Daniel Kaluuya is an Academy Award-winning actor you may have heard of. He’s British.
He was born in London in 1989 and wrote his first play when he was nine years old. It was about two men working at a McDonald’s. When he was a teenager, his mom enrolled him in an after-school drama program. From there he was hooked.
In 2017 he won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts “Rising Star” award. At the ceremony, he said proudly, “I am a product of arts funding within the United Kingdom.” I saw a clip of him saying that last week and it struck me how many lives are changed by publicly funded arts programs.
Just last month the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States announced that in its most recent round of funding, it awarded over 1,400 grants totaling almost $37 million to communities all around the country.
I checked out the list of grants in Texas. The Arts Council up in Wichita Falls received some money to support arts programs in country schools in its area of north Texas. A small art museum in McAllen got a grant to stage a new exhibit of Mexican and Latin American folk art. The Lubbock Symphony Orchestra got a grant to support a free family concert. A grant going to Fort Worth will support a free multi-week musical theater program for teens. A group in Austin got a grant to offset teaching fees for free instrumental music instruction for kids.
I looked at some other states as well. In North Carolina, grants went to a film festival in Wilmington, a dance festival in Durham, and a children’s theater program in Charlotte. There are music and art festivals in Kansas City and St. Louis that might not be able to happen this year without their NEA grants. A St. Louis group is going to use the funds it received to mount something called “Shakespeare in the Streets.” I’d like to see that.
An organization in Birmingham, Alabama is using its grant to support free music performances, and free art instruction. A theater group in Mississippi is using its grant to fund a traveling production of “A Year with Frog and Toad.” I know who that will be aimed at.
There’s going to be a lot of people impacted by these programs. There’s going to be a lot of lives changed. But many Americans struggle with thinking that if a program doesn’t directly impact you then it’s not worth your support.
We don’t know now, but sometime soon, somebody may stand up at the Academy Awards and say, “I am a product of arts funding in the United States of America.” I hope the NEA is still around then to know that it made a difference.
