Ivey Says He’s Leaving a Stronger NEA

As he steps down as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill Ivey--who is credited with building bipartisan support for the federal arts agency in Congress, as well as winning its first budget increases in eight years--says he has few regrets.

“I still believe politics is a fairly noble activity,” said Ivey, a Clinton appointee who resigned from the post effective Sept. 1--eight months before the end of his four-year term. “I enjoyed visiting with members of both parties on the hill, including individuals who have historically been critics of the NEA. When I came to this job, the NEA had been under attack for a number of years, our relationship with Congress was very poor. I do think my willingness to spend time explaining what we were trying to do made a difference.”

Robert Martin, President Bush’s newly appointed director of the federal Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, will do double duty as acting chair of the NEA while the new administration seeks its own candidate to fill the position. And as Ivey prepares for his next job--a faculty position at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University that starts in January--the mild-mannered former director of Nashville’s Country Music Foundation challenges the next NEA chief to move the arts from “the East Wing to the West Wing” of the White House--that is, off the social calendar and to the forefront of the country’s national and international agenda.

“Even the years right before the NEA was created [in 1965], during the Kennedy era, the cultural life of an administration has been pretty much channeled through the first lady’s office--it’s an East Wing activity,” said Ivey in a telephone interview from Washington. “I really think it’s time for the domestic and foreign policy leadership of the White House to take a look at the capacity of the NEA to play a role in their agenda.

“If I were staying around and were the choice of this administration, I would certainly work hard to build a connection between the NEA and the West Wing. I think as a public policy asset,” Ivey continued. “We can play a role, though not always a big one, in many of the activities they’re undertaking.”

When Ivey took over leadership of the federal arts agency from Jane Alexander in 1998, it was locked in a battle for survival, reeling from a 40% budget cut in 1996 and a continuing target for elimination by conservatives in Congress due to its perceived support of “obscene” art.

During his tenure, Ivey won the agency its first budget increases in eight years through his Challenge America program, a community-based arts initiative for which Congress has agreed to allocate $7 million in fiscal year 2001 and another $17 million in 2002.

The agency had become somewhat less of a lightning rod for controversy even before Ivey’s tenure. During Alexander’s chairmanship, most grants to individual artists were eliminated. And in June 1998, the same month Ivey was sworn in, the Supreme Court ruled that “decency” could be considered in awarding federal arts grants.

But even though those changes were not engineered by Ivey, some arts leaders attribute the renewed support for the agency to his immediate public endorsement of the decency ruling, which he continues to support as he leaves the agency.

“I think the decision was a good one; it basically said that Congress can make its opinion known to an agency, but it can’t set rules about content,” Ivey said. “The agency itself takes into account many points of view, our peer panel process does that very well. I think we’re in a very good place right now in terms of operating in a way that gives Congress and the American people confidence in the agency, but also gives us the freedom that we need to support the arts in all of their complexity and diversity.”

Some arts leaders speculated that Ivey’s uncanny ability to win support from both conservatives and liberals might lead the Bush administration to make the unusual move of asking Ivey to remain in the job.

Ivey said he was never in the running--in fact, he made his decision to leave the position before the end of his term because he felt unspoken pressure to allow the new administration to began its search for a new chief.

“As soon as the new administration was inaugurated, I set up meetings with staff members in the White House, and a couple of things became clear--one, that the first lady’s office would be supportive of all the cultural agencies,” Ivey said.

“But what I sensed in talking to the staff of the West Wing was that they were really polite, listened to what I had to say, but were really waiting for their own person to come in as chairman to roll up their sleeves and work on a cultural agenda.

“When you are head of an agency, it’s very important to have people you can talk to, who have complete trust in you and who will go to bat for you in Congress if there’s a problem with one of the grants that you’ve made,” Ivey added.

“Not having that kind of relationship with this White House was another reason I felt it was appropriate for me to move on.”

Ivey does cite one regret as he leaves the NEA--his failure to bridge the gap between the profit and nonprofit arts. “It’s something that is near and dear to me,” he said.

“When I came in, I had been director of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and one of the things I felt was that the endowment needed a stronger connection with the part of the artistic community that is the commercial sector--the for -profit arts, film, TV, recording, publishing and so on.

“There’s a need for this agency to be the arts agency of all arts makers, not just nonprofit arts makers. [HBO’s] ‘The Sopranos’ is art. We have to find a way to nurture and connect with excellence regardless of what umbrella it lives under,” Ivey said.

“I got a start on it, but it’s something I left undone, and that generates a certain amount of regret as I walk out the door.”