Despite increased difficulty providing equal access to the arts for District schoolchildren and residents, funding for DC Arts and Humanities is again in jeopardy. Arts support in the District is disappearing.

Funding for DC’s arts agency, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) has been gutted in the last three years, from over $14 million in FY 09 to under $5 million in FY 11, and the proposed FY 12 budget contains further cuts. The current proposal is $3.92 million for the DCCAH to support all of the arts organizations, artists, and arts education providers in the District. As a recent report from the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies argues, “The arts comprise a very small portion of state spending, less than one tenth of one percent. Reducing expenditures that modest won’t appreciably affect state budgets, but will damage the cultural sector’s ability to provide jobs, goods and services to communities.”

DC arts support is now just $3.92 million within a total District FY 12 budget of $10.8 billion. Increased funding for the DCCAH is necessary to maintain access to the arts for all DC residents. The DC Chamber of Commerce 2011 Policy Agenda states, “The past year has proven to be a test for many of our members as they work to survive the economic downturn. And over the past year, the Chamber has been able to stave off legislative and regulatory initiatives that could harm our members’ ability to operate successfully and help grow our economy, create more jobs, and improve the District’s competitiveness regionally.” As we prepare for Arts Advocacy Day – April 27, 2011 – the DC Advocates for the Arts are fighting to ensure that the District will restore a basic level of support so that artists and arts businesses in every ward have a fighting chance.

On Arts Advocacy Day, Wednesday April 27, 2011, please take a minute to tell policy-makers to support the arts in the District’s FY 12 budget.

Contact Mayor Gray via email at eom@dc.gov or by phone at (202) 727-6300, and
Council Chair Kwame Brown at kbrown@dccouncil.us or (202) 724-8032.

Please ask the Mayor and the Council Chair to support the arts in the DC budget by restoring funding for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities to the FY 2010 level of $5.16 million. Please also share your participation in Arts Advocacy with your friends on facebook and twitter, and encourage them to be advocates as well. We’re using the hashtage #4dcArts on twitter.

Billboard magazine published an interview with the Mayor of Portland, Oregon, February 14, 2011 exploring his support for the arts. An excerpt: “In addition to the art and music, Portland also has high unemployment [10.7% in November 2010, according to the Portland Business Journal] and teacher layoffs. In the face of this issue, how do you justify spending money on the arts? The Mayor: If you want to live in a one-dimensional city, I respect anyone’s right to do so. I don’t. I want to live in a city that has many dimensions to it. The more arts education we offer, the lower our dropout rate will be. The more arts and culture we have in the city, the more innovative we’ll be in all other endeavors. It can’t be an innovative city and be bereft of arts and culture, or have a weak arts and culture scene. My goal is to allow for more full-time, living-wage arts and culture jobs. I was in a meeting the other day where this exact thing came up. I was meeting with area legislators, because we are trying to get the film and video tax credit renewed, and this particular newly elected legislator talked about how rural parts of the state don’t benefit from these fancy film and video jobs. I just reiterated the facts that most of the jobs in arts and culture are accessible; they are not the on-air talents. Behind every successful video, film, every successful music, entertainment offering are multiples of jobs.” To read the entire interview, click here.

In the European system, government arts funding covers the majority of non-profit unearned expenses. In response to the threat of significant new arts cuts Richard Eyre, former Artistic Director of England’s National Theater blogged in the Guardian about the issue February 15, 2011. An excerpt: “Of course it’s irritating for politicians to have to endure the noisy dissent of an apparently arrogant and self-interested claque, but then it’s always been hard for rulers to license the jester as well as the judge, or to acknowledge poets as the legislators of the world…. Art is about the ‘I’ in life not the ‘we, about private life rather than public. A public life that doesn’t acknowledge the private is a life not worth having. David Cameron seems to grasp this and is keen to ‘start measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life.’ But how this could possibly exclude the arts and the humanities? Can’t government for once be persuaded of the virtue of subsidising weapons of happiness rather than weapons of destruction? …The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings. What we hold in our heads – our memory, our feelings, our thoughts, our sense of our own history – is the sum of our humanity. We carry on us what King Lear called the “smell of mortality”; art redeems mortality by giving us a glimpse of eternity. It briefly illuminates something that’s more than human. By diminishing the opportunity to experience the arts or to study them and the humanities – literature, philosophy, history, religion, languages – we condemn future generations to a life a little less than human.” To read the entire article, click here.

President Obama’s FY12 budget contains three big negatives for arts and humanities lovers and creative economy workers in the District of Columbia. He proposed a National Endowment for the Arts budget reduction from 167 million to 145 million, and a National Endowment for the Humanities budget reductions from 168 to 146 million. Both of those budgets get re-granted to state agencies — in dc the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. Reductions in federal funding will mean reduction in federal grants, though the level of reductions remains to be known.

Of even greater impact to the local arts funding eco-system is the reduction of the National Capital Arts and Cultural Affairs (NCACA) program from $9.5 million to $5 million, and the transfer of this program into competitive grants administered by the District of Columbia. Last year NCACA grants provided guaranteed operating support funds of between $300,000 and $400,000 per year to the 32 qualifiying organizations in the District. No matter how this change is implemented, the largest organizations in the District lost a tremendous amount of support in the President’s proposed budget.

The NCACA funding program was a major support for the largest local DC arts employers and this reduction – from 9.5 million to 5 million – will impact our community in unforeseen ways. Operating support offered via grant from the DCCAH was capped at $30,000 in FY 11, and was a minority priority within the DCCAH granting program. This integration will likely lead to major overhaul of the DCCAH’s funding structures.

Stay tuned at http://www.facebook.com/pages/DC-Advocates-for-the-Arts/184310074921149 for more details as they emerge.

In a press advisory released on their website January 11th, the Museum of Censored Art announced their arrival. An excerpt: “The Museum of Censored Art will open to the public on Thursday, January 13, 2011, on the Smithsonian doorstep, announced art and free speech activists Mike Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone today. The free speech advocates will open the Museum of Censored Art in a mobile office trailer outside the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, where they will screen the film censored by the Smithsonian, A Fire In My Belly by the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz. The work was part of the larger Hide/Seek exhibit of gay and lesbian portraiture currently at the National Portrait Gallery. However, the piece was removed Nov. 30 by Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough after anti-gay groups labeled it ‘anti-Christian’. The same groups that succeeded in having the Wojnarowicz film censored originally wanted the entire Hide/Seek exhibit removed from the Gallery.” Click here to read the entire release.

On December 23rd, 2010, the Washington Post published staff writer Philip Kennicott’s call for the resignation of Smithsonian Director G. Wayne Clough. An excerpt: “Three weeks after the Smithsonian Institution ignited fury in the museum world by censoring one of its own exhibitions – removing a video that appeared in the National Portrait Gallery’s groundbreaking exhibition of gay portraiture, ‘Hide/Seek’ – the best option for undoing the damage remains the resignation of the man who made the decision. Curators of the critically acclaimed exhibition, although lamenting the decision, continue to defend the Smithsonian in public, and the National Portrait Gallery’s director, Martin Sullivan, continues to bear much of the brunt of the criticism. And yet Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough has gone missing. Cloughs defense of a decision that will almost certainly mark the nadir of his tenure has been limited to internal memos. By withdrawing from the public debate about what has been tactically, strategically and historically a disaster for the institution, he has called into question whether he shares the fundamental values of openness and engagement that should define the Smithsonian.” To read the rest of the article, click here.