ILF POST

By Jane Alexander “A great nation deserves great art”. This is the slogan and the dream of the National Endowment for the Arts. The cultural fire of the ’90s which sought, under the house leadership of Newt Gingrich, to extinguish the NEA, is now mostly ash and the budget has crept quietly up [...]

By Jane Alexander Muhammad Ali is 65 years old this week. It is hard to believe. Back in 1968 we’d been marching for civil rights for years and the black power movement was at its height. Stokely Carmichael’s message that “black was beautiful” was being heard by thousands who let their hair grow out into [...]

By Jane Alexander The arts have been neglected in the past six years by the outgoing Republican congress. This is both a good thing and a bad. It is good that the demonization of art has been under the radar while our legislators have wrestled with the contentious issues of war, immigration, [...]

By Jane Alexander Those of us in the world of theatre are never very far from Henrik Ibsen who died one hundred years ago. He changed the way drama was conceived and left a legacy for all playwrights to come. He was the greatest playwright since Shakespeare and influenced many a writer even today.Ibsen incorporated [...]

By Jane Alexander May 23rd, 2006 was the centennial of Henrik Ibsen’s death. Ibsen a hundred years ago was the greatest dramatist in the world. He influenced almost every playwright since and broke barriers in theatre that reverberate today; his plays are classics in that their meaning holds true today and for all time [...]

By Jane Alexander A ritual occurs every year in Washington DC which gets little play in the press but which is important to those of us in the arts. Arts Advocacy Day in March is when legions of artists and arts advocates visit the Hill and talk about federal funding for the arts and [...]

By Jane Alexander Cultural diplomacy, once a main arm of politics abroad, is flagging; it is almost dead in fact. If ever we needed to know about the people of Islam and the citizens of Islam needed to know about the American people the time is now. The last conference hosted by President Bill Clinton [...]