Arts Advocacy Day 2010 Report
On April 12-13, 2010, I attended Arts Advocacy Day, organized by American for the Arts, for the second time. Similar to my experience from my first attendance in 2009, I found it exhilarating and empowering. Joining me this year were NAMAC Board President David Dombrosky and Board member Nathan James. Also joining the California delegation (you attend meetings with officials whose districts you reside in or your organization resides in) was NAMAC member Michael Lumpkin from the International Documentary Association.
On Monday, we all attended the Arts Advocacy Summit, the primer for us all to understand the nature of the legislative requests for the current year. Among them were the standards – increased funding support for the NEA/NEH, Arts Education and Museum and Library services, improvement of the visa process for visiting artists, and artists tax deductions for charitable giving. Returning this year was a request to create an Artist Corp as part of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) seeking to extend this valuable service into community-based arts organizations. Net Neutrality, an issue close to NAMAC’s heart, catapulted from an “Issues of Concern” status to front-burner status as a result of the US Court of Appeals ruling in favor of Comcast’s ability to regulate speeds and content over its cable network.
After informative presentations by AftA’s staff members about Meeting with Legislators and Arts Policy Training, Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts greeted us and inspired us. Specifically, he discussed his development of “Art Works,” which is also the name of NEA's blog. He went on to describe his definition of these words as 1) the noun referring to the artists creation of a work of art; 2) how art works on audiences; and 3) that arts workers are an important part of our economy. The Chairman’s complete testimony given before the House’s Appropriation Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies is available here. Perhaps most inspiring in Rocco’s remarks to us was his understanding of and need for more cross-agency collaborations for the greater, and more sustainable, livelihood of arts organizations and the communities they serve.
In the afternoon, I presented on Net Neutrality during the breakout policy session on Telecommunications and the Arts. I also did a stand-in presentation for CPB, which like Net Neutrality was an issue of concern for this year’s Advocacy Day. Keeping the net open and accessible to all Americans is a long-standing policy concern for NAMAC. Its emergence as a “hot issue” a week before the AftA summit allowed me to bring the importance of this issue to the broader cultural community, which at this gathering is predominately performing arts organizations. Since this issue did not have an ask attached to it, I suggested that during the legislative visits advocates bring the issue to Congressional members attention, noting that it may be brought back to Congress if the Federal Communications Commission does not wish to reclassify Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as telecommunications services. Currently, the FCC classifies them as information services.
Later in the day I attended AftA’s Arts Advocacy Fund PAC Fundraiser, where I met Kyle MacLachlan who was testifying the next day at the House’s Appropriation Subcommittee. He spoke quite eloquently about his involvement with the arts, and arts funded organizations, going back to helping his mother in her community theater in Washington and continuing through regional theater throughout the country before moving into mainstream films. Such artist trajectories are extremely important when discussing arts funding because they speak to the interconnectedness of the nonprofit and commercial sectors and the nonprofit sectors importance within the entire creative ecology.
Tuesday, my day on the Hill, began with meeting up with my California cohort so that we could, en masse, cheer on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the recipient of this year’s Congressional Arts Leadership Award. The Speaker was personally involved in ensuring that support for the NEA was included in the final version of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed by Congress in 2009. That day we also heard rousing remarks from Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, 
Co-Chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, and civil rights legend Congressman John Lewis. I never thought that I would see the day that I would be sitting in a Caucus Room on Capital Hill being praised by elected officials for the work that we do to advance the arts in America. Yet there we were, more than 500 of us hearing these words.
Sadly, we don’t hear these remarks broadcast over the mainstream media. Something’s wrong with this picture.
My meetings on the Hill that day included Senator Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein’s offices, Speaker Pelosi’s office, and Representatives George Miller and Barbara Lee. In all of our meetings with these officials’ staff members, we learned the sobering news that increasing arts funding this year was unlikely given the deficit and the President’s budget requiring most agencies to reduce spending from 2010 budget levels. The best we can expect, as of this writing, will be funded remaining at the current budget level of $167.5M; the President’s budget request is for $161.3M. Current funding of the NEA amounts to 54 cents per capita.
As a comparison, before the cultural wars of the Nineties, in 1992 NEA funded was 72 cents per capita. All of our non-funding requests, on the other hand, received strong support, especially around Net Neutrality. All of the staff members were aware of the recent ruling. All reported support for keeping the internet open and accessible to all Americans and their willingness to work with us to achieve that goal.
In leaving DC this time, it struck me again the importance of more media arts organizations attending Arts Advocacy Day. We have a number of major issues as a field that we are leading in, Net Neutrality being one, technology another.We are at a moment when the rest of the arts community needs to engage with new technologies that are part of many NAMAC members core-teaching curriculums.The potential for forging lasting and perhaps new economically sustainable models for collaboration across disciplines has never been greater. Yet, within the performing arts sector we remain virtually invisible often seen as a transmission medium rather than an art form. This thinking will continue as long as our numbers at national convenings and advocacy events like these remains miniscule. Let's turn this trend around: join us for Arts Advocacy Day 2011, and experience the power of 500 plus arts advocates walking the halls of Congress.
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Tune in to my conversation on Net Neutrality with Free Press.
