Proposed NEA Cuts Spur New Strategies : Funding: While the House and Senate must still resolve differences, arts community is preparing for a leaner endowment.

In the wake of last week’s Senate vote to cut the National Endowment for the Arts budget by one-third, local artists and arts organizations have begun speculating what accommodations they may have to make--as well as considering the possible fallout from a planned restructuring of the agency that, among other things, calls for the elimination of grants to individual artists.

“[Losing] a third of the arts budget is out of whack with increases at the Pentagon, you know?” said Gordon Davidson, artistic director-producer of the Center Theatre Group / Mark Taper Forum, which received from the NEA just under $200,000 of its approximately $11 million in operating costs for 1994-95. “A part of me doesn’t want to believe it’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen.

“It’s a myth to think that, just because we are a big organization, we can take care of ourselves,” Davidson continued. “If I lose $200,000, that’s a serious number. And I worry in the same breath about the organizations that depend very heavily on the endowment. The mix of disciplines, the mix of big and small and that most dreaded [category], the individual artists, have added up to an extremely important profile of culture in America, in its diversity and complexity and troublesomeness.”

While a final NEA budget remains to be settled in an upcoming House-Senate conference committee, the arts community acknowledges that big changes are inevitable now that the Senate has endorsed major cuts to both the NEA and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). As approved last week by the Senate, a 1996 appropriations bill would slash the NEA budget from $162 million to $110 million, and the NEH support would be cut from $172 million to $110 million.

Following that Aug. 9 decision, an optimistic Jane Alexander, chairman of the NEA, called the vote “a real and symbolic victory for the American people.” But prior to that, at an Aug. 4 meeting of the NEA’s National Council on the Arts, a more cautious Alexander had already begun to outline a blueprint for cuts that would allow the arts agency to survive.

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Alexander said that NEA staff levels would be reduced, and that the current grant structure providing grants for seasonal support could be eliminated in favor of specific “project” grants. And she outlined a plan to phase out by next February its current 17 programs and multiple separate grant categories, instead regrouping the grants into four “theme” groups: creation and presentation; heritage and preservation; education and access, and planning and stabilization. The NEA hopes the plan will reduce not only the number of grants, but the number of applicants. The current peer panel review system could also be restructured to include an interdisciplinary panel review, pitting, say, an orchestra against an art museum for the same funding dollars.

Unlike Alexander, local artists and arts leaders do not hail the Senate decision as anything close to a victory, with smaller organizations and individual artists most concerned about the cuts. David DiChiera, general director of Orange County’s Opera Pacific, for example, said that the county’s recent economic troubles have dried up private funding, and NEA grants will be all the more important for leveraging private matching grants in the future. Erwin Washington, executive director of South-Central’s L.A. Contemporary Dance Theatre, said that their after-school classes and summer youth programs could be jeopardized.

Gerald Yoshitomi, executive director of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, said he fears losing money to develop young and lesser-known artists in favor of those who are more commercially viable.

Performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who received NEA funds this year, called the elimination of the individual grants “a slap in the face to tens of thousands of artists who have dedicated themselves to a not-for-profit life. They will be expected to concentrate on being consumers, and producing consumer goods.” She believes that artists will continue to create, but many will have to let art become their avocation in order to support themselves with other work.

Jordan Peimer, associate artistic director of Highways, said funding cuts might eliminate funds to publish Highways’ magazine, Traffic Report, or decrease the number of workshops and residencies; he decried the elimination of individual artists grants. “This has been a source of support for the creation of some of the great works of the 20th Century, and that is not an exaggeration. Without support like this, I’d like to ask Congress: Where are the next Alvin Aileys going to come from, the next Bill T. Jones, the next Tony Kushners?”

Peimer also fears that restructuring the agency into interdisciplinary panels is a veiled attempt to discredit smaller organizations in favor of bigger, and blander, groups. “We’re the troublemakers,” he said. “It sounds liked they are really getting into controlling content.”

But, like NEA chief Alexander, most arts leaders from the major institutions remain determined to survive by making the necessary changes.

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Peter Hemmings, executive director of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, which receives about 2% of its $16-million annual budget from government sources, including the NEA, said he believes news reports have painted a bleaker picture of the future of the agency than the situation warrants. “My view is that the NEA’s future is assured,” he said. “It will be very hard for everyone to cope with a 30% cut, but the attempts to do away with the NEA have for the moment foundered.”

William A. Mingst, president of the board of trustees for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said that, although losing NEA funds would cost large organizations a “stamp of approval” that helps bring in corporation grants, the museum will simply figure out another way to bring in money. “We are not going to cut our exhibitions because of it--there is more than one way to skin a cat,” he said.

As for the new NEA structure, which might place the museum in competition for funds with, say, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mingst said philosophically: “You are competing with them for money anyway, from the community.”