(The following speech was delivered by Jane Alexander at the Elizabeth Gibson Drinko Honors Convocation at Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, April 2nd, 2004.)

It is my privilege and honor to be asked to speak to you today about the arts. Dr. Edwin Bingham is this year's faculty member chosen for his knowledge and celebration of music, jazz in particular. What a wonderful musical invention is jazz! Just the name itself rings the promise of something special. Jazz... you can almost feel the hot bubble of water on a griddle, or see a splash of colors in sound. Jazz. The word in the 1920s conjured dens of sin, smoky and illicit gatherings of people defying the status quo, celebrating the art of improvisation in musical virtuosity. Jazz. No other art form I can think of has so special a name. All the others are stuffy by comparison: classical music, popular music, theatre, visual arts, sculpture, literature, folk and traditional arts, film, dance. But Jazz seems to name itself. It is an artform begun in America, with roots in Africa, and now heard the world over. It is always different, never the same, but follows strict rules according to its artistic code. I salute Dr. Bingham and consider his students lucky indeed to be part of his musical world. Jazz is but one component of this great panoply we call the arts, for want of a better word.

And what, after all, is art? There is no adequate definition but art is a uniquely human experience. It is probably part of our DNA. Some birds engage in decoration of their nests, some whales sing, and some animals dance in courtship, but no species other than human has painted frescoes, invented the violin, or Dizzy Gillespie, or put together a ninety piece orchestra to perform Brahms Requiem. We know that art is very old, that it has its roots in worship. Although we don't know why the cave painters of France 35,000 years ago felt compelled to cover the walls with bison, antelope, and other mammals, we do know that they wanted to make something of beauty ---that is clear in every line, in every graceful stroke of the charcoal. The late Ernest Boyer, who was President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement for Teaching said: "the arts are one of humankind's most vital forms of language...in most respects the human species is far less equipped than other creatures on the planet: we are no match for the lion in strength; we're outstripped by the ostrich in speed; we can't outswim the dolphin; we see less acutely than the hawk. And yet, as humans, we excel in the exquisite use of symbols which empowers us to outdistance all other forms of life in what we see, and feel, and know."

These symbols have made all forms of communication possible, from simple hand gestures, which convey information and feelings, to the highest forms of binary computations, which have given us the computer, and take us to the stars. The writer, the playwright, and the poet take written language and go one step further into the realm of metaphor and rhythm, integrating intellect, emotion and image. The musician works in the abstract world of sound, tonal and atonal; while the dancer paints pictures with her body in space. It is our use of these symbols that constitutes what we call creativity. The arts are but one arena of creativity, but there are some things that cannot be conveyed without the language of art. The arts are the soul of a tribe, a people and a nation. And a society that develops intricate forms of art and language celebrates the deepest recesses of the human brain, and leaves a legacy of itself through its art.

What excites us most about great past cultures? Not the endlessly recorded battles throughout history, nor the remarkable scientific achievements of mankind. Usually what thrills us most is the art: the paintings of Da Vinci or Cezanne, the textiles of India or Africa, the music of Bach or Puccini, the architecture and meaning of temples such as the Acropolis or Tikal.

We inherit ritual from our ancestors; we mourn through song and the litany of prayer. The arts help us to heal in a wounded time. Throughout history we've honored those we've lost in the memorials of sculptors--- in rows of empty chairs, as in Oklahoma, in the new design for the twin towers, or on walls of shiny black granite on the Washington Mall. As writer Thulani Davis says of the Vietnam Memorial: "it was the act of an artist who understood that every single individual in the society craves the rites of acknowledgement of our heroism, our grief.. . and.. . that there are few moments in this society when someone calls our name." We use the arts too for rites of celebration: we dance at weddings, write poems on birthdays and anniversaries, and sing whenever possible.

Even with the children in or lives, it is their artistic achievements that most often delight us. Johnny or Judy may excel or math or history but put them on stage, singing a song, playing the trumpet, or playing Tom Sawyer and we are enthralled. We put the drawings of the littlest ones in our lives on our refrigerator doors and coerce friends into listening to their latest poems or stories. Human beings are endlessly fascinated with the variety of arts, past and present that our species creates.

And we are, each and every one of us, creative human beings. The arts are most associated with creativity, but creative minds are found in all walks of life. Creativity is basically problem solving in an innovative way. The problem solving may not always be linear or even logical, but given a theme or an idea it is how one executes the idea that is at the core of creativity.

A business leader may be creative in the structuring of a company, or in the marketing a product. A teacher may be creative in how she involves her students in a subject. A grandmother might be creative in the pattern of a sweater she knits for her latest grandson. A scientist can be creative in the lab, an engineer at the drawing board, or a cook in the kitchen. And a basketball player can be creative on the court. Most creative endeavors in life are more easily quantified than are those in the arts. In the sports world winners and losers are tabulated by numbers, in the kitchen the ingredients for a recipe are measured before combining, in the business world a graph tells whether a product is successful or not---whether it is making money or not. The arts are more elusive. You cannot put together the ingredients for a successful outcome in the same way, and some of the most creative individuals have never made a dime in their life, Van Gogh for example. Creativity in the arts is deeply intuitive and is received by others in a deeply intuitive way. Henry Fonda said to me once when I asked him how he chose great scripts: "I know 'em when the hair stands up on the back of my neck." That doesn't mean that there is not a lot of skill involved in creating something or in appreciating its end result;

but the arts strike chords in our being that are difficult to evaluate.

There is a 60-year-old woman named Judith Scott who lives in Berkeley, California. She has Down's syndrome, and she does not speak, hear, read or write. She spent 36 years locked away in a mental institution because she was mistakenly diagnosed as retarded instead of severely deaf. Then her sister brought her home. A few years ago she picked up some sticks and began wrapping yarn around them, creating her first piece of art. She now visits the Creative Growth Center in Oakland daily and creates large and complicated pieces of fiber art. She has had solo shows in Paris and Tokyo galleries this year and her work is admired and collected by art lovers worldwide, giving her a healthy annuity. No one could tell you what Judith's pieces mean, least of all Judith herself, but she has tapped into areas in herself that would have remained submerged if art were not introduced into her life.

Educator and psychologist Howard Gardner developed his theory of seven human intelligences. Three of them are related to the arts: visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic and musical/rhythmic. The other four, for the record are: verbal/linguistic, mathematical/logical, intrapersonal and interpersonal. Most of us come into this world with strong bents in one or more of these different intelligences, and so most of us have a natural affinity for creativity in some artform. All of us have the capability to appreciate art. We indulge daily in the cornucopia of arts our society presents: music of all kinds, films, TV, photography, museums and books to name a few. Arts education is vital to a greater appreciation and understanding of any art form.

Arts education begins with children at home. Babies are naturals---they sing, dance, clap and draw from a very early age. We encourage these things intuitively by singing to babies and by reading to them later. At some point when we are older someone introduces us to an expanded world of art.

In 1945 a man I barely knew returned from the war. My father had been gone most of my young life and in an effort to get to know me this handsome stranger took me one afternoon to the ballet. The Royal Danish Ballet company was performing "Coppelia" in Boston, and it was danced by lighter than air magicians who pirouetted and leapt across the stage in defiance of gravity. This was surely the seminal experience of my early life; if one can have an epiphany at age seven then that performance was one for me. How could human beings defy gravity with such grace? Hovering in the air like hummingbirds? How was the corps de ballet able to execute their steps in such perfect unison? How did such beauty come to exist at all? --- the costumes, the lights, the sets and most of all the seemingly limitless extension of the human body itself? I was introduced to art, and from that moment on it never left me. At some point in time each of you here probably encountered a similar moment at a young age, when your world was suddenly transformed. When1he promise of what it means to be human was suddenly exceeded by rapture. It might have been a story that enthralled you, read by your mother or a teacher, or the vivid colors in a museum painting, or a soaring trumpet solitary in a vaulted church, or a jazz group in a darkened club. Or it might have been something you yourself created from your own imagination.

Creativity is as necessary to our well-being as the air we breathe and the food we eat. And it needn't always be inspirational. We crave entertainment on a daily basis. Entertainment that may not be great art but are creative endeavors nonetheless. We crave music, we crave games, we crave storytelling through books, tv and movies. Without these things we feel less than human. Art and entertainment is our balance and ballast in life.

I don't suppose we are ever far removed from seeking balance---in our lives, in our work, in our relationships, in politics, in just about anything one could imagine from a meal we prepare, to the arrangement of it on the plate. Everyone finds their own "angle of repose" as Wallace Stegner wrote. But just as a child on a teeter-totter won't stay on the high end for very long, or the low end either, so the balance in our lives keeps seesawing. I don't know about the rest of you but right now my life seems really out of balance with all the information that keeps flowing in, and demands a response from me. Science has outstripped my ability to handle it all. We were told that all these machines, appliances and gadgets would save us time, create more time for pleasure, leisure, and art but what is created instead are more and faster ways of communicating with each other and more and faster demands for response.

There is e mail and snail mail and internet and tv,
There are faxes and fedexes and answering machines,
There are newspapers, radio, phones, magazines
But then, thank God, there is poetry.

There is poetry and while there is plenty of art in our lives today, the past three decades have really been dominated by science. In fact there have been more scientific creations in the past 20 years than in all ever recorded before: cloning to cell phones, sonograms to space elevators, MRIs to GPSs to DNA to HRT. Science has never been more exciting and the promise of new discoveries has never been greater, from the ocean floor to outer space, from the interior of the earth to the interior of the human brain. The arts by comparison are often retreading old structures, either revisiting old models faithfully such as the revivals of Broadway musicals, or the remake of old movies, or deconstructing old masters which has happened in the visual arts world as well as the performing arts world and literature. What is interesting is where art and science begin to collaborate, and where the lines begin to blur. There are going to be some exciting art forms developing in the years to come: the digital world alone has barely begun to be explored. Just as with the birth of radio, then television, the first uses of new forms of communication are invariably for information. We use our computers for the most part to write each other through e mails, to search for bargains or research on the internet, or to get news. Radio began exactly the same way, and so did television. 70 years ago no one could conceive of radio being used for storytelling or becoming the main transmitter of music, it was only used for news and information.. And back in the late 40s the moguls of Hollywood dismissed the idea that television could ever compete with movies. It is exciting to contemplate what our home computers have in store for us in the future. New forms require new ways of thinking We are going to need more imaginative and creative minds for this brave new world. As historian Daniel Boorstin says, "Art is what awakens people to their own possibilities."

Science has given us the tools, now the creativity of artists will supply us with content, with storytelling and entertainment of all sorts. Sadly, at a time when we most need it, arts education is on the decline in our nation’s schools. Arts education is always the first to be eliminated when there are budget cuts. Why? When it has been demonstrated over and over again that the children who have art in their lives do better in every other arena of education from math to history. Often they are cut out of the curriculum because it is harder to measure success in the arts than it is in say Math or English where a test can prove learning. The arts are not quantifiable in the same way. Most nursery schools and primary schools engage children in the arts, but the arts are often discontinued when they have to buckle down to so called "real learning." The three R’s of reading, writing and arithmetic serve us well as basic education. It would be wonderful to see art as the fourth "r" to encourage creativity and stimulate the imaginations of our children. As Issac Stem used to say "Our children are the wealth of the nation." Our children are the wealth of all our tomorrows, and we are depriving them of a full education needed to cope with their futures. It is left to parents and others to give our children the exposure to arts they need.

Einstein was asked once by a mother what she should do to stimulate creativity in her son. "Read him fairy tales," Einstein replied. "And then what?" asked the mother. "Read him more fairy tales," said Einstein. Small children really don't need anything more than an introduction to art, exposure to the options of the world. The technical skills of the potter's wheel or the language of music can be introduced gradually as the child requires more knowledge. To those who want to pursue a career in art, we can offer encouragement and help them with higher educations. But they will find their own way usually and nothing can stop them, even though few will ever achieve the pinnacle of greatness or genius. Genius is not democratic. A young composer asked Mozart how he could develop creatively. Mozart told him to begin with simple things like songs. But you did symphonies, said the young composer. Yes, said Mozart, but I never went to anyone to ask how to be a composer.

Arts education, however, should be for everyone, the old as well as the young. It is to stimulate the creativity in each individual in order that they might have happier and more productive lives, and give the world the imagination we need to envision a safe, secure and healthy world. The child who understands art by doing it and by learning about it in schools or elsewhere will become the adult who encourages the genius of our nation, not fear it. There were a lot of congressmen during my tenure at the NEA who feared art and the artists who made it. Artists break rules, they bust open the status quo and that is scary to some people. Congress feels safer investing in the hardware of defense than paying for the risky elusive business of art. And yet it is our imaginations which will save us, which will draw the maps for our future; which will find new ways of living our lives and alternatives to destructive ways.

James Agee wrote, "With every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, the potentiality of the human race is born again." You can see that in the face of every little boy or girl. The expectation, the delight in life and the creative spirit. It should be our job to promote that throughout life. I believe in the power of art to change lives. I believe in the power of art to save lives. When I was chairing the National Endowment for the Arts I would say "give a child a clarinet or a paintbrush and he's less likely to pick up a needle or a gun." I still believe that and I have seen lives changed first hand. A young boy in Kansas caught in the dead end of drugs transformed through ceramics, the clay in his hands molding a new life. A gang in New Mexico laying down knives to pick up paintbrushes for their neighborhood mural. Kids in the Mosaic Youth theatre in Detroit reveling in the power of language through the discovery of Shakespeare.

All over the world Shakespeare is performed and studied more today than at any time in the last 400 years. A teacher friend of mine sent me this a while ago: this is an actual sixth grader's response on an English test: "The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet."

Kids are bubbling with energy and a desire to connect themselves to something meaningful in the world. I do not question the unique contribution of each human being to this planet. Nor do I question the uniqueness of each human being. Children are highly creative little beings and need artistic endeavors throughout schooling. Because when a child is taught to sing, she is learning to listen. When we teach her to draw, she is learning to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts onstage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. And when we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their own roots and find a place of their own in history. We are what we envision ourselves to be and creative expression develops the possibilities of who we can become. Thank you asking me to be with you tonight.