Last week, the Arts Management program at American University released a series of video interviews with the former chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) on the occasion of the NEA’s 60th anniversary.

These chairs are Jane Alexander, Bill Ivey, Dana Gioia, Jane Chu, Rocco Landesman, Maria Rosario Jackson. While the video says they interviewed seven chairs, only six videos are available. Perhaps Mary Anne Carter was interviewed but wasn’t videotaped.

There is a summary video of some of each of their thoughts which is interesting to watch.

There are also longer individual video interviews with each that I have linked to each name above. I haven’t listened to all of them as of this posting time, but it is interesting to see what each valued and brought to the job.

Jane Chu talked about how her father died when she was 9 years old and she didn’t have the words at that age to express what she was feeling, but that art provided her with an outlet. A fair bit of her focus was on the importance of the arts for social cohesion and self-expression. She cited some examples of how recognition of creative intelligence reveals aspects of people that measures of academic intelligence don’t.

Dana Gioia was apparently the first chair who set a goal to have at least one grant in every Congressional district. He said that given every district has about three-quarters of a million people in it, there must be at least one organization in there that was doing something worthy of a grant. He said this changed the relationship of the NEA with Congress and the people of many districts.

Though he also relates an anecdote where he essentially strong armed a Congressman into attending an advocacy meeting where the representative realized a lot of his campaign donors were passionate about the arts. He makes the point that legislators’ view of things is filtered through their staff so often direct interaction and advocacy is necessary.

Jane Alexander faced something of a similar situation when she was appointed in 1993 during a big uproar over the types of work the NEA was supporting. She said she realized she needed to better communicate the work of the NEA. So she visited over 200 communities soon after she was appointed. She said once people understood that NEA funds were supporting programs in their communities that they and their families valued, they began to advocate for continued support to their representatives and senators. Like Jane Chu she cited meeting people for whom the arts provided an outlet for expression during troubled times in their lives.

Rocco Landesman seemed relatively optimistic about the NEA’s future existence. Though he outright criticized the current politicization of the NEA where some of the other chairs were a little more circumspect.