Artists Feel the Sting as NEA Cuts Museum Funds

Until Monday, David Bunn, a 40-year-old, UCLA-trained artist who creates installations at his studio in downtown Los Angeles, had good reason to believe that 1991 would bring the first purchase of his work by a major museum since he began his career 15 years ago.

But a four-paragraph letter from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Newport Harbor Art Museum--identical to 100 letters sent out by the NEA on Dec. 20 and received by museum grant applicants just after Christmas--may have dashed Bunn’s hopes.

The letter notified the museum that the complicated political accommodation that renewed the NEA’s legislative mandate last fall and appropriated money for the agency for 1991 has resulted in complete elimination of five established arts endowment grant programs.

One of them is the NEA’s only program that specifically provides money for museums to purchase the work of living American artists for their permanent collections. Among the 100 grants for which applications had been received for this year was Newport Harbor’s proposal to buy work by Bunn and two other California artists.

Museum directors across the country and working artists say it is a program that, in fits and starts over the last 20 years, has become one of the most important mechanisms by which predominantly emerging artists have reached the crucial plateau of making their first sales to legitimate museum collections.

NEA grant formulas require museums to raise at least as much money in private donations as they receive in their art purchase grants before they can buy the work in question.

But, said officials of Newport Harbor and other museums, the decision by the arts endowment to support a purchase--especially when the artist in question has not sold anything to a major museum previously--often constitutes a crucial endorsement. Without it, private donors are reluctant to go through with contributions on their own.

“This is the first major museum purchase of my career,” Bunn said. “To have that setback come now is extremely disappointing, if not devastating. A lot of the kinds of art that museums buy, private collectors don’t buy.

“Given everything that is happening, (there is) every sense that public funding (of the arts) seems to be getting gutted. And there is the sense of the collectors all falling apart, too. For the museum purchase program to be gutted is a major disaster.”

The letter that brought the news to Newport Harbor was signed by Andrew Oliver Jr., director of the NEA’s museum program. It was not, Oliver said in a telephone interview Tuesday, news that gave him any joy to convey.

“We realize that this will be painful,” Oliver said. Not only is the money gone for 1991, he said, but the NEA has already decided not to offer the category in 1992, when additional transfers to state arts councils will be required. And, said, Oliver, the art purchase program--founded in 1971 but suspended from 1981 to 1987 under NEA budget cuts in the Reagan administration--may never be resumed.

“It would be wrong for me to arouse any sort of optimism at this point,” he said. “Not until Congress appropriates additional sums of money for the agency as a whole are we likely to see this program come back.”

Hugh Davies, director of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, noted that the purchase program’s history of having been axed once before clearly placed it at risk this year. “I think it probably was ‘last hired-first fired’ in terms of the NEA’s programs,” Davies said.

Oliver’s Dec. 20 letter noted that the new legislation governing the arts endowment requires that the agency nearly double, by 1993, the proportion of its budget channeled directly to state arts councils. As a result, existing NEA grant programs are under greater pressure to make cuts than at any time since 1980--and, NEA observers agree, possibly since the federal agency was founded in 1965.

Five NEA grant categories have been entirely cut, including the museum purchase plan, which was budgeted to distribute $698,500 this year, and another museum program that supports special programs to help museums redefine their missions and artistic directions. That category was to distribute $525,000 this year. Also cut were $305,000 to support special programs for national and regional multimedia arts organizations; $50,000 for other special projects; and $785,000 in project funds for state arts agencies--money transferred directly to the state councils.

But, according to artists, gallery operators, museum officials and arts observers across the country, it is elimination of the program that helps museums purchase the work of living American artists that may be the most troubling of all. Overall, the NEA is cutting, eliminating programs entirely or reducing the number of grants awarded in some categories to achieve savings of nearly $13 million this year.

Newport Harbor received the news more calmly than many museums. Kathleen Costello, the museum’s deputy fund-raising director, said Newport Harbor hoped to receive $19,000 from the NEA to buy work by the three artists--two of whom are scheduled to have work shown at the museum this year.

“It was a surprise and a disappointment to us,” Costello said of the NEA decision entirely eliminating the grant category. “But we expected it to be one of the least secure of the museum program categories.”

Costello said Newport Harbor still hopes to be able to raise the full amount of the proposed purchases from the three artists and go ahead with buying their work. She and other museum officials agreed that the NEA decision to eliminate the grant category strikes an unfortunate contrast with separate action by Congress late in its session last year in which tax deductions for the full market value of art donated to museums--which were stricken from the tax code in 1986--were restored for 1991, but with no indication that the tax benefit will continue after that.

Across the country, museums had voiced hopes that the one-year tax change would touch off a spate of donations of art. Museum spokespersons said the NEA action killing the museum art purchase program entirely may have the effect of canceling out many of the beneficial effects of the tax law change. It is an assertion with which the NEA’s Oliver said he could find little argument.

“There is no way I could dispute that,” he said. “It is a perfectly fair complaint.” But, Oliver said his program was faced with the need to cut something and was concerned with protecting what Oliver called its “core programs” of operating support for museums, conservation of collections and exhibition assistance.

The museum purchase grant cuts were seen as especially onerous at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach, where officials said the gutted NEA program constitutes the principal--and in some cases only--way to expand collections for smaller and medium-sized urban art museums and most museums that serve primarily rural areas.

“To all intents and purposes, it wipes out our acquisition program,” said Constance Glenn, the museum’s director. Cal State Long Beach, she said, had received purchase grants repeatedly in the last few years and had hoped for $20,000 in NEA funds for 1991. “The art world is very unstable today,” Glenn said. “People aren’t making large gifts right now or making impromptu gifts.”

In Chicago, Denise Miller-Clark, director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, said an $8,325 grant the museum hoped to receive to buy work by three young but established photographers would probably eliminate her museum’s ability to buy any work this year, too.

“We have to make a very small budget go far and we have utilized the NEA grant program to help us make significant purchases,” she said.

“This is kind of the risk money for a museum,” said Joy Silverman, interim director of the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, an artist activist group. “What it provides is a kitty of money that’s usually matched by (the fund-raising of) museum board members who are interested in taking chances on new work and new ideas.

“This isn’t like purchasing a Rembrandt, where history has already proven that this artist is accomplished. If the national endowment is not encouraging this kind of activity at all, it’s going to be harder everywhere.”