With degrees from Stanford, Chicago, and Oregon in American History, Ethics, and Law, John
Frohnmayer’s views on freedom of speech and public funding of the arts became well known during the first Bush Administration when he was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. That national debate over obscenity, censorship, and freedom of speech is recounted in his book: Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior.

 

A lifelong trial lawyer, John is also a competitive masters rower, a singer and guitar player, and a
frequent author of commentaries for print and radio.

 

His life in the arts started as legal counsel for the International Sculpture Symposium of 1974 in Eugene, Oregon. In those halcyon days of abundant federal money, seven internationally known sculptors were coming to town, each to create a monumental piece. The symposium had its legal challenges: Dimitri Hadzi’s assistant turned over the boom truck before John got a written insurance binder; two assistants got in a fist fight about whose boss was a real artist; and John Chamberlain showed a pornographic film in the city council chambers.

 

The sculpture symposium led to chair of the committee that chose the first public art for the State
Capitol, eight years on the Oregon Arts Commission by appointment of two separate governors,
Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and two terms on the board of Oregon Humanities.
Interspersed with these public positions, have been dozens of non-profit boards and countless individual artists, musicians, writers, poets, administrators, and dancers with whom he has worked in and out of the legal field.

 

He believes that:

Art is citizenship. It is the willingness to be honest in public; to tell the truth to power; to engage with each other in community.

Art is courage. No tears from the writer, no tears from the reader. Rejection is the ever-present host of all artists.

Art is celebration. Celebration of our triumphs and follies.

Art is conscience. It is the power of the powerless; the fishwife of the satisfied; the pied piper of
those whose brains are still in their original wrappers.

Art is the power of choice. What to include and more importantly, what to leave out. The power of
silence.

Art is subversive. Creativity and imagination are not friendly to the world of order and settled
expectations.

Art is ambiguity. Having it all together is perhaps the least interesting condition for an artist. Chaos, uncertainty, boredom, and making sense of the commonplace—therein lies the challenge and the necessity.

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Art is freedom. Poet William Stafford says you can be free some of the time if you get up before
everyone else. (He got up at 4 a.m. to write, and his daughter, feeling sorry for him, got up to keep him company).

 

 

Aristotle, in refuting Plato’s criticism that artists mislead the people and defeat reason, said that the
artist’s unique talent is to perceive the universal from the particular. John believes, along with the
philosopher Heraclitus, that we cannot step into the same river twice, that everything we do changes us, and that certainty becomes increasingly elusive. But along with Keats he is certain “of the holiness of the Heart’s affections; of the truth of the imagination; and of wonder and mystery as the root of all
knowledge."