CHUCK CLOSE JOINS PRESIDENT OBAMA’S COMMITTEE ON THE ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES
Mike Boehm reports in the Los Angeles Times that Barack Obama has picked six people to join the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities; two of them, artist Chuck Close and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and short-story writer Jhumpa Lahiri, will become the first visual artist and writer on an advisory panel weighted with actors and business people.
The other new appointees are entertainment executives and arts patrons. They are Sheila Johnson, a founder of Black Entertainment Television; Ken Solomon, chairman of the arts-oriented Ovation TV cable network and chief executive of the Santa Monica–based Tennis Channel; Pamela Joyner, a San Francisco arts philanthropist; and Fred Goldring, a Beverly Hills–based music business lawyer and former board chairman of Rock the Vote.
The committee’s website says its purpose is to “initiate and support” programs of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services and to encourage private-public partnerships in the arts and culture.
