Shouts from a Third Act

Art = Life: connecting the dots, story by story

Monthly Archives: March 2017

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The National Endowment for the Arts: Why it Matters

Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C.

There’s a picture book that’s been around for a long time. The Little Engine that Could is a story about hope and determination, two character traits essential to any aspiring artist. It retails for about $5. The U.S. Government has been around even longer, and it costs a mind-boggling $3.899 trillion to keep the wheels turning. The National Endowment for the Arts is like the little engine that could. It does a whole lot with very little–$148 million last year. That’s just 0.01 percent of the entire federal budget. Imagine a network of railroad tracks criss-crossing the country. The NEA would be the equivalent of a single piece of railroad track. You couldn’t see it from the air, but its existence is essential to the trains passing over it.

If  Congress approves President Trump’s proposed budget, the NEA will be yanked from the tracks. Trump isn’t the first president–or politician–who’s tried to do this. The reason others have failed can be tied to the agency’s success stories, both big and small. They began the same year President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the NEA into existence:

  • In 1965, the American Ballet Theatre, founded in 1939, was about to go under. The brand new NEA made its first grant–a check for $100,000–and the doors stayed opened and the dancers kept dancing. The ABT is based in New York City in the prestigious Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, but it tours nationally every year: 450,000 people get to  see its performances.
  • In 1976, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion got a jump start from the NEA. This nationally syndicated radio variety show is still enchanting listeners and even inspired a movie starring Meryl Streep.
  • Over the years, the NEA has given grants to promising novelists who went on to win major awards for later novels. In 1970, Alice Walker received a grant to help fund work on her first novel. Ten years later she wrote The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a Spielberg movie starring Oprah Winfrey. In 1993, after Jeffrey Eugenides wrote his acclaimed debut novel The Virgin Suicides, he received a fellowship that helped fund work on his next novel. Middlesex took him nine years to write/research, and it won the Pulitzer in 2003. Michael Cunningham completed his first novel in 1990 with help from the NEA. Eight years later he wrote The Hours, which won a Pulitzer and was turned into an Academy Award-winning movie.
  • In 1980, the group that organized the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fund was in need of a monument designer. The group turned to the NEA, which funded a national competition to find one. The iconic black wall was completed by Maya Lin in 1982 and is one of the most popular memorials in Washington, D.C.
  • In 1981, Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute was born with support from the NEA. What began as a small workshop for filmmakers and artists evolved into Sundance, the biggest regional film festival in America. It’s launched careers (Quentin Tarantino) and Academy-Award nominated movies like Manchester-by-the-Sea. While the film lost out for Best Picture this year, Casey Affleck took home Best Actor.
  • Before the mega-successful Hamilton made it to Off-Broadway and then Broadway in 2015, The Hamilton Mixtape, as it was first called, was looking for an audience–and some feedback. In 2013, it was selected by a N.Y. theater workshop, the Powerhouse Theater Season, which was partly funded that year by a grant from the NEA.

While there are other big success stories tied to the NEA, its main purpose is something different–and extraordinary. It provides funding to communities in all 50 states and 5 U.S. jurisdictions. It does what nobody else in the U.S. does, in either the public or private sector. Big cities like New York, Chicago and L.A., to name just a few, have wealthy residents who help fund the major art institutions they patronize with big checks. In rural areas or poverty-stricken inner cities, that’s not often the case. The NEA helps keep the arts alive in these underserved areas. And why is that important?

Here’s a different kind of story. The Laramie Project is a play created by a small theatre company in NYC that has received NEA support. In 1998, five weeks after the murder of gay university student Matthew Shepard, members of the Tectonic Theater Company travelled to Laramie, Wyoming, and began interviewing people about their reactions to the murder: Matthew was kidnapped and severely beaten, his battered body tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie and left to die. First performed in 2000, The Laramie Project has become one of the most frequently performed plays in the U.S.

“The Laramie Project is a breathtaking collage that explores the depth to which humanity can sink and the heights of compassion of which we are capable.”  The Associated Press

In 2002, The Laramie Project was made into a film that opened the Sundance Film Festival. A follow-up play, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, was performed on the same night in 2009 that the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed into law. Amazingly, it was performed in all 50 states and in D.C. on that same night. At the time, Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, was grateful the law had finally passed but told the Tectonic’s artistic director/playwright, “Actually, The Laramie Project did more to stop anti-gay violence than a law ever will be able to.”

If, as the saying goes, “there’s a thin line between love and hate,” it’s also true that monsters exist within us all. Art humanizes. Sometimes it allows us to step into someone else’s shoes and see what the world looks like from there. Sometimes it’s so breathtakingly beautiful that it lifts our spirits. Sometimes it’s so profound that it unlocks mysteries inside ourselves. Do we really want to cut this particular $148 million out of a $3.899 trillion budget and risk de-humanizing our society even more? Over two hundred years ago, the second President of the United States said this:

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” John Adams

As a civilization, we’re supposed to be advancing. It’s true we’re at war with terrorism, but if we cut the NEA, we risk further divisiveness in our polarized nation. But that’s not the only reason our government shouldn’t axe the NEA. It makes no sense financially. Think of the millions of dollars Hamilton has brought to the New York economy (the President’s hometown). The Broadway musical has now begun a national tour which will bring big money to other cities. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s parents were born in Puerto Rico and emigrated to the U.S. What if they’d moved to Alaska instead of New York–would we still have a Hamilton? While it’s impossible to say, the existence of the National Endowment for the Arts makes that a possibility.

Just because no U.S. President in the NEA’s 50-year history has been unable to get rid of it, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen this time. Stranger things have taken place. If what I’ve said has resonated with you at all, please don’t remain silent.

 

 

 

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A Hidden Figure in the Fashion World

Jackie Kennedy’s wedding gown made history when she married the young senator from Massachusetts. It became the most photographed wedding dress in America. The year was 1953–eight years before they’d move into the White House–but the press went gaga over the handsome couple (both from American royalty) and Jackie’s stunning gown, which more than suited the “high society” nuptials in Newport, R.I. Now here’s the real surprise. Jackie’s iconic wedding gown was designed by a black woman named Ann Lowe, a society couturier. Last week, on the last day of Black History Month, I tripped over that fact in a Dallas Morning News article about the Smithsonian’s newest museum. Flabbergasted, I set out to learn more.

When Ann Lowe was hired to make Jackie’s wedding gown (and her bridesmaids’ and her mother’s), the Alabama native, age 55, was working in New York City and already well established in her profession. The actress Olivia de Havilland wore one of Ann’s creations in 1947 when she accepted her Oscar for Best Actress, although the name on the dress label said Sonia Rosenberg–Ann’s boss at the time. Like the math wiz Katherine Johnson in the film Hidden Figures, only a tiny segment of the population knew about Ann Lowe’s talent. She dressed the society set, women with last names like Rockefeller, du Pont and Roosevelt. Marjorie Merriweather Post, one of the richest women in the world and the original owner of Mar-a-Lago (President Trump’s weekend White House), was another enthusiastic customer. Yet Ann died almost broke and in relative obscurity at age 82.

Ann was born in 1898 in the deep South, so it’s a given that she endured prejudice. While that’s part of her story, the more extraordinary part is her drive and determination, her talent, and the obstacles she overcame. She was the great-granddaughter of a slave and a white plantation owner. After the Civil War, her grandmother and mother started a dress designing business, but her mother died suddenly when Ann was 16, and Ann took over. The First Lady of Alabama–the governor’s wife–had placed an order for four dresses, and Ann delivered. A few years later, she was a respected designer in Florida, having been enticed by the wife of a Tampa business tycoon to move there and make custom dresses for her and her daughters. Ann jumped on a train with her baby son, but left her new husband behind. “It was a chance to make all the lovely gowns I’d always dreamed of,” she told The Saturday Evening Post in 1964. She’d later marry again and divorce–both husbands disapproved of her ambition.

Design school in New York City was another dream of Ann’s, and she made it happen with the blessing of her Tampa benefactor. She was only nineteen. When she got there, however, she was assigned to a separate classroom because the white students didn’t want to sit with her. She graduated early and returned to a successful business in Tampa, where she dressed the city’s wealthiest women. Ten years later she took her savings and moved to New York for good. She worked as an in-house dress designer for Saks Fifth Avenue and specialty shops like Hattie Carnegie. Word of her talent quickly spread. Famous designers like Christian Dior were equally impressed with her design skills. Ann opened her own shop, but disaster struck.

Ten days before the Kennedy wedding, a water pipe burst and destroyed 10 gowns–Jackie’s and the bridesmaids. It had taken two months to make Jackie’s gown, but Ann regrouped, re-ordered the fabrics and worked around the clock with her small staff. She delivered the dresses on-time and in person to Hammersmith Farm in Rhode Island. On her arrival, the security staff directed her to the back entrance, but she refused and made it through the front door. At the time of the wedding, the only press mention of Ann’s role was by the fashion editor of The Washington Post, who wrote, “The dress was designed by a Negro, Ann Lowe.” She didn’t even profit from the job–due to the burst pipe, she incurred a loss of over two thousand dollars. A decade later Ann owed her suppliers $10,000. Her friends in the business helped cover her debts, but the IRS shut her down for non-payment of back taxes totaling $12,800. An anonymous donor paid her tax bill. Ann later said, in interviews with The Saturday Evening Post and Ebony magazine, that she believed it was Jackie, with whom she had remained close.

“I wanted to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer,” she said in 1965, during an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. Towards that end, she set out to work for the best families. “I’ve been as careful about the people I work for as any social climber,” she told The Saturday Evening Post the year before. “I don’t do many dresses, so I have to be selective.”

Throughout her New York career, Ann lived in a modest Harlem apartment and focused on her work. All the dresses she made were one-of-a-kind. She earned a “Couturier of the Year” plaque in 1961. “I feel so happy when I am making clothes,” she said in an Oakland Tribune interview in 1966. “I could just jump and down with joy.” Managing her business finances was never her strong suit. She relied on her son Arthur for that, but he died in 1958 in a car accident. As her business began to hemorrhage money, she lost one eye to glaucoma and almost lost the other one, too. “I’ve had to work by feel,” she said in 1964 to the Saturday Evening Post. “But people tell me I’ve done better feeling than others do seeing.” In 1968, she opened her final shop, Ann Lowe Originals on a tony patch of Madison Avenue, but it closed before too long and Ann retired with very little money.

Jackie’s wedding gown is part of the permanent collection of the JFK Presidential Library & Museum in Boston, but it hasn’t been displayed since 2003. The weight of the fabric makes it at risk of tearing. The Marshall Fields Department Store in Chicago commissioned a paper replica of the dress to donate to the museum, where it was displayed in 2013–the 60th anniversary of the wedding. The museum has said that exhibits of Jackie’s dress always draw the largest crowds. When Ann died in 1981, The New York Times ran an obituary on her. “Seventeen years ago, at the height of her career, she was said to be almost penniless.” And yet, the newspaper noted, five of her designs were in the costume institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now Ann is getting some long overdue, big-time exposure. The National Museum of African American History & Culture opened last fall and includes a special exhibit on Ann Lowe. She’s no longer “society’s best kept secret,” the words used to describe Ann during the height of her career. There’s even a children’s picture book, Fancy Party Gowns by award-winning journalist Deborah Blumenthal, that was published in January.

If you watched the Academy Awards ceremony last month, you saw the real Katherine Johnson honored on stage for her work with the NASA space program. She’s 98 now, but still looks pretty great–and happy. I’m sure Ann would be pretty happy that her spot in the new museum proves she was “a major dress designer.”  Her life story and her work should inspire young talent of all races for years to come. Too bad Ann isn’t alive to see it.