With degrees from Stanford, Chicago, and Oregon in American History, Ethics, and Law, John Frohnmayer鈥檚 views on freedom of speech and public funding of the arts became well known during the first Bush Administration when he was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. That national debate over obscenity, censorship, and freedom of speech is recounted in his book: "Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior."
lives in southern Oregon and has written his third book in a trilogy of novels. The latest is titled, "." John joins the Exchange to discuss his novels, the arts, his career and his philosophical views on the state of our society today.
A lifelong trial lawyer, John is also a competitive masters rower, a singer and guitar player.
His life in the arts started as legal counsel for the International Sculpture Symposium of 1974 in Eugene, Oregon. The symposium had its legal challenges: two assistants got in a fist fight about whose boss was a real artist; and someone showed a pornographic film in the city council chambers.
The sculpture symposium led to Frohnmayer becoming chair of the committee that chose the first public art for the State Capitol. on the Oregon Arts Commission by appointment of two separate governors, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and two terms on the board of Oregon Humanities.
Frohnmayer believes:
- Art is citizenship. It is the willingness to be honest in public; to tell the truth to power; to engage with each other in community.
- Art is courage. No tears from the writer, no tears from the reader. Rejection is the ever-present host of all artists.
- Art is celebration. Celebration of our triumphs and follies.
- Art is conscience. It is the power of the powerless; the fishwife of the satisfied; the pied piper of those whose brains are still in their original wrappers.
- Art is the power of choice. What to include and more importantly, what to leave out. The power of silence.
- Art is subversive. Creativity and imagination are not friendly to the world of order and settled expectations.
- Art is ambiguity. Having it all together is perhaps the least interesting condition for an artist. Chaos, uncertainty, boredom, and making sense of the commonplace鈥攖herein lies the challenge and the necessity.
- Art is freedom. Poet William Stafford says you can be free some of the time if you get up before everyone else. (He got up at 4 a.m. to write, and his daughter, feeling sorry for him, got up to keep him company).
