NEA Restores Grant for Environmental Project

The National Endowment for the Arts, completing action to reverse a decision that roused major controversy among artists, voted unanimously Saturday to make a $10,000 grant to a Texas environmental group for an ecology-related project by New York City artist Mel Chin.

The vote by the National Council on the Arts was immediately endorsed by NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, apparently bringing to a close an episode that began late last year.

In that action, Frohnmayer overturned a lopsided national council vote in favor of the grant, which had also been enthusiastically supported by a panel of grant-review experts. At the time, Frohnmayer said that he acted because he was not convinced the project was artistically worthwhile.

Chin proposed to create a work called “Revival Field,” an outdoor installation utilizing contaminated earth and other materials to transform a hazardous waste disposal site into an artistic environmental statement. The project is to be sponsored by the Citizens Environmental Coalition of Houston.

Confronted with a controversy among artists who accused him of axing the Chin grant to appease NEA critics in Congress, Frohnmayer met with the artist and the sponsor group in December. The two sides agreed that Chin would send in a new description of the work, which Frohnmayer would resubmit to the NEA council. At a special meeting of the national council in December, members were sharply critical of the Frohnmayer decision to kill the grant.

In a brief exchange before Saturday’s vote, Frohnmayer tried to put a positive face on the controversy, maintaining that artists must learn to supply the NEA with “a clear articulation of the artistic merit” of a project. But some council members remained highly skeptical, raising publicly a suspicion that Frohnmayer may have rejected the grant originally not because the description was inadequate but because he didn’t understand it.

“When we seem not to understand (a project), it is important to investigate it,” said Harvey Lichtenstein, a national council member and president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “One should investigate before coming down against it.”