Bush Announces Nominee for Chairman of the NEA

President Bush has announced his intention to nominate Michael P. Hammond, currently dean of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pending confirmation by the Senate, Hammond will replace Clinton appointee Bill Ivey, who stepped down as chairman of the federal arts agency Sept. 1, eight months before the end of his four-year term. Robert Martin, Bush’s newly appointed director of the Federal Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, has been serving as acting chairman of the NEA since Ivey’s departure.

“Although I don’t know Dr. Hammond personally, his qualifications are impressive, and I wish him well in this important assignment,” said Ivey in a statement. Ivey, former director of Nashville’s Country Music Foundation, will take a faculty position at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University in January.

Also in a statement, Hammond said: “I am deeply honored by President Bush’s confidence in me. The National Endowment for the Arts is an increasingly important agency. The arts can help heal our country and be a source of pride and comfort.”

Before taking a position at Houston’s Rice University, Hammond was the founding dean of music for the new arts campus of the State University of New York at Purchase, where he later served as president of the college. He founded Pepsico Summerfare, an international festival of the arts at Purchase, and has been director of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee.

A Rhodes scholar educated at Lawrence University and Delhi University, Hammond is a composer and conductor. He is on the board of the Houston Symphony and was a founder of the Prague Mozart Academy, now the European Mozart Academy, in the Czech Republic.

If confirmed, Hammond would assume the post in a period of relative calm for the agency. When Ivey took over in 1998, it was still reeling from a 40% budget cut under former chairwoman Jane Alexander. And even though the NEA eliminated most grants to individual artists during Alexander’s tenure, the agency remained a target for elimination by conservatives in Congress who perceived it as a supporter of obscene art.

While those changes were made before his tenure, Ivey is credited with engendering new bipartisan support for the NEA by publicly supporting the 1998 Supreme Court ruling that “decency” could be considered in grant-making, and won the first budget increases for the agency in eight years for fiscal years 2000 and 2001 for his community-based Challenge America program.