President Bush to Honor Arts Medal Recipients : Ceremony: James Earl Jones and Marilyn Horne are among 13 who will receive medals today at the White House.

Film director Robert Wise, opera singer Marilyn Horne and actor James Earl Jones are among those chosen to receive the 1992 National Medal of Arts. President Bush will honor this year’s recipients today at a White House ceremony .

Medals also will be presented to American Indian sculptor Allan Houser, Grand Ole Opry performer Minnie Pearl, television producer and museum director Robert Saudek, banjo player Earl Scruggs, choral director Robert Shaw, jazz pianist Billy Taylor, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, AT&T; and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund.

The President, with the help of the National Endowment for the Arts, chooses individuals and corporations that enhance the arts in America for the honor. Earlier this year, author Wallace Stegner and composer Stephen Sondheim turned down the medal to protest recent actions at the NEA. In a letter sent to the endowment, Sondheim denounced a climate of “censorship and repression.”

The refusal by Sondheim and Stegner came shortly after Anne-Imelda Radice, the arts agency’s acting chairwoman, overruled an advisory body’s recommendation to provide grants to two art exhibitions because they depicted genitalia. It was the latest in a series of controversies over federal support of provocative art and performances that has plagued the NEA in recent years.

“I’m accepting the national medal in honor of the entire history of the arts endowment and with the conviction that the endowment and all artists can transcend ideological controversies,” Jones said.

“This award is very meaningful to me,” said Wise, whose films include “The Sound of Music.” Wise, who was on the National Council on the Arts from 1970-76, said he is “a strong supporter of the NEA and a strong supporter of the value of the work it does.” Although he said he found some of the NEA’s recent decisions “questionable,” he doesn’t “feel strong enough to turn (the medal) down. By turning it down, I would be putting it down. I’d rather get in and fight.”

Saudek, founding director of the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City, said he was “enormously pleased and proud to be in the company of those receiving the award.”

“I abhor any political censorship in the arts,” Saudek said. “But this award is between the country and individual. It seems to me that I wouldn’t affect any usefulness in rejecting this honor.”

The medal was authorized by Congress in 1984. The President gives the award to individuals or groups for outstanding contributions “to the excellence, growth, support, and availability of the arts in the United States.” Past winners have included writers Saul Bellow and John Updike, film director Frank Capra, composer Aaron Copland, painter Georgia O’Keeffe and dancer-choreographer Martha Graham.

In 1989, the late Leonard Bernstein turned down the national arts medal in protest of the cancellation of an NEA grant to Artists Space Gallery in Manhattan for a show on AIDS.