Robert Gard Lecture Series

Second Annual Robert Gard Lecture
June 17, 2000

by Mary Regan, Executive Director
The North Carolina Arts Council
Raleigh, NC
Arts Extension Service, University of Massachusetts
Northampton, Massachusetts

Thank you, Craig, and a very special thanks to all those at Arts Extension Service who brought me here to talk with you today. Craig Dreeszen and Barbara Shaffer Bacon have come to North Carolina on many different occasions to help us at various points in our work and they've always left us in much better shape than they found us. And we are very grateful.

I am deeply honored to receive the Robert Gard award. Though I never had the chance to know Mr.Gard, I have known and admired his daughter, Maryo Ewell, since the seventies. She is a national leader in this great community arts movement and I'm always awed and refreshed by her strength and the fresh insight she brings to her work.

About the time Mr. Gard was doing his Grassroots Theater work in New York and Canada and Wisconsin, back in Chapel Hill a professor named Frederick Koch was on a similar mission, encouraging his students to write stories drawn from their own life experiences. Two of his students were Thomas Wolfe and Paul Green and so, much of the great wealth of literature they left us and the Outdoor Drama movement we still enjoy today was influenced by and grew out of this Folk Theater movement that Mr. Gard and Professor Koch shared.

Craig said I could talk to you about whatever I wanted. He did tell me to take the long view — to look back and see what — in my experience — had really made the difference over the years. And, though I resisted the impulse time and time again, I kept coming back to the one thing I felt I had to talk with you about, although it is an idea in great disrepair these days. It is neither popular nor terribly interesting to discuss, but I am driven to bring it up.

It is, what I believe to be, the enormous role government has played in shaping the arts communities across America today. Arriving at this opinion is something of a natural evolution for me. I was raised in a time when people complained about what was happening in Washington, but they weren't really bitter about it, and they actually thought our state government was doing pretty good. To them "good government" was not an oxymoron and, in fact, was quite achievable by ordinary people wherever they might live.

At different times, my father was a state legislator and a district attorney, both positions elected by the people. My mother was the first woman to serve on the school board in my little home town of 2,500 people and she was a community activist in the causes women confronted in that place and time. I went off to college and studied U.S. History and political science and journalism. I was set on a course that should somehow take me into the public service arena.

Then I lapsed. It was the sixties and I found myself spending the good happy years of my twenties wandering around free-spirit-style, anti-establishment, trying out all kinds of places and jobs. But, I'm glad that Thomas Wolfe was not universally correct when he said "You Can't Go Home Again" for on my third pull back into North Carolina, I stayed.

We have a really wonderful state. I'm sure yours is, too. In fact, I know something about many of your states, and the more I know, the more moved I am by the richness of the places that make America. And the common history we share. It looks different and feels different here in New England and in the Rockies and down in steamy New Orleans. But, all across America in the towns and cities we have created, people — ordinary people — have come together to make their communities good places to live. They've solved many of the same problems, created many of the same kinds of institutions, and worked through difficult community-threatening situations by reaching back to many of the same moral codes and shared values.

It is said that "democracy is sweeping the world" today. And, yet, you look with both admiration and fear at Russia and other countries like her and you see the turmoil and horrible sacrifices and the frantic uncertainty the people are facing and you wonder how they can possibly get through it without our safety net that is made of all the habits we fall back on naturally from nearly 400 years of muddling through and working things out.

Do you know Stephen Crane's poem about the little man and the mountains?

Once I saw mountains angry,
And ranged in battle-front.
Against them stood a little man;
Ay, he was no bigger than my finger.
I laughed, and spoke to one near me,
"Will he prevail?"
"Surely," replied this other;
"His grandfathers beat them many times."
Then did I see much virtue in grandfathers —
At least, for the little man
Who stood against the mountains.

("Once I Saw Mountains Angry")

And so I am ingrained with an understanding of grandfathers and I have a deep respect for what we have learned to do here in this country — for the place of good government in our lives.

I came to the North Carolina Arts Council at the end of 1972. Back then, government support for the arts was a new and daring idea and we were accustomed to justifying every move we made by elaborate arguments and thorough defenses.

The National Endowment for the Arts had just been formed in 1965. The North Carolina Arts Council had been created by executive order in ‘64 and began operation in ‘67. And, at that time, only six of our 100 counties had spent tax dollars on the arts.

And so, we took nothing for granted. We expected nothing to be easy. We weren't "entitled." We had not made it to the table. Yet.

What we believed was that the arts could play a powerful role in making our towns and our state a better place to live. That the arts were a part of the public good. That government had an obligation to its citizens to make their lives richer and fuller.

Last year in North Carolina, three-fourths of our counties gave tax money to their local arts councils and commissions. Our state grants reached all 100 counties. And funds from the Arts Endowment went into more than one-fourth of our counties, a remarkable record for a federal agency that many consider distant and inaccessible.

And so today we have an amazing public-private partnership resting solidly on a three-layer government infrastructure. Each level of government plays a slightly different role and each role is significant.

But, more importantly, it is the mere fact of government's involvement in the arts at all that has given this nation's arts programs their breadth and their vitality. For to justify the expenditure of tax dollars, government arts agencies required their grantees to reach out broadly into their communities — and daily life in this country was forever changed.

Government funds have subsidized ticket prices so that ordinary people — taxpayers — could afford them and so that expanding audiences would justify continued and increasing government support. And to reach new audiences not accustomed to coming into concert halls and museums, the venue for the arts expanded to city streets, ball parks, community colleges and nursing homes.

Government funds were directed into rural areas whose populations could not sustain arts programs with private funding alone. And excellence in the arts was extended to include the best of the folk arts, jazz, gospel music and crafts along with the best of theater, dance, symphonic music, painting, sculpture and literature.

Government influence has been enormous. But, its influence is a two-edged sword. Back a few years when the Arts Endowment was under heavy attack by Congress and we were undergoing a parallel onslaught in North Carolina, I thought wistfully of those days back in the seventies when we sat around with local arts council directors and talked about "getting to the table." If we could only get to the table, they said....If we could sit there with the parks people and the libraries and the public works and be a government concern.

Well, here we were. And a funny thing had happened on the way to the arts getting democratized. We had made every taxpayer into an arts patron. We had so expanded decision-making in the arts that now everybody had the right and everybody had an avenue to begin telling us how to do our jobs.

In the old days, a museum director may have had to listen to a wealthy patron or two about what art should hang on the museum walls. Now, ordinary citizens were saying that they liked this painting, but they didn't like that one over there and they were taxpayers and we should take it down.

We had arrived — big time! We were at the table — front and center! And it wasn't at all what we had dreamed it would be — sitting there back in the seventies, plotting how to get noticed by the powers-that-be, how to matter to the world.

Which is one of the reasons why government arts agencies absolutely must not try to go their way alone. Instead, they must think and move and work in a true and healthy partnership with the private non-profit arts world. And this brings me to the main reason I was invited here to talk to you today.

In North Carolina for most of the State Arts Council's history, we have enjoyed a lively and productive and sometimes cantankerous partnership with a hardy network of local arts agencies. I'm not sure why we threw our lot in with them instead of taking off in some other direction. There are several possibilities.

Historically, we were a state of small farmers with strong populist leanings. We didn't have the large wealthy plantations that characterized our neighbors to the north and south. Most immigrants to our part of the South came in through the deep harbors at Charleston in South Carolina and the James River in Virginia. If ships missed those harbors they ended up sunk along our coast in the Graveyard of the Atlantic where treacherous shifting sandbars create our extraordinary beaches.

The story is told that the people came first to South Carolina and Virginia and the ones who couldn't make it there spilled over into North Carolina — to which one of our early governors responded that, indeed, we are the "Valley of Humility" between "Two Mountains of Conceit."

So, all these "spill-overs" spread from one end of our state to the other, eventually settling into small and medium-sized towns. We are a very large state in population — the 10th largest — and yet over the years we've had no large population centers to which the people looked for their cultural activities.

Our people lived in the kind of towns where things were still manageable, where the people thought they could make a difference, where they wanted to do things for themselves. In towns like these, there is a strong sense of place, a pride in who they are and what they have. They might not mind driving a couple of hours to see some very special performance, but beyond that, they wanted the arts to happen here, in their towns. All this makes for fertile territory in which local arts councils can develop.

And surely the early leadership of the North Carolina Arts Council was a critical factor. Philip Hanes, who chaired the study commission that led to the creation of our State Arts Council, had been one of the founders of the Winston-Salem Arts Council 15 years earlier. And the first chairman of the State Council itself was Sam Ragan, a poet from a very rural county who had become a newspaper editor in Raleigh, but whose heart was still out there in all those rural places like the one in which he was raised.

And the early help and influence of the National Endowment for the Arts was crucial. In fact, most of the earliest steps we took in developing a community arts program came with guidance and financial assistance from the Arts Endowment.

For example, in 1974, an NEA grant allowed us to begin a position which would focus full-time on local arts council development. We hired Jack LeSueur who ever since has been our point person on community issues — our man in the trenches.

Our partnership with local arts agencies actually has four corners and a central pillar:

First corner — from the beginning we had a salary assistance program which somewhat systematically attempted to establish paid staff positions at every local arts council which felt it could sustain a staff over time. Today, 67 of our 104 arts councils are professionally staffed.

Second corner — these arts council directors organized the NC Association of Arts Councils in 1974 as both a self-help organization for its members and an advocate and watchdog for special local issues — sometimes a watchdog on us. We have had an on-going relationship with it ever since — sometimes happy, sometimes contentious — but always very useful.

Third corner — it became clear that if arts councils were going to become important players in the public mind, they had to be aligned somewhat with local government and alignment in our case meant money. So, also in '74 with a $25,000 NEA grant we launched our Local Government Challenge Grants Program. At that time only 16 city and county governments were contributing to their local arts councils. We offered to match any new money a local government would give to the arts.

It was magic — overwhelming magic. The first year the number jumped from 16 to 50 and the next year to 96. We scrambled like mad to reshuffle our budget so we wouldn't have to turn down any requests, fearing that a rejection at this point might reflect negatively on the community arts council in the eyes of its local government.

And before we got to the fourth corner — or even knew it was missing — we began laying the foundation for the central pillar — the program that would become the core of our partnership with local arts agencies. The Grassroots Arts Program which got underway in 1977 is a legislated partnership that distributes one-third of our grants money on a per capita basis into every county in our state through local arts councils. The Grassroots Program was an early decentralization program with the distinction that the decision-making was decentralized as well as the funding.

At the time we began, this move was considered adventurous at best and risky at worst. But, it thrust our partnership with local arts councils into a much more sophisticated arena in which all of us became more responsible and responsive to our communities, more skillful in our management, and more ambitious in our reach and our programming.

Though we have had some challenging and complicated times, all the bad things that could have happened, didn't, and I cannot imagine how we would function today without such a program.

So, we had three corners and a central pillar — but something was missing. It was a concrete connection to individual artists and the fourth corner became the Regional Artists Projects Program. It sealed a big gap in the programming of local arts councils and filled our need to reach artists at all stages of their development — not just those who had achieved such a standard of accomplishment that they would be competitive in our statewide fellowship program.

Through the Regional Artists Program, local arts councils give small amounts of money to artists in their communities for purposes that will further their careers. Even artists who have gotten fellowships directly from us in much larger amounts, say that there is no way to put a monetary value on the meaningfulness of being recognized there at home where they live and work and where they previously felt unnoticed and undervalued.

So, looking back, though we have tried other things, these five programs seem to me to have helped most to create a full partnership in which local arts agencies' ambitions and our need to reach across a very large state seemed to merge and move forward together.

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Today and many times since I came to the Arts Council in 1972, I marvel at how lucky I was to be hired. I wouldn't get in the door now with the credentials I had then. Several years after I started work, I found out that I had been a compromise candidate — that the two people making the decision each wanted a different person, which put me at least third down the list. Anyway, I got the job.

I was to be a Community Associate and travel out into the state helping local arts councils and other community organizations. I knew a lot about North Carolina but I didn't have a clue what an arts council was. The director then, Edgar Marston, sent me to the nearby Durham Arts Council where a wonderful visionary arts administrator, Jim McIntyre, gave me a three-day crash course that launched me into the midst of this dynamic and challenging world.

When I returned to my office, I met Robert Gard. He was actually a book on the shelf called, "The Arts in the Small Community — A National Plan." It had been developed by the Wisconsin Idea Theatre which he directed and it was financed by the National Endowment for the Arts. It would become my anchor. I ordered several copies and wherever I went out in the state I showed it to the small groups of people who had gathered to consider forming an arts council and I talked from it and I always left a copy behind.

And, so, I'm a little awed to be given this honor in Robert Gard's name almost 29 years after he grounded me in this field and set me on a course that has been so challenging and so rich and so rewarding.

I'd like to close with some words from Mr. Gard's book:

"Certainly not all that passes under the name of art is the real thing.

"Cheapness and fake values are everywhere and in every activity. The community arts council is not an automatic road to excellence either through the work of amateurs or the products of professionals.

"But excellence, while more rare than pretense, is as equally distributed. Talent is ubiquitous.

"In the small community, it may sometimes be found unspoiled.

"No one can prove that it will not be discovered next door...next moment....

"Nor can anyone say that the next important art event may not be an historic moment in artistic expression."

And then he said:

"There is a vast and noticeable difference between letting a thousand flowers bloom and permitting everything to come up in weeds.

"But if arts councils encourage and foster genuineness among artists and honor authenticity of product among professionals, they will set standards and refurbish the instinct for what is real.

"Further, if they branch out through alliance with other community arts councils to form regional councils and with state arts councils, they can contribute to a germanely American culture.

"Arts councils in small communities all over the nation are doing this. A group of interested individuals working in your community can do the same.

"Why not try?" he said.

And that is what we have done.