ARTS EDUCATION PROPOSAL DRAWS FIRE OF STATE CHIEFS

Silhouetted against tall glass windows 35 floors above Puget Sound, Joe Prince, director of the Artists-in-Education program of the National Endowment for the Arts, figured he looked “like a moving target.” He also told a luncheon of arts agencies chairmen at the 11th annual National Assembly of State Arts Agencies conference that if it seems he has gained weight since last year, it’s only because he is wearing “a bulletproof vest.”

Obviously, Prince was trying to ease the tension caused by endowment chairman Frank Hodsoll’s unveiling here of draft No. 12 of proposed guidelines for arts education. Hodsoll, who is scheduled to be reappointed by President Reagan today to a second four-year term, wants to make arts education a “basic”--much the way reading and arithmetic are.

Currently the size of a college term paper, the guidelines seek to ensure that in time all high school graduates “possess basic knowledge of, and skills in, the arts. . . . (and) to have a sense of the range of the artistic expression of their and other cultures.”

Hodsoll is talking about achieving this goal through a “serious . . . systematic and . . . sequential” course of study. Funding will eventually be based on state arts agencies’ efforts to achieve that goal.

Although most arts agencies representatives consider that desirable, they are concerned that artist-residency programs in schools, hospitals, prisons and other community centers will inevitably fall by the wayside, losing state, as well as federal, support.

“First of all, it’s (the endowment program) not anti-art, anti-artist and not anti-residency,” Prince began. “These are draft guidelines, a work in progress.” But nothing could dispel Hodsoll’s “bold” new initiative in which “residencies”--artists working for specified periods of time in schools and other community facilities--could “supplement but never substitute for” a disciplined, sequential arts education assuring “literacy” in the arts for high school graduates.

Questions flew at Prince, but Gary Montague, chairman of the Washington State Arts Commission, would later tell the full assembly that they “didn’t get all the answers.” So the arts agencies chairmen, directors and other delegates provided their own response while Prince monitored the proceedings.

By the time the three-day conference adjourned late Saturday afternoon, the state arts representatives had, in effect, thrown down their gauntlet of discontent to the national endowment. Meanwhile, the state agency assembly intends to continue pressuring the national endowment on the issue.

At first the delegates quickly passed the expected, relatively mild resolution on the recommendation of agency artists-in-education coordinators, who had also met here. The resolution encouraged “the recognition of residency activities and other innovative approaches as valid ways of dealing with art in education,” and also urged Hodsoll to extend his timetable on the issue. (In February, Hodsoll, also chairman of the National Council on the Arts, is expected to submit arts-education guidelines to the 25-member body for approval.)

Then Susan Kelly, chairman of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, asked, “Isn’t there anything more we can do? .”

After a heated debate on tactics, with a delegate from Louisiana questioning whether it was wise to “offend” and a delegate from West Virginia worrying that they, like Hodsoll, might be “going too far,” the delegates voted approval of their second resolution:

“That the proposed draft guidelines for Arts in Education do not reflect a true partnership between the federal government and the states and that the draft guidelines are not acceptable.”

The vote of the 50 states and six special jurisdictions was 22-16, with five abstentions--one of them California. Robert Reid, chief deputy director of the California Arts Council, and other staff had already left, except one. Paula Leftwich, a special assistant to the director and whose area of expertise is multicultural organizations and not artists-in-education, felt that abstention was the only course. (Director Marilyn Ryan, who has been ill, did not attend, nor did any of the members of the California Arts Council.)

“We have been through a train wreck,” David Nelson, executive director of the Montana Arts Council, told colleagues after the vote. What was wrecked, Nelson said, was the “process” by which the endowment, presumably in cooperation with state arts agencies, fashioned major arts policies.

Expressing concern over the formulation of other policies, including a new rural arts program, Mary Regan, director of the North Carolina Council on the Arts, noted that it ought to be a simple matter to assure some “flexibility” for artist residencies without completely overhauling the new approach.

Though the conference had officially ended, Sunday’s executive board meeting was packed with people and suitcases. Robin Tryloff, executive director of the Nebraska Arts Council and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies chairman, said that Hodsoll would receive a letter today expressing the assembly’s “level of concern” not only for the “process” but also noting that “as implementers” of national policy, the state arts agencies must be more directly involved.

There appeared to be some indication that the assembly’s tough stance was having some effect. Anthony Turney, who heads the endowment’s state-local partnership program, told the board that he and Prince, who was sitting next to him, “talked this morning on how we might buy some time.” Turney added, however, that it was up to Hodsoll to decide.

“We’re not being pigheaded,” Turney said. “Obviously we have to come to an accommodation.”

Ironically, this was to have been the convention concentrating on aesthetics and beauty--or, as its theme stated, the convention about “The Arts and Livability.”

To a degree, it was. In the area of “public art,” or art commissioned with a percentage from public-construction funds, delegates saw a wall made of cast glass blocks that looked like the glass had been woven in the lobby of a police precinct 10 miles north of downtown. And whoever expected a batch of arts administrators to be standing in the rain outside an electrical substation in a blue-collar neighborhood?

But they did, because this substation had walls brightened by seemingly dancing pastel triangles, and models of pails, shovels and construction hats that were actually bits of sculpture.

Yet public art can also be political, and a connection was made to the matter of arts education. At a luncheon round-table moderated by Hodsoll, Gustave Harrow--a lawyer who represents Richard Serra, the sculptor who is under fire for his massive “Tilted Arc” outside the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan--talked about the freedom of artistic expression, and about the opposition that “in effect is attempting to lynch this work.”

Hodsoll suggested that the democratic process and a majority of citizens expressing a point of view should also count for something. Michael Newman, an architect and chairman of the North Carolina Arts Council, said the work--”that thing”--was simply a “mistake.”

Harrow bristled. “If any mistake was made, it was in the failure to educate the public,” he said. “Not training in art, not training in creativity so that people can relate to other people, that (is what) divides society into classes. That’s an enormous slur to democracy.”

This was also the state arts agency convention where a new organization--the Assn. of American Cultures--flourished. Established “to communicate, educate, promote and network to further the growth, development and visibility of the arts of Asian-Americans, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and others,” the association was born at the arts agency assemblage two years ago in New Orleans.

Noting that the assembly’s theme that year was “cultural pluralism,” Barbara Nicholson, chairman of the association and deputy director of the (Washington) D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, said there was “dissatisfaction” with the treatment of the issue. “So on the banks of the Mississippi, 12 of us toasted our new organization,” she said.

Playwright Luis Valdez, who keynoted the association’s “Open Dialogue II” last May in San Antonio, was heard here too--albeit a frame removed, on videotape. Poetically, lyrically, Valdez spoke of the new “American” culture expressed in the individuality and blending of its diverse peoples. He defined himself, among other ways, as “a Mozart fanatic.”

Convention delegates also got a more direct taste of the nation’s multicultural heritage at a party at the Daybreak Star Cultural Center, hosted by Bernie Whitebear, executive director of United Indians of All Tribes Foundation. For entertainment, there were the Cape Fox Dancers led by Cecelia White and her family. An administrator at Daybreak Star, White is a member of the Tlinget tribe of southeastern Alaska.

Between songs and dances that were also a form of theater, White said she is proud that her children and grandchildren have learned the songs and dances of their people and how to sew the buttons on their capes for decoration. “And sometimes my mother calls me long distance from Alaska, and she sings to me on the phone the songs as they should be sung.”