Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
U.S. Rep. Miller moves forward with arts hearings
Here’s an update on the Congressional-level arts hearings I mentioned back in February:
The economic role of the U.S. arts industry and the disproportionate job losses it may be suffering in the current recession will be examined by the House Education & Labor Committee in hearings starting Thursday, March 26.
Titled “The Economic and Employment Impact of the Arts and Music Industry” and chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the initial hearing will investigate how American communities are affected economically by arts activity. The committee will also examine the the arts and music industries in light of media reports about heavy job losses and endangered institutions, economic troubles reflected by a National Endowment for the Arts study that found unemployment in the arts to be substantially greater in 2008 than the national unemployment level for that year.
U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), who co-chairs the Congressional Arts Caucus, will provide testimony, as will Robert Lynch, head of Americans for the Arts; Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs; Michael Bahr, education director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival; and Tim Daly, co-president of the Creative Coalition, an arts, education and First-Amendment-rights advocacy organization co-founded by the late Ron Silver.
I expect to have more to report on this soon.
A Silver lining
Ron Silver died Sunday.
Even for an actor, he had an unusual range. In his art, he stretched from Broadway productions of gritty David Mamet plays to silly TV sitcoms such as “Rhoda” and from film versions of true-life characters such as ferocious lawyer Alan Dershowitz and learned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on one end to showoff tennis champ Bobby Riggs and ’60s rock-concert promoter Bill Graham on the other. In his active political life, he headed the stage union Actors Equity Association and helped out on Council on Foreign Relations committees. Supported Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama … and Republicans Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani.
So it maybe it makes sense that he also co-founded The Creative Coalition, a nonprofit social and political advocacy group dedicated to educating arts-community leaders on public issues related to First-Amendment rights, arts advocacy and education - and mobilizing them.
Actors know that creative people need to speak the truth, no matter which side of the political line or what unnerving human experience it comes from. They know it because they play all of us – all the tangled, dark, bright and blithe characters that we humans are - and find something that matters in every one of them.
So I hope they and the rest of us can carry on Silver’s work and keep creatively crossing the lines between opposites until we find we have linked the encampments with our daring steps.