Good morning.
I'm delighted to join you at the start of the National Arts Action Summit, and I'm grateful to AFTA and Nolen for inviting me to share thoughts with you today. I'm also grateful to AFTA and all in attendance for your work in helping to educate the public about the roles, value, and impact of the arts culture and creativity.
I feel very honored to have been appointed by President Biden to serve as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and I hope that what I have to offer from my perspective and body of research is a good match for the time. Stepping into this role, I am embracing the notion that we are in a new season. The last two years have been challenging to say the least. The pandemic, heightened racial reckoning, social and political polarization, global instability, environmental challenges. It has been and continues to be an extraordinary time full of trials and tragedy, but also full of evidence of strength, resilience, and possibility. Not surprisingly, that evidence of strength, resilience, and possibility is often connected to creativity in the arts.
Our creativity and imagination have allowed us to respond, adapt, step up. In addition to the critically important economic impact of the sector, the arts and our creative expression help us to mourn, celebrate, speak out, hope, connect, and find both meaningful difference in common ground. We see this nationally, locally, and globally. Perhaps, most recently in artists' deeply moving contribution as the world processes and attempts to make sense of the situation in Ukraine.
In the past two years, even in altered times, the NEA has carried out its regular work and then some. In 2021, the Arts Endowment distributed $135 million in resources through the American Rescue Plan. This money, as you heard, was distributed to state and local arts agencies, regional arts organizations, and arts organizations throughout the country to help the arts and cultural sector operate facilities, purchase health and safety supplies, and save careers. Prior to that, the NEA distributed $75 million as part of the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act to assist businesses in the arts.
These investments included resources to underserved communities, and many organizations that did not previously have a direct relationship with the Arts Endowment. Even with the massive effort on the part of the NEA in distributing funds, we know that people and organizations are still hurting.
We are grateful to President Biden and Congress for the support of the NEA. The president's budget for fiscal year 2023 builds on fiscal year 2022, and it is the culmination of a great deal of work from people who have been active in the arts for a very long time. At the same time that we've seen dimensions of the sector devastated, we are reminded of the power of the arts and the prospect of recovery, and recovery that's not only fueled by what has been, but by what can be.
So as we adjust lifestyles, reimagine work, and reconsider what it means to care for each other as a nation, the last two years have taught us that in some cases, we don't have to do what we have always done. What we may have thought about as an orthodoxy might be one approach among many we should consider going forward. The last two years may have also taught us something about what is essential, not negotiable, foundational, core to who we are and who we want to be.
As we step into a new season, hopefully bolstered by what we have learned and are learning, the invitation is not just to snap back to what was. The invitation or perhaps the obligation is to pause and consider where we must refrain. That is, see things differently and retool, devise new or different ways of working in order to truly do the work of repair, the work of healing and mending, work that is so necessary to the reaching of our full potential.
When I was approached about the opportunity to chair the NEA, I had to dig deep to get really clear about why I might say "yes." I will share with you that it boils down to three things. One is personal and has to do with my upbringing and what I have to offer as a result of my career. The second has to do with the Arts Endowment, itself, and its stellar record. I've had the privilege of having proximity to the NEA as Nolen mentioned, as a member of the National Council of the Arts, so I have seen up close the breath and depth of what the NEA does. The third is this particular time. At its best, in spite of or perhaps because of the challenges we face, there is a culture of possibility.
A little bit about my upbringing in my career. So, my parents were not artists. They were not wealthy arts patrons, but they believed that my brother and I should have artful lives. They believed in cultivating our curiosity and creativity, and they also resorted to the arts, and especially the work of artists from their respective communities to make sure that as children of a black man who endured Jim Crowe segregation and a woman who was a Mexican immigrant that we understood their origins, our origins. They wanted us to know that we were connected to people with depth and nuance. Narratives not only of hardship but also triumph and joy. People who were capable of the highest expression of humanity. They also wanted us to be curious about others and able to see commonalities.
Very early on, I was clear that the arts are a critical element of environments where people can thrive. This carried over into my career. While I didn't set out to work in the arts directly, I pursued a career path that was focused on expanding opportunity, redressing historic harm, and the creation of healthy places where all people can thrive. I was not always encouraged to pursue the arts in my career, well-meaning colleagues often said to me, "Why are you doing this arts and culture stuff?" The answer is we can't get to where we want to go or say be who we say we want to be without the arts. In addition to the arts and the creative sector being a very significant economic driver, engaging in the arts makes possible what I think are preconditions necessary for so much of what we say we want to achieve. Engagement in the arts cultivates curiosity, empathy, imagination, the ability to hold nuance, and individual and collective agency. Engagement in the arts is critical to our health and well-being. It is also critical to helping us get unstuck. I could go on and on.
The second area I talked about was the work of the agency. As a council member, I know close up that the work that the endowment does is also the work of a collaborator, a connector, and a catalyst while it's known primarily as a grant maker. In fact, it is and has potential to be a critical partner in helping to build arts ecosystems. It is an entity that's understood best when we see it as a national resource.
Last, the time. Some of the characteristics of this time I've already alluded to, but what I want to underscore in addition to the formidable challenges that are before us is this idea of a culture of possibility. Specific programmatic priorities are appropriately still in planning stages. What I can share with you today is directional. There's some guiding premises that have informed my work over the course of my career, and these, along with other inputs, will inform specific programmatic priorities as well. One idea is that creativity is a natural impulse and community asset from which to build, and that communities are not blank slates. Some of the most valuable assets that exist in communities are actually people's imagination and their creative impulse. This is core, foundational, critical to who we say we want to be. While the Arts Endowment certainly plays an important role in bringing art from other places to many communities around the country, some of our most important work is also in lifting up and strengthening cultural assets that are already in communities, helping to cultivate and advance creativity and imagination in place.
A second idea is that cultural self-determination is a crucial dimension of equity. That is the ability to make sense of the world on one's own terms, to tell one's own story, to dream, imagine, assert aesthetically. This is foundational to our American ethos, and access to the resources and opportunities for arts engagement is a crucial dimension of an equitable community.
Third, cultural participation takes many forms and happens in a wide range of venues. We often think about cultural participation as audience participation happening in formal, cultural venues of many different sizes, and this is certainly a critically important facet of how we should think about arts engagement, but there's so many other ways that we also engage in making, doing, teaching, supporting, and the arts and culture in our world is present in so many other contexts. So the ability to see clearly the range of possibilities before us as we build places that have culture vitality and lift up the arts creates enormous opportunity, and it also helps us to see how our cultural lives have been formed to date.
A fourth idea is that art process can be as important or even more important than art product. This is true in many examples of the work at the National Endowment for the Arts whether it is work around arts therapy or art in public health or work in arts in education, sometimes focused on trauma-informed learning environments, work from the Our Town program, thats focused on community engagement and creating healthier communities. All of this relies on a creative process and recognizing the importance of being engaged in that creativity process, not only for the purposes of developing an art product at the end, but for the benefits that creativity has to offer in so many different manifestations.
A fifth idea is that artists and designers have many kinds of relationships with publics and roles within communities, so, certainly, our traditional understanding of artists as the makers of work that is to be presented or consumed by audiences is important. We also have to think about teaching artists, artists as problem solvers and thought partners. People who are able to get us, as I said before, unstuck. People who are able to help us see and achieve the kinds of societal goals that we say we want to achieve. Artists have a complicated set of relationships with communities that we don't fully explore or understand yet. We default to a very specific way of thinking about how they contribute to society, when, in fact, there's so many other ways of understanding the contributions.
In a related sixth idea, is that art, culture, and creativity are intrinsically important, period. Full stop. And at the same time, arts and cultural activity can contribute to other community issues and dynamics, and we see this in the economic impacts that we're able to report in our partnership with the Bureau of Economic analysis. We see how it contributes to social fabric and social discourse in programs like the NEA Big Read or to youth development through Poetry Out Loud and some of our arts education investments. There are many examples of individual and collective healing that are anchored in arts practices, and, again, some of the work in the Our Town program which focuses on a wide range of issues where the artists and art organizations are key partners.
As you can tell, I'm not starting from scratch. There's much to build from at the NEA. I believe that the endowment is not only a grant maker, again, but also a convener, a collaborator, a thought partner, a catalyst, and amplifier. It is a national resource and key partner in building healthy arts and cultural ecosystems. These ecosystems make it possible for all Americans to have artful lives, and these ecosystems also make it possible for the infusion of arts and culture into our civic infrastructure. What I think of is the policy and programmatic relationships that we rely on to care for each other, to create opportunity-rich environments that allow us to reach our full potential. This requires an expansive notion of ecosystem that includes arts and culture at the intersection of other non-art sectors such as health, climate, justice, and community development.
More specific programmatic priorities will be aligned with the Arts Endowment new Strategic Plan, and it is work related to the racial equity executive order that President Biden signed on his first day in office obligating every department and agency in the Federal Government to examine its practices and develop a plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion. I'm eager to share more with you as specific programmatic priorities come into sharper relief.
In closing, I invite you to consider critically important questions with me. One is, what do healthy arts and cultural ecosystems that make possible artful lives for all people and the infusion of art to our specific infrastructure, what do they require? And as we reflect on what we have learned and are learning, what beliefs and ways of working do we keep, alter, or shed? How do we not snap back to business as usual when we know we can do better?
I'm so excited to be on this journey with you. Mindful of the challenges ahead, I'm also deeply inspired by what is possible. Thank you for taking time to be with me today.