These days it is easier to occupy young minds with mobile phones and tablet computers, but I have a special respect for the mothers and fathers who continue to lug around the bags of crayons, markers, and paper. It brings a smile to my face when I see a child drawing. And while I know there are museum- and concertgoers who are irritated by sharing the spaces with sometimes unruly children, I am encouraged when I see generations of the future engaging with the arts. These pursuits are central to our American identity. Patriotism can burst to the surface through many geysers of expression.
Perhaps one of the most inspiring visions for our nation can be found in a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. It was the spring of 1780, he was serving a diplomatic post in Paris, and the final outcome of the Revolutionary War was still in doubt. But Adams had his eyes firmly set on the future. “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy . . . in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, [and] Musick.” It’s an incredibly hopeful articulation of progress whereby the lasting worth of a nascent nation would depend on the arts being cultivated, encouraged, and appreciated. But there is another important current running through Adams’s letter, a notion that American art would have to await future generations. This sense of cultural inferiority would stretch well past the colonial era.
My first introduction to what might be considered art (at the time narrowly defined as high culture) came in high school. But we weren’t taught to celebrate the power of free expression in a vibrant American democracy. Instead, art was described to us mainly as a product of Old World refinement and a necessary accoutrement for those of us intent on climbing the social ladder. We were brought to the symphony, the art museum, the ballet, and the theater, but the impact was largely lost on us. Eventually I came to enjoy all the art forms that hadn’t impressed me as a teenager, but it took time and exposure. I now realize that my early lack of interest was also born from fear. I believed that understanding art was beyond my capabilities. It was as if I had internalized the cultural insecurities of the United States.
This way of thinking was common in mid-twentieth-century America. Although the United States had just rescued Europe from the conflagration of fascism, we still had a profound inferiority complex when it came to assessing our own cultural value. Every city wanted a museum of fine arts (collections of mostly European paintings and sculptures) and a symphony conducted by a European maestro. Even NBC had its own orchestra led by the acclaimed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. In postwar Houston, pretension outstripped our modest reality. We wanted to imagine ourselves as a great American city, and the community leaders saw the arts as paramount to achieving status. Legend has it that the Houston Symphony approached the wealthy oilman Robert Everett Smith (everyone called him “Ree Bob”) to raise money to bring the famous conductor Leopold Stokowski to the city. According to the story, when Ree Bob was told they needed $1 million and had him down for half, he replied that he would give the entire amount if he didn’t have to actually go hear the orchestra in person. Whether true or a tall tale, this story nevertheless captured the mood of the times. For many Americans, especially the ones I knew growing up, art felt elitist and far removed from our daily blue-collar lives. Luckily for me, in more ways than one, that was about to change.
When I met Jean, we were in our early twenties and she had an enthusiastic thirst for the arts. She loved to paint and go to art exhibits. I wanted to impress her, so on our second date I took her to the Alley Theatre, which has since become one of Houston’s most cherished institutions. The Alley was the brainchild of Nina Vance, who gained a national reputation for proving that a town like Houston could handle serious works for the stage. The play Jean and I saw that night was The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I was transfixed by the production onstage, and by my date sitting next to me. I knew I wanted to accompany Jean on a lifetime of performances, and over our six decades of marriage, we have done that.
Through Jean, whose education began, literally, in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Texas, I learned to appreciate art, symphonic music, and opera. When we relocated to the cultural mecca of New York, we witnessed the rise and fall of artistic fads and saw the first big shows of artists who went on to become household names. I also started to see art as an increasingly democratic enterprise. I came to realize that the masterful lyrics of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” were much more than just a radio ballad; they were American poetry: “The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky.” Similarly, the best Broadway shows, like Oklahoma!, and Hollywood films, like Citizen Kane, were not simply entertainment but uniquely American art forms. And jazz like Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” demanded the same seriousness as a Beethoven symphony. As I started to take all this in, I appreciated that art shouldn’t be about impressing others; whether you are an individual or a nation, art is about engaging in a candid dialogue with yourself.
We now understand that the great American story is not confined to history books or political speeches. It is sung, and danced, and dramatized, and turned into verse. It is painted, and sculpted, and written, and filmed. Artists may not swear an oath to serve in government or the military, but they swear an oath to freedom of expression that is no less worthy of recognition, especially in a democracy such as ours. Theirs are not always comfortable voices to hear, or even comfortable people to be around. But they are the truth tellers whose works have challenged our national complacency, like Woody Guthrie’s songs; held up mirrors to the darker corners of our society, as do the photographs of Jacob Riis; and summoned the winds of justice, like the novels of Toni Morrison. American artists have also taken the grand artistic traditions of the rest of the world and unapologetically created something dynamic and new, such as my fellow Texan the choreographer Alvin Ailey. He married the forms of classical ballet with the deep spiritual and musical traditions of the African American community to worldwide acclaim.
Our art has been, like our country, boisterous and courageous and gloriously distinct. It has expressed euphoria, shame, and outrage. It has been exalted and it has felt the sting of suppression and marginalization. It has been misunderstood. Perhaps most important, our art has been wonderfully diverse. Our corporate boardrooms do not represent America; neither does our Congress, Supreme Court, nor certainly those we have elected to the presidency. But our artistic community represents the United States in all its multiple wonders.
Any list of great American artists would be woefully incomplete if it did not celebrate the broad democratic stirrings of a diverse nation. Consider one idiosyncratic sampling: Louis Armstrong and Mark Twain and Martha Graham, Emily Dickinson and Ella Fitzgerald and Edward Hopper, William Faulkner and Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes and Jackson Pollock and Charlie Chaplin, Johnny Cash and Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright, Miles Davis and Willa Cather and Ansel Adams, Willie Nelson and Maya Angelou and Martin Scorsese, George Gershwin and Marlon Brando and Prince, Elvis Presley and Carlos Santana and Stephen Sondheim, Maria Tallchief and Robin Williams and Ernest Hemingway. The list could go on and on. American art is proof that people from all backgrounds and corners of this country have something important to say.
Back in 1982, we ended a CBS Evening News broadcast with a profile of a quirky artist who was making impromptu line drawings in chalk around New York City. It was one of those slice-of-life pieces—the humorous and heartwarming stories that we use to round out the more serious news of the day. I set it up with a bit of humor: “One subway artist is making a name for himself somewhere besides the police blotter.” The artist was indeed starting to make a name for himself, and he became one of our more famous pop artists. His name was Keith Haring, and he was just a kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, who felt that art should be accessible to everyone. Sadly, we lost him at age thirty-one, a life, like so many others, cut short by AIDS. But his unique voice continues to speak to us. That is the wonder of the immortality of art.
Our Founding Fathers understood that free expression was central to democracy, a core value that separates us from autocratic and despotic societies where artists are often targeted as subversive and dangerous. In the spring of 2011, we were working on a report about government censorship in China when we interviewed one of the country’s most famous contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei. Ai had already been the subject of harassments and even severe beatings at the hands of government authorities who were not pleased by his art. He had become a fierce critic of the corruption that led to shoddily built schools that had collapsed during a major earthquake in 2008. Thousands of young students had been crushed to death. In one work, Ai laid out nine thousand colorful children’s backpacks to spell out “For seven years she lived happily on this earth,” a eulogy from a mother of one of the victims. It was a stark message, amplified by the urgency of the artwork. And it was not the kind of message Chinese authorities liked to hear.
Just ten days after our interview, Ai was arrested, and he was held for eighty-one days without charges. His work is now suppressed in his home country. “The harm of a censorship system is not just that it impoverishes intellectual life,” Ai wrote in a column for the New York Times in 2017. “It also fundamentally distorts the rational order in which the natural and spiritual worlds are understood. The censorship system relies on robbing a person of the self-perception that one needs in order to maintain an independent existence. It cuts off one’s access to independence and happiness.”
The idea of art as “access to independence and happiness” is a notion that speaks to my own experience. In art, you can find voices that channel your own life story better than you could ever express it yourself. And you can also find voices that introduce you to worlds you would never have otherwise visited. In a diverse republic such as ours, both of these inspirations are especially important.
One American artist whose work spoke to me with uncanny resonance was the greatly underappreciated playwright Horton Foote. He and I both were born in the same small Texas town of Wharton (although I moved to Houston when I was a year old), and we came to know each other after finding our ways to New York much later in life. Foote is perhaps best known for his Academy Award – winning screenplay for the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, and he was considered a skilled dramatizer of the works of Southern literature (William Faulkner was particularly pleased with Foote’s adaptations of his stories). But it is Foote’s original work that stands out to me as a mark of greatness. Foote’s plays, screenplays, and memoirs are centered on an America that once was the norm but now has largely disappeared: small-town, rural life where families intersected with one another countless times across the generations. His work beats with the heart of a democratic nation, as he transformed the drama and comedy of everyday life into great art through his exquisite sense of dialogue. His Academy Award – winning films Tender Mercies, about a country music singer seeking redemption, and The Trip to Bountiful, about an old woman returning one last time to the farmland of her youth, echo an America in social, cultural, and geographic transformation. And they remind me that some of the best art is the most modest in its framing and far reaching in its emotional impact.
Foote’s America is one that I knew well. His characters act and talk like the family, friends, and neighbors of my youth. But the rapturous reviews he received and the awards he was given, like the Pulitzer Prize for drama, are proof that he was able to capture the common nobility of our nation. I hope that Horton Foote’s work will continue to be shown for as long as there is American theater, but I worry that his deceptively simple and superficially dated plays are perhaps falling out of favor. In art, as in our country more broadly, we cannot allow only the newest, loudest, and brashest voices to be heard.
While Foote always felt familiar, art also has a way of exposing you to a point of view you never could have imagined. That is the case with one of my favorite singers—and, more important, songwriters: the country star Loretta Lynn. A coal miner’s daughter who rose from poverty-stricken Appalachia to Nashville royalty, she epitomized the Horatio Alger stories and the American Dream, albeit with a very important twist. Loretta Lynn achieved all this as a female artist. Lynn’s catalog of songs is one of the most impressive collections of socially relevant commentary in the history of American music. As early as 1966, she was challenging her audience with a mournful story of a woman losing her husband to the Vietnam War. Entitled “Dear Uncle Sam,” it included poignant lyrics such as, “You said you really need him, but you don’t need him like I do.” Lynn painted the lives of working-class women with honesty and humor. And she was undeterred in the face of opposition. She once told me, about her songs being banned, “When they don’t play ’em, you know it’s gonna be a hit.” Many radio stations at the time refused to play “The Pill,” a funny and yet fierce ode to women’s empowerment (which Lynn recorded but didn’t write). Released in 1975, it became her top crossover hit on the pop charts. I don’t think anybody had heard anything like it, with lines like, “You’ve set this chicken your last time, ’cause now I’ve got the pill.”
Lynn brought the intimate experiences of working-class American women to the nation’s airwaves, whether it was about a girl losing her virginity in “Wings Upon Your Horns,” the stigma of divorce on women in “Rated X” (“Divorce is the key to bein’ loose and free, so you’re gonna be talked about”), or the struggles of marriage in “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ ” (“No, don’t come home a drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind, just stay out there on the town and see what you can find”). The rock star Jack White told me once that he revered Lynn’s work: “It was the female side of our species speaking, finally, for themselves out loud.” And Lynn told me herself, “When I’d go to do a show, all the women would be out there. ‘I’m with you,’ you know? And they’d holler at me and say, ‘You come to talk to us women.’ ” A lot of men also learned something from her songs, this one included. I consider her another patriotic artist, a fearless social commentator channeling the experiences of an overlooked segment of society.
As I have traveled to countless museums over the years with Jean, I have been struck by how transformative art can be, and few exhibitions have moved me more than a 2015 showing of Jacob Lawrence’s iconic series of sixty tempera paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Produced over the course of 1940 and 1941, the series tells one of the truly epochal transformations of the American experience: the exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural, agricultural South to the urban, industrial North and Midwest. Initially called The Migration of the Negro, the series was renamed by Lawrence to The Migration Series a few years before his death in 2000. It tells a cautionary tale of persecution and discrimination—in the South and the North. Its power lies in Lawrence’s ability to distill these experiences down to a starkly beautiful or brutal image. Each picture in the series is a complete drama and part of the bigger whole. And they are paired with simple but evocative captions, like one painting of huddled black faces wrapped in colorful blankets and seated in rows of bench seats with the corresponding text: “The trains were packed continually with migrants.” The review of the show in the New York Times does a better job than I can to explain the spell cast by the works: “[E]ven from a distance, standing in the middle of the room, you can pick up the formal links and syncopations. Dark, dense compositions alternate with open, light ones. Geometric dominance—vertical, horizontal, diagonal—shifts from panel to panel. Single rich colors—rust-pink, mustard, sherbet-green—recur, threading through the whole like the sound of bright instruments in an orchestra.” The paintings are a brilliant evocation of an entire historical movement, provocative and emotionally distilled in a way that is achievable only through art.
Lawrence was twenty-three years old when he finished the series, and he painted all sixty pieces at the same time to give them a unified feel. When they debuted at a gallery in Manhattan, it marked the first such showing for an African American artist. The curatorial materials that accompanied the recent MoMA show explained that Lawrence researched the migration in great detail. However, he also tapped into a world of artistic expression much bigger than his own voice. Lawrence was living in New York in the midst of the great flowering of African American culture of the Harlem Renaissance, and one need not be a scholar to see the crosscurrents of influences in the work. The exhibition placed Lawrence’s series alongside documentary photographs and journalism that had inspired him. There was film of the great Marian Anderson singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after she had been banned from singing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution. (It was Eleanor Roosevelt who helped change the venue of the concert.) Anderson’s beautiful operatic voice, breaking through stifling racial barriers, is a potent symbol of the incongruities inherent in American art.
For me, the most effective accompaniment to Lawrence’s work in the show was film of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” the chilling song about lynching.
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
The word “lynching” is never mentioned in the song, but the terror and horror of the act is palpable. Similarly, Lawrence addresses lynching in a pair of paintings in his series, but neither shows a dead body. In the first, we see a living figure sitting huddled in terror or sadness beneath a noose on a leafless branch. The text accompanying the images is all the more searing for its simplicity: “Another cause [of the migration] was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this.” In the second, we see a female figure sitting at a stark wooden table with her head in her arms in sorrow.
Taking in Lawrence’s paintings and the song “Strange Fruit,” I was struck by the power of art to move me. As a young reporter, I had witnessed the lethal results of institutionalized racism firsthand, and standing there in the bright galleries of the MoMA, I was transported back across time and distance. I wasn’t just thinking. I was feeling.
I was curious about the story behind “Strange Fruit,” and I was in for a surprise. It was written by Abel Meeropol, a child of Jewish immigrants who taught at a public high school in the Bronx. He had seen a photograph of a lynching victim that he couldn’t get out of his mind, and he turned that into a poem, and then put it to music. The song eventually found its way to Holiday, who made it into a classic. (In 1999, Time magazine dubbed it the song of the century.)
Art is an attempt to capture the truths of the world as you see it in a medium you can share with others. It is about lending your voice, your perspective to local, national, and global conversations. And that is why, in the United States in particular, our definition of what is art and who is an artist must be as varied as our citizenry.
I am relieved that we have escaped the narrow definitions of art from my childhood, a development gloriously celebrated in the musical Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creative genius behind the show, has tapped into the broadest currents of America’s modern musical traditions and made the case that they are important and profound. He has captured the attention of young and old alike, and people from across the political spectrum, with a story that is rooted in the awe-inspiring heterogeneity of America. This work of art has brought people together and inspired them to look with fresh eyes on our common history. Schoolchildren now listen to the soundtrack and see themselves in the multitude of voices. It is testimony to the sheer power of the piece that it all seems so apparent and obvious in retrospect, that you can tell a story of a Founding Father using hip-hop and other such urgent new forms of expression. Sadly, the incredible success of Hamilton means that ticket prices in New York and in its traveling shows are out of reach for most Americans. We must find creative ways to ensure that great art like this is accessible to not only the rich and well connected, but to everyone.
Our art is our story. It grows with the inclusion of different peoples and cultures, and we are stronger for it. Watching Hamilton, I remembered how in a previous era those who pioneered the musical traditions that Miranda was exalting were not really considered artists by the cultural elites. And there was a time, not so long ago, when these young, beautiful, diverse actors and musicians would be told that their voices were not worthy of inclusion on Broadway stages or in concert halls. What Hamilton shows so brilliantly through its modern, vibrant musical score is that this spirit of innovation and experimentation in art echoes the narrative of the founding of our nation. It is the ultimate story of freedom. And it is a vital part of what unites us.