My Arts Extension Service journey began in Fall 1974 through an accidental meeting with Stan Rosenberg on the Amherst free bus. I found his AES story and AES’s concept fascinating and learned that the work was called arts administration. As an English/Poetry major (UMass ’71), I’d never heard of it before. Stan was looking for ways to get the word out. We agreed that I would write and pitch a feature story to the local newspaper (see below). The pitch worked and the article shared my thoughts about AES and arts administration - before I ever really had been part of either.
I discovered this work was something I might like to do myself and Stan welcomed me to intern at AES. The internship morphed into an actual job as Artist Resource Coordinator and then Director. In my time at AES, Barbara Schaffer Bacon, Pam Korza, and Craig Dreeszen all arrived. Together we piloted programs and developed training for prisons, rural, inner-city, and elder populations, and through arts festivals and local arts agencies throughout New England. Many programs won national awards and our training and materials came into demand nationally.
AES was also where I found my passion for advocacy and a concept for how to do it effectively. It was forged out of community need and in support of the University’s land grant mission to provide “research, education, and extension” through outreach. We had learned that community involvement in arts events helped create community activists and leaders who went on to run for school boards and town councils.
I sought out the counsel of a true UMass asset, Maurice Donahue. Donahue knew a lot about political maneuvering. He had served as Senate President for seven years and at UMass was director of a program to study and teach government service, now called the Donahue Institute. Donahue became an insightful mentor and even co-taught AES’s Arts Advocacy workshops across the state. He always started by saying, “the one thing to remember is that 60 percent of every day of every politician’s life is spent thinking about getting reelected.” That became a life lesson for me in who is essential to reach and how to affect pro-arts legislative decisions.
Another critical influence was Ms. Elma Lewis, founder of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts in Roxbury, MA. She was a social justice warrior and brilliant presenter for AES on effective community organizing and advocacy for community development especially in diverse communities. AES promoted broad cooperation and helped found CLAAM, a consortium of local arts agencies and MAASH, an arts advocacy coalition.
So, when a cultural funding crisis hit the state around 1979, it was logical for AES to get involved. Then Governor, Edward King, proposed eliminating funding for the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. There existed loosely organized state advocacy efforts mostly from the several large cultural institutions around Boston. But this funding cut would affect organizations large and small throughout the state.
We began to mobilize and train arts organizations in each of the 40 state senatorial districts to deliver a “save the arts funding” message. We discovered the power of data. The New England Foundation for the Arts had just finished one of the first arts economic impact studies. We incorporated the job creation and economic data. We made our pitch to the Governor and at the end of the meeting he looked up and said “I’m not going to propose elimination or even restoring the budget to $2.3 million. If this data is accurate, I will propose an increase in budget to $3.5 million.” He did that. I was hooked.
Over the years we enlisted celebrities like opera legend Sarah Caldwell, jazz master Billy Taylor (UM EdD), folk pioneer Tom Rush. We brought the art of western MA artists to the Boston State House for exhibitions and receptions with legislators including one in the offices of US Senator Paul Tsongas. We placed a 10-foot Boston Cream pie with a banner reading “A piece of the Pie for the Arts” in the Rotunda of the State Capital attracting every legislator and their staff.
AES later helped create the state’s Arts Lottery which established an arts council in every town. In MA much of this infrastructure still exists or is modelled on those early efforts, and the state’s arts budget request for 2025 is a robust $28 million.
In 1985, when I moved on to lead the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, I brought these advocacy learnings with me. At the national level, we once again involved the full range of diverse and small arts organizations, public sector support organizations like state arts agencies, and the big institutions, and trained a grassroots army of local arts advocates from every state. We established national messaging through a multi-year media campaign called Arts Ask for More. We put memorable faces, entertainment celebrities, corporate CEOs, and US military generals behind our key messages and created a robust research component featuring economic impact. This was enormously helpful in the fight to prevent the elimination of federal support for the arts during a decade of attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts in the eighties and nineties.
And it all owes a great debt to lessons learned, incubated, tested, and proven successful at the Arts Extension Service of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Robert L. Lynch is the former president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, the national organization dedicated to advancing the arts and arts education in people's lives, schools, and communities. Bob was Director of the Arts Extension Service from 1976 to 1985. Bob currently serves on the board of the Arts Extension Institute and the UMass, Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts Boards. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
To learn more about the Arts Extension Service’s history, visit the 50th Anniversary page for more articles as well as the AES History page.