What If the NEA Dies? : With the Agency’s Future in Question, O.C. Arts Groups Ponder Theirs

Exactly what might the end of the National Endowment for the Arts mean to Orange County’s leading arts groups?

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It could force cutbacks in programs aimed at those who represent the future of the county’s arts scene: children. Without NEA money, the Pacific Symphony would play to tens of thousands fewer schoolchildren who now attend its free concerts. South Coast Repertory might have to abandon nearly 75% of its outreach programming, which brings plays and drama workshops to roughly 70,000 children annually.

It could hamper groups’ abilities to make contributions in their fields. The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, for instance, would organize one less major exhibition a year--it generates, rather than imports, only two annually--the sort that adds new research to the record. Laguna Art Museum would have less time to research self-generated exhibits--private funders usually like to fund completed projects, whereas the NEA supports them in the critical germinative stage.

It could affect the quality of performances: Opera Pacific would have to cut out some rehearsals and would have less money to hire engaging, well-known artists.

Under a proposal passed last week by conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, funding for the NEA, which has a $168-million budget this year, would be cut by 40% next year and phased out after two years. The full House and the Senate have yet to vote on the proposal.

NEA grants rarely provide a significant chunk of any arts organization’s budget. Pacific Symphony, for instance, annually receives about $60,000 from the agency, just 1% of its $6-million budget.

But the grants have a critical multiplier effect because they must be matched, typically 3 to 1, with private-sector funds. Arts groups get tremendous leverage from the prestigious awards.

An NEA grant “tells Orange County that Pacific Symphony is valuable not only locally but on a national basis and deserves support,” says the group’s executive director, Louis G. Spisto. “And the individuals on the panels [that choose grant recipients] are respected nationally. The grants are a seal of approval.”

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If the NEA were abolished, Spisto said, the orchestra probably would reduce the scope of its education programs by up to 10%, thereby reaching 25,000 fewer children a year.

“We’d have to take a look at anything that was not absolutely core to our primary mission of performing,” he said.

Spisto said he hopes that local arts patrons would step forward to make up the difference but that the orchestra’s private fund-raising seems to have hit a plateau--the orchestra has raised about $1.5 million in each of the last several years.

Indeed, expecting the private sector to fill the funding gap that would be left if the NEA were eliminated is naive, said Martin Benson, SCR’s artistic director.

The Republicans’ budget-cutting “Contract With America” will remove “so many safety nets for the poor and disadvantaged” that those groups will have more persuasive arguments to make when appealing for foundation and corporate donations, he said.

“This began happening long before the ‘Contract With America,’ but we’ll have vastly more competition,” Benson said.

Figures recently released by the American Assn. of Fund Raising Counsel back up Benson’s contention. Private arts donations totaled $9.6 billion last year, which, after inflation is factored in, is a decrease of almost 2% over the previous year.

SCR received a $115,000 NEA outreach grant this year--barely 2% of the theater’s $6-million budget.

Without that money, however, “it’s highly doubtful that our children’s countywide touring theater would go out on the road,” Benson said, referring to the 28-year-old Educational Touring Program that brings one play annually to some 70,000 elementary schoolchildren.

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Several officials from organizations that aren’t getting NEA funds also said that the agency’s termination would be a blow to the arts.

The very existence of the agency “shows [citizens] that their government gives some priority to culture, albeit small,” said Dean Corey, executive director of the Orange County Philharmonic Society, a 41-year-old presenter of touring orchestras and other groups.

But even though the society receives no NEA assistance, Corey said, the agency’s grants to orchestras and dance companies that the society presents are critical to those groups, particularly for their leveraging effect.

The program is one of “the best bargains we’ve got,” Corey said, citing NEA figures that show arts groups actually match NEA money on average at a rate of $12 for every $1 awarded, higher than the typical 3-to-1 minimum required by the NEA.

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has not applied for endowment grants since 1993--in part because of difficulties in obtaining private donations, according to director Michael Botwinick.

Private-sector support, which accounts for about 80% of any exhibit’s cost, has declined over the past few years and typically isn’t secured until less than a year before an exhibit opens.

Without that in place, the exhibit’s execution isn’t definite and the museum--which prefers to apply for NEA grants three years in advance of an exhibit’s opening--wouldn’t ask for NEA funds for a show that may not run, Botwinick said.

The result?

“There are meaningful exhibits out there I would have liked to have done that are beyond our scope because we needed NEA funding” to do them, Botwinick said. Asked to describe these exhibits, he said only: “A missed opportunity is a missed opportunity.”

The museum’s permanent collection would suffer most if the NEA goes under, Botwinick said, because federal funds to purchase contemporary art would be lost.

The museum received $20,000 from the NEA in 1991. It was one of several “key grants which had a real impact on the kind of art we could acquire--purchases that were not subject to fashion or donor involvement,” Botwinick said.

He said that the museum will again apply for NEA grants when its finances improve and that the museum will be working harder than ever to raise private funds.

Naomi Vine, director of the Laguna Art Museum, said that “what the NEA does that no other funder does is tend to give advance research support for exhibitions, so you can have longer lead time to do research and planning that we’d all prefer to do for major exhibits. That’s probably where we’d feel the pinch the most. Private funders--corporations, foundations and individuals--tend to want to see a project closer to completion before they fund it.”

Still, Laguna is working to avoid being caught in a serious pinch should the NEA disappear.

“We’d have to do more of what we are already doing in terms of finding exhibit support in the private sector,” Vine said. “We’re committed to maintaining a diverse exhibition schedule, and we’re working to diversify our funding base.

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Currently, NEA funding supplies a “negligible” percentage of the museum’s annual budget of just under $1 million, Vine said. But three NEA grants for next year totaling $150,000 will equal roughly 10% of the projected budget for fiscal year 1995-96, beginning this fall, she said.

Patricia House, vice president of programs and development at the Bowers Museum, agreed. Without the $50,000 grant it received last year, it would not have been able to fund local research or send Armand Labbe, the museum’s director of research and collections, to Panama to research and develop “Between Empires: The Artistic Legacy of Prehispanic Panama,” currently on view. Generating an exhibition, rather than merely hosting one originated elsewhere, is critical to a museum’s vitality and standing in the art world.

“The exhibit added original research to the record,” House said. Specifically, Labbe developed a new timetable for the development of the region’s artistic styles that “alters quite radically previous timetables” and establishes a framework for a “true art history,” she said. “That kind of thing is very important, but that’s what we won’t have money for.”

David DiChiera, general director of Opera Pacific, said the loss of the NEA could mean trimming one of four orchestral rehearsals per production or engaging guest singers who costs $5,000 per performance instead of twice that.

The troupe this year received a $32,500 grant, which is about half of 1% of its $5.7-million budget. But DiChiera, like his colleagues, said he would hate to see the NEA die.

“The importance of endowment support is not in the amount” that groups receive, he said. “It’s in what it represents: public funding and appreciation for what the arts do for our culture and society. When you consider that the city of Berlin supports the arts to the tune of [about $730 million] a year--and that’s one city--and we are supporting the NEA at about $160 million for the entire nation, it gives you a sense of the scope of the resources being committed.”