NEA Seeks Millennium Money : Conference: Funds are scarce, but Chair Jane Alexander sees ‘a turning point’ in the history of public support for the arts.

This is a delicate time for American arts, and for the National Endowment for the Arts in particular.

Money is scarce, and years of controversy over sexual and religious imagery have bruised the sensibilities of politicians and artists alike.

And so, six months after taking office as NEA chairman, actress Jane Alexander convened the first federal conference on the arts at the Hyatt Regency hotel here this week “out of a sense of necessity,” she told her audience of more than 1,000 as the meeting opened. “We are at a turning point in the history of public funding for the arts.”

The trend is certainly not upward; the NEA has lost nearly half of its purchasing power since the late 1970s, including a $4-million reduction this year.

But, then again, President Clinton is not seeking further cuts in the NEA’s $170-million budget. “Hopefully,” he said in a videotaped message to the assemblage on Thursday, “we can do more in the years to come.”

Alexander has set a deadline for amassing more resources, and the conference title, “Art-21,” provides a clue to her thinking. “We have a big event coming up . . . the millennium,” she said in an interview before the meeting started. “How do we celebrate who we are at the end of a big century and 1,000 years? If there was ever any century that belonged to America, it was the 20th. I’m hoping that artists and arts organizations will be applying for big, big projects, and I’d like to have the money to fund them.”

To that end, she treads carefully now. She has been seeking to reassure conservatives who once tried to eliminate the agency that the NEA is a force for social good, by anyone’s definition. At the same time, she says she backs artists’ right to free expression, although she clearly does not relish the thought of enduring the type of turbulence that surrounded earlier federal grants to exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs and Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.”

Alexander doesn’t promise never to veto a grant awarded by an NEA panel, but, she said, “I don’t know what would make me do that. I depend heavily on the juries.”

Mostly, she is changing the subject. “I’d rather focus on the plethora of grants that everybody can agree on,” she said. She has been on the road incessantly, with stops from Burlington, Vt., to Waterloo, Iowa, visiting local arts programs. The day before “Art-21,” she watched young students on Chicago’s South Side learn traditional African dance.

Clinton, she said, is interested “in all of the arts being involved in everyone’s life on a daily basis.” She talks of a new emphasis on getting children involved--and trained--at an early age, as young as toddlerhood.

“The kid has to sit down with the instrument and learn to play, preferably a keyboard or percussion,” she said. Instruction doesn’t have to be costly, she said, citing the People’s Music School here. The director “couldn’t afford drums,” Alexander said, “so she used telephone books.”

The agency’s funding of such programs can also fit in with the agendas of other Cabinet departments, such as Justice and Housing and Urban Development, she added. “If children don’t have art in the home and just come home to TV, which is a passive art form--sometimes it’s not even art--what happens to that creative impulse? ‘Let’s trash our neighborhood.’ If you are engaged in art, you become an appreciator,” she said.

Meanwhile, she is also urging creativity on the part of arts administrators. “We seed,” she said. “We seed to leverage the private sector.” Innovative partnerships, she said, can also bear financial fruit. The Detroit Institute of Art, for example, received money from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for outreach work with the homeless.

Museums can work with one another too. The San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art, for example, is entering into a long-term agreement to present exhibitions from the permanent collection of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The shows will be presented during the next seven years, in chronological order, for 18 months at a time.

“This could be a very exciting time,” said Whitney grants officer James Bonkovsky, who was attending the conference. He praised Alexander, with her aristocratic bearing and the fame won after decades on the stage, in movies and in television, as “an incredibly strong presence, a real leader.”

Like others, he was heartened by the effort she made to solicit opinions at the conference. She attended working sessions, taking a chair near the back during a panel on “Facing Society’s Censure”--although she left before Brian Freeman, artistic director of San Francisco’s Pomo Afro Homos, described strong reactions faced when the renowned black gay male performance artists came to towns as different as Anchorage and Atlanta. She was long gone when Freeman showed a video clip of a performer who clutched an upright microphone in his lap while describing a back-room, safe-sex encounter--at once one of the group’s most provocative segments and a piece lauded by AIDS educators.

There would be plenty of opportunity for her to review the reaction later. Volunteers passed out cards for the participants to write down comments and questions, and an electronic bulletin board for on-line discussions was created.

A blank canvas was hanging too, with plenty of pens nearby, outside a banquet room. It didn’t stay blank for long.

“Artists Mastering Poverty,” someone had scrawled anonymously.

“Thank you NEA and don’t forget,” wrote another on the canvas, which Alexander intends to take back to Washington. “All art is subversive but we need not fear the artists.”

“There is hope,” yet another entry read.