During February, KERA (Channel 13) has dedicated a significant chunk of its schedule to programs that celebrate Black History Month. Many of those shows highlight African American achievement in the arts, including one that’s on tonight.

Fats Domino: Walking Back to New Orleans (10 p.m.) chronicles the legendary piano player’s return to his hometown in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2007, Domino headlined a concert that was filmed for this special. Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Robert Plant and Randy Newman join in to discuss Domino’s influence on their respective careers.

Keep reading for more arts-related Black History Month programming coming up on KERA:

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Architect Joshua Prince-Ramus has explained his thinking behind the Wyly’s radical theater design in a video taken of his 2006 TEDtalk. Now David Basulto re-states that thinking for urbanpromoter.com, laying out graphically what led to a theater ‘standing on its head.’

Extra added visual bonus: a compendium of images of the Wyly being designed and built.

UPDATE: Rem Koolhaas, the other credited architect of the Wyly (Prince-Ramus worked in his OMA outfit until he established his own REX), has had an unexpected setback. The luxury hotel he designed in Beijing has burned down. It wasn’t completed, but lunar new year fireworks set it on fire.

Several years ago, during a public panel discussing the intellectual life of this city (held at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture), the talk had turned a little glum — along the lines of, ‘What can be done to improve things?’ One simple but significant improvement, I suggested, would be getting more spirited public discussion going. It’s hard to have a conversation with a single voice. Only the Dallas Morning News was reviewing vast sections of the local arts scene. Back then, for instance, the paper had  the only full-time book critic on a newspaper staff in the entire state of Texas. Me.

What is the sound of one reviewer clapping? Or no reviewer? The newspaper book-critic position no longer exists.

So the idea at the time was: Encourage media outlets like D Magazine to cover the arts — beyond what it was doing then, which was mostly reviews of restaurants and plastic surgeons. Got applause from the attendees with that crack but also caught some flak from FrontBurner. They vigorously defended their restaurant reviews.

Now in a column for D magazine, publisher Wick Allison asks much the same question: What can be done — especially now, when the city is about to launch a vast expansion of its Arts District — and there’s very little left in the way of professional criticism? (“Good critics do more than critique. The late John Rosenfield of the Morning News helped establish the American regional theater movement in the 1950s, at a time when cities like Dallas were exposed to nothing more than third-rate traveling companies of old Broadway standbys.”)

Yes, he writes, there are bloggers (ahem). But you generally have to know where to look, so they tend to speak to the already-interested. True, but then Allison fails even to mention the Art&Seek reviews and news reports that have been appearing on KERA-FM since May.  We only have a North Texas listening audience that numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

But we’ll let that slide because the publisher of D and FrontBurner humbly admits his own part in this situation. He eliminated the entire arts section from his People City newspapers last year. Glenn Arberry was an intelligent and knowledgeable theater critic for them, a welcome voice in the cultural conversation.

Then Allison concludes with this notable promise:

I do not have a solution to the problem. But as a media owner, I do have a responsibility. At the moment, we are monitoring and talking to very bright people in other cities who are grappling with the same dilemma. When we see an idea that works, D Magazine will do everything in its limited power to introduce it to Dallas. To my mind, the need is too great to merely sit by and watch.

Monday evening, TACA (The Arts Community Alliance) awarded 34 area arts groups $1 million in grants. The awards were announced at the Horchow Auditorium at the Dallas Museum of Art, with special guest Kimberly Grigsby, an SMU grad and Broadway musical director.

Six of the 34 groups received the full amount they requested (they were “fully funded”): Children’s Chorus of Greater Dallas, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Wind Symphony, Fine Arts Chamber Players, Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra and Project X. The ailing Texas Ballet Theatre received $65,000 — one of the larger grants — while Kitchen Dog Theatre received more than the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas or  Theatre 3 ($36,000).

The complete list comes below the fold:

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The 1999 drug busts in Tulia, Texas, were initially hailed as great progress in the War on Drugs, but became emblematic of the racial divides in Tulia and elsewhere. KERA will air the Independent Lens documentary Tulia, Texas on Tuesday at 9 p.m. To get you ready, Think discussed the cases with retired justice Ron Chapman, who presided over the evidentiary hearing that led to the cases being overturned, and Alan Bean, the founder of the advocacy group Friends of Justice, which fought for the release of the Tulia convicts. Think airs Friday at 7:30 p.m. on KERA (Channel 13). It airs again Wednesday at 1:30 a.m.

Now that it appears that money for the arts has been competely dumped from the economic stimulus package, some of our national culture writers are hoppin’ mad. Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune wonders how the arts descended to this lowly spot on the government priority list.

“The contrast in priority with the last comparable American stimulus package is simply breathtaking. Funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration made the arts a priority. Federal Project Number One — home of the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Music Project and the Federal Art Project — was, believe it or not, the largest of the WPA’s endeavors.

Its mission was to give more Americans the chance to experience what Roosevelt called “a fuller life.” Its legacy — from invigorating murals to landscape paintings to the careers of Arthur Miller or Orson Welles — is everywhere you look.”

Meanwhile, Christopher Knight, writing for the L.A. Times Culture Monster blog, takes direct aim at a piece of the bailout package he deems as way unnecessary. Rather than spend $62 billion to continue funding of the F-22 fighter plane – a project that even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been critical of – Knight suggests that money would be better spend on the arts. He’s quick to point out that that will never happen, but his argument is an interesting one. To make it, he uses the example of an upgrade that L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art is in need of:

“MOCA estimates the upgrade cost at about $20 million. The rehab would create and retain construction jobs, directly as well as indirectly from suppliers; ensure future levels of museum employment; and add permanent infrastructure value to the cultural landscape.

Now, multiply that by 100,000. I suspect every one of America’s nonprofits has at least one unfunded project that it would like to get going – “shovel-ready,” as it were, even if the job doesn’t involve bricks and mortar. A program tour, say, or a schools program.”

So why do projects like the F-22 get funding while arts groups don’t? Back in Chicago, Jones writes:

Somehow it has come to be broadly accepted that concrete, asphalt and medicine for the body (as distinct from the heart and soul) have greater moral worth. … More significantly, the arts have thrown up precious few, articulate, clout-heavy American leaders of their own. That needs to change. Old economic arguments must be articulated anew.

The sad truth to all of this is that one need only follow the money to figure out why we’ll continue building outdated fighter planes instead of new arts infrastructure. Knight says that a group of 46 senators signed a letter urging that the F-22 program continue. When it does, the companies that build them will get rich, and some of that money can in turn be spend to fund campaigns and pay lobbyists.

It’s a nasty cycle. And the fact that there were not enough voices in the Senate willing to speak out against dumping the arts funding from the stimulus packages shows that it’s a cycle with no end in sight.

• UPDATE from Culture Monster: Tom Coburn, the senator from Oklahoma who stripped arts funding from the stimulus package? His daughter is an opera singer and he’s an opera lover.

“Cymbal of Peace” by Kevin Obregon

In 1988, PBS debuted Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a series of conversations between Campbell, a scholar of comparative mythology, and journalist Bill Moyers. The transcripts from those conversations were adapted into the bestselling book The Power of Myth. Of the many themes discussed in the book, one chapter, “Sacrifice and Bliss,” addresses both the impact of the landscape on the individual and the role of the artist in contemporary society.  The following words are an excerpt from that conversation; the photographs were taken this weekend on the grounds of what will soon become the La Reunion TX Artist Residency:

MOYERS: You write in The Mythic Image about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder. What does it mean to have a sacred place?

CAMPBELL: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you.  This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.  This is the place of creative incubation.  At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.  

“Bee Cause” by VET

MOYERS: We have talked about the impact of the landscape on the people.  But what about the effect of people on the landscape?

CAMPBELL: People claim the land by creating sacred sites, by mythologizing the animals and plants – they invest the land with spiritual powers. It becomes like a temple, a place for meditation. For example, the Navaho did a marvelous job in mythologizing animals. In the Navaho sand paintings, you see these little animals, each with its own value. Now, these animals are not shown naturalistically. They are stylized. And the stylization refers to their spiritual, not to their merely physical, characteristics. 

“Post Industrial Entropy” by Oliver Bradley and David Blood

MOYERS: And the purpose of all this?

CAMPBELL: To claim the land. To turn the land where they lived into a place of spiritual relevance.

MOYERS: Who interprets the divinity inherent in  nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?

CAMPBELL: It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn’t simply a sociologist with a program for you.  

Excerpted from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers.

The La Reunion TX Open House and Tree Carving was held on Saturday, Feb. 7  on the Oak Cliff grounds of the upcoming La Reunion Artist Residency.

On Friday, the Senate passed an amendment to the economic stimulus package that would make sure that taxpayer money is not lost on “wasteful and non-stimulative projects” — such as funding museums, theaters and art centers. The amendment was proposed by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. The vote was 73-24.

Bad banks, yes. Car companies, yes. Symphonies, no.

Robin Bronk, executive director of the Creative Coalition, wonders why the arts are being attacked — as if they didn’t employ millions. She cites the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration as a great, historic example of successful economic and artistic stimulus:

These programs created much-needed jobs in the immediate term, but they did much more. They fostered great talents that otherwise may have been lost. The work of the many great artists supported by the government in the 1930s still benefits us today. Their contributions to our culture endure, and their successful careers resulted in employment for many others in the years that followed.

She neglects to remember that the WPA was indeed repeatedly attacked. It was politically controversial from the start — partly because it was feared by Republicans as a Democratic political machine-in-the-making, partly out of anti-Red hysteria, partly as a ploy to derail the popular New Deal, partly because there was indeed waste and featherbedding.

From a history of New Deal cultural programs by Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard:

By 1938, a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats began to press their opposition to New Deal cultural policies. Late in July, 1938, Representative J. Parnell Thomas of the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (HUAC, also known in the ’30s as the “Dies Committee,” after its chair Martin Dies) claimed that he had “startling evidence” that the Theatre and Writers Projects were “a hotbed of Communists” and “one more link in the vast and unparalleled New Deal propaganda network.” He announced that an investigation would be launched. …

Just as the Dies Committee report was being issued and a further investigation launched, Rep. Clifton Woodrum declared his intention to “get the government out of the theater business.” In June, 1939, the House Appropriations Committee which Woodrum chaired successfully barred future use of WPA funds for theater activities of any kind, bringing the Federal Theatre Project to an end virtually overnight, just four years after it was begun.

Christopher Knight in the LA Times counters the Senate anti-arts funding amendment with a proposal of his own: Forget about a few piddly millions for the arts. Let’s talk billions in support.

Zach Mortice summarizes the buildings and aspirations that are going into the District. Two interesting points. I hadn’t known that the city’s Performance Hall will be an add-on-as-money-permits design:

SOM’s City Performance Hall is organized as a series of sloping parallel concrete bands of varying heights and widths. Each band contains a single performance venue, which design partner Leigh Breslau, AIA, says will create easy-to-navigate circulation paths meant to aid the 70 groups that will use the building. As the only project in the center that is city-funded and dependent on bonds, Breslau says he designed it to be built as financing permits one section at a time, as a “continuous ribbon” that still maintains design coherence.

And Brad Coepfil, the designer of the new Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet, agrees with moi — the idea that the Arts District (and the accompanying Woodall Rodgers Park) will create an ‘urban pedestrian neighborhood’ is a bit of a stretch. For now, anyway:

Many hope the district will evolve into a pedestrian neighborhood of mixed-uses and artistic synergies in the middle of sprawl-laden Dallas. Arts district boosters say that having a public high school helps make the area an active community; housing and retail development should also prevent the district from becoming a cultural ghetto that empties out when the theaters are dark. But Cloepfil says it might be misguided to expect Jane Jacobs-style urbanism to sprout in north Texas, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Dallas might have to accept the arts district as a successful destination, not a way of life. “I’m trying to be a realist to other urban types,” he says. “I do think there are other models of urban success that we may not want to believe are successful.”

Tonight, at the DMA’s Horchow Auditorium, TACA (The Arts Community Alliance) is giving $1 million to 34 North Texas performing arts groups — for only the second time since TACA was founded in 1966.

For its arts grants, TACA raises funds via special events, including the Silver Cup Award luncheon, which was begun in 1979 by former Dallas mayor Annette Strauss (and which will be held again this March).

On Sunday, the Dallas Morning News ran a Q&A with TACA’s executive director, Rebecca Young, in which she talks about TACA possibly moving its offices to One Arts Plaza as well as the economic downturn’s effect on the arts and arts fundraising: “When times get tough, people get creative.”