In October 1993, U.S. stage and screen actress Jane Alexander set her career aside to assume the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the U.S. Government's principal grantor of funds to support the visual and performing arts around the United States. When a new U.S. Congress, representing a differing political philosophy, convened in January 1995, one of the issues raised was the question of whether such public funding should continue at all, and if so, at what amount. Although she traveled widely, monitoring the health and well-being of culture across the nation, the budget issue dominated much of her stewardship, affecting public funding at local, regional and national levels of government. Yet, through Alexander's effective communication and management skills, the NEA continues to exist, if at a reduced budget of $98 million for fiscal 1998. President Clinton has proposed a figure of $126 million for fiscal 1999 (see table below on funding for the nonprofit sector).

Alexander resigned the chairmanship in October 1997, and returned to her stage career in the spring of 1998, in a drama called Honour. In this interview with Michael J. Bandler, she reflects on her tenure at the NEA and on the challenges for government support of the arts that lie ahead.

Q: With all that you were aware of about the arts landscape, from your experiences as an artist, when you arrived at the NEA, what did you learn about culture in the United States that was new to you? What surprised you?

A: When we think of how the U.S. Government supports the arts, most of us focus on performing arts companies or museum exhibitions. What surprised me was that the NEA supports so much more, everything from arts organizations that deal with youth after school to community centers to individual craftsmen, from whale bone sculptors in Alaska to Cajun pirogue makers in Louisiana.

Q: In other words, it gets down to the grass-roots level.

A: Oh, yes, it's very grass roots. I discovered, for example, in a little dance organization in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, three young women who were going to New York City for the summer to learn and to train with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. So what is amazing is what the arts mean, and how they permeate all levels of society.

Q: Are the arts taken for granted by Americans?

A: Yes. They're taken for granted, and they're also misunderstood in terms of how they're funded. Most people think that most arts organizations are self-sustaining and aren't in deficit, and that most artists make a very good living. And of course the opposite is true.

Q: By the same token, do they realize the minuscule amount of public funds steered to the arts as opposed to corporate, foundation, private contributions?

A: No, I don't think so. I don't think they understand the ratio. Actually, corporate support is still not as much as what the individual givers contribute. Foundations are a very small percentage of giving overall. Individuals in the United States, like you and me, are the ones who sustain the nonprofit arts.

Q: Go to any city Cincinnati [Ohio], Atlanta [Georgia] and look in the back of the printed program for any performance. You'll get a cross-section of the local donors. They take care of their own.

A: To a certain degree. But it's getting harder and harder as expenses rise.

Q: With the economy improving, are contributions also on the ascent?

A: Not necessarily. What I was trying to point out to corporate executives during my years at NEA was that they need to step up to bat even more. There are some that do. Take Sara Lee Corporation in Chicago as an example. It is an international corporation in its diversification, employing vast numbers of people worldwide. It dedicates a certain proportion of corporate giving to the arts. That was part of the thinking of its founders. All corporations in America should do that across the board. After a certain profit margin, you should give a percentage.

Q: Do people feel they need the arts in their lives? Are they fully aware of the role the arts play in their everyday experiences that may be subtle or intangible?

A: Well, if you took the arts away, then people would certainly realize it. I remember going to East Germany during the Cold War. There was some state-supported art in East Germany at the time, but it was a very, very gray, literally, gray-looking country. You didn't feel a lot of vibrancy of color or anything like that. Imagine going to a Caribbean country and not seeing any painting or hearing any music. It would be shocking. I think that that's what would happen here.

Q: A glass artist named Kate Vogel suggests that one problem might be that we tend to view the arts in the United States as on a pedestal that culture is lofty. That may cause some inaccessibility or fear of inaccessibility.

A: That's true. It might be people's perceptions. It is very difficult for the average citizen to scrape together the money to go to the Metropolitan Opera. But if they really want to do it, they do, by finding discount tickets that do exist. [Ed. note: Most theater, dance and musical organizations in the United States allot a certain number of tickets for each performance to be sold at a discount through a structured arrangement that is well publicized in their communities.] More than that, what's been interesting in my travels has been that even the smaller communities I visited places like Greenville, South Carolina were developing their own rather extensive performing arts centers and visual arts centers. I was surprised at that. I was surprised that the capital outlay for new buildings came from public- private partnerships. I was excited by it, although I didn't see plans for long-term maintenance.

Q: But there was excitement.

A: Yes. And everybody seems to want something like that in their own back yard.

Q: In local communities, don't you also find fusions of arts groups four or five arts organizations or performing groups forming coalitions?

A: Yes. And that's been very helpful for most of them. In Canton, Ohio, you have a cultural center that has under its roof the museum or gallery, a big hall for music, a smaller hall for theater and more.

Q: And you found this wherever you went?

A: Oh, yes. There was a lot more than just NEA grants. Communities were creating all sorts of projects. Many arts advocates on the community level across the nation are pushing harder and harder not to have their grants cut.

Q: Expand a bit on the role of the arts in the community.

A: It so happens that culture works best, in many respects, when it's localized, so that every neighborhood, ideally, can have its own little place so that kids can go after school, adults can go when they were free, so that there'd be a theater and a space for dance and visual arts, and a place for arts education. That's the ideal. That is so rare to come by. But in my mind, I saw a whole nation of this, people just expressing themselves. It doesn't mean they have to sell it all. It doesn't mean they have to do anything with it professionally. It just becomes part of their own psyche. In a way, I think it changes thinking, because people can put their minds into arts problems. It teaches them problem-solving. So it's happening. But there are many, many areas that are deprived. Take arts education, because the cultural thriving of a community begins with the kids. The littler they are, and the more they're exposed to it in one way or another, the better it can be and not just appreciating art, but also participating.

Q: It seems like arts programs in schools are always the first to go when there are budgetary constraints.

A: That would have been unthinkable at the turn of the century. Consider the United States priding itself on the fact that it had become an industrialized society, a civilized society, like Europe. The arts were part of that. Then you had the great philanthropists [John D.] Rockefeller and [J.P.] Morgan and others building huge edifices. And it was part of your schooling, too.

Q: It seems, though, that the picture is starting to turn around, that arts education in primary and secondary schools is gradually expanding.

A: There's no comprehensive study yet on it. The Kennedy Center [for the Performing Arts in Washington] and the NEA are studying the schools in America with the U.S. Department of Education to discover exactly how much arts education there is in the schools. That's ongoing. But there definitely was a decline in the Seventies and Eighties.

Q: So that's one of the challenges for the future.

A: Absolutely.

Q: Let's discuss the role of the arts in one's individual life.

A: It's as vital as bread. What are we as an animal without language? And language is words, which then become expressed in the written word and so on. You start there. Music is as old as time.

Q: It appears to me that American Canvas [a recent NEA report detailing the national discussion the Endowment initiated to consider the U.S. arts legacy] arose out of the budgetary crisis and the need to rethink approaches and priorities. Is that a fair presumption?

A: In some ways, yes. Congress was pushing us to that. We had to begin to define for legislators the value of the arts to society. And in doing so, we began to examine what the NEA had been doing all along, and what its purpose was. In short, we had to show them what the value of the NEA was.

Q: Why, with the beauty, the vitality and the creativity, are the arts such a catalyst for controversy?

A: Oh, well. Because some people want to define everything for society, and new art can be very frightening. It's the new art that scares people, not the old. It's just the same as what happens when the kids in the commercial music market do stuff that is a little outr . Everybody shakes and quakes.

Q: How do our budgetary tensions and challenges stack up against the situation in other countries?

A: We're unique in the world in that the ratio of public giving to private support is 1-to-10. Ninety percent of giving to the arts in this country is private. In the rest of the world it has been virtually the other way. Now Britain has been courting the private sector. The social democratic states in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, which have always given heavily to the arts, are now courting the private sector.

Q: While we're on the international scene, touch upon the impact of the American arts on the global landscape.

A: Oh, it's staggering. Obviously you feel the impact of our film, music and publishing on the rest of the world. It's a bit harder to assess the impact of visual arts.

Q: What would you say are the challenges we face as a nation, what we need to concentrate on, in terms of establishing or preserving our artistic legacy?

A: One is understanding that after more than 150 years of civilization, with the Industrial Revolution in the United States, we do have a significant American cultural legacy. It may be influenced by those who came from Europe to the United States, but it is no longer dominated by European themes. So it's a great time to begin to define what that is, the different patterns, the diaspora. I mean, imagine if you were able to track the heritage of the Polish people or the Ghanaian people through the United States what their cultural legacy was to any community to which they came. This would be fascinating! We also have to begin defining who we are as a nation in terms of the arts. As a nation of theater, are we just Broadway [the commercial theater], or are we all these other venues [the non- commercial theater]? If you go anywhere in the country and talk about theater, people seem to know only about their own community and about Broadway.

Q: I've often wondered why there hasn't been sharing among arts organizations in different regions.

A: They're beginning to do that now for economic reasons. It's being done in opera and music, too, believe it or not communities sharing orchestras, opera companies sharing sets and costumes. And among ballet companies, too sharing cities. It's the smart thing to do and it's a healthy trend. It means that performers have a life. They'll have 40, 50 weeks of work a year, though it'll be in different cities.

Q: Could you say a word about how technology is starting to have an impact both organizationally at the NEA and in the culture itself?

A: Right now, I just see it as a tool. I think that artists are still assessing how they're going to use it so that it becomes a way to express themselves artistically. It's wide open and so nascent that nobody really knows. But it sure is helpful for running organizations just getting out and doing demographics and reaching the right people. For example, the show I'm in now, Honour, got its preview audiences through a mailing list that indicated the audience who might be interested in this play. That's such a boon!

Q: We haven't spoken about the NEA. It has a multifaceted role as grantor, convener, catalyst...

A: ...an ambassadorship to the world.

Q: Does it fill its role well?

A: I think it does. The genius of it is the peer panel system that brings citizens from all across the country to adjudicate the grant applications. My favorite thing to do at the Endowment was to sit in on those panels.

Q: In other words, artists within each discipline of the arts decide on grants for that discipline.

A: Yes. But we couldn't begin to fulfill all of the needs in the country with the budget that we had. Then, when it was slashed, we had to become very targeted and promote partnerships which are great. But sometimes, you think, this visual arts organization in Des Moines [Iowa] really could use $100,000. And now they're getting only $10,000, and have to make up an awful lot of money to do what they have to do. So what you're seeing is a decline in the most exciting kind of art, because people can't fulfill their vision. It's such a struggle to fulfill your technical dreams alone in a performing arts or visual arts organization. There's not a museum I know that doesn't have a deficit in their conservatorship budget. And they're not developing a lot of new conservators -- they don't have the money for it.

Q: Have the budgetary battles caused people to focus more on how vital the arts are in life?

A: I think they want culture, but we still have only 24 hours in our day. There are so many distractions. The computer has really taken over people's lives.

Q: What are you proudest of these past four years?

A: I think I'm proudest not only of keeping the Endowment alive, but bringing together the forces of arts advocacy, so they're working in concert, and not separately. There used to be more of a separation of the entity, of music versus art, and I said, "You know something? It's all the same thing -- it's just manifested differently."

Q: What are you most optimistic about?

A: That artists will always persevere. They'll always find a way. Even if it's minimalist, they'll create. And I'm also optimistic that since there has been more vested in the arts when the economy is good, that will continue.