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President Trump has proposed eliminating the NEA in his first federal budget. Here’s a sampling of famous American art created with the help of the endowment since its founding in 1965.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
In 1980, when organizers of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund were searching for a monument designer, they turned to the NEA's Council for the Arts, which funded a national competition to find one. Completed in 1982, Maya Lin's iconic, winning monument — a glossy, 247-ft, black wall inscribed with the names of 58,307 soldiers who were killed or missing in action in the Vietnam War — is now one of the most popular memorials in Washington D.C., visited by over 3 million people each year.
Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images / Via arts.gov
The Sundance Film Festival
Robert Redford's Sundance Institute began as a small workshop for filmmakers and artists in 1981 with support from the NEA. It's since gone on to produce the biggest film festival in America, which has launched the careers of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Jemal Countess / Sundance Institute / Via arts.gov
Alice Walker’s first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland
In 1970, more than a decade before she earned a Pulitzer Prize for her literary classic The Color Purple, a young Alice Walker used an NEA Discovery Award to fund work on her debut about a sharecropper in rural Georgia.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images / Via arts.gov
The American Ballet Theatre
In 1965, the very first NEA grant — a check for $100,000 — went to the American Ballet Theatre, which was on the verge of insolvency at the time. Based in New York, America's National Ballet Company performs for 450,000 people each year during its annual national tours.
Gene Schiavone / ABT.org / Via arts.gov
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