I’m writing this reflection from home in my bedroom in Illinois, trying to stay focused and trying to come up with some sort of response to tie up everything that I’ve learned about the National Endowment for the Arts into some neat little package.
It’s hard to tie the different perceptions that I have together in my mind. Part of the difficulty of doing this is that this is our first meeting with arts policy professionals for the class. There is no prescient to this experience, but it feels similar to other things I’ve done before. One of my initial impressions upon leaving the meeting was that the experience felt very similar to the alumni panels I did recently for my ENVST 399 class this past fall. Our professors for that class had alumni in various environmental fields such as research and policy explained what they did and how they got there, giving us opportunities to reflect on.
How our guests talked about their experiences and positions felt very similar to what the alumni panels in my previous class, but it wasn’t the experience I was expecting. My preliminary research trained me to think about the NEA as a whole large organization. None of the articles that talked about the current happenings within the NEA named names or used quotes from those who worked for the NEA. All of them focused on the big picture projects and controversies of the federal agency. I wasn’t processing that these big broad organizations that we’re meeting are all composed of individuals, and the individuals don’t represent the entire organization on their own.
I had mentally guided myself into thinking that we’d be talking more about large picture ideas. As our meeting with Jennie, Beth, and Margaret started, I was expecting them to talk about their experiences in their roles and about their larger views of how the federal government supports the arts. I was expecting a lot of insight into their own personal philosophies about what drives them to do this work. I wanted an experience to bring more solidity to the big picture ideas of what it means to have art be representative of a large, complicated democracy.
I quickly realized that I had to do a mental switch, since the desires that I formed from my preliminary research weren’t going fulfilled, especially considering we didn’t have a lot of time for questions. While there’s some lingering disappointment, I did learn more about our guests’ values and positioning in life surrounding the arts, which we did get when they explained their jobs in more detail.
The interviewees through their work uphold some of the values of diversity and equity as defined at the beginning of the National Arts and Humanities Act and are extremely dedicated to the values established in the act. Beth from the NEA currently works on making the programming that the NEA find accessible according to American Disability Act standards, while Jennie from the NEA and Margaret from the NEH both help organizations across the country apply for grants that will help keep them operating while being involved with projects including making grant application processes more accessible for those without reliable internet access, and working on creating partnerships with HBCUs and Indigenous nations.
Hearing about the inner workings of the NEA and the NEH them really gave an insight where if I was part of an arts organization and was applying for a federal grant from either the NEA or the NEH, I would feel comfortable doing so because as public servants dedicated to the arts, they have the best intentions in helping organizations succeed when they need support. It was something that I really enjoyed and appreciated about the experience overall.
I would say that one final aspect that surprised me about the interview was that many of these initiatives that our guest were working on are emphasized by the Biden-Harris administration. I don’t particularly view the administration positively, but this experience made me realize that what leaves “the swamp” in my news updates doesn’t often match what’s happening in the offices of these places, especially in terms of the arts. The actual reality of the work was depicted differently to me in comparison to what I read before, and it makes me wish that the positive work that’s being done in these organizations is better shared by our government and news outlets to ordinary people like me rather than it being.
In conclusion, the experience felt both underwhelming and overwhelming, but was overall a good learning experience. I am looking forward to our future interviews, and am excited about what insights I will glean from our guests in the future.