Endowment’s Unnoticed Eclecticism: 700 Grants

The NEA’s advisory National Council on the Arts seemed to navigate piles of politically sensitive grants during a tempestuous weekend meeting here.

But virtually without notice it approved 700 grant applications, worth $13 million, to arts projects that are in the diverse, eclectic tradition that has established the NEA as perhaps the most unusual agency of the federal government.

Some of them seemingly defied the argument that the arts endowment is a godless obscenity monger. Others recalled and emphasized a pure artistic tradition in which the NEA has in past years awarded grants for, among other things, a landscape design project for the Moon. Among the newly approved grants:

* $12,500 to a Stanford, Calif., man who proposes to assemble an exhibit of calligraphic art illustrating verses from the Bible by a total of 50 artists from 21 different countries. The biblical message, said an NEA grant description, will result in “a variety of themes and images accompanied by commentary from each artist about experience in interpreting the verses.”

* $9,000 to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), for a project in which artist/educator Susan Mogul will prepare an exhibition produced by a mix of 20 deaf and gifted children from the Multnomah Street Elementary School. The children will keep individual journals during a three-month residency by Mogul at the school. LACE will exhibit a multimedia mural prepared by Mogul using the journals as a guide.

* $10,000 for a project by a Redondo Beach man, Stanley W. Resnicoff, in which he will produce a videotape for children that explains how toys are designed. An animated character will use computer technology to permit a child to select a toy that is then taken apart before his eyes.

* $75,000 for the American Indian Council of Architects and Engineers and Native American Housing for architectural design studies to produce prototypes for improved housing for American Indians. The goal is to break down the monotony and poor quality of much housing on Indian reservations.

* 9,000 to the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a organization called the Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers to fund a series of performance workshops on traditional folk singing in the South.

* $9,000 to the Community Music Center to establish programs specializing in classical music, spirituals and jazz that will be performed by inner city children. The young musicians will participate in an orchestra, chorus, string quartet, brass quintet and male quartet.

* $5,000 for the Aleph Movement Theater, of Helena, Mont., to develop audience enhancement techniques for use by a touring stage company that travels extensively to isolated rural communities throughout Montana. Another $15,000 will go to the Fairmont Theatre of the Deaf in Cleveland for a series of plays throughout the Great Lakes region put on by deaf and blind performers.

* $10,000 to the Sealaska Heritage Foundation in Juneau to underwrite the 1990-91 season of the Naa Kahidi Theater, which specializes in dramatic productions of legends of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian cultures. The theater emphasizes locales that are inaccessible by road.