2134th Stated Meeting | March 30, 2025 | Art Institute of Chicago
On March 30, 2025, the Academy’s Chicago Committee hosted an event for members and guests that explored the role of cultural organizations and the communities they serve. The program featured Leah A. Dickerman (The Museum of Modern Art) and Oskar Eustis (The Public Theater) in conversation with Academy President Laurie L. Patton. An edited transcript of the program follows.
Laurie L. Patton
Laurie L. Patton is President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected to the Academy in 2018.
Good evening. It is such a pleasure to be here in the storied Art Institute of Chicago as we consider cultural spaces and their communities. This space was a refuge for me as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1980s.
Our gathering tonight is reflective, particularly around the role of culture and cultural institutions and the power of the local in service of the national. It is also reflective of the legacy and future potential of this Academy to continue to advance its mission “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” In this moment we are all called to rethink what those words mean and how those words can animate us.
Our program today will consider the role of cultural organizations and the communities they serve. More than a year ago, my predecessor David Oxtoby initiated discussions on the power of America’s cultural institutions and their role in our democracy. That focus has become more urgent as institutions from performing arts spaces to museums and historic sites to public libraries experience seismic shifts. With sudden funding cuts, how can cultural institutions, now operating with fewer resources, cultivate a new generation?
Our cultural institutions are facing moral, financial, and structural crises, and I believe we have a responsibility to seek resilience and hope amid these challenges, not only for us but for the nation. Tomorrow a small group will be convening to explore the growing tensions between what cultural institutions are and who they hope to serve and how they can survive in this current moment. These conversations will build on the incredible work of the Academy’s Commission on the Arts, which was led by Deborah Rutter, John Lithgow, and Natasha Trethewey. That commission introduced many of the questions that will drive this important work, and that work begins tonight.
In the tradition of the Academy’s interdisciplinary spirit, we have designed this event to maximize conversation and discussion. I hope that regardless of your relationship to any given cultural institution, whether you are an administrator, employee, audience member, or simply someone who appreciates these institutions, you will bring your perspectives to bear on such questions as, How do cultural organizations survive? Who do they serve? Who sustains them? What value do they provide? The health and survival of our cultural institutions impact us all and are inextricably linked to the health of our society and the vibrancy of our democracy.
We are joined this evening by leaders of two premier cultural institutions. They bring a distinct perspective on the current state of cultural organizations in the United States. Both of them are members of the American Academy. Unfortunately, our third panelist, Cynthia Chavez Lamar, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, is not able to join us tonight.
With us on stage is Leah Dickerman, Director of Research Programs at the Museum of Modern Art. As the head of one of MoMA’s newest departments, Leah is building an infrastructure to support and strengthen the museum’s many scholarly activities, amplify their impact, and share insight and resources. She previously served as Director of Editorial and Content Strategy and Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, and prior to that she was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She has served on the editorial board of the art criticism and theory journal October since 2001.
Our second panelist is Oskar Eustis, who has served as the Artistic Director of The Public Theater since 2005. He is also Professor of Dramatic Writing and Arts and Public Policy at New York University. Oskar is dedicated to the development of new work that speaks to the great issues of our time and has worked with countless artists in pursuit of that aim, including Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, David Henry Hwang, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Richard Nelson, Rinne Groff, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Lisa Kron. Prior to The Public Theater, Oskar was the Artistic Director at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. He previously served as Associate Artistic Director at LA’s Mark Taper Forum and prior to that he was resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco.
Thank you both for being here tonight. I want to acknowledge before we start that we are all in dual roles frequently and tonight is no exception. We are institutional leaders and also thinkers who pull from our life experiences and observations.
I am going to begin with a multifaceted question for both of you because you are in the trenches right now. First, how are you doing and how is your organization handling the challenges of this moment? Second, do the current strengths of your institutions look different than they did three or four months ago? Are you making connections with other cultural institutions? And third, how does this perilous moment that we are experiencing inform your plans for the future?
Leah A. Dickerman
Leah A. Dickerman is Director of Research Programs at the Museum of Modern Art. She was elected to the American Academy in 2019.
The need for museums to think outside of art history, to connect with thinkers across disciplines, is going to be critically important. And, of course, there is the very basic commitment to ensuring that we are telling many different kinds of stories.
We have been working very concertedly on developing a framework for bringing thinkers from across disciplines and institutions together around conversations about art and ideas. Just a week ago we had a convening called “Monumental Concerns” that was hosted by artist Carrie Mae Weems. It brought an extraordinary group of people together to talk about the commemorative landscape and the importance of history—what we remember, what we forget, and how that is being shaped in the current moment. These connections with thinkers across disciplines, to think how we build relays between artists and activists, are going to be critically important.
Oskar Eustis
Oskar Eustis is Artistic Director of The Public Theater. He was elected to the American Academy in 2022.
I would like to acknowledge that a lot of what I know has been shaped by two people who are here this evening. Dr. Ciara Murphy, who worked for The Public Theater for many years and is now at Mellon Foundation, did a lot of the work, both theoretical and practical, that connected The Public Theater to its community. And Pablo Hernandez Basulto, who is in charge of civic artistic projects at The Public Theater, has been a champion of expanding the theater’s reach beyond its doors.
Though The Public Theater has a lot of strengths, what I’m most concerned about right now is that I think we have reached the end of a seventy-five-year cycle of the American nonprofit theater movement. The consensus that formed this movement in the mid-1950s through the early 1960s—between the government, corporations, foundations, even individual philanthropy—around the need for a nonprofit theater sector has completely broken down. In fact, that consensus no longer exists. As a result, we need to fundamentally reshape what we are doing, why we are doing it, and who we are doing it for. It is a very dangerous moment, which manifested itself strikingly when the new NEA guidelines for grants were announced.
I thought it would be easy for us to reject those guidelines because they attacked the very nature of the work we do. I discovered it was unbelievably challenging to gather a group of theaters to oppose these guidelines. After three weeks of difficult work, speaking to dozens and dozens of theaters, we managed to get three theaters across the country to join with us in publicly opposing these guidelines. That is a measure of the level of fear and dissension—anxiety is too small a word for it—that has extended across the country.
The threat is existential and real and enormous. The Public Theater is protected from it to a certain extent because, frankly, our sympathies were very loud and clear for a long time so our head was above the parapet. Our funding is not in direct danger because we don’t receive a lot of federal money. I’m not trying to be morally judgmental about my colleagues’ theaters, which have a harder time getting funding. But it is a sign of how dangerous and real this moment is for the nonprofit sector and how difficult it is to achieve collective action.
DICKERMAN: We shouldn’t underestimate the degree to which there’s a concerted and multipronged effort to reshape the cultural landscape. It is worth naming some of these things so we get a sense of the totality of the initiatives that have taken place. It goes far beyond taking over the Kennedy Center. There are book bans. There are efforts to limit certain curricular issues and even historical narratives. On the Arlington Cemetery website, they have removed the page dedicated to Medgar Evers. On the Pentagon website, they have taken down pages dedicated to the Tuskegee airmen and the Navajo code talkers. That created such an outcry that the pages were put back, which a Pentagon spokesman explained as follows, “They are back because we don’t view them through the prism of race.” (Of course, this also serves as a reminder that small acts of protest and resistance can be powerful.)
There have been directives on architecture. As Oskar mentioned, there has been a redirection of NEA money away from making grants to regional and local cultural organizations. Next year’s NEA funding cycle will prioritize celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. It is an extraordinary document to be sure, but we can also understand this initiative as re-centering 1776 as the founding of America in response to 1619 conversations a few years ago, which marked four hundred years from when the first slave ships touched American shores in order to highlight how this country’s history has been entangled with enslavement. Universities are taking steps to quell protest and free speech on campus under pressure from the federal government; and this seems to be reaching into the realm of private opinions. A French researcher was turned away at the border because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his personal opinion on the Trump administration’s science policies. There are statements supporting the idea of re-erecting some of the Confederate monuments that have been taken down since 2020. Public media has been threatened and defunded. And there have been ideological deportations and refusals at the border. The prizewinning Canadian composer Andrew Balfour, who was due to appear at Carnegie Hall today, was turned away at the border. And then of course the Smithsonian directive that came out on Thursday that used truly Orwellian language to talk about “truth and sanity” in American history.
It is important to say all of this because in its totality it really is an assault on free expression and on spaces of free thinking. That effort has a hue, as Sarah Lewis has said, and it is undergirding a lot of the other political actions that are taking place. There is a twisting of language here: When we talk about making America great again, that means covering over certain aspects of American history in which we failed to live up to our principles. It is a seismic challenge.
PATTON: Thank you, Leah. Oskar, reflecting on what you said about reaching out to other cultural institutions, have you noticed anything in the past two or three months about the conditions that made it possible for the two or three other cultural leaders who joined you to do so? And for both Oskar and Leah, are there still conditions that allow for speaking up or expressing agency? Where do you see the terrain now given that the possibilities for speaking out are so differently configured?
EUSTIS: In this moment, everybody is testing. Again, I do not want to be judgmental about anybody’s choices, but we have to cede as little terrain as we possibly can. And that includes changing words. I have never been in love with the words diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is a lot that is problematic about DEI, but I’m not going to change those words now because we cannot let them become toxic. We saw what happened to critical race theory. We can’t let that happen again. There is a battle over words, over narratives, over language that the other side has been unbelievably aggressive about, and they are winning the narrative battles. They are winning the language battles. They are now winning battles that frankly I’m shocked they’re contesting at all. People are ceding territory, settling lawsuits, bowing. We are giving up, and that has huge consequences.
After three weeks of really hard work, we got three theaters to join us, most of whom, frankly, agreed to do it because they had so little to lose. But those three theaters signing onto the statement plus the National Queer Theater’s lawsuit with the ACLU, which we supported, was enough to cause the NEA to suspend some of the guidelines. I think the staff at the NEA was delighted that there was some pushback. I believe there is room for more pushback. It is a terrible mistake for the powerful to be giving in now. We are giving away territory we don’t need to give. We need to figure out how to test the waters. Those of us who have some resources, who have some strength, who have some endowments should be using that strength to push back. I’m seeing some signs of that, but we need to do more.
DICKERMAN: I couldn’t agree more. One thing that I’m excited about with our convening tomorrow is it’s unusual that music institutions, performing arts institutions, and visual arts institutions are in the room together. We don’t speak together that often. Like Oskar, I think that there’s a lot of narrative work to be done. In the United States we haven’t done such a good job of articulating the value of culture, at least politically, and unfortunately it is often seen as a form of elitism. There are so many other cases to be made about culture as an economic driver, as a key pillar in urban planning, as an important infrastructure for education and community building. We need a concerted and compelling multimedia, multiplatform articulation of the value of culture.
PATTON: Let’s stay with that for a moment. In what ways is the critique valid? Is there something in the critique that cultural institutions, in particular, need to address? Is the value of culture unraveling now? Will a new narrative be more inclusive of folks who haven’t felt that elite cultural institutions were meant for them? And if so, what will that look like if we put effort into that work?
EUSTIS: We’ve made countless mistakes and we have to do better. There’s no returning to what there was before because it was full of errors, and those errors were visible long before Donald Trump was elected.
PATTON: Say more about those mistakes and errors.
EUSTIS: If you look at the nonprofit theaters that were created in the 1950s and 1960s, which were supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, they were predominantly white institutions. They served a white, educated, upper-middle-class audience. We did too little about that for the last seventy-five years. When I look ahead at what we have to do if we’re going to survive, one clear thing is that we need to diversify our audiences. Free Shakespeare in the Park was an extraordinary leap for the theater, mostly by making the theater accessible economically, but in 2013 the audience was 71 percent white. Through diligent work and alliances with borough libraries, that number was down to 62 percent in 2018. That’s not changing the world, but for those of us who have been working on diversifying audiences in the American theater, it is a marked change. It’s a start.
We know that our mobile unit that goes to prisons, halfway houses, and parks in the outer boroughs is The Public Theater’s only program in which the demographics of the audience exactly match the demographics of New York City. So what does that tell us? Namely, we have to put a lot more of our energy into going where people are and a lot less of our energy into inviting them to come to us. But we have to invite them to come to us too. We have to make sure that our institutions are sites of human connection. There is a lot more work that we need to do. We have to double down on that work, not retreat and try to protect what we have. We have to make something that is worth saving, which can rally people around us.
PATTON: Leah, is MoMA still a temple of art? You’ve written beautifully about institutional resilience. How would you respond to what Oskar just said?
DICKERMAN: I’m going to start in a different way and then come back to your questions. When I think about what needs to change it seems to depend on the nature of the threat. Let me explain by speaking historically about Confederate monuments. The way that those monuments were used to reinforce things ideologically has something to say about what’s being attempted in this moment. Confederate monuments weren’t built in the years immediately following the Civil War. They were built in a multidecade campaign over the first years of the twentieth century, from 1910 to 1940. Thousands of Confederate monuments were put in towns and cities across the thirteen states of the former Confederacy and in northern states too. There are now more Confederate monuments than there are monuments to the victorious forces of the North.
We often talk about these monuments one by one, as if it’s a particular monument that is a problem. But it is really the flooding of the field that is problematic; it’s a kind of monumental propaganda. When I see the directives about what can and can’t be said or what federal architecture could and should look like, it is that same effort to flood the field, to proliferate the field with certain kinds of mythic formations that have little to do with a diverse, energized, engaged, and multi-perspective citizenry.
PATTON: What does it mean in your case to take art out to the community, like the mobile units that Oskar was describing?
DICKERMAN: MoMA is far less of a temple than it was two decades ago. In fact, I was really struck when I saw the images of our reopening in 2004. There were so few works by women or people of color, by artists of different geographies, perspectives, and those who came to artmaking in nontraditional ways, but now the galleries are so rich and so dynamic. There is a new kind of looseness, but there is an aspect of the museum—all museums—that is still temple-like. There are things that we can do better, of course, but I want to avoid the self-flagellation, as I don’t think it’s causal here.
EUSTIS: But you’re also saying it’s about the story that we tell.
DICKERMAN: Yes, it is about narrative. Museums have a responsibility to hold mythic formations up to questioning—to fact-based research and scholarship—and a commitment to hold steadfast in telling many kinds of stories through the art they show.
EUSTIS: I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t know Sarah Lewis’s work until I met her this last weekend, and she blew me away with the analysis of all the ways in which the forces of the right have won the narrative. I knew what was going on in the theater and in film, but I didn’t realize how pervasively they have won the narrative in visual arts as well.
PATTON: Could the forces of the right that you mention ever be allies for the arts? One focus of the Academy for the future is the power of the local—thinking about local alliances with diverse cultural institutions and doing that narrative building that we need to do. What are the local institutions that immediately come to mind to you as possible partners, that could be your allies in building that better narrative?
DICKERMAN: We have to be working with different forms and types of cultural institutions. Together we need to think about how we articulate the value of culture with a steady and compelling beat—to say these are a set of key principles that we are willing to defend. Our alliances need to be national and they need to cross into organizations that are doing democracy work, like the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy in Washington, D.C. Let me say that I’m so pleased with the democracy focus of the American Academy under President Patton.
PATTON: I think you are talking about the local in service of the national. I think that is exactly where we need to go.
EUSTIS: Locally there are two kinds of alliances that we have been making. One is through our civic art projects. We have relationships with community-based organizations in the boroughs that have proven to be very fruitful. Because we will never be social workers and will never be truly embedded in the different communities we want to work in, we need to find organizations that are experts at that, like the Brownsville Recreation Center, Domestic Workers United, and The Fortune Society. We partner with them so that we can bring our expertise, they can bring their expertise, and together we can really magnify each other’s work. We have had these relationships for twelve or thirteen years.
The second alliance is newer and recognizes that in these hard times we need to bring other theater companies into our theater and do more to present their work as well as our own. There are a lot of small theaters—Ma-Yi Theater, the National Asian American Theatre Company—that are threatened at this time and one of the things we can do is provide a shelter for them. In some ways, that is more important than just producing our own work. I’ve sometimes said that god doesn’t care if The Public Theater is producing the new play or if Ma-Yi Theater is producing the new play as long as the new play is getting produced. It is a way of decentralizing the artistic control. If we are giving Ma-Yi space and they’re producing the work, in some ways that is a better thing than having me decide what shows we are doing.
DICKERMAN: Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is to share the platform.
PATTON: Your comments have me thinking about making alliances with cultural organizations that are also focused on democracy, much like what the Academy’s Our Common Purpose report has so effectively done. So has the Academy’s CORE project, with its Faces of America publication. And coming back to this idea of refuge, we have directors of historical museums and leaders of science museums in our audience, and they may see their museums as a refuge in this moment. We have time for a few questions from our distinguished audience.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: When we look at the data on high school seniors, a very small percentage, like 18 percent, can name the three branches of government. What are we doing at the elementary, secondary, and college levels to make sure that this new generation does not fall into the same traps that this current generation has?
PATTON: The Academy’s Our Common Purpose project has done an inventory of the new organizations that are teaching civics. A lot of organizations have emerged as NGOs and as democracy centers in the last ten years to address this very question. I’m thinking of Citizen University, the Civics Alliance, More Perfect, and Better Angels. Our Common Purpose also helped start the Council on Civic Strength, headed by Danielle Allen, which is a group of organizations united around civic education. They are actively creating curricula in this space. When I ask people, “Would you like a bipartisan-model for constitutional democracy with 31 actionable recommendations?” the answer is always yes. The Academy has created such a report, Our Common Purpose, and it delivers exactly that. We also just released Habits of Heart and Mind, which I would recommend to everyone. It includes recommendations for building civic culture and several recommendations about civics education. I think every educational institution in the country should have these two reports.
EUSTIS: I’m certainly not an expert in education, so I can’t say what reform the education system needs, but the idea of a common good in our society has withered in the last fifty years. If we have a society that focuses entirely on individual achievement, why should anybody care about the three branches of government? For many, their primary concern is whether they can program computers, or what their starting salary will be, or what college they can get into. Our society has prioritized individual achievement to the point where we’ve lost sight of what it takes to build things that are good for everybody. If we focus on building a culture that values the common good above all, it becomes clear why it is so important to understand how government works. You need to know how cities govern themselves, how the parks work, how transportation systems work. This is where the arts can play a vital role in creating a common culture and reminding us of what we owe to one another.
DICKERMAN: There’s a reason the current administration is focusing on both education and culture—they are the foundation for nurturing democratic imagination and cultivating informed, engaged citizens. Culture is often targeted because it empowers people to engage with diverse perspectives and actively participate in their own governance. But culture has power too, especially for helping people understand history. TV miniseries like Roots or Holocaust had an enormous impact on generational understanding of key historical events. The ability for culture to develop an empathetic perspective seems critical right now.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You have all referred to the narrative battle, which is absolutely right. The weapons are war and language, culture and history. How do we harness the power of culture, and what forms can that take when culture and history are being used for certain ideological aims?
EUSTIS: The simplest and perhaps most powerful thing that the theater does is make people the agents of their own story. We put people center stage; we put the spotlight on them. This is what Clifford Odets and then Arthur Miller did with the Jewish émigrés to the United States. They put them center stage and made their story the center of the American story. August Wilson puts the African American story center stage and says this is the American story. The great breakthrough of Angels in America is saying gay people can represent America, we can represent everybody. Making people agents of their own lives is hugely important. And their stories matter. Hamilton and Shakespeare both took the language of the common people and elevated it into verse. And by doing that, they gave people the power to tell their own stories, ennobling both the language and the people speaking it.
PATTON: Leah, how does that dynamic in theater translate to the fine arts?
DICKERMAN: There are extraordinary examples of artists who tried to challenge hegemonic mythic formations. For example, Aaron Douglas created mural panels for the Schomburg Library, which offered an image of Reconstruction that was very different from the Lost Cause narratives of Confederate monuments. Or one that I’m close to: the sixty panels that a twenty-three-year-old Jacob Lawrence made to tell the story of the Great Migration from the South to the North, which was a very different story than you would have learned in a classroom at that time. Or when I went to high school for that matter. His panels were informed by what he heard at history clubs at the Schomburg Library, study groups that pieced together a history of Black experience in America from the books and documents held in the library’s collections, and from the memories and stories of community members. So that connection between historical work and image-making is important.
We have structured our fields so that there is an extraordinary amount of intellectual segregation between a white art history and a Black art history: that became very clear to me in working on the Jacob Lawrence project that we did a number of years ago. One of Jacob Lawrence’s best friends was a guy named Jay Leyda, a film curator at MoMA. The two of them had met in the payroll line on King Street when they were getting paid by the WPA (Works Progress Administration). Jay Leyda had just spent three years on the film crew with Sergei Eisenstein and had been buying copies of the first museum prints of Battleship Potemkin for the Museum of Modern Art. When you look at Lawrence’s series and the way the train comes back again and again, it’s certainly influenced by Potemkin’s repeated motif of the baby carriage bouncing down the Odessa steps. But nobody talks about Lawrence and the Russian avant-garde together: we hold these two disciplinary formations separately. In fact, in many universities, if you want to learn about Black artists in a substantive way, you have to go to the African American Studies department. This is an example of what we need to fix. We have to model what culture for a multiracial democracy looks like.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It is not lost on me that the majority of the examples you have given about progressive conversations and efforts toward democracy are representative of people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives. You mentioned the two worlds of art history: one white, the other black. And they are kept apart. It seems that there is a desire for theory to meet practice, but there are structures and systems in place that keep them separate. Could you say a little bit more about theory and practice?
EUSTIS: What I found truly amazing about the last five years is that they allowed me to address issues I’ve been grappling with throughout my entire career. They also gave my staff the confidence to speak up about things they hadn’t felt comfortable sharing with me before. To be honest, it was painful, but we changed in some good ways. I recognized the need for some structural changes, one of which was that I had sole control over artistic decisions, which was skewing the overall curatorial vision of the theater. So I changed the structure, and we now have two associate artistic directors, both of whom are people of color. I made the commitment that every artistic decision would be thoroughly discussed among the three of us, and then I would make the decision in their presence and tell them why I was making that decision.
This process not only changed the decisions I was making, but the fact that I needed to explain the decisions and do so in front of them changed me. I think better decisions are now getting made. I’ll be stepping down in three years and there are half a dozen people who have been groomed to replace me. That is a good thing.
DICKERMAN: We have to stop tolerating the kind of intellectual segregation that we have in our lives. All of our histories are entangled, so we need to model multiracial and historical creative expression as a robust answer to intellectual segregation.
PATTON: We have learned and heard today about the important role of the arts to make democracy concrete. Can we explore the stories that we tell collaboratively in new and important ways? What are the stories that we haven’t told yet, or told very well, about our histories and our ancestors? (And for the Academy that ancestry begins with John Adams.) We’re looking forward to hearing your ideas.
Let me thank Leah and Oskar for this wonderful conversation. I also want to thank our audience for joining us this evening.
© 2025 by Leah A. Dickerman and Oskar Eustis
To view or listen to the presentation, visit the Academy’s website.