than artistic excellence. From that moment forward, Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller would become known as the NEA Four. Performance artists were easy prey for the conservative right, the Christian Coalition, and the censors. Working in the underground scene or performance art world, many solo artists had latitude and could often be found exploring themes of LGBTQ identity and communities, sexuality and the human body, and the objectification of women. These four artists became the lightning rods for what had begun with the NEA’s grant for AVA-7.
The decency clause was taking hold. Going forward, the clause insisted that the NEA must consider not just artistic merit but “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public.” In other words, the NEA could deny funding based on the subject matter alone.
As theatre artists and administrators, we were outraged, confused, righteous—and in need of the precious funding provided by the NEA. As grant recipients, if we accepted funding, we were accepting the conditions of the decency clause. Joseph Papp famously rejected funding for The Public Theater, while managers, artistic directors, and boards across the country wrestled with what to do. Many (maybe most) accepted the new mandate. Some sorted through the options and felt they had to comply despite their objections. Others felt they could do more good with the grant than without it. And some felt the work of their theatres actually aligned with general standards of decency within their communities.
The NEA Four won an out-of-court settlement in 1993 that awarded them amounts equal to the grants they were to receive. In late 1997, they filed suit in federal court to litigate the decency clause. Ruling in the 1998 case NEA vs. Finley, the Supreme Court upheld the decency clause even while declaring that the language was “advisory,” meaningless, and did not interfere with First Amendment rights. Although the courts ruled the clause had no real teeth, it was here to stay.
The culture wars for my generation had begun.
If you research “culture wars,” you may find yourself, as I did, on a fascinating trip back to Germany in the late 1880s. The term first appears to describe the ideological struggles between religious and cultural forces of that time. The first US reference to culture wars was in the 1920s, when social and political conflicts divided communities as values shifted in response to the ways in which modernization was changing our social and moral codes. It seems that from decade to decade over the course of the past 150 years, you can find scholars and historians staking claims to a new culture war. A common thread: every battle in every culture war is influenced by artists—because it dramatically impacts their lives.
Public funding for the arts has always been fraught. It’s easy to get distracted by the hyperbole of any point in time. At times, political leaders have even taken advantage of the power of the arts. With the WPA work programs, the arts were a central cog in an economic engine. During Nixon’s presidency, the NEA budget grew from $8 million to $161 million. Nixon felt that the arts served a purpose—propaganda, if you will—in the Cold War as the US positioned itself as the “land of the free.”
Some attribute the culture wars of the ’90s to the success of the gay rights movement, the increased presence of women in leadership and politics, and the glimmers of what an increasingly racially diverse society might mean in the 21st century. It’s also likely that Senator Helms was simply lying in wait for artists like Serrano, Mapplethorpe, and the NEA Four. In 1974, he had lashed out at the NEA and its chair, Nancy Hanks, after learning that Erica Jong—who had just published Fear of Flying, with its uninhibited portrayal of female sexuality—had been an NEA grantee. Helms was not successful in rallying support at that time. But 15 years later, he did.
By 1993, Frohnmayer was forced to resign because of the continuing onslaught of controversies. The NEA budget was gutted, reaching a low of $99.5 million from its peak of $169 million in 1989.
The culture wars hit hard at the regional level, playing out in communities across the country through intense struggles over content and funding. Angels in America stunned American theatre audiences in all the right ways, even as productions pushed through the pressure of community censors. Just hours before the opening night of the 1996 Charlotte Repertory Theatre’s production, Superior Court Judge Marvin Gray instructed that no members of the cast should be arrested, as nudity in the play “appears to constitute artistic expression” and was “not properly the subject of criminal prosecution.” Soon after, $2,000,000 was cut from the local arts and science council. Community members were going to be sure that no public money would go to groups that offer “exposure to perverted forms of sexuality.”
American theatres rose to the occasion to defend themselves against these threats to their core funding and artistic decision making. I experienced these events from the frontlines at Seattle Rep and later as Managing Director at Intiman Theatre. My fellow managers and I produced fact sheets for subscribers, urging them to make calls to representatives; we made visits to “the Hill,” with service organizations TCG and American Arts Alliance, dragging board members from office to office with those same fact sheets that, by that time, they had memorized.
We did delicate dances with individual donors whose political leanings were not always easy to decode. We had conversations with corporate sponsors as they became more strategic in their giving, less philanthropic, and more interested (or concerned) with how a particular project might impact their brand.
Partnerships were forged with our colleagues in dance, symphony, and opera companies as we embraced our commitment to young people and education programs. (Simultaneously, arts programming in public education was being gutted.) We began to focus on rural arts and the underserved.
We touted the economic impact of the arts and insisted the NEA was necessary. And we courted our neighborhood Republican leaders to keep the NEA alive. In 1997, after considerable lobbying on behalf of the arts, Slade Gorton—a Republican senator from Washington state—proposed a symbolic increase to the agency, stating, “I have polled the members of the subcommittee and I don’t find any sentiment on the committee to end the endowment. I think it’s much more likely than not that the agency will survive.” (Tangled up in the same appropriation bill, though, was Gorton’s ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Native American tribes’ sovereign immunity and rights to basic federal operating funds for reservations.)
Many believe that NEA Chair Jane Alexander saved the NEA. She reframed the narrative and, out of necessity, the programs, by embracing the agency’s service to the public and communities. (Some claimed this would be done by shifting the agency’s focus away from artistic excellence and toward arts education.) By the turn of the millennium, peer panels would still exist but were organized around new categories of Creation and Presentation, Heritage and Preservation, Education and Access, and Planning and Stabilization. Site visits: gone. Grants to individual artists: gone. General operating support to theatre companies: gone. Today, the agency soldiers on from appropriation cycle to appropriation cycle, providing critical support where it is able as its tenacious program staff advocates for our artists and our theatres.
While the drama of the ’90s culture wars has faded and the economic recession of that decade recedes into distant memory, we have not seen any restoration of support across contributed income sources. In fact, we have seen a steady decline.
Whether consciously or not, funders appear to have followed the NEA’s lead. Corporate support was the first to become project-based, and foundations incrementally migrated away from general operating support to funding projects and special initiatives that all too often required new programs and additional operating expense to produce. Last to conform to new contributed income norms were individuals who, at one time, loved theatres and believed in their inherent value to communities. Individual philanthropists were beginning to sponsor a production or an education program that spoke directly to their interests. Many funders continued to support theatre from one year to the next, and yet one could start to wonder what might happen if your next season didn’t include a play that had a special kind of resonance. The lack of general operating support has contributed to the structural deficit facing many of our theatre companies. The burden remains very real and has contributed unrelenting stress to our theatres.
And now, some 30 years out from the NEA Four battle, we are in another culture war. Perhaps one that has broken out on two fronts.
Externally, we are threatened by political and societal forces that are challenging the very nature of our civil society, wreaking havoc on our lives while placing unprecedented pressure on a deeply undercapitalized nonprofit arts sector and the volatile, high-risk, rarefied proposition that is the commercial arena. While daunting and discouraging, this battlefield is not unfamiliar.
Less familiar is the other front, where we are struggling in our relationships with one another as we respond in real-time to the long overdue recalibration of our culture. Like 100 years ago, our values and habits are shifting. Cultural and political conflicts divide our communities while many theatre practitioners are responding as best they can—under the watchful eye of ever-expanding and volatile social media realities.
We are in the midst of a transfer of influence. We are reckoning with the fact that a life in the theatre has too long been the exclusive purview of a select few. Not just a field where jobs have been dominated by a single demographic but a craft whose very expression has been too often limited to a single cultural perspective. Artists of color are no longer willing to accept a career that would mean primarily working on smaller stages, on projects limited to their own race or ethnicity, and little, if any, access to the commercial sector.
In the late 1980s, I was introduced to the Hudson Institute study “Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century,” a report that gave insights into the major demographic shift in the workforce at the turn of the century and called for careful policy development to prepare for the change. Without preparation and changes in policy, the US position as a global economic force would be at risk. The study’s predictions were manifest: more women would be entering the workforce, with minorities representing an even larger share, and immigrants would represent the largest share of the increase in the population and the workforce since World War I. The theatre would be no different. Change would infuse our companies with new possibilities; it was inevitable. Prior knowledge for those of us who were familiar with its predictions has not necessarily given us the tools we need.
Simultaneously, our culture is demanding we all be held accountable for our actions and behavior. We are being asked to evaluate and adjust our practices and relationships, to reconsider the work we make and the way in which we make it.
Impatience can be a good thing. It can drive overdue change. Some 80 years into the nonprofit theatre movement, impatience is pressing many of our well-established companies to embrace new values for a new century, and while some can pivot, others lack the agility to evolve fast enough. Can we find that place between pressure and support, so they can become new versions of themselves, born of systemic transformation, becoming vibrant homes for a new generation of theatremakers? Can we find the place between pressure and support for one another?
This current cultural moment is as thrilling as it is terrifying. Many of our artists are drawn to the theatre to contribute to building an informed citizenry, to lighting the imaginations of our friends and foes as the lights go down in theatres across the country night after night. How do we balance our internal commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion so that all voices are heard—while also remaining united to hold our ground as external forces threaten our vital role in our communities?
All the while, the decency clause remains in place: “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public.” What does it mean today? If we didn’t know the story of the NEA Four, how might it read? At first glance it might seem innocuous, or perhaps a reasonable standard to strive for. Decency and respect are values many hold dear, but we must remember the insidiousness of this phrase as it set out to silence our most daring artists. To protect our future, we must braid learning from the past into the present. Remembering how we got here may better equip us to chart a course through the battles we find in our communities today—and those that we will meet in the future.
You may find a few inspirations in this issue of the Journal, which features artists whose visions are bold and uncompromising; they wake us up, challenge our assumptions, and take us out of ourselves into provocative, sometimes dangerous terrain. Jackson Gay. Daniel Fish and Donald Byrd. Niegel Smith and Taylor Mac. Ty Defoe, Omar Abusaada, Steve Cosson, and more. Resisting censorship and pressing us on and off our stages to consider what is possible, what is necessary. They are our friends and they are fierce—as are our foes.
In Solidarity,
Laura Penn
Executive Director