ASMA KHALID, HOST:
In the span of just a few months, the Trump administration has rapidly redrawn the landscape for arts and culture in the United States. It has canceled millions of dollars in previously awarded grants to museums and libraries. It has attacked the Smithsonian Institution, saying in an executive order, it has, quote, "come under the influence of a divisive race-centered ideology." And President Trump purged the board of the Kennedy Center here in Washington and replaced it with loyalists who, in an unprecedented move, elected him as the new chair. To make sense of this moment, we've called up Jane Alexander. The Emmy and Tony Award-winning actor chaired the National Endowment for the Arts in the mid-1990s. Now, to be clear, the NEA has not seen cuts like other arts institutions, but as a lifelong advocate of the arts, we wanted to talk with Jane Alexander about what she sees as the broader importance of arts funding across the country. Jane Alexander, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
JANE ALEXANDER: Oh, thank you, Asma. Happy to be here.
KHALID: So at the outset here, I should note that NPR has received financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts. You know, I just outlined, Jane, a few of the many cuts, though, that the Trump administration has made to arts programs and cultural agencies. I want to ask - what has been your initial reaction to these changes that we have been seeing the last couple of months?
ALEXANDER: Oh, well, I'm not surprised that it has happened under this administration. They - I think they were looking at absolutely everything. I'm appalled. I don't think it's a wise decision, particularly since the arts are really for everyone, and we know that people love the arts in their community. So I don't think it's wise, but it's here. And we have to challenge it.
KHALID: In your time leading the NEA, you toured the nation examining the impact of that endowment's work. Can you give us a better sense of the sorts of things these federal arts grants support in local communities?
ALEXANDER: Oh, sure. The thing we have to remember is the endowment was founded to decentralize the commercial art centers of the United States and bring the arts across the country to areas that did not have real accessibility to it. It was a noble dream, and it came to fruition in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. And it's been extremely successful. I mean, just to give an example of theaters, there was a handful of professional theaters - and I include places like the Cleveland Play House - that had been going a long time. And now there are - in almost every community of over 50,000 people, there is a professional theater. So that's extreme, wonderful growth, and it allows the community to really participate.
KHALID: Jane, you chaired the NEA in the 1990s, and you all did face some budget cuts during that time. Does what's happening today resemble the sorts of challenges you encountered back then?
ALEXANDER: Absolutely, yes.
KHALID: Any lessons learned?
ALEXANDER: Yes, there are a lot of lessons learned, but there's some things that have happened that make it difficult to move forward in many respects - is - that's the lack of bipartisanship in the House and the Senate to some degree, too. You know, if you can't get the votes from both sides of the aisles, because we're talking about all people represented in America, then you have a problem moving forward. It's going to be a challenge, but I think the case can be made because as I said, people want the arts in their district. They want it. I traveled to all the states, the districts, 200 cities and towns in one year. And I saw a plethora of arts everywhere.
My favorite place that I remember in my travels was - I couldn't even drive to it. The area was so rural, in a mining town way up in the hills of West Virginia. And I came in on a helicopter and came out of the helicopter, and in this extraordinary field of flowers in June were all these young people dressed in costumes, and they were part of the Heartwood dance company that was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. And my heart stopped. I felt like something out of Shakespeare's "Midsummer's Night's Dream" (ph) as they walked me through these flowers and we went to watch them dance. So this was the kind of thing that the NEA was seeding all across America, and it has been seeding since 1965.
KHALID: Jane, I want to ask you about what the Trump administration is arguing in this moment. They hold that they are restoring, quote, "truth and sanity to American history." We have heard the press secretary call programming at the Kennedy Center, for example, woke. They feel that, broadly, cultural institutions in this country at this moment have had a liberal bent and that they have long had a liberal bent. Was that your experience?
ALEXANDER: Well, there's no such thing as a liberal or conservative bent, really, when you think about the arts. I mean, how do you talk about a painting that you might paint of trees? And, you know, there's no such thing. So are there things that are unacceptable to some people, or they don't like? Absolutely. The arts are always going to be controversial in one way or another because people have likes and they have dislikes.
KHALID: Jane, I have one final question for you here. Why should the government fund the arts? You mentioned that the United States only started doing this in the mid-'60s with funding the National Endowment of the Arts (ph). Some folks would question why the government ought to do this.
ALEXANDER: I'll tell you why - because the child's mind is the wealth of the nation. And if children don't grow up with any kind of cultural arts in their life, they are not going to know the expanse of the universe and everything that they can bring to it in and of themselves, even as an artist or as a participant in the arts - by that, I mean an audience member. But everybody has a creative bent. Everybody has a creative spirit. Everybody wants to be part of it. All you have to do is look at television. How much of that is politics and news, and how much of that is of an artistic or sports events? And you see the people want to take part. They want to see.
KHALID: Jane Alexander is an actor and the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. Thank you so much for joining us.
ALEXANDER: Thank you, Asma.
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