As a member of the National Council on the Arts, the advisory board to the National Endowment for the Arts, I was pleased to read about the recent unveiling of the Rosa Parks statue in the U.S. Capitol Building's National Statuary Hall.

Musicals are one of America's most beloved forms of entertainment. And they have often offered audiences a chance to explore controversial topics of the day.

Receiving a Grumbacher medal does not assure a visual artist that a line of patrons will appear at his or her door the next day, or making the cover of People magazine, or being ranked among the top artists of one's time.

The arts are in desperate need of technological convergence. And TedxBroadway is hoping to give theatrical entertainment a push towards progress.

The New York Times recently contrived to use its banner of influence to revile contemporary art by flagging in two separate editions the same letter parading the moth-eaten defamations of the contemporary art world.

Take away The Nutcracker, and what you end up with is profuse sweating, retching, agitation and massive irritability. Guess what? That time for rehabilitation is coming. Why?

Like the business leaders and legislators who promote Wal-Mart as an economic engine, theater artists and educators who continue to promote this system are contributing to the homogenization of the American theater.

I imagine most writers have a dedicated writing buddy -- and hope many have been as lucky as I have. Pamela Hart and I met in 1974 at Boston University.

While local arts organizations only expect a small percentage of their budget to come from government funding, that funding is critical to a healthy and bountiful arts ecosystem.

Every four years America gets another chance to make its voice heard. And every four years the American arts community, in a way, gets a bit of a fiscal makeover.

Enough of the cultural silent majority. What's real is that the arts and their peers are well on their way to Armageddon no matter what may take place by a government near you in early 2013.

Please don't just vote for someone because of how you think it will affect your wallet -- vote for someone who wants to improve your quality of life on many different levels. Let's encourage Americans to continue innovating in every area that we are capable of -- including the arts.

Nobody puts the Arts sector in a corner. That's pretty much what the National Endowment of Arts said when they announced their partnership with the Bu...

Would capping charitable deductions at a low figure (like Romney's hypothetical $25,000) be the death knell for mega-donations that are the lifeblood of cultural institutions?

Governor Romney may call himself a Republican, but he is not a Republican of the iconic stature of President Reagan. President Reagan fully understood the importance of the arts to the formation of the nation's character.

Although I grew up in New York and have lived there for many years, I have a summer studio in Maine. Every summer I pack up and go to paint following the tradition of so many of America's painters from Winslow Homer to Alex Katz.

What was considered so important for artists to know back then now seems vaguely irrelevant. These days, the focus of artist-as-businessperson workshops and classes is not how to apply for money but how to earn it -- how to be entrepreneurial.

One of Japan's most celebrated cultural treasures, "Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings" by Itō Jakuchū (1716-1800) is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington through April 29.