Academic literature on the topic 'National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)'

What are the stakes in saving the NEA, today? Departing from the recent legislative back-and-forth between President Donald Trump and Congress over the budgetary future of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), this performance analysis of the NEA’s 31 March 2017 meeting of the National Council on the Arts reveals the complex political posturing that undergirds federal support for the arts in US culture.

The United States off ers a decade-long illustration of the implementation of a major policy initiative for art and culture across the nation's cities and towns. In this article, we focus on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and its companion ArtPlace and Our Town initiative around place-making, as they have developed since 2009. We describe the challenges that almost eliminated the NEA in the 1990s, the subsequent advocacy shift towards the economic impact of the arts, and the emergence of the Our Town initiative in 2011. We analyse the policy initiatives, their rationales and implementation. We conclude with lessons and ways to improve practice in relation to the roles of artists and arts organizations covering issues of displacement, gentrification and racism (often unanticipated challenges for communities and funders); the impact of the arts in economic terms; and evaluative challenges for funders and place-makers, especially given cultural diversity and 'place-keeping' priorities.

The controversy in the United States surrounding the funding of ‘offensive‐ and ‘pornographic‐ works by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has centered on whether or not the organization should espouse a morally conservative outlook in regard to the public funding of artistic works. However, the NEA arguably already pursues conservative policies rooted in its vision of the form, function, and outlook of the arts it exists to serve. The appointment of the actress Jane Alexander as chair of the NEA may have indicated that the organization would become more liberal in its moral stance, but the question remains: can government-supported art be anything but conservative? The following is a case study of one theatre's relationship to the NEA in the context of the Washington, DC, theatre community. The author, Mary C. Resing, is a former business manager of New Playwrights' Theatre in Washington, DC, and a former grant writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently working on her dissertation on the actress-manager Vera Kommissarzhevskaia.

A 2013 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report, How a Nation Engages with Art, illustrates that voluntary “literary” reading rates of adults have fallen1 compared to an applauded rise in 2008.2Prior to these two reports, other NEA research showed a serious decline in both literary and book reading by adults of all ages, races, incomes, and education levels.3 Other survey data measuring what youth do in their leisure time indicated that young men and women read fewer than twelve minutes per day.4 These reports show that boys’ frequency of reading lags behind that of girls and that boys are reading neither the number of books nor the range of genres they should read as they progress through the elementary grades.

In 1989, Robert Mapplethorpe's photographic exhibit The Perfect Moment toured the country with the support of a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibit, which included several sado-masochistic and homo-erotic photographs, drew the ire of the Reverend Donald Wildmon, who turned to Senator Jesse Helms (R- NC). In the summer of 1989, Congress debated policy toward the funding practices of the NEA, sparking a major controversy in Congress and in the arts community. This study examines media coverage of the controversy and the reaction of the public in terms of museum attendance and the value of Mapplethorpe's art.

With Brittney Silva’s tragic May 2014 death fresh in everyone’s memory, the city of San Leandro began collaboration efforts between them and University of California, Berkeley to do something to make the city safer for pedestrians. A course was developed at UC Berkeley called Sensing Cityscapes, offered Fall 2015, aiming to collect data about human activities too often ignored. As part of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative, the class aimed to harness methods not just from city planning, engineering, and architecture, but from the humanistic disciplines, cognitive science, art, public health, and performance studies, bringing students together from each field. We now are bringing the installation back to the streets of San Leandro with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant for a project called San Leandro Lights. Transferring the project from the lab back to the street, we hope that the positive effect for individuals we observed in the lab will remain, and that responsive lighting will create a dynamic culture of attention.

A Review of:
 Joint, Nicholas. “Is Digitisation the New Circulation?: Borrowing Trends, Digitisation and the nature of reading in US and UK Libraries.” Library Review 57.2 (2008): 87-95.
 
 Objective – To discern the statistical accuracy of reports that print circulation is in decline in libraries, particularly higher education libraries in the United States (U.S.) and United Kingdom (U.K.), and to determine if circulation patterns reflect a changing dynamic in patron reading habits.
 
 Design – Comparative statistical analysis. 
 
 Setting – Library circulation statistics from as early as 1982 to as recent as 2006, culled from various sources with specific references to statistics gathered by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
 
 Subjects – Higher education institutions in the United States and United Kingdom, along with public libraries to a lesser extent.
 
 Methods – This study consists of an analysis of print circulation statistics in public and higher education libraries in the U.S. and U.K., combined with data on multimedia circulation in public libraries and instances of digital access in university libraries. Specifically, NEA statistics provided data on print readership levels in the U.S. from 1982 to 2002; LISU statistics were analyzed for circulation figures and gate counts in U.K. public libraries; ARL statistics from 1996 to 2006 provided circulation data for large North American research libraries; NCES statistics from 1990 to 2004 contributed data on circulation in “tertiary level” U.S. higher education libraries; and ACRL statistics were analyzed for more circulation numbers for U.S. post-secondary education libraries. The study further includes data on U.K. trends in print readership and circulation in U.K. higher education libraries, and trends in U.S. public library circulation of non-print materials. 
 
 Main Results – Analysis of the data indicates that print circulation is down in U.S. and U.K. public libraries and in ARL-member libraries, while it is up in the non-ARL higher education libraries represented and in UK higher education libraries. However, audio book circulation in U.S. public libraries supplements print circulation to the point where overall circulation of book materials is increasing, and the access of digital literature supplements print circulation in ARL-member libraries (although the statistics are difficult to measure and meld with print circulation statistics). Essentially, the circulation of book material is increasing in most institutions when all formats are considered. According to the author, library patrons are reading more than ever; the materials patrons are accessing are traditional in content regardless of the means by which the materials are accessed.
 
 Conclusion – The author contends that print circulation is in decline only where digitization efforts are extensive, such as in ARL-member libraries; when digital content is factored into the equation the access of book-type materials is up in most libraries. The author speculates that whether library patrons use print or digital materials, the content of those materials is largely traditional in nature, thereby resulting in the act of “literary” reading remaining a focal point of library usage. Modes of reading and learning have not changed, at least insofar as these things may be inferred from studying circulation statistics. The author asserts that digital access is favourable to patrons and that libraries should attempt to follow the ARL model of engaging in large-scale digitization projects in order to provide better service to their patrons; the author goes on to argue that U.K. institutions with comparable funding to ARLs will have greater success in this endeavour if U.K. copyright laws are relaxed.