Do the Arts Matter?

If the arts matter to you, you might want to know how the leading candidates for president stand on funding the arts. So let’s go through and see where each candidate stands on public funding and support for the arts:

Barack Obama:
-Supports increasing funding for the NEA from $125 million to $175 million annually
-Wants to expand both public and private partnerships between schools and arts organizations
-Supports the creation of an “Artists Corp” to work in low-income communities
-Promotes cultural diplomacy (send performance artists abroad)
-Welcomes international artists into the US
-Wants to provide health care to artists and their family members
-Supports ensuring tax fairness for artists
-As Senator, co-sponsored and passed legislation to honor the legacy of Katherine Dunham
-Supports the Artists-Museum Partnership Act, which allows artists to deduct the fair market value of their work when making charitable contributions

Hillary Clinton:
-Supports the NEA’s mission and increasing Federal funding for the NEA
-Wants to reform No Child Left Behind to strengthen funding for arts education in public schools
-Believes in international cultural exchange as a form of diplomacy
-Supporter of Public Broadcasting
-Created the Finger Lakes Trading Cooperative, an initiative that links local businesses with artisans in upstate NY
-Helped to develop affordable living/work space for artists in Buffalo
-Entered a statement to the Senate Congressional Record in support of creative arts therapies
-As First Lady, was the honorary chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities

John McCain:
-In 1999, voted NO on funding for the National Endowment of the Arts
-Does not support abolishing the NEA
-Voted in favor of the Helms Amendment to withdraw Federal funding grants to art considered “obscene”
-An honorary member of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, 1997-present
-2007, proposed a bill to protect Indian arts and crafts

see more

Hap tip: Ron Silliman

Black History Month: Safe Bus Company @ NC Transportation Museum

A temporary exhibit featuring the Safe Bus Company will be at the North Carolina Transportation Museum, located in Spencer, NC, February 15-29, 2008. The N.C. Transportation Museum, located in historic Spencer Shops, the former Southern Railway repair facility for steam locomotives, is part of the Division of State Historic Sites, Department of Cultural Resources. (see another picture at this site)

A 1969 bus from the historic African American-owned bus company that operated in Winston-Salem, NC from 1926 to 1972 will be shown. The bus line was formed to provide African American workers in East Winston-Salem with transportation to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company plants.

[ EDIT: Highway 52 divides Winston-Salem into Winston and East Winston, which is historically black but now home to Hispanics as well. R. J. Reynolds is in Winston, of course.]

“To celebrate the history of this inspiring group of African Americans, the museum will exhibit historic photographs, bus tokens, a bus driver’s uniform and employee handbook and other items belonging to employees of the Safe Bus Company. In addition, the museum will host a media event at 10 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 15 to showcase the company’s 1969 GMC bus that the WSTA [Winston-Salem Transit Authority] intends to restore and use as a rolling museum. Clark Campbell, veteran Safe Bus Company driver and namesake of downtown Winston Salem’s Clark Campbell Transportation Center, will also attend the event.” (see more)

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See Winston-Salem Journal and Salisbury Post articles on the Safe Bus Company.

First Wednesday In Lent: God Exists by Henri Nouwen

So work out your salvation in fear and trembling. It is God who, for his own generous purpose, gives you the intention and powers to act. Let your behavior be free of murmuring and complaining so that you remain faultless and pure unspoilt children of God. Philippians 2: 12-15

“God exists. . . . is the most world shattering statement a human being can make. . . . Because when God exists, all that is flows from him. . . . [And] my existence can no longer remain the center, because the essence of the knowledge of God reveals my own existence as deriving its total being from his. . . . The it becomes real for me that I can love myself and my neighbor only because God loved me first. . . .”

to read the rest of this devotional see Show Me the Way: Daily Lenten Readings by Henri Nouwen