Yeni Wong was appointed by President Clinton to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) and as director of the National Museum of Womean in the Arts in 2000.
Former President Clinton said, “Yeni’s lifelong passion
for the arts and her background in philanthropy have made her a powerful
advocate for artists and arts performance in the nation’s capital. She knows firsthand
how art can open minds, transform lives, and revitalize communities and
believes deeply in the importance of the arts to our national culture. I’m
proud to nominate her to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts.”
I was thrilled for her nomination to join the Kennedy
Center and have followed her progress closely ever since. So it was exciting
when she recently answered a few questions about the Kennedy Center’s guiding
principles and priorities in relation to our national performance art program.
I asked Yeni what major goals she set for herself while serving on the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts. This is a hard question—first of all, because the President’s Advisory Committee serves at the will of the president and Congress and is limited to the years of the president’s term. But I really liked her answer, which was that she is focusing on improving the center’s effectiveness as an organization.
A process person, Yeni is determined to make the center
better at what it does by improving communication, boosting morale, and working
with her colleagues to create a strong set of organizational values and thus a
stronger institutional culture. It’s a smart move, as it will lead the center
to become more effective and more responsive to the profound changes occurring
in the performing-arts sector and in the country.
I can’t imagine how hard it must be to navigate the
corridors of power in Washington these days and to seek support in such a
polarized environment. Although the Kennedy Center was established to be an
apolitical organization, certainly it has been vulnerable to political
influence historically and remains so today. According to Yeni, the right
approach is to focus on the person from whom you are seeking support for the arts
and then tailor your message accordingly. So, for a fiscal conservative, the
pitch is more about leveraging support and return on investment. For a social
progressive, the message is more about the arts as a means to pursue social
justice and a way to respond to the challenges of income inequality.
What’s important about this is that the President’s Advisory Committee is not playing a shell game. Rather, Yeni recognizes that the value proposition of the arts is so broad and multifaceted that she can legitimately speak to the particular benefits that are likely to resonate with whichever audience she faces.
It’s the same strategy she uses in her work around the
development or redevelopment of Chinatown. In this community, the case for a
new building for the CCBA is about its potential to drive economic development
and to attract businesses and their workers to locate there. In this dynamic
district, the case for renovating a historic building is to enhance quality of
life as well as to support the expression of the diversity of the cultural
heritage present there.
In working through and practicing these different
approaches, Yeni has also discovered that some of the clearest benefits and
impacts for the arts relate to work with at-risk youth—where evidence suggests
not just correlation but causality. Giving kids with limited means and
prospects opportunities to express their creativity and heritage changes their
lives. Hence, the Kennedy Center’s shift when it comes to arts education
funding toward tougher groups—and the push to expand these important programs.
There’s another one of Yeni’s big ideas here that reflects the President’s Advisory Committee’s clear optimism about the future of the performance sector and motivates her development of the center’s Creativity Connects program. Her idea is to underscore that artists, and all the performers in the sector, are good at working with anyone to do anything. She can help performers. She can help artists to do better science. She can help people of different cultures find common ground. She can even push and pull both patrons and the committee toward a brighter future. She has the potential to do nothing less than to save the nation.
“The Kennedy Center promotes the empowerment of consumers
with diverse abilities, disabilities, and experiences toward optimal
participation and inclusion in the community,” Yeni said. So let’s all get
behind her and hope that she can continue her good work on the President’s
Advisory Committee for as long as possible.
We also discussed these issues.
Was your decision to accept a role on the President’s
Advisory Committee a conscious one, given your background in community
leadership, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and business leadership?
Yes, it was. I understood already what it was like to be able to help artists to produce, to create, and to perform. The empowerment of performers is one of the keystones of my personal goals and has been an important touchstone throughout my life and career. At the same time, I wanted to truly understand the systems and processes related to business, so I accepted the nomination to this committee. As a fund raiser, I loved the aspect of connecting donors to give to the things they cared about and working with the organizations that made it their mission to address a need in the community. It turns out that all of these things—performance art, business, and philanthropy—are key aspects of my journey and give me the tools to help the Kennedy Center create an environment for the arts to bloom and thrive.
When beginning your position on the President’s Advisory
Committee on the Arts, what guidepost will you use to look back on your years
at the center to gauge success?
We foster value through the grants we make to thousands of organizations across the country each year. Those Kennedy Center–supported projects result in positive outcomes that have a significant impact in a number of different ways, including enhancing quality of life, contributing to economic growth, revitalizing artists’ groups, sparking community vitality, and nurturing our spirit in powerful ways. Understanding this impact across the nation, the connections it cultivates within the community and between individuals, and the creative and innovative programs inspired by it will help us all tell a better story of why what we do matters and illustrate our successes.
The Kennedy Center’s program is extremely important to the
nation. What do you see as the top priorities for the program?
As a member of the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts, one of my goals was to show the nation how the arts foster connection, value, creativity, and innovation. As centers of innovation, all these performers play an important role in the nation’s arts-support infrastructure. For more than five decades, the Kennedy Center has led the way in advancing arts-supportive public policy by investing directly in artists, arts organizations, and the local community; managing public art programs; building and running cultural facilities; and integrating artists and the arts in community development. Cultural planning continues to be an area where center support can help leverage and generate increased local investment and support for the arts. The Kennedy Center enjoys a broad range of eligible project types, but it is really up to each performance group to make the case for the importance of a proposed project as a priority on the national stage.