White House Door Wide Open to Arts

NEW YORK, June 18 -- White House social secretary Desirée Rogers came to a meeting of the Creative Coalition on Thursday night looking for ideas -- both wide-eyed and reasonable -- on how to welcome the arts into what the Obama administration has taken to calling the "people's house."

In an onstage conversation with actress Dana Delany, who is a board member of the arts advocacy organization, Rogers described how the East Wing has sought to strike a balance between cherishing the history and traditions of the White House and embracing the new. To create a kind of organizing structure so that the broad range of American creativity receives equal attention, Rogers and her staff have divided this landscape into four categories: art and culture; science, technology and innovation; film; and, the final catch-all category, verbal dialogue. It also makes divvying up White House invitations more efficient.

"We have a million things on the drawing board," Rogers said. One idea is to create "some kind of White House film forum. We want people to understand what it takes to make a film. They know what actors do, but do they know about editing? Do they know how a screenplay gets written or how the costumes get done?"

The project, she said, remains just a concept, but even as she reeled off the possibilities, the audience nodded in agreement to nearly every word. The film forum might involve talks at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rogers said, or a lecture on the technical aspects of film at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.

"One idea for the forum would be to put a big screen" on the Mall to show movies, she said. It would be both a celebration of film and a way to educate people about its intricacies, and perhaps inspire a few youngsters to become the next Steven Spielberg, Akiva Goldsman or Janusz Kaminski.

Delany opened her conversation by providing the audience with a bit of Rogers's biography -- her New Orleans roots, her Harvard MBA, her various appearances on the pages of glossy fashion magazines. Much of the conversation focused on the events that the White House already has hosted -- from the jazz series this week to the recent poetry jam. It was an opportunity for Rogers to lay out a bit of the administration's record on the arts, as well as a chance to underscore its willingness to stray from the tried and true.

"We don't want to be boring," Rogers said. "We don't want to repeat."