Museum Day!

A good day to visit your local museum.  A good day to urge you to write your congress people in support of the arts!

Here, use this postcard:

Go ahead, print it at 4 1/4" x 6"

Preachin' to the choir here if you're reading this blog... so let's all preach at Congress, huh?

Up is Down, Black is White

Feel like America has fallen Through the Looking Glass?

Me too.

Anyway.  

Whenever you're talking to, emailing, faxing, writing to, or protesting at your senator or representative on the latest Outrage du Jour, please remember to mention NEA funding too.  The National Endowment for the Arts supports all sorts of art - it's especially important in getting arts into the countryside and into smaller towns, where students (or adults) wouldn't otherwise have art funding at all.  

My personal experience of NEA support comes mostly from Kitchen Dog Theater, where for five consecutive years (the only Texas theater who can say this!) we have received national funding for our New Works Festival.  

New plays by living American writers!

If you do feel moved to write your congressional folk, you're welcome to use this postcard:

Please feel free to use - print at 4 1/4" x 6" on card stock

This year will be Kitchen Dog's 19th New Works Festival.  In our time we've produced 26 world premiers of new plays and 125 staged readings of new works.  That's NEW work by living writers.

Please help us - and all those other artists that count on it - by helping the NEA.

Inauguration Day

Well, Donald Trump gets sworn in today.

Yesterday's political-news leak was that his proposed budget cuts spending for the Arts and Humanities to $ 0.

The Hill's Alexander Bolton reports that Brian Darling, a former Heritage Foundation staffer now a Paul Ryan aide, said about this budget:

"The Trump Administration needs to reform and cut spending dramatically, and 

targeting waste like the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities would be a good first step ..."

Sure, every civilization up till today has created its Great Public Art - pyramids, Versailles, operas, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Bolshoi Ballet, Muppets - art that survives its era and glorifies it.  Historically, it is Art that makes a civilization remembered as great.  

Or remembered at all.

But that junk's all "waste" so why should the United States of America spend a nickel?

Sistine-Trump

public domain image messed with

ADDENDUM:
The Washington Post has a good article on the stupidity of this "budget" idea HERE.

Addendum #2:
Need the dollars and cents?  According to the NEA, the arts adds $700 billion - that's $700,000,000,000 - to the American economy every year and employs 5 million Americans.  For comparison, the oil and gas industry (as best I can figure out) employs around 2.1 million workers - less than half!

Watch a nice NEA film:

Woohoo! Arts Funding

Terrific news! Kitchen Dog Theater has been awarded a sizable NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant to support its new play festival this coming spring.

One of only four theater grants in Texas.

This is a huge boost.  Thank you NEA!  We'll put your funding money to good use.

Now for something completely different...

My printer, Lulu.com, is having a buy-it-in-time-for-Christmas sale on my how-to theater design book Alice Through the Proscenium.  You can find out more about Alice  HERE at Squidoo or see the Lulu.com page HERE.  Don't forget the secret-santa-saving code word!

And, if you like, you can think of this purchase too as Funding for the Arts... because I'm in the throes of starting a sequel to Alice Through the Proscenium, which is about scenery design, with a new volume about scenery building.  

I've gotten such a great response to my Squidoo page "Theater Set Questions Answered" that it's become obvious to me that there is a throng of desperate readers just waiting for such a book to be written.  Take heart! Gentle Readers, it will (eventualllllly) come.  Meanwhile, there's a lot on set construction and painting in Alice... available in soft covers at Lulu.com or as an epub book for NOOK etc. at Barnes and Noble HERE.